Part 30

If my good reader ever has to take an eternal farewell of a too dear friend, let him take it _twice_.--The _first_ we all understand, as a matter of course, when he sinks in the intoxication of sorrow, in the hemorrhage of heart and eyes, and when the beloved object burns itself with flames into the tender soul; but _then_ he will never be able to forget the being thus torn from his heart. Therefore he must take a _second_ farewell, which is colder even for the reason that passionate emotions admit no _dal segno_[226] of repetition; nay, (if he will take the wisest course of all,) he must endeavor, after the first tragic leave-taking, to see her in a public place (e. g. at a coronation), where she must appear cold. Her frosty face will then snow over her glowing one in his brain; and my good reader has, undoubtedly, collected together again wits enough to know what he reads in the Dog-Post-Days....

--Upon my word, if Jean Paul does not write industriously, then no one does; it has already struck one, and he took it for a quarter to twelve; my sister will already be folding her hands before the tucked-up smoking pike, which, like the serpent of eternity, has his tail in his mouth, and saying, incessantly, "It is all growing cold!"--"It must be so, after such glowing chapters," say I, "if thou meanest the reader and the author."--Already, while I still sit over the twentieth chapter, the post-dog is frisking round in the chamber with the twenty-first; and yet I will starve myself, unless I can still utter before dinner, like the seven wise men, seven golden sayings:--

1. When one who is stung by a bee or by fate does not keep still, the sting tears out, and is left behind.

2. Miserable earth, which three or four great or bold men can reform and agitate! Thou art a true stage: in the foreground are some fighting players and a few canvas-tents; the background swims with painted tents and soldiers!

3. States and diamonds are in these days, when they have stains, cut up into little ones; and as

4. Men in great states and bees in great hives suffer a loss of courage and warmth; accordingly now-a-days they join to small countries other small countries, as they do to beehives colony-hives.

5. Man takes _his_ suffering for that of _humanity_, as the bees take the dropping of their bee-stand, when the sun already shines out again, for rain, and stay in-doors.

6. But he commits daily a _lesser_ error: he regards as an _eternity_ (that Aristotelian Unity of Time to the drama--of Existence) at first his present _hour_,--then his _youth_,--then his _life_,--then his _century_,--then the duration of the _globe_,--then that of the _sun_,--then that of the _heavens_,--then (this is the least error) _time_ itself....

7. There are in man, in the beginning and at the end, as in books, two blank bookbinder's leaves,--childhood and old age; and so, too, in the Dog-Post-Days: see the end of this day and the beginning of the next.

FIFTH INTERCALARY DAY.

_Continuation of the Register of Extra-Sheets_.

K.

Cold.[227]--In our age decrease of _stoicism_ and increase of _egotism_ are found side by side. The former covers its treasures and germs with ice; the latter is itself ice. So, in physics, _mountains_ wear away, and _glaciers_ increase.

L.

Library (Circulating) for Reviewers and Young Ladies.--I still always adhere to my purpose of having it inserted in the Intelligence-leaf of the Literary Gazette, that I shall not destroy the purchase-money which I raise upon my _evening star_ [Hesperus], nor, like Musæus, fritter it away in the purchase of summer-houses, but shall lay out the whole capital upon a complete collection of all German _prefaces_ and _titles_ that appear from fair to fair. I can carry out the plan, if I give out a preface a week, on the payment of a penny, to reviewers, who do not care to read the book itself when they review it.

That not even the surplus of the aforesaid mintage may lie as dead capital in my house, I shall employ it--if I do not change my mind--in getting the bookbinder to publish the _heavier_ German masterpieces,--e. g. Frederick Jacobi's, Klinger's, Goethe's Tasso,--likewise the better satirical and philosophical ones, in a _lighter_ ladies' edition, which shall consist wholly of so-called _puzzle-volumes_, which have no book slid into them. I shall thereby, methinks, be playing something pithy into the hands of my fair readers, which shall be as well bound and as well titled as the booksellers' edition, and in which--because the hard stone-fruit is already _shelled out_, and there is nothing inside--they can lay not only just as much of silk threads and silk snippings as in the printed edition, but six ounces more. _Allwill's_ correspondence--a heavy, two-yolked ostrich's egg of the author's, which I have had _blown out_ by the bookbinder in this manner, because most of the fair readers are too _cold_ to hatch it--is now quite _light_. But of the German romances I shall never prepare such a work-box edition of empty state-carriages of the God of the Sun and the Muses, because I fear the trade would cry out about _piracy_.--A happy man were I, if the joint subscribers to my circulating-capsule-library had only been shown round as much as twice in some Italian and Portuguese bookeries:[228] they would there, where often only the titles of works--and of the stupidest, into the bargain--are daubed on the wall, be astonished to see what a miserable figure such useless libraries, beside my bookery of regular puzzle-books, which I select from so many departments and with some originality, cannot do otherwise than cut.

--Thus, of course, German capsule-readers among the ladies will never be overtaken by you Portuguese women! Much rather will the former follow in the footsteps even of the men, advocates and business people, who subscribe to similar capsule-journalistics, and jointly read and circulate the covers of the best German journals,--which latter are often annexed as _curiosa_ even to the capsules, and fill them out.... Such is my plan and sketch; but even sheep would presume I were merely playing off a joke here, unless I really carried it through.

M.

Maidens.--Young maidens are like young turkey-hens, that thrive poorly, if one touches them often; and mothers keep these soft creatures, made of floating pollen, like _pastel-pictures_, under window-glass--because everything is afraid of us princess-stealers and fruit-thieves--until they are fixed. Meanwhile the proper crown-guard around a female heart is neither solitude,--which leads only to an untried innocence,[229] that falls, to be sure, not before the debauchee, but yet before the hypocrite,--nor society, nor hard labor,--otherwise no country girl would ever fall,--nor good teachings,--for these are to be had in every mouth and in every circulating library; but these four first and last things do it all at once, and they are at once superseded, united, and replaced by a wise and virtuous mother.

N.

Names of the Great.[230]--When I see, as I do, how they scatter their productions for the Fair, occasional writings and fugitive pieces (children born out of wedlock) as anonymously as if they were reviews, then I say: "Herein I recognize genuine modesty; for natural children are precisely their best and their own, and can, besides, be acknowledged by the Prince _as_ genuine; whereas their supernatural [or extra-natural] ones born in wedlock have to do without the certification; and yet they will not let the world know the name of the benefactor, but quite as often (nay, oftener) get people _into it_ as _out of it_ secretly. What the child in other cases first learns to pronounce, such parents speak to him last,--their name. Methinks they follow herein Goethe's fine ear; for they hide themselves, while they fill the orchestra of the world with children's voices and with _vingt-quatre_,[231] and with alarm-works and repeating-works, (what a juxtaposition of unlike things!) just as Goethe demands of the playing musical artist that he shall work for the ears, but hide himself for the sake of sparing the eyes. Quite as beautifully do they do the thing when they finally adopt as children, and show to the world, their children by the thirtieth marriage (often after the five or twenty years' limitation), and thus imitate the greenfinches, which, it is said, make their nest and its inmates invisible by means of the so-called greenfinch-stone, till the latter are fledged."

O.

Ostracism.--It was among the Greeks, as is well known, no punishment. Only people of great merits achieved it; and so soon as this banishment from the country was lavished upon bad men, it went entirely into disuse. An imperial citizen must lament that we, who have a similar public educational institution,--namely, banishment,--squander it often upon the very wretchedest rascals, and therefore--with the design of making one circle or country the spit-box and secreting-vessel of another--drive out of the country scoundrels who are hardly fit to stay in it. Thereby is this clearing of the country deprived for the most part of the honorable and distinguishing feature which it might have for the man of merit, and an honest man--e. g. a Bahrdt[232]--is almost ashamed to be invested with such an honor. There should, therefore, be an imperial police-regulation that only ministers, professors, and officers of decided worth, like important documents, should be dismissed and banished. To similar men I would also limit hanging. With the Romans, in truth, only great heads and lights were interred on the _way_[233] at the expense of a whole state; but what shall I think of the Germans, with whom seldom serviceable subjects, but mostly finished rogues, are buried at public expense, which they call hangman's fees, having been previously hanged on the gallows by the roadside?--Not even in his lifetime can a man, unless he has extraordinary, and often _eccentric_ merits,--although eccentric men fall back into the truth, as _comets_ do into the _sun_, as fuel,--make his calculations upon being, in some manner, as the ancients duplicated their noble men in statues and pictures, hung up in _effigy_ in a thick stone frame.... Let me have an answer; I allow myself to be talked with.

P.

Philosophy.--Some critical philosophers have now borrowed from the algebra a mathematical method, without which one cannot for a single minute--not so much think as--write philosophically. The algebraist, by the transposition of mere _letters_, catches truths which no chain of reasoning could ever draw out of the deep. In this the critical philosopher has imitated him, but with greater advantage. As he cleverly mixes together, not letters, but whole _technical words_, there rises from the alliteration of the same a cream of truths which he could hardly have dreamed of. Such philosophers are forbidden, and rightly, like the preachers of Gotha (Goth. Public Ordinances, P. III. p. 16), to use allegories, or any flower of speech, which, as other flowers do for the drawing-hounds, would spoil the scent.--Properly, however, the picturesque style is more definite than the technical word-style, which finally, as all _abstract words are pictures_, is also itself a picturesque style, only one full of pictures that have run out and faded. Jacobi is not obscure in consequence of his _images_, but in consequence of the new _ideas_ which through them he would communicate to us.

I have lately been looking over the birth-lists of the learned and teaching republic, and counting up the young little Kants whom the old Kant--otherwise unmarried, like his cousin Newton--has for the last ten Fairs begotten. Demetrius Magnus, who wanted to make a book of authors of the same name, must have been very stupid, if he had undertaken to write in our times, and yet at the same time, though he nevertheless communicated that there had been sixteen Platos, twenty Socrateses, twenty-eight Pythagorases, thirty-two Aristotles, had very sinfully omitted to say that there are now as many philosophers and philosophists as those make when reckoned all together--namely, ninety-six--who could bear the name of Kant,--that is, if they chose to. Such mechanics--thus may I call the magisters, because formerly the mechanics, inversely, were called magisters, and the upper master arch-magister--one should take into account as the best propaganda which bulky books can have. They are, at best, competent to diffuse the system, because they know how to separate from it the incomprehensible, the spiritual, and to extract what is popular and palpable, i. e. the words for readers, who, otherwise simple, nevertheless would not die without a critical philosophy. The most miserable theological and æsthetic stone receives now a Kantian setting in words. Although every new system introduces a certain _one-sidedness_ of view into all heads,--especially as every cold philosopher has so much the more _one-sidedness_, precisely as he has the more _insight_,--still that is no matter; for great bars of truth come forth through the joint digging of the whole thinking-works.[234] Whoever has seen Kant standing on his mountain among his learned fellow-laborers, is reminded with pleasure of a similar incident in Peru, which Buffon communicates. When Condamine and Bouger were measuring there the equatorial degrees of the earth (as Kant did of the intellectual world), whole troops of apes appeared as coadjutors, put on spectacles, looked at the stars and down at the clocks, and reduced one thing and another to writing, although without salary, which is their only distinction from the vicariate Kants.

Every man of genius is a philosopher, but not the reverse. A philosopher without fancy, without history, and without a _general knowledge_ of the most important things, is more one-sided than a politician. Whoever has adopted, rather than discovered, a system; whoever has not had beforehand dark presentiments thereof; whoever has not at least pined for it beforehand; in short, whoever does not bring with him a soul like a full, warm, ground filled with germs, which waits only for its summer,--such a one may indeed be a teacher, but not a scholar of the philosophy which he degrades to a mercenary profession; and, briefly, it is all one what place one climbs as his philosophical observatory,--a throne, or a Pegasus, or an Alp, or a Cæsar's-couch, or a bier,--and they are almost all higher than the desk in a lecture-room and hall of disputation.

Q (_see_ K).

R.

Reviewers.--An editor of a review should have six tables. At the first should sit and eat the advertisers of the _existence_ of a book; at the second, the wholesale appraisers of its _value_; at the third, the epitomists of it; at the fourth, the grammarians and philologists, who distribute to the public _catalogues raisonnés_ of other men's grammatical blunders; at the fifth, the fighters, who refute a new book, not by a new book, but by a sheet; at the sixth should stand the critical, princely bench, on which might sit Herder, Goethe, Wieland, and perhaps yet another, who survey a book as a human life, who apprehend its _individuality_, indicate at once the spirit of the literary creation and creator, and separate that incarnation and embodiment of the divine beauty which takes the form of an individual _from_ the beauty, and then disclose and pardon it.

These six critical benches, which might edit six different literary periodicals, are now thrown over each other, and form _one_.--Frankly, however, as I come out against this jumbling together of learned (1) advertisements, (2) reviews, (3) extracts, (4) verbal and (5) real criticisms, and (6) artistic judgments, still I am ready and glad to admit that the critical _Fauna_ and _Flora_ of the first _five_ tables root out, perhaps, full as many shoots of weeds as they put forth themselves from their own germs; and I therefore appeal to a private letter of my own, which is beyond the suspicion of flattery, and wherein I associate it with a toadstool, which, although it produces, itself, upon an affusion (in this case, of ink), whole hosts of insects, nevertheless eradicates the flies.--But as among the reviewers there are also authors, like myself; as among the Portuguese inquisitors there are Jews; and, in fact, as I should want to talk whole intercalary years on the subject,--why talk a whole intercalary day?

S.

Stripes.--"He that knoweth his Lord's will, and doeth it not, shall receive double stripes."--Who, then, gets the single ones? Not he, surely, who knows not the will and does it not?--It follows, therefore, that greater knowledge, not _aggravates_, but itself _creates_, moral guilt; for in so far as I absolutely do not discern a moral obligation, my offence against it is surely not less, but none at all.

I will be my own Academy of Sciences, and assign to myself the following prize-question, which I will myself answer in a prize essay: "Since only such actions are virtuous as proceed from love for goodness, it follows that only those can be sinful which proceed from mere love of evil, and reference to self-interest must lessen the degree of a sin, as well as that of a virtue. But, on the other hand, what could there be but self-interest in our nature, which should impel us to what is bad? And if evil were done from a pure propensity to evil, then there would be a second, although opposite, autonomy[235] of the will."

T.

Trouble, Tribulation.--Now, as I write these distressful sounds, which announce to me that Nature makes only _thorn-hedges_, but men _crowns of thorns_, all pleasure in lashing about me with the thorns of satire dies away, and I would rather draw some thorns out of your hands or feet.

21. DOG-POST-DAY.

Victor's Professional Visits.--Concerning Houses full of Daughters.--The Two Fools.--The Carrousel.

The following remark comes not from the dog's knapsack, but from my own head: One needs not to be a panegyrist of our times, to see with pleasure that authors, princes, women, and others have now mostly laid aside the unnatural _false_ masks of virtue (e. g. bigotry, pietism, ceremonial behavior), and have entirely assumed instead the _genuine_ tasteful _show_ of virtue. This improvement of our character-masks, whereby we hit more finely the exterior of virtue, is contemporaneous with a similar one on the stage, where they play their antics and their tragics no longer, as once, with _paper_ clothes and badly imitated laces, but with the _true_ ones.--

"The Princess wanted you yesterday," said the Prince to the Court-Physician, almost as soon as he had entered with his exhausted face. The inflammation of Agnola's eyes had, in consequence of the autumn weather, night-feasts, and Culpepper's bold practice and her own--for the red capital letters of beauty (namely, painted cheeks) she was always putting on afresh--very much increased. Properly, Victor was too proud to let himself be sent for as a mere physician; nay, he was too proud to let himself be in demand for anything else (and though it were philosophy or beauty) than his character; for his father, who had just as much delicate pride, had taught him that we must not serve any one who does not respect us, or whom we ourselves do not respect,--nay, that one must not accept a favor from any one to whom one can only return outward, but not inward thanks. But this tender sense of honor, which never came into an unequal conflict with his self-interest, though it might well with his humanity, could never bind the hands wherewith he might relieve an unhappy Princess--unhappy, like himself, from a famine of love--at least of the pains of her eyes; perhaps, also, of _younger_ pangs; for his good-heartedness suggested to him nothing but reconciliations,--of the Prince with Le Baut, with the Princess, with the Minister. Nothing is more dangerous than to reconcile two persons,--unless, indeed, one is himself one of them; to set them at variance is much safer and easier.

He found Agnola, even in the afternoon, still in her chamber, because its green tapestries flattered (not the face, to be sure, but) the hot eye. A thick veil over the face was her screen from daylight. When she, like a sun, lifted her veil, he could not comprehend how in Tostato's shop he could make, out of this Italian fire and these quick court-eyes, the face, red with weeping, of a blonde. A part of this fire belonged, to be sure, to her sickness. Her first word was a decided disobedience to his first; meanwhile she flew in the face of the Messrs. _Pringle_ and _Schmucker_, as well as himself; for the whole triune College advised leeches round the eyes; but those were disgusting to her. The medicus then suggested cupping-glasses at the back of the head; but her hair was more precious to her than her eyes.

"Must, then, everything be bought with blood?" said she, with Italian vivacity.

"Realms and religions ought not to be, but health should," said he, with English freedom of speech.

Once more he demanded her blood. She would not give it to him, however, until he changed the sacrificial knife, and proposed opening a vein in the eye. Persons of rank, like learned men, are often ignorant of the commonest things: she thought the Doctor would open the vein. And as she thought so, he did it, with a hand trained by the couching-needle.

Meanwhile, if (according to Pliny) a kiss on the eye is one on the soul, the opening of a vein in that organ is no joke; but one may, while he inflicts a wound, himself get one. The poor Court-Medicus must, with his swimming, friendly eye, from which only within a few days the tear of love has been dried away, boldly gaze into the sun pent up in an eye-socket, and, what is more, softly rest his finger on the warm face, and from the fountain of tears make bright blood spurt out.... One ought, before undertaking such an operation, to have a similar one performed on himself, for the sake of the cooling. But, in truth, fate had given him nothing this week but lancet-cuts into his heart's arteries. Let one, further, represent to himself how the whole female sex appeared to him like a magic, far-receded shape, which had once gleamed near to him in a dream, and as a paled moon by day, which he had worshipped in a bright night; and then will one have opened his good innocent heart to behold therein, beside a great ever-active sorrow, a thousand sympathetic wishes for the compassionated Princess. Despite her singular mixture of pride, liveliness, and refinement, he still thought he discovered a change in her, which he could explain partly by his to-day's assiduity and partly by his influence on the Prince, which had been thus far so favorable to her,--a change which would have given him greater courage, had he not insisted upon being threatened with special drafts upon his courage by the billet above the imperator of the compass-watch. At the former and first visit his courage was lamed, because he thought himself avoided, as the son of a father who seemed to fortify his influence by his care for natural children; for a man full of love beside one full of hatred is dumb and stupid.

What put him most in heart to-day, next to the quarrels in which he was defeated (as the one about leeches, &c.), was the last and following, in which he conquered (one grows more courageous and prosperous when one contradicts a proud woman than when one flatters her): He saw a mask lying there; now, as he knew that in Italy ladies wore them in bed, as ours do gloves, using them as a sort of glove to the face, he straightly forbade her the mask, as being tinder to the inflammation of her eyes. It was no flattery when he said to her that the mask might take from her more than it gave. In short, he insisted upon it.--