Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces Part 27

"We never _hate_ ourselves," I said. "We _despise_ and _pity_ ourselves, when we have done wrong. Although--I _must_ add this--we hate all men, our ownselves excepted, for vices. Can this be right?"

"Self-hatred," went on the Professor, "is not possible, for hatred is nothing but the wishing of evil to the object of it--_i. e_., a desire to punish, not for _bettering's_ sake, but for _punishing's_. But the most repentant of sinners never can wish himself made the subject of a chastening of this kind; and even if he could, such a wish would be merely a _disguised_ desire for _bettering_--_i. e_., for greater happiness. But to a transgressor other than ourselves we hardly can concede _rapidity_ of conversion, not, at all events, until he has gone through a proper expiation. What distinguishes our feeling concerning other people's errors from our feeling concerning our own is a sham self-love. The very minutest particle of hatred desires the unhappiness of its object; that is what I have got to prove now."

His own wife here interrupted him with the words, "My heart tells me, as plainly as possible, that I could never wish any serious misfortune to happen to my bitterest enemy--such as money troubles, or anything about her children. I could not bear even the idea of a tear being brought to her eyes on my account."

"No, I suppose not," he went on. "The better nature within us never wishes its antipode a broken leg, would not leave him without a strip of lint, or a wish for his recovery. But I know that that same 'better nature' does take a delight in his minor skin-wounds--his being put to confusion, his sleigh slipping down hill backwards, his losing his hair. The gentlest of souls hides, at the back of its tender sympathy with great troubles, its _untender_ satisfaction with small ones, such as call for condolence (_a smaller thing than sympathy_). The tenderest of people, people incapable of indicting the smallest wound imaginable on their enemy's _skin_, are delighted to make a thousand deep ones in his _heart_." "Ah!" said Luna, "how can that be possible?" "I don't think it _would_ be possible," Clotilda answered her, "if the pain of the soul had as definite a physiognomy, and as real tears, as that of the body."

"Exactly," said the Professor; "that is just where it is. To make ourselves feel more gently towards the wicked we have only to think of them as delivered wholly over into our hands. For what harm would one do them then? The moment they _acknowledged_ their fault we would stay the rack, and bid the torture cease. What redoubles our indignation, and renders it everlasting, is the very impossibility of inflicting any punishment."

"Yes, that is quite true," said Melchior. "The oftener I read of these two live guillotines of their age, Alba and Philip (whose lips were shears of the Parcae), or of those two other mowers of mankind, Marat and Robespierre, the deeper does the aquafortis of anger etch their condemnation into my heart, although death has drawn up their Acts of Amnesty."

"And yet, after all," I put in (leaving the Piqueur in the rear for the present), "if anybody would deliver over the King and the Duke to you and me here this afternoon, and a couple of caldrons of boiling oil into the bargain, _I_ feel quite certain I couldn't throw one of them in--at any rate till the oil had stood a long time in the cold. I should let them off with a good flogging--say 100 lashes, or so. Ah!

what a cast-iron sort of fellow were he who should not soothe, and comfort with cooling, healing touch (had he the power) a heart breaking with anguish, a face whereon the worm of suffering was ploughing its tortuous track! At the same time (I continued, rapidly; for I was determined to bring in my Piqueur somehow or other), where emotion is concerned, the memory of past errors is not the smallest safeguard against new ones."

"You see, you won't allow me to speak," the Professor broke in. "I still owe you a tremendous number of proofs, and I am most anxious to acquit the debt. Our _hatred_, being an emotion, always turns every _action_ into a _whole life_; every _attribute_ into a _personality_ (or, to speak more accurately, because our only mode of _seeing_ any personality is by its reflection in the mirror of its attributes) converts _one_ attribute into the sum of them. It is only in the case of liking--of friendship--that we find it easy to separate the attribute from the personality. Hatred can not do it. Nay, in the case of liking, the _converse_ transformation takes place--that of the personality into the attribute. We hate as if the object of our hatred had never possessed any virtues, or inclination to them--neither pity nor truthfulness, love of the young, one single good hour, anything whatever. In brief, since it is with the _individuality_ of the person whose punishment we are decreeing that we are angry (not with its characteristic of the moment), we make him out to be a _wholly_ wicked being. Yet such a being is not conceivable. The voice of conscience speaking in that being would be of itself _one_ goodness in him, even though it spoke in vain; the pain of that conscience would be another; each joy and each impulse of his life another."

"Ah! how delightful," said Luna, "that there is n.o.body so utterly bad; n.o.body whom one would have to hate altogether."

"You see," he continued, "it cannot be the _me_ of a person that we hate; for the _me_ is still the same _me_ when it improves, and wins our regard."

In the warmth of our discussion we were losing sight altogether of one of the two concave mirrors which distort other people's moral distortions for us even more wildly than they are distorted to begin with--I mean, our own egotism. Often, when I have seen and heard women squabbling in the market-place (women of whom one was just as good as the other, and with just as good an opinion of herself), and one hurling her invectives with delight, like a red-hot stone, at the other's head, which seethed and swelled in waves of anger around that stone, while a third woman kept calm and cool in the midway-path between, I have been ashamed of the human race--ashamed that the self-same reproach, or immorality, which _ought_ to produce exactly the same effect upon all the three, should make _too_ strong an impression on the one, too weak a one on the other, none whatever on the third.

Paul pointed to the _second_ of these distorting mirrors--our bodily senses. For these render the vinegar of hatred doubly bitter by throwing into its fermenting-vat these parts of the enemy which _they_ take cognizance of--his clothes, movements, gestures, tones, &c.

Here we reached the Gordian knot which only I could cut with the Piqueur. "Who is to save us from these bodily senses?" I inquired (with a certain amount of hopeful expectancy). Melchior answered, "I do not allow them to influence my philanthropy, at all events. They are the straw which feeds the flame under that ascending windbag balloon, the heart."

Jean Paul thrust me back from the Gordian knot. "I," he said, "have an admirable sweetener at all times in readiness to apply when a sinner embitters my senses. I take him, and (like a victorious enemy) strip all the clothes off him, not leaving him so much as his hat or his wig.

When once I've got him standing there before me, cold and wretched as any corpse (I mean, of course, in imagination), I begin to feel sorry for the scoundrel. But this is not enough. I have got to sweeten myself a good deal more than this; so I proceed to slit him up with a long, slicing cut from top to bottom into three cavities (as if he were a carp), so that I can see his heart and brain pulsating. The mere sight of a red human heart (Danaid's bucket for happiness--safe storehouse of so many a sorrow) makes my own soft and heavy; and I have often not forgiven a street robber till the Professor has been shewing us his heart and brain in the anatomical theatre. 'Thou unhappy, sorrowful heart,' I have always found myself thinking, with deep, sympathetic emotion, 'how many a blood-billow has gone surging through thee, glowing and freezing in the same moment.' But if all this process failed to have its effect, I should proceed to extremities, and smite my enemy dead; then take the naked, fluttering, trembling soul--like an evening moth--out of its brain-chamber chrysalis, and, holding up the quivering night-creature between my forefinger and thumb, gaze at it without a trace of rancour left in me."

"To picture one's enemy to one's self as unclothed, or disembodied,"

said I, "so as to be able to put up with him, as though he were dead (perhaps that is the chief reason why we love the dead), is just the operation _I_ perform too. I often try to soften the unpleasant effect which some repulsive physiognomy produces upon me by thinking of it as scalped, and with its skin folded back."

And now I determined, seriously and in earnest, that the sceptre and throne insignia of the conversation, should no more depart from my hands. Wherefore I commenced as follows: "But who is to provide us with the time and the power, not only to remember, but to act upon, this precious and reliable principle, or rule of conduct, right in the thick of this world's Pyrrhic war-dance, and the rapid evolutions of our emotions? Who is to stoke the aether-flame of philanthropy with a sufficient supply of combustible matter, seeing that there are such hosts of people continually drowning it out, smothering it up, and building it in! Who is to make up to us for the lack of a gentle, quiet temperament? Who, or what?"

Just as I was going to fix the Piqueur on to this lance-shaft by way of point, the cold dinner was brought, and the Professor's wife went to fetch her children. For the dinner had to be over before sunset; because, like a fresh supply of green firewood, it would drown out the flame of enthusiasm for a time, and break the unity of its vertical, purple fire pyramid. The company, therefore, waited in vain for me to go on with what I had to say. I shook my head, expressing, by nods, that I should do so when we were all together again, and sitting down.

While we were at dinner I was able to set up my speaking machine, and set it a-going at my ease.

"I asked you once or twice before dinner," I commenced, "_who_ can invigorate and quicken our principles of love to our fellows, and set them fully to work? I answer, the chief Piqueur can; only I'm afraid I've made go many false starts, and baulked in so many of my runs before making this grand jump of mine, that I have led you to entertain far greater expectations concerning it than it (or I) may be able to fulfil. A day or two before the stump-end of the chief Piqueur's life-candle fell down and went guttering out in its candlestick-socket, he sent for me to the side of his bed of suffering and begged me--not to prescribe for him, but--to make a thorough inspection of his house.

He drew my head down close to his wretched pillow, and said, 'You see, doctor, Death has got his hunting-knife at my throat. But I'm not sorry to go, and what little I leave behind me in the shape of worldly gear goes all to the poor. It's but little that I have ever thought of sc.r.a.ping together for _myself_, and that is a comfort to think on now.

It's for the _poor_ that I have screwed and saved, pinched and pared; and when a man has done that it's a pleasure to him to make his will; he knows it will be paid back again _elsewhere_. But there's one hard stone at my heart still. You see I have neither chick nor child belonging to me, and when the breath is out of my body, the old woman who keeps my room in order will be in the house by herself. She's an honest body enough, but as poor as a church mouse, and pretty sure to help herself to something before the seals are put on my effects. Now, doctor, you are a man who are just as good to the poor as I am myself; you often prescribe for them gratis; I want to ask _you_ to go through the house with the notary (I don't trust _him_ a bit more than I do the old woman), take an inventory of what there is, and have a regular notarial instrument drawn up concerning my property. I've left the whole of it to the Poor-house and the Inst.i.tution for Dest.i.tute Gamekeepers. The notary must begin with my breeches under the pillow here, because my purse is there.'

"A man whose stubble Death is in the very act of turning up with his plough, has, upon me, a more powerful claim than that of the _first_ request--that of the _last_. I came the next day, bringing with me the notary, and also my dislike to the dying man and his distrustful suspicions. With gay indifference I helped to protocol the effects in the sick-room--his shooting-jacket, worn into shining patches by his old game-bag--his old guns and knives--even such matters as a leather over-shoe for his thumb, and a long mummy bandage for his nose, which he had worn on occasions when he had hurt himself in these members with his gun.

"As we went through the other silent chambers--empty snail-sh.e.l.ls of his shrivelled, dried-up life--my frozen blood began to thaw within me, and to move in warm, light mercury-globules. But when I came to the lumber-room, with the notary, and tuned over the rag-fair of his old night-shirts--(caterpillar cases and blood-shirts of his feverish nights, in which I seemed still to see him groaning and thirsting)--and his _Pathebrief_,[71] and his name copied from thence with all its flourishes on to his pointer's collar--and the picture of his pretty mother with him as a smiling infant in her lap--and his wife's bridal garland of wire, covered with green silk--(Oh! for goodness' sake do _not_ interrupt me with talk--I've had enough of that, Heaven knows).

When I took in my hands these opera-costumes, these theatrical properties, in which the sick player down-stairs had performed his _probe-rolle_[72] of a Harpaxus for the benefit of the poor--not only did the poor fellow's _moral_ emptiness of treasury, and miserable rate of monthly salary, strike me with pain, but, moreover, I wished him _no heavier suffering, no severer punishment, than he would wish for himself, were he really to repent in good earnest before his plunge into the depths of the soil_. No, not so much, for the matter of that.

Therefore, my dislike to him was gone. For I put myself in his place--not _outwardly_ only, as people generally do, fancying themselves in another person's physical place with _their_ own souls, _their_ own wishes, habitudes, &c.--but _inwardly_--in _his_ mind, his youth, wishes, sufferings, thoughts.

"'Poor _Piqueur_,' I said, as I went down-stairs; 'I have no more satiric pleasure now over your gnawing suspicion, your errors, your self-shooting covetousness, your hungry avarice. You have got to live through a long eternity with that self, that "me" of yours, the best way you can, just as I have with mine. You have got to rise with that self of yours at the Resurrection, and go about with it, and look after it, and care for its welfare. And, of course, you can't but be _fond_ of _yourself_, just as _I am_ of _myself_, and put up with all that self's defects and shortcomings whether you will or not. Go in peace then into the other world, where the broken gla.s.ses of your harmonica of life will be replaced with fresh-tuned ones--in the great home of all the spirits!'

"The old woman met us on the stairs crying out that the man was dying.

I went to his bed-side, looked upon his cold, yellow, senseless form, and saw that he would very soon throw off his last stage-dress, his body. Next day the tolling bell announced that, he had returned to the dust--gone back into the ground--that, stage dressing-room of souls and flowers. (And we are _rung_ off and on to that stage, as well as others.)

"Meanwhile I made an experiment with my modified and mildened system of treatment, upon the poor notary devil; the day after I tried it on the jurists who came from the college. (Jean Paul! communicate your idea to us by-and-bye--do _not_ interrupt me just now)--I did this, I say, and found that I was able to establish a heart-peace even with the plebeians among them--who dishonour their calling--the only really _free_ one in all the body politic. For in the cases of these lawyers, and those of my own medical colleagues from whose b.r.e.a.s.t.s I have been so often in such a hurry to cut off, and melt down, the medals of honour which they have cast for themselves, I have had merely to take away the roof from over their heads, lift the rafters from their walls, and bare their houses to the four winds of heaven. Then I could look in and see everything there--their housekeeping, their unoffending wives, their sleep (_i. e_., mock-death), sicknesses, sorrows, birth-days, and funeral-days, and this reconciled me to them! Of a truth, to love a man, I have only to think of his children, his parents--the love he feels and inspires. One can easily perform this philanthropic transmigration of soul at any moment, without help of the balloon of phantasy, or the diving-bell of profound reflection. Good heavens! it _does_ seem hard (and a shame and disgrace into the bargain) that it should have taken me thirty years of my life to understand properly what it is that self-love is really driving at--my own and everybody else's--what it wants is, to be surrounded with mere repet.i.tions of its own 'me.' It insists upon every infant on earth being a parson's son (as I am)--that everybody shall have lost, and gained, n.o.ble friends--that everybody shall be an M.D., and have studied at Gottingen--that his name shall be Sebastian, and that he shall be an overseer of mines, and write his life in forty-five dog-post-days--in brief, that this world shall contain a thousand million Victors instead of one. I beg that everybody may send spies into his soul, to look carefully about them and see whether it be not the case that there are thousands of instances in which what we hate a man for is, either that he is as fat as a prize pig, or as lean as a stick of vermicelli--or that he is a district secretary, or a Roman Catholic watchman in Augspurg, and wears a coat white on the one side, and green on the other--or that he eats his veal with melted b.u.t.ter;[73] (or, at all events, hate them _more_ for these reasons; for when we are _indifferent_ to people, all their external characteristics, beautiful or ugly, merely increase our indifference). People are so deep sunk in their dear selves that everybody yawns at the _menu_ of everybody else's favourite dishes, but expects _them_ to be interested when _he_ reads out _his_ to _them_."

That feathered echo, the nightingale, was singing to us phrases of the music of the spheres, to us inaudible until thus repeated to us by her.

But I had my rapid descent from my Mont Cenis to finish, and could but give utterance to my applause (of the bird and her music) by a hasty nod. "Heavenly! Elysian! I've been hearing it every now and then. But, one thing more. Since my sentimental journey in other people's souls, I have been happier and fatter than I used to be, in ball-rooms, anterooms, and large a.s.semblages (hot lark-spits which roasted all the fat out of a Swift). This enduring of transgressors includes a greater enduring still of fools and dunces, although the great world makes war on these three tolerated sects in just the contrary ratio.

"The amnesty thus granted to humanity makes the duty of loving more easy to perform; moreover, it renders the deep blissfulness of friendship and love more justifiable; for the glow, the fire of the latter often vitrifies and calcines the heart towards the rest of mankind. And this is the reason why the last and best fruit...."

Clotilda looked inquiringly here, as if begging to be allowed one word of remonstrance with me for forgetting to put myself in the place of those whose transformation I was thus extolling. I reddened, and paused. "This," observed Jean Paul, "is the reason why a concert-room audience cries out the loudest against noise or disturbance just during the loveliest adagios--when people are most deeply touched--and swear and weep at the same time."

"I cannot help being ashamed of an experience of my own," said Clotilda. "The other day I cried so at reading Silly's letters (in Allwill's Papers) that I was obliged to put the book down. Then I went to the casino with my head full of what I had been reading--and I dare not tell you what hard opinions I entertained, several times that very evening, of several people of my acquaintance. I expected of _them_ that they should all be in exactly the same mood of mind as myself--although, of course, they had not just come from reading Silly's letters."

"That is exactly what I was coming to," concluded I. "The last and best fruit, which ripens late in a soul ever warm, is tenderness towards the hard--patience with the impatient--kindly feeling for the selfish--and philanthropy towards the misanthropic."

It is a very odd thing, beloved Cato, but Jean Paul has just come and told me a murder-tale of human iniquity, which goes hissing through my heart like a red-hot iron. All my _theories_ stand bright and clear as stare around my soul, but I can do nothing save look inactively down upon the billows in which my blood is foaming, heated by this subterranean earth-fire, and wait until they cool down and subside.

Alas! we poor, poor mortals! Jean Paul, who knew the story the day before yesterday, and had consequently all that time to put the cooling process in practice in advance of me, is going to take charge of the picture exhibition of our insular flower-pieces in my stead, and add a postscript to this. Which is well, for to-day I really could not do it.

By the 10th of April the air will have cooled; then _you_ are sure to be coming, as the French election meetings begin then. We must keep the "settling weeks" of your great feast and fairtide here. Alas! in what a disquiet condition have I to stop writing to you. _You_ will go on reading, but not

Your Victor.

POSTSCRIPT BY JEAN PAUL.

DEAR BROTHER.

Our Victor's virtuous indignation will soon be over and past. The reason why he, and I too, now, have made a written confession of the cure of our disposition to censure our fellows, is, that we may be compelled to be excessively ashamed of ourselves if ever we chide for more than a minute, or hate for more than a moment. This all embracing love demands a sacrifice, which is made with greater hesitation than one would expect--the sacrifice of the pleasure of being satisfied with one's self--which anger adds to the contemplation of other people's faults (and satire to the contemplation of other people's follies)--by way of a sweetening ingredient, and whose place is taken by a pure and unalloyed regret at the frequency with which the disease shifts its seat, and at the chronicity of the bleeding of the wounds and scars of helpless man.

However, for the present, what I would fain do is to steer our floating island, and its blessed twilight, close up to your view.

The sun was sinking towards the cloud Alps, and glowing white over France in the west as if it should shortly drop down on its plains as a gleaming shield of freedom, or fall into its billowy ocean as a wedding-ring between heaven and earth. The shades of evening were already overflowing the first two steps of the hill, and the darkening Rhine seemed to be pa.s.sing an arm of night around the earth. We ascended our little steps as the sun descended his great ones, seeming, as we ascended, to rise from his burning grave with the face of a saint at the Resurrection. The hill lifted up our eyes and our souls.

Remembering my shortcomings I took Victor's hand, and said, "Ah! dear Victor! could it but come to pa.s.s that one could make a treaty of peace with all mankind, and with one's own self--if one's shattered heart could absorb and retain, from out the leaven of the hating and hated world, nothing but the sweet, mild, life-sap of love--as the oyster, amid mud and slime, takes nothing save bright pure water into his house. Ah! if one but knew that such an event were about to come to pa.s.s of a truth, an evening of happiness such as this would refresh and fill one's thirsting breast, (all _cracked_ with thirst and dryness)--would still the everlasting sigh." Victor answered (not looking round, but keeping his glowing and beglowed face--which his loving heart suffused with a brighter tint--turned to the sun, now burning half sunk in the earth), "Perhaps," he said, "that time may come; a time when we shall all be happy when a human being smiles--even should he not deserve it--when we shall speak kindly to every one--not by way of a mere sacrifice to the laws of polite society, but for very love--and there will be no difficulties, no complications, for hearts which will no longer have any inward annoyance to conceal. To-day the spring sun rests upon the world like the eye of a mother, and shines warm upon every heart, the wicked as well as the good. Yes, thou Eternal One, we here now give our hands and our hearts to thy whole creation, and no longer hate anything which thou hast made." We were overpowered, and we embraced with tears, and no words, in the first darkening of the night. Over the sun's burial place stood the zodiacal light, a red grave pyramid, flaming unmoved up into the silent deep of blue.

The City of G.o.d which hangs displayed on high above our earth, built on the arch of the Milky Way, appeared from out the endless distances with all its shining sun-lights.

We came down from the hill--each spot of earth was a hill just then; an unseen hand lifted our souls on high above the dark vapour-circle, and they looked down as if from alps, seeing nothing save gleaming peaks of other mountain ranges--for all the mean, all that was not the high, all graves, petty goals, and life careers of humanity, were veiled in heavy mist.

We lost each other amongst the paths, but in our hearts we were all together. We met again, but the silence in our souls was not broken, for each heart beat just as did all the others, and there was no difference, save the being alone, between a prayer and an embrace.

The scattered flames of our emotion had gradually merged into one glowing sun sphere, as the ancients believed that the fluttering after-midnight fires thickened ere morning into a sun.[74]

But I, a stranger, alas! in this paradise stood beneath the leafless branches, sad, and alone, beside the dark-blue Rhine stream where the stars were mirrored--it glided, with gently heaving wavelets, over the German soil, binding two great republics[75] together, like some heavenly band; and to me it seemed as though the thirst, the fire, of a breast no broader even than mine could be quenched with nothing less than the waters of this great river. Alas! we are all like this. In the transient clasp of our little grandeurs and blisses, we long to rest, and _die_, upon something _great_. We long to cast ourselves into the depths of the heavens when we see them glitter and sparkle above us--or down upon the many-tinted earth, when her flowers and gra.s.ses wave--or into the endless river, flowing as if from out the past onwards into the future.

Our ladies and the children had gone away--departing in silence from this anchorage of hours so happy--I saw them as they floated over the wavelets, singing like swans, and dropping spring flowers into the ripples, that they might float back as souvenirs to us upon our island sh.o.r.e. The children were sleeping softly in their arms, between the glories of the heaven and of the earth, lulled by the arms, the songs, and the ripples.

When it was 12 o'clock, and the first morning of spring was come, Victor summoned us all to the hill, we knew not wherefore. All around and beneath us was the music of the rush of the Rhine, and through it, came gliding clear the bright spring-melody of the nightingale; the stars of the twelfth hour sank, drop by drop, into the darkened grave of the sun, and went paling out among the grey ashes of the western clouds. Suddenly a straight, beautiful flame shot up in the west, and music came palpitating through the darkness.

"Do you not think of your France," said Victor, "the first hour of day is breaking for _her_ this 21st of March--the day when the six thousand primary a.s.semblies form themselves, like stars, into one constellation, that one law may burst into being from out a million hearts."