The Invisible Lodge Part 21

An ominous pleurisy--if one may put any faith in the entire system of semeiology and the hard beatings of the pulse and strictures in the chest--has grasped and held me since day before yesterday and threatens to make an end of my maltreated life and of this biography--unless by a fortunate cure death should be softened into an empyema[88]--or into a phthisis--or vomica [abscess] or into a scirrhus [glandular induration], or else into an ulcer.----After such a heating, one has only to bore into my breast, so as to draw out, from that source whence there once came a book full of the milk of human kindness, life and the morbid matter together....

FORTY-SIXTH, OR ESTO-MIHI, SECTION.

You good readers! who have followed me with your indulgent eyes from the chess-board of the first section to the death-bed of the last, my road and our acquaintance are at an end--may life never be a burden to you--may your practical eye never forget in the little field the great one; in this first life the next; in men, yourselves--may dreams crown your life and may none affright your dying hour ... My sister shall conclude all.... Live happily and sink happily to sleep!...

FORTY-SEVENTH, OR INVOCAVIT, SECTION.

My good and martyred brother will have it that I should finish this book. Ah, his sister would not be able to do it for grief, if it should become necessary. But I hope to heaven that my brother is not so sick as he fancies. After dinner indeed he has such a notion. And I, if we are both to have any peace, must needs confirm him in it, and acknowledge him to be just as sick as he imagines himself. Yesterday the schoolmaster had to rap on his chest, that he might hear whether it rang, because a certain Avenbrugger in Vienna had written that this ringing showed sound lungs. Unfortunately it rang but little, and he therefore gives himself up; but I will, without his knowledge, write to Dr. Fenk, that he may allay his qualms. I have further to state that young Mr. von Falkenberg is sick at the house of his parents in Ober-Scheerau, and that my friend Beata is also sick with hers.... It is a gloomy winter for us all. May the spring heal every heart and restore to me and the readers of this book my dear brother!

FORTY-EIGHTH, OR MAY, SECTION.

The Pounding Cousin.--Cure.--Bathing.--Caravan.

Once more you are to have him--the Brother and Biographer! In freedom and gladness I come forth again; the winter and my craziness are over and clear joy dwells in every second, on every octavo page, in every drop of ink.

It happened thus: Every imagined sickness presupposes an actual: nevertheless there are imaginary causes of sickness. My alternation between health and sickness, between merry and mournful, soft and stern moods, had reached, in its rapidity and its contrasts, the maximum point; I could no longer, for want of breath, dictate a protocol, and as to the scenes of this biography I could not so much as conceive them; when on a ruddy, glowing winter evening, I sallied out and strode round through the rosy-tinted snow, and in this snow lighted on the word _heureus.e.m.e.nt_.

I shall never cease to think of this word on the wax-tablet of the snow; it was beautifully engraved in the lapidary style with a bamboo-cane. "Fenk;" I exclaimed mechanically. "Thou canst not be far away," thought I; for as every European (even on his plantations) tries the nib of his pen on a special word, and as the Doctor had already filled whole sheets with the trial-word _heureus.e.m.e.nt_ as first impression of his pen, I knew at once how it was. And he sat down with me and laughed at me (to be sure more at my sister's history of the sickness than at my invalid appearance) till I, not knowing whether I ought to laugh or be angry, did, as well as I could, one after the other. But soon he fell into my own condition and was obliged himself to do one after the other--when we came to a history which put us, namely the whole hypochondriacal committee of safety, to shame; which I nevertheless relate.

There happened to be, namely in the room with us, a near cousin of mine, named Fedderlein, who is both cobbler and steeple-warder of Scheerau; he cares for the boots and for the safety of the city and has to do both with leather and (on account of his ringing) with chronology. My near cousin was coal-black and troubled, not on account of my sickness, but on account of his wife, who had died of it. This case of sickness and death he would fain communicate to me and the doctor, by way of enlightening the latter and affecting the former. And he would have succeeded, had he not unfortunately s.n.a.t.c.hed a ripping-knife from my Philippina and in the absorption of his own attention to the tale of mortality, pounded vehemently on the table. I immediately proposed to myself not to suffer it. My hand therefore crept along--my eyes meanwhile holding his fixed--nearer and nearer to the said hammer in order to stop it.

But my cousin's hand politely evaded it and kept on pounding. I would gladly have been profoundly moved, for he came nearer and nearer to the last hours of my deceased kinswoman--but I could not withdraw my ears from the foundry-work of the knife-handle. Fortunately I saw little Wutz standing there, and hurriedly borrowed the unlucky knife of the hammerer and with it in my nervousness cut out for the child one or two halves of fastnight-cracknels.

So there I stood rescued and had the knife to myself. But now he began drumming with his disarmed fingers upon the key-board of the table, and provided his wife in his novel with the holy supper. I tried to subdue myself and my ears; but as, partly the internal conflict, partly my intense attention to his drumming fingers, which I could hear only with the greatest difficulty, drew me wholly away from my good cousin, who was certainly a wife and a steeple-wardress such as few are, I soon had enough of it and caught at his organ-playing hand of torture, put it under arrest, and broke out: "O my dear, worthy cousin Fedderlein!" He surmised that I was affected: and became himself still more so, forgot himself, and with the still unarrested fingers of his left hand continued to tap too vigorously on the table.

I undertook, like a stoic, to help myself out from this station of misery by an internal effort, and while the outward tinkling went on behind me, placed before my mind my good cousin and her deathbed: "and so then," I eloquently soliloquized, "thou liest there, poor faded flower, stiff and motionless, and, so to speak, dead!"--At this moment the trip-hammer became quite furious. I could not help it, but I took the left hand of the historian prisoner also and pressed it partly with emotion. "You can both imagine," said he, "how I felt, as if the steeple fell upon me, when one had to take her up on his back like a sack, and so carry her down the seven stairs." I was beside myself, first at the thought of that, and secondly, because I felt in my hand the effort of his toward a new tattooing; I broke down and said: "for heaven's sake, my dear cousin, for the sake of the good deceased saint, if one has any regard for his own cousin ..."

"I will come to an end presently," said he, "if it takes such a hold of you." "No;" said I, "only I beg you not to drum so! But such a _cousin we two_ shall neither of us be likely soon to have again!" For I was fairly beside myself.

And yet life, like a miniature painting, is made up of such points, of such moments. Stoicism can often keep off the club of the hour, but not the gnat-sting of the second.

My doctor--(while my cousin put the question: "What was my worthy cousin's meaning?")--took me out of the room and said gravely: "Dear Jean Paul, thou art my true friend, a government-advocate, a Maussenbach audienza, an author in the biographical department--but a fool nevertheless, I mean a hypochondriae."

In the evening he demonstrated the double proposition. O, on that evening, good Fenk, thou didst draw me out of the laws and the poison-fangs of hypochondria, which sprinkle their pungent juice over all moments! Thy whole dispensary lay on thy tongue! Thy prescriptions were satires, and thy cure enlightenment!

"Set it down in thy biography"--he began, and thrust his hands into his m.u.f.f--"that there is in thy case do imitating Herr Thummel and his doctor and their medical college, which consisted half of the patient and half of the physician--that I even scold thee; for that is in fact what I am going to do. Tell me, where has thy reason been all this time; nay, where hast thou kept thy conceptive faculty that thou hast been, bodily, in the devil's hands? Don't answer me that the learned are here of too many different opinions--['Who shall decide when doctors disagree?']--that Willis places conception in the _corpus callosum_--Posidonius, on the contrary, in the front chamber, as does aetius also--and Glaser in the oval _centrum_. The thing is only a lively figure of speech; but inasmuch as thou confusest me thereby, I will attack thee in another quarter. Tell me--or do you tell me, dear Philippina, how could you allow the patient hitherto to have so many exalted, touching or poetic emotions and to write them down for other people? Could you not have overturned his inkstand or coffeepot, or the whole writing-table? The strain of sentimental fancy is of all intellectual processes the most enervating; an algebraist always outlives a tragic poet."

"And a physiologist, too," said I, "Haller's cursed and yet admirable physiology came near working me into the grave; the eight volumes here."

"For that very reason," he continued, "this anatomical octupla fastens the fancy, which was wont to hover only over fleeting poetic pastures, to sharply defined and minute objects; hence...."

"Fortunately," I interrupted him, "I could always recover myself and my fancy tolerably well by brown beer,[89] which I had to take (if I would get my breath) so long as I sat over Herrn von Haller. In this vehicle, and in this diluted form, I could more easily get down that medicine of the mind, physiology. I cannot possibly, therefore, unless I would become the greatest of drinkers, become the greatest physiologist."

"That is well," said he impatiently, and pulled the tail out of his m.u.f.f, "but it comes to nothing. Thou and I stand here talking mere digressions, instead of consecutive and logical paragraphs: the reviewers of thy biography must think me very unsystematic.

"I will now talk like a book or like a doctor's dissertation; besides I ought to write one for a medical candidate with a pa.s.sion for the doctorate, and I would therein go through with the _nervus ischiaticus_ or the _nervus sympatheticus_; I will let all that be and speak here and in the dissertation of weak nerves generally.

"Every physician must have a favorite malady, which he sees oftener than any other--mine is nervous debility. Sensitive, weak, overstrained nerves, hysterical conditions and thy hypochondria,--are different baptismal names of my one darling malady.

"One can get it as early as an hereditary n.o.bility--even the hereditary n.o.bility itself, almost all the higher women and highest children have it at first hand--then not all doctors hats can remove it, any more than they can the eternal torments, but only alleviate it.

"But thou hast gained it, like the bought-n.o.bility, by merit."

"Say rather, it is itself a merit," said I, "and a hypochondriac is own brother to a learned man, if he is not in fact that very one; just as the measles, which attack monkeys as well as men, set the seal upon their relations.h.i.+p to our race."

"But thy merit," he continued, "is much easier to cure. If one should take from thee three kinds of thing, namely, thy pathological _fever-dreams_, thy _medicine-gla.s.ses_ and thy _books_, then would the entire sickness go with them. I am always forgetting that I was to discourse like a dissertation. Then for the fever-visions. The most miserable semeiology or diagnosis is certainly not the Chinese, but the hypochondriacal. Thy malady and a stoical virtue are alike in this, that whoever has one has all. Thou stoodst there as a _p.a.w.n-bearing statue_, on which pathology hung all her insignia and signs--miserably hast thou been trudging round, under thy medical armor-bearing and thy semeiotic land-freight of heart-polypus, macerated lung-lobes, stomach-inhabitants, etc."

"Ah!" I replied; "all is discharged, and I bear nothing more upon my brain but a capillary or hair-net of swollen veins, or such a kind of diver's-cap of death as the people commonly call a stroke of apoplexy."

"A fool's cap thou hast on, in thy inner man; for this is the way the thing stands. In the hypochondriac all nerves are weak, but those are the weakest which he has most abused. Now, as one mostly contracts this weakness by sitting, studying and writing, and consequently deprives the bowels, which yet must be the Moloch of these intellectual children, of all the motion which is given to the fingers; one confounds the sick bowels with sick nerves and hopes that Kampf's visceral-syringe will prove a double-barreled musket against the one and the other. Believe it not, however; a hypochondrical chest may rest upon a vigorous abdomen. It is not that the lobes of the lungs are impaired, if they sometimes flag, but that the lung-nerves are exhausted of animation, by which the lung-wings should be lifted, or else the nerves of the cuticle. If my gastric nerves are unstrung, then thou hast as much dizziness and nausea, as if there were actually a dietetic sediment in the stomach or a flow of blood on the brain. Even a weak stomach is not always a consequence of weak nerves; only observe how greedily a faint hectic patient eats and digests half an hour before death. Hence, thy yellow, autumnal color, thy fleshless petrifaction of the bones, thy remittent pulse, even thy fainting have--nothing to say, my dear Paul."

"Ha! the devil!" said the patient!

"For," said the doctor, "as all is carried on by the nerves, whereof the learned cla.s.s to which I belong often do not so much as know the definition, accordingly the periodical and movable, but fleeting, cramps and exhaustion of the nerves gradually run through the whole semeiology, but not the entire pathology. Now comes on the second paragraph of my gold-edged dissertation."

"What then has become of the first?" I asked.

"That was it: accordingly the second throws all medicine-vials into the street, blows all powders into the air, with lightnings of excommunication lays all cursed stomach medicines in ashes, empties even warm and often cold bath-tubs, and shoves Kampf's clyster-machines under the sick-bed and is exceeding mad. For the nerves can no more be strengthened in a week (even by the best iron-cure) than they can be exhausted in a week (by the greatest excess); their strength returns with as slow steps as it departed. Medicine must therefore be changed into food--and as this is injurious--consequently food must be changed into medicine."

"I eat very few things."

"That is the most blamable intemperance; and the stomach exercises then according to its powers a kind of skepticism, or Fabiism, or at least apathy. Invert rather the literary rule (_multum non multa_) and eat many kinds of things, but not _much_. Dietetics have no commands to give as to the _kind_, in eating, drinking, sleeping, etc., but only as to _degree_. At most, every one has his own rainbow, his own belief, his own stomach and his own--system of diet. And yet all this is not my third candidate's paragraph; but here it is first presented: Simple _movement_ of the body is the first a.s.sistant physician against hypochondria; and--as I have already seen hypochondria and motion united in a movable _tiers etat_--simple absence of all motion of the soul is the first body-physician against the entire devil. Pa.s.sions are as unwholesome as their enemy, thinking, or their friend, poetizing; only the complete coalition of them all is more poisonous still.

"Under the influence of the pa.s.sions," he continued, "grief, like thawy weather, dissolves all the powers, just as enjoyment is the strongest of all levers of the nerves. I will now bring all thy medicinal blunders and illegalities into a heap that thou mayst just hear a true account of thyself."

"I pay no attention to it," said I.

"But thou hast nevertheless, like all hypochondriacs and all weak women, acted outrageously and oiled now the stomach, now the lungs, _i.

e_., now the cog-wheel, now the lever-wheel, now the dial-plate-wheel, while the propelling weight lay broken off or run down, on the ground.

Like the one-legged mussel, thou hast adhered by suction to thy study rock; and--this was in fact the one only bad thing about it--with the burning and languid breast of a brooding hen, thou satst upon thy biographical eggs and sections and wouldst fain keep up with the living. Where all the while was thy conscience, thy sister, thy scholarly fame, thy stomach?"

"Don't wag thy m.u.f.f-tail so violently, Fenk, but rather throw it into bed."

"My doctor's dissertation and thy sickness, too, are both over, when thy activity, as in a state, decreases from above downward;--the head inactive, the heart beating gaily, the feet on the run; and then let March come on as soon as it will." ...