Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces Part 12

When he had got thus far, he was compelled to stop, because a housemaid _wouldn't_ stop, but went on reiterating what her mistress had gone on re-iterating, namely, how her night-cap was to be done up; twenty times did she sketch the ground-plan and elevation of the said cap, and laid weight on the necessity for speedy execution. Lenette answered her tautologies with equivalent ones, paying her back to the full in her own coin. Scarce was the housemaid out at the door, when the reviewer said--

"I haven't written a word while that windmill was clacking. Lenette, tell me, is it really a positive impossibility for a woman to say, 'It's four o'clock,' instead of 'The four quarters to four have gone?'

Can no woman say, 'The head-clout will be ready to-morrow,' and then an end of the matter? Can no woman say, 'I want a dollar for it,' and there an end of the story? Nor, 'Run in again to-morrow!' and no more about it? Can _you_ not do it, for instance?"

Lenette answered very coldly, "Oh! of course you think everybody thinks just as you think yourself!"

Lenette had two feminine bad habits, which have sent millions of male rockets, or pyrotechnic serpents--namely, curses--up skywards. The first was, that whenever she gave the servant an order, she did it as if it were a memorial in two copies, and then went out of the room with her and repeated the order in question three or four times more in the pa.s.sage. The second was, that let Siebenkaes shout a thing to her, as distinctly as man could, her first answer was, "What?" or, "What do you say?" Now, I not only advise ladies always to demand a "second of exchange" of this sort when they are in any embarra.s.sment for an answer, and I laud them fur so doing; but in cases where what is required of them is attention, not the truth, this _ancora_ and _bis_ which they cry to a speaker who is anxious not to waste time, is as c.u.mbersome as it is unnecessary. Matters of this kind are trifles in married life only so long as the sufferer by them does not complain of them. But when they have been found fault with they are worse than deadly sins, and felonies, and adulteries--seeing that they occur much more frequently.

If the author were disturbed at his work by pleonasms of the above description; what he would do would be, not deliver a serious lecture, but (because this is a good opportunity) write the following

EXTRA LEAFLET ON FEMALE LOQUACITY.

"The author of the work on 'Marriage' has said, 'A woman who does not talk is a stupid woman.' But it is easier to be his encomiast than his disciple. The cleverest women are often silent with women, and the most stupid and most silent are often both with men. On the whole, this statement, which has been applied to the male s.e.x, is true also of the female, namely, that those who think most have least to say; as frogs cease croaking when a light is brought to the side of their pond.

Moreover, the extreme talkativeness of women is a result of the sedentary nature of their occupations. Men, whose work is sedentary, such as tailors, shoemakers, weavers, have in common with women not only their hypochondriac fancies, but also their loquacity.

"The little work-tables, where feminine fingers are employed, are also the playgrounds of the feminine imagination, and their needles become little magic wands, wherewith they transform their rooms into isles of spirits filled with dreams. Hence it is that a letter or a book distracts a woman who is in love more than the knitting of a whole pair of stockings. Savages say that the monkeys refrain from talking that they may not be made to work; but many a woman talks twice as much when she is working as when she is not.

"I have devoted much thought to the question, what purpose this peculiarity subserves in the economy of the universe. At first it might strike us that Nature has ordained these re-iterations of that which has been already said with a view to the development of metaphysical truths: for, as demonstration, according to Jacobi and Kant, is merely a series, or progression, of identical propositions, it is evident that women, who always proceed from the same thing to the same thing, are continually demonstrating. There can be no doubt, however, that the object which Nature has chiefly had in view is the following. Accurate observers of nature have pointed out that the reason why the leaves of trees keep up their constant fluttering motion is that the atmosphere may be purified by this perpetual flagellation--this oscillation of the leaves having very much the effect of a light and gentle breeze.[43] It would, however, be very wonderful had Nature--always economising her forces, Nature, who never does anything in vain--ordained this much longer oscillation, this seventy years' wagging of the feminine tongue, to no definite purpose. For the purpose in question, however, we have not far to seek. It is the same which is subserved by the quivering of the leaves of trees. The endless, regular, unceasing beat of the feminine tongue is to a.s.sist in agitating and stirring up the atmosphere, which would otherwise become putrescent. The moon has her ocean of water, and the feminine head has its ocean of air, to stir into salubrity and to keep in perpetual freshness. Hence a universal Pythagorean noviciate would, sooner or later, give rise to epidemics, and Chartreuses of nuns would become pesthouses. Hence it is that diseases of the pestiferous type are less frequent among civilised nations, who talk the most. And hence Nature's beneficent arrangement that it is exactly in the largest cities--and moreover in the winter--and moreover indoors--and in large a.s.semblages--that women talk most, inasmuch as it is exactly in these places and at these periods that the atmosphere is most impure, and charged with the largest proportion of carbonic acid and other products of respiration, &c., requiring to be thoroughly fanned and set in motion. And, indeed, Nature here overthrows all artificial barriers and impediments; for, although many European women have endeavoured to imitate those of America--who fill their mouths with water in order to keep silence--and, while making calls, fill theirs with tea or coffee, yet these fluids have been found rather to facilitate than to prevent the free flow of feminine speech.

"I trust that in this I am far from being like the narrow-minded teleologists, who, to every grand sun-path, or sun-orbit of Nature, must always be appending and intercalating little subsidiary foot-tracks and 'ends in view. Such persons might permit themselves the supposition (_I_ should be ashamed to do so) that the oscillation of the female tongue, the use of which is sufficiently apparent in the motion which it communicates to the atmosphere, may possibly serve to give typical ill.u.s.tration to some thought or idea of a spiritual nature--_e. g_. the female soul itself, perhaps.

"This belongs to that cla.s.s of things with respect to which Kant has said that they can neither be proved nor disproved. I myself should rather incline, however, to the opinion that the talking of women is an indication of the cessation of thought and mental activity--as in a good mill the warning bell only rings when there is no corn left in the hopper. Moreover, every husband knows that tongues are attached to women's heads in order to give due notice, by their clanging, that some contradiction, something irregular or impossible, is dominating in them.[44] Similarly, H. Muller's calculating machine has a little bell in it, which rings merely to give notice that some error has occurred in a calculation. However, it now remains for the natural philosopher to prosecute this inquiry, and to determine to what extent my views may prove to be erroneous."

I may just mention that the above leaflet was written by the advocate.

He did not finish his review till the following morning. He had intended to go on writing down his ideas on the subject of the translation of Emilia Galotti till the money coming to him as the price of the ideas should be enough to pay for new toes to his boots--Fecht asked a sheet and a half for doing the pair--but he had not time for this, as he was obliged to calculate the price of his notice by the compositor's sight-rule, and get the money for it that very day.

The reviews were sent to the editor; the critical invoice amounted to three florins four groschen and five pfennige. Strange! we smile when we see the spiritual and the corporeal, intellect and hard cash, pain and pecuniary compensation, stated as sums in proportion; but is not our whole life an equation, a sum in "partners.h.i.+p" between soul and body; and is not all action _upon_ us corporeal, and all _re_action _from_ us spiritual?

The servant-girl brought back only "kind regards;" not the leaves of silver which his ink should have crystallised into. Peltzstiefel had not given the matter a thought. He was so absorbed in his studies that he was indifferent to his own money, and blind to the poverty of other people. He was capable, indeed, of noticing a _hiatus_; but it must be in a ma.n.u.script--not in his own or other people's shoes, stockings, &c. An inward fire blinded this fortunate man to the phosph.o.r.escence of the rotten wood around him. And happy is every actor in the school-theatricals of life who finds the lofty inward delusion suffice to compensate him for the delusions without, or to hide them from his view;--who is so carried away by the enthusiasm with which he enters into and renders his spiritual _role_, that the coa.r.s.e daubs of landscapes of the scenery seem to bloom, and the branches to rustle in the refres.h.i.+ng showers (of peas) from the rain-box--and who does not wake to reality at the s.h.i.+fting of the scenes.

But this beautiful blindness of the Rath was very distressing to our two dear friends; their little constellation, which was to have shone in their evening sky, fell all down in meteoric drops upon the earth. I do not blame Stiefel; he had an ear for distress, though not an eye.

But ye rich and great ones of the earth, who, helpless in the honeycombs of your pleasures, swimming with clogged wings in your melted sugar of roses, do not find it an easy matter to move your hand, put it into your money-bag, and take out the wage of him who helped to fill your honey-cells--an hour of judgment will strike at last for _you_, and ask you if ye were worthy to _live_, let alone to live a life of pleasure, when ye avoid even the _trifling_ trouble of _paying_ the poor who have undergone the _immense_ trouble of _earning_. But ye would be better if ye thought what misery your comfortable, indolent, indisposition to open a purse, or to read a little account, often inflicts upon the poor; if ye pictured to yourselves the backward start of hopeless disappointment of some poor woman whose husband comes home without his money--the starvation, the obliteration of so many hopes, and the weary sorrowful days of a whole family.

The advocate, therefore, put on his wicked silverising face again and went prying about into every corner with his eyegla.s.s, making himself into a species of pressgang of the furniture. As a king or an English minister sits up in his bed at night, rests his head on his hand, and considers what commodity or what tree-stem full of birch-sap he may stick his winetap of a new tax into, or (in another metaphor) so cut the peat of taxation that new peat may grow in its place: thus did Siebenkaes. With his letter of marque in his hand he scanned minutely every flag that hove in sight; he lifted up his shaving-dish and set it down; he shook the paralytic arms of an old chair till they cracked again--he subjected it to a trial more severe, by sitting down in it and getting up again.--I interrupt my period to observe _en pa.s.sant_ that Lenette fully understood the danger of this conscription and measuring of the children of the land, and that she protested continuously and unavailingly against this game of pledges with Job-like lamentations.--He also took down from its hook an old yellow mirror, with a gilt leaf-pattern frame, which hung in the bedroom opposite the green-railed bed, examined its wooden case and the back of it, moved the gla.s.s of it up and down a little and then hung it up again--an old firedog and some bedroom crockery he did not touch; he whipt the lid off a porcelain b.u.t.ter-boat, made, according to the plastic art of the period, in the shape of a cow, and glanced into the inside of it, but set it back, empty and full of dust, as an ornament on the mantelpiece again; he weighed, longer and with both hands, a spice-mortar, and put it back again into the cupboard.

He looked more and more dangerous, and more and more merry; he drew out with both arms the drawer of a wardrobe, shoved back table-napkins, and begun to overhaul a mourning-dress of checked cotton a little ----. But here Lenette flew out, seized him by his overhauling arm, and cried, "Why not, indeed! But, please G.o.d, it shall _not_ come to _that_ with _me_!"

He shut the drawer quietly, opened the cupboard again, and carefully lifted the mortar on to the table, saying, "Oh! very well, it matters little to me, it comes all to the same thing; the mortar will have to take its departure." By covering this bell of shame with his open hand by way of a damper, he was able to take out the pestle, its clapper, without producing any ring or clang. He had been perfectly aware all the time that she would rather p.a.w.n the garment of her soul (_i. e_.

her body) than the checked garment of that garment; but it was of set purpose that, like the Court of Rome, he demanded the entire hand that he might be the more likely to obtain a single finger of it--in this case the mortar--and moreover he hoped the mere frequency with which he reiterated his determination would save him the necessity of stating any reasons, and that he would familiarise Lenette with the bugbear and hobgoblin by keeping it continually before her eyes (I mean, with his design upon the mortar). Wherefore he went on to say, "The fact is, that it's very little that we have to pound in the course of a twelvemonth, except when we have a quarter of a fat beast; at the same time, just give me some idea why you're so anxious to keep the checked gown--what on earth is the use of it? The only time you can wear it will be when I depart this life. Now, Lenette, that's a terrible sort of idea; I can't stand it. Coin the dress into silver--eliminate it altogether; I'll send two pairs of mourning-buckles of mine along with it; I hope I may never have anything to buckle with them again."

She stormed without bounds and preached with much wisdom against all "careless, thoughtless householders;" and this for the very reason, that she felt it was only too probable that he would soon take every article of furniture in the place (which he had been feeling and valuing, like a person buying bullocks) to the slaughter-house, and--goodness gracious! the checked dress among the rest. "I had rather starve," she cried, "than throw away that mortar for a mere song. The Schulrath is sure to be here to-morrow evening, with the money for your reviews."

"Now you begin to talk sense," said he; and he carried the pestle horizontally in both his hands into the bedroom, and laid it on to Lenette's pillow--next bringing the mortar, and placing it on his own.

"If people should happen to hear it ring," he said, "they would think I wanted to turn it into silver, as we were pounding nothing in it; and I shouldn't like that."

The united capital contained in his greenish-yellow cotton-purse, and her large money-bag (which she wore at her girdle), amounted to about three groschen, good money. In the evening there would have to be a groschen-loaf bought, for cash, and the remainder of the metallic-seed must be sown in the morning to grow the breakfast- and dinner-crop. The servant-girl went out for the bread, but came back with the groschen and with the Job's message, "There's nothing left at the bakers' shops at this time of night but two-groschen loaves; father (the cobbler Fecht) couldn't get any either." This was lucky; the advocate could enter into partners.h.i.+p with the shoemaker, and it would be easy for these partners, by each contributing a groschen to the partners.h.i.+p funds, to obtain a two-groschen loaf. The Fechts were asked if they agreed to this. The cobbler, who made no secret of his daily bankruptcies, answered--

"With all my heart. G--d d--n me! (Heaven forgive me for swearing) if I and the whole crew of young tatterdemalions in the place have had a sc.r.a.p of anything to fill our mouths with the whole blessed day but waxed-ends." In short, this coalition of the _tiers etat_ with the learned estates put an end to the famine, and the covenanting parties broke the loaf in two and weighed it in a just balance, it being itself both the weight and the thing weighed. Ah! ye rich! Ye, with your manna, or bread sent from heaven, little think how indispensable to poverty are small weights, apothecaries' measure, h.e.l.ler-loaves,[45] a dinner for eight kreuzers (and your s.h.i.+rt washed into the bargain); and a broken-bread shop, where mere crumbs and black-bread powder are to be had for money; and how the comfort of a whole family's evening depends on the fact that your hundredweights are on sale in lots of half-an-ounce.

They ate, and were content. Lenette was in good humour because she had gained her point. At night the advocate put the things which were to be p.a.w.ned upon a soft chair. In the morning she facilitated his writing by keeping very quiet. It was a good omen, however, that she did not put the mortar back into the cupboard. And Siebenkaes fired off various queries out of the said bomb-mortar in parabolic curves. He knew perfectly well that the Loretto- and Harmonica-bell in question must march that day or the next over the frontier for a small pecuniary _Abzug-geld_.[46] Women always like to put everything off till the very last possible moment.

Peltzstiefel came in that evening. It was both ridiculous and natural to expect that the first thing the editor of the 'Heavenly Messenger'

would do would be to pay the critic his wages, so that he might at least be able to set before his editor a candlestick with a candle in it, and a beer-gla.s.s containing beer. Nothing can be more cruel than an anxiety of this sort, because this kind of shame breaks in a moment all the springs in the human machine. Siebenkaes wouldn't let it trouble his head, because he knew Stiefel wouldn't let it trouble his. But Lenette was to be pitied, inasmuch as the blushes of her shame were heightened by her fondness for Stiefel! At last the Rath put his hand in his pocket. They thought now he was going to produce the review-money; but all he took out was his snuff-machine, his tobacco-grater, and he dived back into his coat-tail pocket for half-an-ounce of rappee to put upon this little chopping-bench. But he had grated the half-ounce already.

He searched his breeches-pockets for money to send for another half-ounce. Truly--and here he swore an oath for which he would have incurred a fine had he been in England--he had sent, like an a.s.s, not only his purse but also the money for the reviews, carefully counted out and neatly wrapped in paper, with his breeches--they were his plush ones--to the tailor's. He said it wasn't the first time, and it was a lucky job that the tailor was an honest man; the only thing was, he hadn't noticed how much there was in his purse. He innocently requested Lenette to "send and get him an ounce of rappee; he would repay her next morning, when he sent the money for the reviews." Siebenkaes roguishly added, "And send for some beer at the same time, dear." He and Stiefel looked out of window; but he saw that his poor wife--her bosom torn with sighs, and suffering _peine forte et dure_--stole into the bedroom and noiselessly put the spice-mill into her ap.r.o.n.

After a good half-hour, rappee, beer, money, and happiness entered the room; the bell-metal of the mortar was transformed into sustenance for the inward man, and the bell in question had been somewhat like the little altar-bell, which in this case, besides _announcing_ a transubstantiation, or transformation of the substance of the bread, as it does in the Roman Catholic Church, had _undergone_ one itself. Their blood no longer gurgled among rocks and stones, but flowed softly and tranquilly along, by meadows, and over silver sands. Such is man. When he is in the depths of misery, the first happy moment lifts him out; when he is at the height of bliss, the remotest sorrowful moment, even though it is down beneath the horizon, casts him to earth.

No great man, who has _maitres de cuisine_, clerks of the cellar, capon-stuffers, and confectioners, has any true enjoyment of the pleasure it is to give and receive hospitality; he gets and gives no thanks. But a poor man and his poor guest, with whom he halves his loaf and his can, are united by a mutual bond of grat.i.tude.

The evening wound a soft bandage about the pain of the morning. The poppy-juice of sixty drops of happiness was taken hourly, and the medicine had a gently soothing and exhilarating power. When his old, kind friend was leaving, Siebenkaes gave him a hearty, grateful kiss for his cheering visit, Lenette standing by, with the candle in her hand.

Her husband, as some little compensation to her for having pounded her little fit of obstinacy to groats in the mortar, said to her in an off-hand, cheerful manner, "You give him one, too." The blushes mantled on her cheeks like fire, and she leant back, as if she had a mouth to avoid already. It was quite clear that, if she had not been obliged to perform the office of torch-bearer, she would have fled to her room on the spot. The Rath stood before her beaming with affectionate friendliness--something like a white winter-landscape in suns.h.i.+ne--waiting till--she should give him the kiss. The fruitlessness of this expectation, and the prematureness of her bending her head out of the way, began to vex him a little at last. Somewhat hurt, but still beaming as affectionately as ever, he said--

"Am I not worth a kiss, Madam Siebenkaes?"

Her husband said, "Surely you don't expect my wife to _give_ you the kiss. She would set her hair and everything in a blaze with the candle!"

Upon this, Peltzstiefel inclined his head slowly and cautiously, and at the same time commandingly, down to her mouth, and laid his warm lips on hers, like the half of a stick of melted sealing-wax on the other half. Lenette gave him more s.p.a.ce, by bending back her head; yet it must be said that while she held her left arm with the candle high up in the air, for fear of fire, she did a good deal to push away the Rath--another, more proximate, fire--politely with the other. When he was gone, she was still just the least bit embarra.s.sed. She moved about with a certain floating motion, as though some great happiness was buoying her up with its wings--the evening red was still bright on her cheek, though the moon was high in the heavens: her eyes were bright, but dreamy, seeming to notice nothing about her--her smiles came before her words, and she spake very few--not the slightest allusion was made to the mortar. She touched everything more gently, and looked out of the window at the sky two or three times. She didn't seem to care to eat more of the two-groschen loaf, and drank no beer, but only a gla.s.s or two of water. Anybody else--myself for example--would have held up his finger and sworn he was looking upon a girl who had just had a first kiss from her sweetheart.

And I shouldn't have regretted having taken that oath had I seen the sudden blush which suffused her face next day when the money for the reviews and the snuff was brought. It was a miracle, and an extraordinary piece of politeness, that Peltzstiefel should not have forgotten about his having contracted this little loan--little debts of two or three groschen always escaped his preoccupied memory. But rich people, who always carry less money about them than the poor, and therefore borrow from them, ought to inscribe trifling debts of this sort on a memorial tablet, in their brain, because it is very wrong to break into a pool devil's purse, who gets, moreover, no thanks for these groschen of his which thus drop into the stream of Lethe.

Now, I beg to say, I should be happy to give two sheets of this ma.n.u.script if the day of the shooting-match were but come, solely because our dear couple build so upon it and upon its bird-pole. For the position of these people is really going on from bad to worse; the days of their destiny move with those of the calendar, from October on to November, that is to say, from the end of summer to the beginning of winter, and they find that moral frosts and nights get harder and longer in the same ratio with those of the season. However, I must go regularly on with my story.

I think there is no doubt that November, the month which is such a _Novembriseur_ of the British, is the most horrible month of all the year--for me it is a regular _Septembriseur_. I wish I could hybernate, sleep, till the beginning of the Christmas month, December. The November of '85 had, at the commencement of its reign, a dreadful wheezing breath, a hand as cold as death, and an unpleasant lachrymal fistula; in fact it was unendurable. The northeast wind, which in summer it is so pleasant to hear blowing past one's ears, because one knows it is a sure sign of settled weather, is, in autumn, only a sign of steady cold. To our couple the weatherc.o.c.k was really a funeral standard. Though they didn't exactly go out to the woods themselves with baskets and barrows to pick up fallen branches and twigs, like the poor day-labourer, they had to buy the stuff for firewood from the wood-gatherers, by weight, as if it had been wood from the Indies, and it had to be dried by the combustion of other wood before it would burn. But this damp cold weather was more trying to the advocate's stoicism, after all, than even to his purse; he couldn't run out and go up a hill, and look about him, and seek in the heavens for that which consoles and comforts the anxious and sorrowful, that which dissipates the clouds which shroud our life, and shows us guiding nebulae (Magellan's clouds), if nothing else, gleaming through the fog-banks.

For when he could go up the Rabenstein, or some other hill, he could get sight from thence of the aurora of the sun of happiness, though that sun was under his horizon; the sorrows and torments of this earthly life lay, writhing, like other vipers, in the clefts and hollows beneath him, and no rattlesnake could rear itself with its fangs up to his hill. Ah! there, in the free air, close to the ocean of life which stretches on into the invisible distance of infinity, near to the lofty heavens, the blue coal smoke of the stifling, suffocating dwelling of our daily life cannot rise to us, we see its wreaths hanging far down beneath; our sorrows drop, like leeches, from our bleeding bosoms, and raised, for the time, above our woes, we stretch our arms--no fetters on them now, though sore and marked, and bruised with the galling iron--we stretch them out as if to soar in the pure bright aether; we stretch them out, and fain would take to our bosom the peaceful universe above us, we stretch them to the invisible eternal Father, like children hastening home to Him--and we open them wider yet to clasp our visible mother, created Nature, crying, "Oh take not this solace, this comfort, away from me, when I am down there again among the fog and the sorrow." And why is it that prisoners and the sick are so wretched in their confinement? They are there shut up in their holes, the clouds sail over them, they can only see the mountains far away in the distance, these mountains whence, as from those of the Polar regions in summer midnights, the sun, down below the horizon, can be seen s.h.i.+ning with a mild face, as if in slumber. But in this wretched weather though Siebenkaes could not enjoy the consolations of imagination, which bloom beneath the open sky, he could derive comfort from reason, which thrives in the flower-pots of the window-sills. His chief consolation, which I commend to everybody, was this: Man is under the pressure of a necessity of two kinds--an every-day necessity, which, everybody bears uncomplainingly, and a rare, or yearly-recurrent necessity, which is only submitted to after struggles and complaints.

The daily and everlastingly recurrent necessity is this--that corn does not ripen in winter--that we have not got wings, though so many lower creatures have them--or that we cannot go and stand upon the ring-shaped craters of the lunar mountains, and looking down into the abysses, which are miles in depth, watch the marvellous and beautiful effects of the setting sun's rays. The annual, or rarely recurrent, necessity is that there is rainy weather when the corn is in blossom--that there are a great many water-meadows of this world where it is very bad walking, and that sometimes, because we have corns, or no shoes, we cannot even walk anywhere. Only the annual necessity and the daily are of exactly equal magnitude, and it is just as senseless to murmur because we have paralysed limbs as because we have no wings.

All the PAST--and this alone is the subject of our sorrow--is of so iron a necessity that in the eyes of a superior intelligence it is just as senseless of an apothecary to mourn because his shop is burnt to the ground as to sigh because he can't go botanising in the moon, although there may be many things in the phials there which he has not got in his.

I mean to introduce an extra leaflet here on the consolations which we may meet with in this damp, chilly, draughty life of ours. Anybody who may be annoyed at these brief digressions of mine, and is scarcely to be consoled, let him seek consolation in this--

EXTRA LEAFLET ON CONSOLATION.

A time may, that is to say, _must_ come when it shall be held to be a moral obligation not only to cease to torment other people, but to cease to torment ourselves; a time must and will come when we shall wipe away the greater part of our tears, even here on earth, were it only from proper pride.

It is true, nature is so constantly drawing tears from our eyes, and forcing sighs from our b.r.e.a.s.t.s, that a wise man can scarcely ever wholly lay aside his _body's_ garb of mourning; but let his soul wear none! For if it is a simple duty or merit to endure minor sorrows with proper cheerfulness, it is likewise a merit, only a greater one, to bear the greatest sorrows bravely, just as the same reason which enjoins the forgiveness of small injuries is equally valid for the forgiveness of the greatest.

What we have princ.i.p.ally to contend against, and to treat with due contempt, in sorrow, as in anger, is its paralysing poisonous sweetness, which we are so loth to exchange for the exertion of consoling ourselves and of exercising our reasoning faculties.

We must not expect Philosophy to produce, with one stroke of the pen, the converse effect to that which Rubens produced, when he converted a smiling child into a weeping one with one stroke of his brush. It is sufficient if she converts the soul's deep mourning garb into half-mourning; it is enough when I can say to myself, "I am content to bear that share of my sorrow of which my philosophy has not relieved me; but for her it would have been greater--the gnat's sting would have been a wasp's."

It is only through the imagination, as from an electric condenser, that even physical pain emits its sparks upon us. We would bear the severest physical pains without a wince if they were not of longer duration than a sixtieth part of a second; but we never really do have an hour of pain to endure, but only a succession of sixtieth parts of a second of pain, the sixty separate rays of which are concentrated into the focus and burning-point of a second, and directed upon our nerves by the imagination alone. The most painful part of corporeal pain is the _in_corporeal part of it, that is to say, our own impatience, and our delusive conviction that it will last for ever.

We all know for certain that we shall have given up grieving for many a loss, in twenty, ten, or two years why do we not say to ourselves, "Very well--if this is an opinion which I shall cease to hold in twenty years' time,--I prefer to abandon it to-day, at once? Why must it take me twenty years to abandon an error, when I need not hold it twenty hours?"

When I awake from a dream which has painted for me an Otaheite on the black background of the night, and find the flowery land melted away, I scarcely sigh, and I think it was but a dream. How were it if I had actually possessed this flowery island in waking life, and it had been submerged in the sea by an earthquake? Why should I not, _then_ also, say, "The island was but a dream"? Why am I more inconsolable for the loss of a LONGER dream than for the loss of a SHORTER (for that is what const.i.tutes the distinction),--and why does man think a great loss less necessary and less probable than a small?