Doctor Faustus (37 page)

I: “Is he like that—Spengler?”

He: “Why not? I suppose you think you are the only one in like case? I know thou haddest thine liefer quite by thyself and art vexed at any comparison. My dear fellow, a man always has a great many companions. Spengler, of course, is an Esmeraldus. It is not without reason that he blinks, so sly and shamefast, and not for nothing does Inez Rodde call him a sneak. So it is: Leo Zink, the
Faunus ficarius
, has always heretofore escaped; but it got the clean, clever Spengler early on. Yet be calm, withhold your jealousy. It is a banal, tedious case, productive of nothing at all. He is no python, in whom we bring sensational deeds to pass. A little brighter, more given to the intellectual he may be become since the reception and would peradventure list not so much on reading the Goncourt journals or Abbe Galiani if he had not the relation with the higher world, nor had the privy memorandum. Psychology, my dear friend. Disease, indeed I mean repulsive, individual, private disease, makes a certain critical contrast to the world, to life’s mean, puts a man in a mood rebellious and ironic against the bourgeois order, makes its man take refuge with the free spirit, with books, in cogitation. But more it is not with Spengler. The space that is still allotted him for reading, quoting, drinking red wine, and idling about, it isn’t we who have sold it to him, it is anything rather than genialized time. A man of the world, just singed by our flame, weary, mildly interesting, no more. He rots away, liver, kidneys, stomach, heart, bowels; some day his voice will be a croak, or he will be deaf, after a few years he will ingloriously shuffle off this coyle, with a cynical quip on his lips—what then? It forceth but little, there was never any illumination, enhancing or enthusiasm, for it was not of the brain, not cerebral, you understand—our little ones in that case made no force of the upper and noble, it had obviously no fascination for them, it did not come to a metastasis into the metaphysical, metavenereal, meta-infectivus… “

I (with venom): “How long must I needs sit and freeze and listen to your intolerable gibberish?”

He: “Gibberish? Have to listen? That’s a funny chord to strike. In mine opinion you* listen very attentively and are but impatient to know more, yea and all. You have just asked eagerly after your friend Spengler in Munich, and if I had not cut you off, you would avidly have asked me all this whole time about hell’s fiery pit. Don’t, I beg of you, pretend you’re put on. I also have my self-respect, and know that I am no unbidden guest. To be short, the meta-spirochaetose, that is the meningeal process, and I assure you, it is just as though certain of the little ones had a passion for the upper storey, a special preference for the head region, the meninges, the dura mater, the tentorium, and the pia, which protect the tender parenchyma inside and from the moment of the first general contagion swarmed passionately hither.”

I: “It is with you as you say. The rampallion seems to have studied
medicinam?

He: “No more than you theology, that is in bits and as a specialist. Will you gainsay that you studied the best of the arts and sciences also only as specialist and amateur? Your interest had to do with me. I am obliged to you. But wherefore should I, Esmeralda’s friend and cohabitant, in which quality you behold me before you, not have a special interest in the medical field concerned, which borders on it, and be at home in it as a specialist? Indeed, I constantly and with the greatest attention follow the latest results of research in this field. Item, some doctores assert and swear by Peter and Paul there must be brain specialists among the little ones, amateurs in the cerebral sphere, in short a
virus nerveux
. But these experts are in the aforementioned box. It is arsie-versie in the matter, for ‘tis the brain which gapes at their visitation and looks forward expectantly, as you to mine, that it invites them to itself, draws them unto it, as though it could not bear at all to wait for them. Do you still remember? The philosopher,
De anima
: ‘the acts of the person acting are performed on him the previously disposed to suffer it.’ There you have it: on the disposition, the readiness, the invitation, all depends. That some men be more qualified to the practising of witchcraft, then other, and we know well how to discern them, of that already are aware the worthy authors of the
Malleus
.”

I: “Slanderer, I have no connection with you. I did not invite you.”

He: “La, la, sweet innocence! The far-travelled client of my little ones was I suppose not forewarned? And your doctors too you chose with sure instinct.”

I: “I looked them out in the directory. Whom should I have asked? And who could have told me that they would leave me in the lash? What did you do with my two physicians?”

He: “Put them away, put them away. Oh, of course we put the blunderers away in your interest. And at the right moment iwis, not too soon and not too late, when they had got the thing in train with their quackery and quicksilvery, and if we had left them they might have botched the beautiful case. We allowed them the provocation, then basta and away with them! So soon as they with their specific treatment had properly limited the first, cutaneously emphasized general infiltration, and thus given a powerful impetus to the metastasis upwards, their business was accomplished, they had to be removed. The fools, to wit, do not know, and if they know they cannot change it, that by the general treatment the upper, the metavenereal processes are powerfully accelerated. Indeed, by not treating the fresh stages it is often enough forwarded; in short, the way they do it is wrong. In no case could we let the provocation by quackery and quickery go on. The regression of the general penetration was to be left to itself, that the progression up there should go on pretty slowly, in order that years, decades, of nigromantic time should be saved for you, a whole houre-glasseful of divel-time, genius-time. Narrow and small and finely circumscribed it is today, four years after you got it, the place up there in you; but it is there, the hearth, the workroom of the little ones, who on the liquor way, the water way as it were, got there, the place of incipient illumination.”

I: “Do I trap you, blockhead? Do you betray yourself and name to me yourself the place in my brain, the fever hearth, that makes me imagine you, and without which you were not? Be-trayest to me that in excited state I see and hear you, yet you are but a bauling before my eyes!”

He: “The Great God Logick! Little fool, it is topside the other waie: I am not the product of your pia hearth up there, rather the hearth enables you to perceive me, understand, and without it, indeed, you would not see me. Is therefore my existence dependent on your incipient drunkenness? Do I belong in your subjective? I ask you! Only patience, what goes on and progresses there will give you the capacity for a great deal more, will conquer quite other impediments and make you to soar over lameness and halting. Wait till Good Friday, and ‘twill soon be Easter! Wait one, ten, twelve years, until the illumination, the dazzling radiance as all lame scruples and doubts fall away and you will know for what you pay, why you make over body and soul to us. Then shall osmotic growths
sine pudore
sprout out of the apothecary’s sowing… “

I (start up): “Hold thy foul mouth! I forbid thee to speak of my father!”

He: “Oh, thy father is not so ill placed in my mouth. He was a shrewd one, always wanting to speculate the elements. The mygrim, the point of attack for the knife-pains of the little seamaid—after all, you have them from him… Moreover, I have spoken quite correctly: osmosis, fluid diffusion, the proliferation process—the whole magic intreats of these. You have there the spinal sac with the pulsating column of fluid therein, reaching to the cerebrum, to the meninges, in whose tissues the furtive venereal meningitis is at its soundless stealthy work. But our little ones could not reach into the inside, into the parenchyma, however much they are drawn, however much they longingly draw thither—without fluid diffusion, osmosis, with the cell-fluid of the pia watering it, dissolving the tissue, and paving a way inside for the scourges. Everything comes from osmosis, my friend, in whose teasing manifestations you so early diverted yourself.”

I: “Your baseness makes me to laugh. I wish Schildknapp would come back that I might laugh with him. I would tell him father-stories, I too. Of the tears in my father’s eyes, when he said: ‘And yet they are dead!’ “

He: “Cock’s body! You were right to laugh at his ruthful tears-aside from the fact that whoever has, by nature, dealings with the tempter is always at variance with the feelings of people, al ways tempted to laugh when they weep, and weep when they laugh. What then does ‘dead’ mean, when the flora grows so rankly, in such diverse colours and shapes? And when they are even heliotropic? What does ‘dead’ mean when the drop displays such a healthy appetite? What is sick, what well, my friend, about that we must not let the philistine have the last word. Whether he does understand life so well remains a question. What has come about by the way of death, of sickness, at that life has many a time clutched with joy and let itself be led by it higher and further. Have you forgotten what you learned in the schools, that God can bring good out of evil and that the occasion to it shall not be marred? Item, a man must have been always ill and mad in order that others no longer need be so. And where mad ness begins to be malady, there is nobody knows at all. If a man taken up in a rapture write in a margent note: Am blissful! Am beside myself! That I call new and great! Seething bliss of in spiration! My cheeks glow like molten iron! I am raging, you will all be raging, when this comes to you! Then God succour your poor sely souls!’ Is that still mad healthiness, normal madness, or has he got it in the meninges! The bourgeois is the last to diagnose; for long in any case nothing further about it strikes him as strange, because forsooth artists are queer birds anyhow. If next day on a rebound he cry: ‘Oh, flat and stale! Oh, a dog’s life, when a man can do nothing! Were there but a war, so that somewhat would happen! If I could croak in good style! May hell pity me, for I am a son of hell!’ Does he really mean that? Is it the literal truth that he says there of hell, or is it only metaphor for a little normal Durer melancolia? In summa, we simply give you that for which the classic poet, the lofty and stately genius, so beautifully thanked his gods:

All do the gods give, the Eternal,

To their favourites, wholly:

All the joys, the eternal,

All the pangs, the eternal, Wholly.”

I: “Mocker and liar!
Si diabolus non esset mendax et homicida!
If I must listen, at least speak to me not of sane and sound greatness and native gold! I know that gold made with fire instead of by the sun is not genuine.”

He: “Who says so? Has the sun better fire then the kitchen? And sane and sound greatness! Whenever I hear of such, I laugh! Do you believe in anything like an
ingenium
that has nothing to do with hell?
Non datur!
The artist is the brother of the criminal and the madman. Do you ween that any important work was ever wrought except its maker learned to understand the way of the criminal and madman? Morbid and healthy! Without the morbid would life all its whole life never have survived. Genuine and false! Are we land-loping knaves? Do we draw the good things out of the nose of nothing? Where nothing is, there the Devil too has lost his right and no pallid Venus produces anything worth while! We make naught new—that is other people’s matter. We only release, only set free. We let the lameness and selfconsciousness, the chaste scruples and doubts go to the Devil. We physic away fatigue merely by a little charm-hypersemia, the great and the small, of the person and of the time. That is it, you do not think of the passage of time, you do not think historically, when you complain that such and such a one could have it ‘wholly,’ joys and pains endlessly, without the hour-glass being set for him, the reckoning finally made. What he in his classical decades could have without us, certainly, that, nowadaies, we alone have to offer. And we offer better, we offer only the right and true—that is no lenger the classical, my friend, what we give to experience, it is the archaic, the primeval, that which long since has not been tried. Who knows today, who even knew in classical times, what inspiration is, what genuine, old, primeval enthusiasm, insicklied critique, unparalysed by thought or by the mortal domination of reason—who knows the divine raptus? I believe, indeed, the devil passes for a man of destructive criticism? Slander and again slander, my friend! Gog’s sacrament! If there is anything he cannot abide, if there’s one thing in the whole world he cannot stomach, it is destructive criticism. What he wants and gives is triumph over it, is shining, sparkling, vainglorious unreflectiveness!”

I: “Charlatan!”

He: “Yea, of a truth. When you set right the grossest false understandings about yourself, more out of love of truth than of self, then you are a cheap jack. I will not let my mouth be stopped by your shamefast ungraciousness; I know that you are but suppressing your emotions, you are listening to me with as much pleasure as the maid to the whisperer in church… Let us just for an instance take the ‘idea’—what you call that, what for a hundred years or so you have been calling it, sithence earlier there was no such category, as little as musical copyright and all that. The idea, then, a matter of three, four bars, no more, isn’t it? All the residue is elaboration, sticking at it. Or isn’t it? Good. But now we are all experts, all critics: we note that the idea is nothing new, that it all too much reminds us of something in Rimsky-Korsakov or Brahms. What is to be done? You just change it. But a changed idea, is that still an idea? Take Beethoven’s notebooks. There is no thematic conception there as God gave it. He remoulds it and adds ‘Meilleur.’ Scant confidence in God’s prompting, scant respect for it is expressed in that ‘Meilleur’—itself not so very enthusiastic either. A genuine inspiration, immediate, absolute, unquestioned, ravishing, where there is no choice, no tinkering, no possible improvement; where all is as a sacred mandate, a visitation received by the possessed one with faltering and stumbling step, with shudders of awe from head to foot, with tears of joy blinding his eyes: no, that is not possible with God, who leaves the understanding too much to do. It comes but from the divel, the true master and giver of such rapture.”