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Title: Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. II.
Author: Jean Paul
Language: English
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Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source: Making of America
http://www.archive.org/details/hesperusorforty01paulgoog
2. The caret ^ indicates superscript. The superscript text is
enclosed by { }.
3. [Greek: gelotophuê] represents the transliteration of the Greek
text.
HESPERUS
_Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days_
A BIOGRAPHY
FROM THE GERMAN OF
_JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER_
TRANSLATED BY
CHARLES T. BROOKS
"The Earth is the _cul-de-sac_ in the great city of God,--the
camera obscura full of inverted and contracted images from a fairer
world,--the coast of God's creation,--a vaporous halo around a better
sun,--the numerator to a still invisible denominator,--in fact, it is
almost nothing at all."
_Selections from the Papers of the Devil_.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
BOSTON:
TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
1865.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by
TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.
University Press:
Welch, Bigelow, And Company,
Cambridge.
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
25. DOG-POST-DAY.
Feigned and Real Swoons of Clotilda.--Julius.--Emanuel's Letter
Concerning God.
26. DOG-POST-DAY.
Tergemini.--Zeusel and his Twin-Brother.--The Ascending Peruke.--
Detection Of Knaveries.
27. DOG-POST-DAY.
Eye-Bandaging.--Picture behind the Bed-curtain.--Two Virtues in
Danger.
28. DOG-POST-DAY.
First Easter-Holiday.--Arrival at the Parsonage.--Club of the Three
Twins.--Carps.
Second Easter-Holiday.--Funeral-Discourse on Himself.--Two Opposite
Sorts of Fatality to the Wax-Statue.
Third Easter-Holiday.--F. Koch's Double Jews-harp.--The
Sleigh-Ride.--The Ball And....
Preface to Part III.
Seventh Intercalary Day.--End of the Register of Extra-Shoots.--
Unfeelingness of Readers.--Vol. III. (Preface to).
29. DOG-POST-DAY.
Conversion.--Billet-Doux of the Watch.--Crape Hat.
30. DOG-POST-DAY.
Letters.
31. DOG-POST-DAY.
Clotilda's Letter.--The Night-Express.--Rents and Gashes in the
Band of Friendship.
32. DOG-POST-DAY.
Physiognomies of Victor and Flamin.--Boiling-Point of Friendship.--
Splendid Hopes for us.
33. DOG-POST-DAY.
First Whitsuntide-Day.--Police-Regulations of Pleasure.--Church.--
The Evening.--The Blooming-Cavern.
34. DOG-POST-DAY.
Second Day of Whitsuntide.--Morning.--The Abbess.--The
Water-Mirror.--Dumb Action for Libel.--The Rain and the Open
Heaven.
35. DOG-POST-DAY.
Third Day of Whitsuntide, or Burgundy Chapter.--The Englishman.--
Meadow-Ball.--Blissful Night.--The Blooming Cave.
36. DOG-POST-DAY.
Fourth and Last Day of Whitsuntide.--Hyacinth.--The Voice of
Emanuel's Father.--Letter from the Angel.--Flute on the Grave.--
Second Nightingale,--Farewell.--Pistols.--Ghostly Apparition.
Fourth Preface, or, Extorted Anticritique against one or another
Review, with which I might possibly be displeased.
Ninth Intercalary Day.--Victor's Essay on the Relation of the Soul
to the Organs.
37. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Amoroso at Court.--Preliminary Recesses of Marriage.--Defence
of Courtly Back-bending.
38. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Sublime Hour before Midnight.--The Blissful After-Midnight.--The
Soft Evening.
39. DOG-POST-DAY.
Great Disclosure.--New Separations.
40. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Murderous Duel.--Apology for the Duel.--Prisons regarded as
Temples.--Job's-Wails of the Parson.--Legends of my Biographical
Past.--Potato-Planting.
41. DOG-POST-DAY.
Letter.--Two new Incisions of Fate.--His Lordship's Confession of
Faith.
42. DOG-POST-DAY.
Self-Sacrifice.--Farewell Addresses to the Earth.--Memento Mori.--
Walk.--Heart of Wax.
43. DOG-POST-DAY.
Matthieu's Four Whitsuntide Days and Jubilee.
44. DOG-POST-DAY.
Brotherly Love.--Friendly Love.--Maternal Love.--Love.
45. OR LAST CHAPTER.
Knef.--The Town of Hof.--Sorrel House.--Robbers.--Sleep.--Oath.--
Night Journey.--Bushes.--End.
APPENDIX.
Additional Notes to "Titan".
HESPERUS,
OR
45 DOG-POST-DAYS.
25. DOG-POST-DAY.
Feigned and Real Swoons of Clotilda.--Julius.--Emanuel's
Letter concerning God.
Good, beautiful sex! Sometimes, when I see a diamond heart hanging
above thy warm one, I ask: Is it for some such reason as _this_ thou
wearest a copied heart on thy bosom, in order to indicate to Love,
Fate, and Slander a common mark for their different arrows, as the poor
soldier who is shot kneeling points out to the balls of his comrades,
by a heart cut out of paper, the place of the beating one?
--When this chapter is ended, the reader will no longer ask me, why I
begin it thus....
Once Victor came back from a day's walk, when Marie ran breathless to
meet him with a letter from Matthieu. It contained the question whether
he would not accompany him and his sister to-day to Kussewitz via St.
Luna. Marie's running had arisen merely from a rich messenger's-fee and
gratuity on the part of Mat, who often treated poor people at once with
generosity and with persiflage, just as he thought his sister at once
amiable and absurd. To people who knew him, he therefore appeared comic
when he must have been serious. But Victor said "No" to the request for
his company; which was very well, for in fact the two had already
started. I cannot determine whether it was after two or after three
days that they came back, the sister with the coldest face towards him
and the brother with the warmest. This double temperature could not be
wholly explained, but only about half, on the ground of discoveries
which the couple might have made at Tostato's and Count O.'s concerning
his disguise and his shop-drama. Heretofore Joachime's anger had always
been a consequence of his: now it was the reverse; but this vexed him
exceedingly.
Some days after he was standing with the Princess and Joachime in a
window of the Ministerial _Louvre_. The conversation was lively enough;
the Princess counted over the shops in the market, Joachime was
following with her eye the swift zigzag of a swallow, Victor was
standing secretly on one leg (the other he set, only apparently and
without resting on it, on the floor), to try how long he could hold
out. All at once the Princess said, "Holy Mary! how can one carry round
a poor child shut up so in a box!" They all peered out into the street.
Victor took the liberty to remark that the poor child was "made of
wax." A woman was carrying a little glass case hanging before her,
wherein there slept a swaddled waxen angel; she begged, like the rest,
as if for this child, and the little one supported her better than if
it had been alive. The Princess called up the new apparition. The woman
came in trembling with her mummy-chest, and drew back the little
curtain. The Princess bent an artistically enchanted eye on the sweet
slumbering form, which (like its wax material) seemed to have been born
of flowers and reared in springtimes. All beauty penetrated deeply into
her heart; hence she loved Clotilda so exceedingly and many Germans so
little. Joachime was fond of only _one_ child and _one_ beauty,--and
each was _herself_. Victor said, "This waxen mimic and copy of life had
always made him sad, and that he could not even see his own wax
counterfeit in St. Luna without shuddering."
"Doesn't it stand in a frock-coat at the window of the parsonage?"
asked Joachime, becoming much more pleasant.
"Isn't it true," he asked in return, "that you thought, some days ago,
it was I myself?" He guessed from her look her former error, which
perhaps had contributed to excite her against him.
The father confessor of the Princess now came up and added,--after his
custom of being complimentary,--that, in order to save him the trouble
of a sitting, he would draw him the next time merely from his wax
image. The Pater was well known to be a good draughtsman.
I let circumstances which are less important lie unrelated, and gayly
proceed.
It was as early as March, when the higher classes, on account of their
sedentary winter sleep, are more full-blooded than cold-blooded,--any
one who does not understand the matter takes for granted that
their overflow of blood proceeds more from their sucking that of
others,--when sicknesses leave their visiting-cards in the form of
recipes with the whole court,--when the eyes of the Princess, the
_embonpoint_ of the princely ether, and the gouty hands of the court
apothecary continued the storms of winter; it was even then; I say,
that Clotilda also experienced every day more intensely the influence
of the winter, and of her double withdrawal from relaxations and of her
intercourse with her fancies.... If I must speak sincerely, I attribute
little to her seclusion, but all to the necessity which propriety
imposes on her of intercourse with the noble Mat, with the Schleuneses
and with other cold-blooded Amphibia;[1] an innocent heart must, in
moral frosty weather, like alabaster garden statues in the physical,
when the former and the latter have soft, absorbing veins, get cracks,
and break.
Thus matters stood with her on a weighty day, when he found with her
little Julia. This beloved name she affixed to the child of the Senior,
Flamin's landlord, in order to keep alive her sad yearning after her
dead Giulia by a similarity of sound, by the relic of an echo. "This
funereal tone," said Victor to himself, "is indeed to her the welcome
distant roll of the hearse which shall come to take her to the friend
of her youth; and her expectation of a like fate is truly the most
mournful evidence of a like grief." If anything further was needed to
purify his friendship from all love, it was this swift falling-off of
the leaves of so fair a passion-flower;--towards the suffering, one is
ashamed of the least selfishness. During the conversation, from which
the jealous Julia was excluded by not understanding it, the child in a
pet twitched at the servants' bell; for girls make claims to attention
eight years earlier than boys. Clotilda forbade this ringing by a too
late interdict; the little one, delighted that she had set in motion
the chambermaid, who came hastening up, tried again to twitch at the
cord. Clotilda said in French to the Doctor, "One must not give her any
command too monarchically; now she will not rest till I have tried my
extremest method." "Julia!" said she once more, her large eye
overflowing with love; but in vain. "Well, now I am going to die!" said
she, already dying away, and leaned her fair head, inhabited by a
departing genius, back against the chair, and closed her pure eyes,
which deserved to open again only in a heaven.--While Victor stood in
silent emotion before the still tranced one, and thought to himself:
"If now she should never wake again, and thou shouldst vainly snatch
her stiff hand, and her last word on this dreary earth should have
been, 'Now I am going to die,'--O God! would there be any other remedy
for the inconsolableness of her friend than a sword and the last wound?
And I should clasp with a cold hand her hand, and say, I go with thee!"
As he thought thus, and as the little one, weeping, lifted the sinking
right hand, her countenance really grew paler, and the left hand glided
down from her lap;--here was that sword's sharp edge drawn across his
heart;--but soon she opened her wandering eyes again, coming out of the
drowsiness of the death-sleep to herself and to a sense of shame. She
excused the transient swoon with the remark, "I have done as that
player[2] did with the urn of his child: I imagined myself in the place
of my Giulia in her last moments, but a little too successfully."
He was just on the point of drawing up medical pastoral letters against
this consuming enthusiasm,--so much does an unhappy love translate
every female heart from the _major_ tone into the _minor_, even that of
a Clotilda, whose forehead had a manly elevation, and whose chin
expressed almost more courage than beauty,--when quite other pastoral
letters arrived. The bearer of them was Victor's _happier_ friend
Agatha. Send back with thy laugh, thou untroubled one, life into two
hearts on which death has flung his flying cloud-shadows! She fell
confidingly into two friendly arms; but towards her doctor brother, who
so long, instead of his whole person, had let only his hand, i. e. his
handwriting, go to St. Luna, she was still shy. But this fault of his,
when he had avoided a house one quarter of a year _for_ reasons, of
absenting himself from it another quarter of a year _without_
reason,--this fault I cannot wholly condemn, because I--have it myself.
She could not satisfy her eyes with looking at him; her blooming
country face showed him, instead of his present passion-week of grief,
a red chalk drawing of his and her vanished days of joy in the
parsonage-garden. He solemnly promised her to be her Easter guest with
her brother, and, instead of heads and windows, to break nothing but
eggs; he rested not till he was the same old Sebastian and she the same
old Agatha again. As she delivered to the two court-people, smiling
only from love, the long duodecimo history of the village and her
father, not at all as a compiler or epitomist, or in a mutilated
edition, but in volumes as long as her heel-ligaments; then did
Clotilda and Victor feel how soothing to them was this descent from the
glittering, sharp court-glaciers into the soft vales of the middling
stations of life, and they both yearned to exchange polished hearts for
warm ones. Among men and Borsdorf apples the best are not the smooth
ones, but the rough ones that have some warts. This longing for sincere
souls, too, it may well have been which wrung from Clotilda the
assertion, that there were mismatches only between souls, not between
ranks. Hence came her growing love for this Agatha, who bloomed
outside of the forcing-box of a genealogical tree only in the common
pasture,--a love which the reader and I in the first volume, from
sharp-sightedness, explained as the hiding-cloak of another love toward
Flamin, and which ought to wean us both from bringing a reproach upon a
heroine, who in the sequel continually refutes it.
The superscription of the thick letter-packet which Agatha brought was
in the handwriting of Emanuel, whom Clotilda got to superscribe
everything to the parson's wife, in order to save her stepmother the
trouble of--closing her letters. Madame Le Baut had learned this
_insight_ into documents, this Socratic art of midwifery, in the
ministry, which possesses the right of search into the letters of all
subjects, because it can hold them either as infected or arrested, if
it please. While the step-daughter, in the adjoining chamber, broke
open the outer packet, because from its thickness she prophesied an
enclosed communication for the Doctor: the latter breathed, by
chance--or design, for he had, this long time, established everywhere
his deciphering offices of women, in the narrowest corner, in every
fold of a dress, in the marks of books which had been read,--he
breathed, I said, accidentally on the window-panes, on which one can
then at once read what a warm finger has written thereon. There came
out, after the involuntary breathing, nothing but French initial S's,
sketched with the finger-nail. "S!" thought he, "that is singular; that
is the beginning of my own name."
His conjectures were interrupted by Clotilda's returning with a face
blissfully cleared of all its clouds, and, handing to the thoughtful
Medicus a great letter from Emanuel. Upon the heels of this second
pleasure followed, in the place of the third, a piece of news; she now
disclosed to him, "that Emanuel had at last enabled her to be an
obedient, though not believing patient." She had, namely, hitherto
suppressed the purpose of her obedience and her spring cure, until
her friend in Maienthal had secured her for some spring months a
sick-chamber at the Abbess's,--the very one Giulia had had,--that the
fanning of spring might there lift her drooping pinions, the incense of
flowers heal her torn heart, and the great friend enable _his_ great
friend to stand upright.
Victor slipped away hastily, not only from hunger and thirst after what
he held in his hand, but because a new flood of thought broke through
his old trains of ideas. "Bastian!" said Bastian to himself on the way,
"I have often held thee to be stupid, but so stupid as that--no, never.
It is sinful that a man, a court-medicus, a thinker, should ruminate
for months, often half-evenings together, and yet not bring the matter
out, till he hears it, now for the first time. Verily, even the 'S' on
the window fits!" The reader and I will take out of his hands the thing
with which he is stoning himself before our faces; for he throws at
both of us as well, because we failed to guess at anything just as much
as he did. In short, the unknown happy one who makes the fair Clotilda
unhappy, and for whom she sighs out her dumb, shy soul, and who for
most of her charms has no eye at all, is the blind--Julius in
Maienthal. Hence her desire to go thither.
I should like to fill a folio volume with the proofs of this: Victor
counted them off on his five fingers. On his thumb he said, "For
Julius's sake she seeks little Julia; so, too, is it with Giulia." At
the forefinger he said, "The French initial _I_ looks like an _S_
without the cross-stroke." At the middle finger, "Minerva has furnished
him, indeed, not merely the flute, but also Minerva's fair face, and in
this blind Cupid's-face Clotilda could lose herself without blushing;
even from love for his friend Emanuel, she might have loved him." At
the ring-finger, "Hence her justification of mis-matches, since his
citizenly ring-finger is to be joined to her noble one." At the little
finger, "By Heaven! all this proves not the least."
For now, for the first time, all the proofs came upon him in a flood:
in the first volume of this book there came often an unknown angel to
Julius and said: "Be good, I will hover round thee, I will guard thy
veiled soul,--I go back into heaven."--
Secondly, this angel once gave Julius a paper, and said, "Conceal it,
and after a year, when the birches grow green in the temple, let
Clotilda read it to thee; I take my flight, and thou wilt not hear me
sooner than a year hence."----
All this fitted Clotilda as if it were moulded on her: she could never
unfold to the blind one her dying heart,--she was going just now to
Maienthal (how long is it still to Whitsuntide?) to read to him herself
the leaf which she had handed to him in the character and mask of an
angel,--finally, she was going off precisely then to St. Luna;----in
short, everything hits to a hair.
If the Biographer might venture to put in a word, it would be this: The
Mining-Superintendent, the Biographer, for his part, believes it all
with great pleasure; but as to Clotilda, who hitherto has come forth
whitely radiant from every pitchy cloud, and on whom, as on the sun,
one has so often confounded _clouds_ with _sun-spots_, he cannot blame
her, until she herself sets the example. Victor, as I myself did in the
first edition, has even forgotten many proofs of Clotilda's love for
Julius: e. g. her warm interest in his blindness, and her desire of his
recovery (in her letter to Emanuel), Flamin's obsolete jealousy in
Maienthal, even the rapture with which, in the playhouse, she calls the
vale an Eden, and rejects the Lethe.
Victor tore open the packet, and two leaves fell out of a large sheet.
One of the notes and the large sheet were from Emanuel, the other from
his Lordship. He studied the last, written in double cipher, first; it
was as follows:--
"I come in autumn, when the _apples_ ripen,--the Trinity [his Lordship
means the Prince's three sons] is found; but the fourth Person [the
fourth, merry son] is wanting.--Flee from the Palace of the Empress of
all the Russias [with this cipher the two had concerted to designate
the Minister Schleunes], but the grand duchess [Joachime] avoid still
more: she wants no heart, but a princely hat.--In Rome [he means
Agnola] beware of the crucifix, out of which a stiletto springs! Think
of the _Island_, ere thou makest a misstep."
Victor was astonished at first at the accidental appropriateness of
these prohibitions; but when he bethought himself that he would have
given them to him even on the Island, if they had not referred to his
more recent circumstances, then he was still more astonished at the
channels through which the espionage-despatches of his present
relations might have reached his father,--(as if my correspondent and
spy might not have been the father's also!)--and most of all at the
warning against Joachime. "Oh! if she were false to me!" he said,
sighing, and would not complete the dark picture nor the sigh.----But
he drove both away by the little leaf from Emanuel, which read thus:--
"My Son:--
"The dawn of the new year shone on my face across the snow, as I placed
before me the paper [Emanuel's second immediately following letter],
upon which I sought to impress for the last time my soul with all its
images reaching out beyond this globe. But the flames of my soul dart
even to the body, and singe the frail thread of life; I was obliged
often to turn away my too easily bleeding breast from the paper and
from my rapture.
"I have, my son, written to thee with my blood.--Julius has now the
thought of God.--The spring glows under the snow, and will soon lift
itself up out of the green, and bloom even to the clouds.--My daughter
[Clotilda] takes spring by the hand and comes to me,--let her take my
son with the other hand, and lay him on my breast, wherein is a failing
breath and an everlasting heart.... O how melodiously sound around me
the evening bells of life!--Ay, when thou and thy Clotilda and our
Julius, when we all, we who love each other, stand together, when I
hear your voices, then shall I look to Heaven and say, The evening
bells of life sound around me too mournfully; I shall for ecstasy die
still earlier than the eve of the longest day, and ere my sainted
father has appeared to me.
"EMANUEL."
* * * * *
Dear Emanuel, that, alas! thou wilt do! The heaven of joy presses
downward to thy lips, and amidst breezes, amidst tones, amidst kisses,
it drinks up thy flickering breath; for the earthly body which will
only _graze_, not _pluck_, digests only _lowly_ joys, and chills under
the beam of a higher sun!--
With emotion I draw aside from Victor's distracted, irrecognizable face
the veil which covers his sorrows. Let us look upon thee, disconsolate
man, who art going to meet a spring where thy heart is to lose
everything: Emanuel by death, Clotilda by love, Flamin by jealousy,
even Joachime by suspicion! Let us look upon thee, impoverished one; I
know why thy eye is still dry, and why thou sayst brokenly and with a
shake of the head, "No, my dear Emanuel, I shall not come, for indeed I
cannot."--What ate most deeply into thy heart was, that thy true
Emanuel should be the very one who still believed thou wert loved by
his friend.--An undeveloped sorrow is without tears or signs; but when
man through fancy draws out of his own bosom a heart full of confluent
wounds, and counts the gashes, and then forgets that it is his own,
then does he weep sympathetically at that which beats so painfully in
his hands, and then he bethinks himself and weeps still more. Victor
would fain release as it were by warming his stiff soul from frozen
tears, and went to the balcony window and pictured to himself, while
the suppressed evening-glow of March burned out of the clouds over the
hills of Maienthal, Clotilda's marriage to Julius.--O, in order to make
himself right sad, he drew a spring day over the vale, the genius
of love flung open, above the nuptial altar, the blue heaven, and bore
the sun as bridal torch without cloud-smoke through the pure
immensity.--There walked, on that day, Emanuel transfigured, Julius
blind, but blissful, Clotilda blushing and long since well again, and
every one was happy. Only one unhappy one he saw there standing among
the flowers, namely, himself; he saw there, how this afflicted one,
chary of words for sorrow, joyous from virtue, more familiar and
confidential with the bride from coldness, went round among the rest,
so unknown, properly so superfluous; how the guiltless pair, with every
sign of love, reckoned up before him all that he had lost, or indeed
concealed those signs from forbearance, because they guessed his
grief;--this thought darted at him like a blaze;--and how at last, as
the heavy-laden past brought all his slain hopes and his withered
wishes before him, he turned round, when the beloved pair went from him
to the altar and to the eternal covenant, how he turned round
inconsolably toward the still, empty fields, to weep infinitely, and
how he then remained so alone and dark in the fair region, and said to
himself: "In thee, no human being takes an interest to-day,--none
presses thy hand, and says, 'Victor, why weepest thou so?'--Oh! this
heart is as full of unspeakable love as any other, but it fades unloved
and unknown, and its dying and its weeping disturb no one.
Nevertheless, nevertheless, O Julius! O Clotilda! I wish you eternal
happiness, and only contented days." ... Then he could do no more; he
pressed his eyes to his hands and to the window-frame, and gave free
play to them, and thought of nothing more; the sorrow, which, like a
rattlesnake, had watched with distended jaws him and his charmed and
writhing approaches, now seized and swallowed him and crushed him to
pieces....
Soft hearts, ye torment yourselves as much on this flinty earth as hard
ones do _others_,--the spark which only makes a burn, ye swing round
till it becomes a wheel of fire, and under the blossoms a sharp leaf
becomes to you a thorn!... But why, I say to myself, dost thou show
that of thy friend and open afresh remote similar wounds in men who
have been healed?--O, answer for me, ye who resemble him, could you do
without a single tear? And since the woes of fantasy are to be reckoned
among the joys of fantasy,--a moist eye and a heavily drawn breath are
the least with which we buy a fair hour....
--Pride--the best counterpoise to effeminate tears--wiped away my
hero's, and said to him: "Thou art worth as much as they who are more
fortunate; and if unhappy love has hitherto made thee bad, how good
might not a happy love make thee!" There was stillness in and around
him; night stood in heaven; he read Emanuel's letter.
"My Horion!
"Within a few hours Time has reversed its hour-glass, and now the sands
of a new year are trickling down.--Uranus strikes for our little earth
the centuries, the sun strikes the years, the moon the months; and on
this concert clock, constructed out of worlds, human beings come forth
as images, that utter cries and tones of joy, when it strikes.
"I too come out gladly under the fair new-year's dawn, which gleams
through all the clouds, and flames up the high hemisphere of heaven. In
a year I shall look into the sin from another world: O how my heart,
for this last time, under the earthly cloud, overflows with love toward
the Father of this fair earth, toward his children and my brothers and
sisters, toward this flowery cradle, wherein we only once awake, and
amidst its rocking in the sun only once fall asleep!
"I shall never live to see another summer-day, therefore will I
describe the fairest one, on which, with thy Julius[3] I for the first
time tremblingly penetrated through luminous clouds, and through
harmonies, and fell down with him before a thundering throne, and said
to him, 'Overhead, in the immeasurable cloud which they call eternity,
He dwells, who has made us and loves us.' This day will I to-day repeat
in my soul; and never, too, may it be extinguished in my Julius or my
Horion!
"I have often said to my Julius, 'I have not yet given thee the
greatest thought of man, which bows down his soul and yet erects it
again forever; but I will name it to thee on the day when thy spirit
and mine are the purest, or when I die.' Hence he often begged me, when
_his angel_ had been with him, or when the flute and the awe-inspiring
night or a tempest had exalted him, 'Name to me, Emanuel, the greatest
thought of man!'
"It was a sweet July evening, when my beloved one lay on my bosom,
weeping, under the birch-tree on the mountain, and said: 'Tell me why I
weep so very much this evening? Dost thou, then, never do it, Emanuel?
But there fall also warm drops from the clouds on my cheeks.' I
answered: 'There are little warm clouds that float round in heaven, and
shake out a few dew-drops; but does not the angel walk up and down in
thy soul? For thou stretchest out thy hand to touch him.' Julius said:
'Yes, he stands before my thoughts; but it was only thou that I wanted
to touch: for the angel indeed is gone from the earth, and I long right
earnestly for his voice. Dreamy shapes undulate into each other within
me, but they have no such bright colors as in sleep,--gracious, smiling
faces look upon me, and come up to me with outspread, shadowy arms, and
beckon to my soul, and melt away, ere I can press them to my heart.[4]
My Emanuel, is not thy face, then, one among my shadowy forms?' Here he
pressed his wet face glowingly to mine, which seemed to hover before
him in shadowy outline; a cloud sprinkled the consecrating water of
heaven upon our embrace, and I said: 'We are softened so to-day only by
that which encircles us, and which I now see.'--He answered: 'O, tell
me what thou seest, and leave not off till the sun is gone down.'
"My heart swam in love and trembled in rapture at my words: 'Beloved,
the earth is to-day so beautiful! that indeed makes man more tender:
heaven rests with a caress and kiss of love on the earth, as a father
on a mother and her children,--the flowers and beating hearts fall into
the embrace and nestle around the mother. The twig gently rocks its
singer up and down, the flower cradles its bee, the leaf its fly and
its drop of honey: in the open flower-cups hang the warm tears, into
which the clouds dissolve themselves, as if in eyes, and my flower-beds
bear the rainbow, which is built up on them, without sinking. The woods
lie nursing themselves at the breast of heaven, and having drunken
deeply of the clouds, all summits stand fixed in silent bliss. A
zephyr, not stronger than a warm sigh of love, breathes along by our
cheeks among the steaming corn-blossoms, and lifts clouds of seed-dust,
and one little breeze after another plays its antics with the flying
harvests of the lands; but it lays them at our feet when it has done
playing. O beloved, when all is love, all harmony, all loves and is
loved, all meadows _one_ intoxicating blossom-chalice, then indeed in
man also does the lofty spirit stretch out its arms, and long to
embrace with them a spirit, and then, when it folds its arms only
around shadows, then it grows very sad for infinite, inexpressible
longing after love.'
"'Emanuel, I am sad too,' said my Julius.
"'Lo, the sun goes down, the earth veils itself: let me still see all
and tell it to thee. Now a white dove flies dazzling, like a great
snow-flake, across the deep blue.... Now she sails round the gold-spark
of the lightning-rod, as if around a glistening star hung out in the
day-sky. O, how she floats and floats, and sinks and vanishes in the
tall flowers of the churchyard!... Julius, didst thou feel nothing,
while I spoke? Ah, the white dove was perhaps thy angel, and therefore
thy heart melted when he was so near thee to-day. The dove does not fly
up, but clouds of dew, with a silver border, like fragments torn from
summer-nights, glide across the church-yard, and overspread the
blooming graves with colored shadows.... Now, one such shadow falling
from heaven swims towards us and bathes our mountain. Melt, melt,
fleeting night, emblem of life, and hide not long from me the sinking
sun!... Our little cloud moves on into the flames of the sun.... O thou
gracious sun, looking back so softly from behind the shore of earth,
thou maternal eye of the world, truly thou sheddest thy evening light
from thee as warmly and slowly as trickling blood, and palest as thou
sinkest, but the earth, hung up and laid upon thee in fruit-festoons
and flower-chains, reddens as if new-created, and with swelling
energy.... Hark! Julius, now the gardens resound,--the air hums,--the
birds with their calls wheel across each other's tracks,--the
storm-wind lifts its mighty wing, and flaps against the woods; hark!
they give the sign that our good sun is departed.
"'O Julius, Julius!' said I, and embraced his breast, 'the earth is
great; but the heart which rests upon it is still greater than the
earth, and greater than the sun.... For it alone thinks the _greatest
thought_!'
"Suddenly there came forth a coolness from the deathbed of the sun, as
from a grave. The high sea of the air undulated, and a broad stream, in
whose bed woods lay prostrate, came roaring back through the heaven
along the path by which the sun had departed. The altars of Nature, the
mountains, were veiled in black as at a great mourning. Man was
fastened down to the earth by the mist-cloud and separated from heaven.
Transparent lightnings licked at the foot of the cloud, and the thunder
smote three times at the black arch. But the storm upreared itself and
rent it asunder; it drove the flying ruins of the shattered prison
through the blue, and flung the dismembered masses of vapor down below
the sky,--and for a long time it still continued to roar alone over the
open earth, through the bright and cleansed plain.... But above it,
behind the curtain which it had torn aside, glistened the all-holiest,
the starry night.--
"Like a sun, the greatest thought of man rose in heaven,--my soul was
borne down when I looked toward heaven, it was lifted up when I looked
upon the earth.--
"For the Infinite has sowed his name in the heavens in burning stars,
but on the earth He has sowed his name in tender flowers.
"'O Julius,' said I, 'hast thou been good to-day?' He answered: 'I have
done nothing but weep.'
"'Julius, kneel down and put away every evil thought,--hear my voice
quiver, feel my hand tremble;--I kneel beside thee.
"'We kneel here on this little earth before immensity, before the
immeasurable world floating over us, before the radiant circumference
of space. Raise thy spirit and conceive what I see. Thou hearest the
storm-wind which drives the clouds around the earth,--but thou hearest
not the storm-wind which drives the earth around the sun, nor yet the
greatest, which blows beyond the suns and carries them around a veiled
All which lies with sun-flames in the abyss.--Step from the earth into
the void ether, here float and see it dwindle to a flying mountain, and
with six other particles of sun-dust play around the sun,--moving
_mountains_, after which _hills_[5] flutter, whirl along before thee,
and go up and down before the sunshine,--then gaze about thee in the
round, flashing, high vault, built up of crystallized suns, through
whose chinks looks the immeasurable night in which hangs the sparkling
arch.--Thou fliest for thousands of years, but thou wilt never set foot
on the last sun, nor step out into the great night.--Thou shuttest
thine eyes and throwest thyself with a thought over the abyss and over
the visible universe, and when thou openest them again, lo! there sweep
around thee, as thoughts do around souls, new streams, surging up and
down, composed of light waves of suns, of dark drops of earths, and new
successions of suns stand over against each other in the east and in
the west,--and the fire-wheel of a new Milky-Way revolves in the stream
of time.--Ay, let an infinite hand remove me out of the whole heaven;
thou lookest back and fixest thine eye on the paling, shrivelling sea
of suns; at last the remote creation hovers now as nothing more than a
pale, still cloudlet in the depths of night; thou imaginest thyself
alone and lookest round thee and----just as many suns and milky-ways
flame up and down, and the pale cloudlet hangs still paler between
them, and out around the whole dazzling abyss move nothing but pale,
still cloudlets.----
"'O Julius! O Julius! amidst the onward moving fire-mountains, amidst
the milky-ways hurled from one abyss to another, there flutters a
particle of blossom-dust made of six thousands of years and the human
race,--Julius, who beholds and who cares for the fluttering particle of
dust which consists of all our hearts?--
"'A star was just now cast down. Fall willingly, O star caught in the
atmosphere of the earth; the stars above the earth also, as well as
thyself, fall headlong into their distant graves,--the sea of worlds
without shore or bottom wells up here, dries up there; the great moth,
the earth, flies round the sunlight and sinks into the light and is
consumed;--O Julius, who sees and sustains the fluttering particle of
dust on the moth, in the midst of the fermenting, blooming, dissolving
chaos? O Julius, if every moment witnesses the dissolution of a man and
a world,--if time passes over the comets and treads them out like
sparks, and grinds to powder the carbonized suns,--if the milky-ways
dart only like returning flashes of lightning out of the great
gloom,--if one procession of worlds after another is drawn down into
the abyss,--if the eternal grave is never full and the eternal starry
firmament is never empty: O my beloved, who then sees and sustains us
little mortals made of dust?--Thou, all-gracious One, sustainest us,
thou Infinite One, thou, O God, thou formest us, thou seest us, thou
lovest us.--O Julius! raise thy spirit and grasp the greatest thought
of man! There where Eternity is, there where Immensity is, and where
night begins, there an Infinite Spirit spreads out its arms and folds
them around the great falling universe of worlds and bears it and warms
it. I and thou and all men, and all angels and all worms, rest on His
bosom, and the roaring, beating sea of worlds and suns is an only child
in his arms. He sees away through the ocean, wherein coral-trees full
of earths sway to and fro, and sees the little worm that cleaves to the
smallest coral, which is I, and He gives the worm the nearest drop,
and a blissful heart, and a future, and an eye to look up even to
Himself--yea, O God, even up to thee, even to thy heart.'--
"Inexpressibly moved, Julius said, weeping: 'Thou seest, then, O Spirit
of Love, poor blind me also!--O, come into my soul, when it is alone,
and it rains warm and still on my cheeks, and I weep at it and feel an
inexpressible love: ah, thou good, great Spirit, it is surely Thou whom
I have hitherto meant and loved! Emanuel, tell me yet more, tell me his
thoughts and his beginning.'
"'God is eternity, God is truth, God is holiness,--He has nothing, He
is all, the _whole heart_ conceives Him, but no _thought_; and _we are
only His thought, when He is ours_.[6]----All that is infinite and
incomprehensible in man is his reflection; but beyond this let not thy
awestricken thought go. Creation hangs as a veil, woven out of suns and
spirits, over the infinite, and the eternities pass by before the veil,
and draw it not away from the splendor which it hides.'
"Silently we went hand in hand down the mountain, we perceived not the
storm-wind for the voice of our thoughts, and when we entered our
cottage, Julius said: 'I shall always think the greatest thought of
man, amidst the music of my flute, amidst the roar of the storm, and
amidst the falling of the warm rain, and when I weep and when I embrace
thee, and when I am dying!'--And thou, my beloved Horion, do so too.
"Emanuel."
* * * * *
The petty woe of earth, the petty thoughts of earth, had now flown
away from Horion's soul, and, after a devout look into the open
starry heaven, he went, led by the hand of sleep, into the realm of
dreams.--Let us imitate him, and come upon nothing further to-day.[7]
26. DOG-POST-DAY.
Tergemini.--Zeusel and his Twin-Brother.--The Ascending
Peruke.--Detection of Knaveries.
If I were in Covent Garden, and had wept over the tragedy, I would
still stay to the epilogue, although I should have to laugh over it.
Only, however, from tragedy does a cross-lane lead over to comedy, but
not from the epic; in short, man can laugh after _tender_, but not
after _exalting_ emotion. I cannot, therefore, allow a fast reader,
immediately after the twenty-fifth chapter, to begin this one. In fact,
when one sees how they read a book,--namely, even five times as
miserably, thoughtlessly, fragmentarily as it is written--(I speak
merely of attention; knowledge is, of course, out of the question
during the reading, and the author's pen cannot raise the spirits of
the reader, any more than the piston can the water, beyond a certain
level); how, at the best passages, they turn over two leaves at
once,--now grapple two unlike chapters, and now spend four weeks in
reading through a chapter which ought to have been finished in one
sitting; how such classical readers often just before a visit, or
during the twisting on or in fact the heating of the hair-roller, or
during the combing out of the hair (which absolutely powders the
sublimest chapter) how they take that moment to read one of this last
kind, or an affecting one while scolding at the whole room;--when one
considers that such readers comprise most of those in Scheerau and
Flachsenfingen, those female readers only excepted who know how to hit
the way into all books and men, and to whom it is all one what they
read or marry,--and when one actually learns by sad observation, that,
if not even the reading-penny which they have to pay for the book has
power enough to persuade them into the enjoyment of affecting and
sublime pages, this long period will still less constrain them to
it,--one must congratulate the German public, which is still nourished
by works in which, as in turkey-fowls, the best part is the _white_.
As the _Vienna Magazine_ is also such a turkey-cock, and I had a dream
last week that my dog wrote for it, this will be a fitting place to
revoke my error. The dream does not strike me as strange,--(since my
bestial correspondent is likewise named _Hofmann_,[8])--that this same
beast was the Professor swaddled and chrysalized into the body of a
dog. I certainly never should have hit upon the idea that a Professor
of "practical eloquence" would in the form of a dog give the world
printed things, had not once in Paris a fellow got himself sewed up
with _contraband_ goods in a poodle-skin, in order, thus disguised, to
make his way through the gate. I might have known well enough, from the
inequality of size between the two creatures, what was in the wind;[9]
but I went so far in my crazy dream as actually to pinch and feel of
the dog to probe him, when the Professor, whom I sought behind this
mask, himself in person entered the door. He at once removed all
confusion; I imposed on myself, however, as it were to give him
satisfaction, the penalty of making the whole thing known, and of
being, into the bargain, his fellow-laborer, i. e. his monthly pigeon,
which hatches every month.... Many are actually said, therefore, to
have looked in the Vienna Magazine (for in the first edition I forgot
to state that I had only dreamed) for articles by me: is it possible, I
ask?----
We left our Victor in suspense under a cloud of dark conjectures: now
we meet him again in the presence of an incident that confirms them
all.
Whoso knows, though only by hearsay, the Apothecary Zeusel, around whom
the whole occurrence revolves, knows that he is a hare's-foot.[10] The
said foot--a hare and the Devil, though the whole skin is stripped off,
still retain the foot--was delighted when a gentleman of the court got
a dinner out of him and--a laugh upon him; he could not keep within the
bounds of modesty, when a distinguished person made a fool of him. The
noble Mat, therefore, often took away his modesty. From him he could,
like the Flachsenfingeners, bear everything, from Victor nothing. I can
explain it only by the fact, that Victor's satires were general and
apt, and improving; but men sooner forgive lampoons than satire,
slander than admonition, jests upon orthodox and aristocrats than
reasonings about them.[11] Notwithstanding, though Zeusel was again
this time the victim of practical jokes[12] and trouncings at
Matthieu's hands, he could not fairly forgive him for it, but got the
gout on the subject.
It was, namely, just before the first of April--many have three hundred
and sixty-five first of April's every year--when the page made the
apothecary an April fool.[13] In St. Luna three bathing and drinking
visitors had already arrived, three wild young Englishmen, who
announced themselves as _tergemini_, but were probably only brothers
born in succession, not at once. Only their souls seemed three twins of
the spirit of freedom and fraternity; they were so republican, that
they did not even appear at court, and, like every Englishman,
accounted us all, me and the reader and the Professor of Eloquence, as
Christian slaves, and the enfranchised as turnkeys' assistants. The
magic influence of a congenial heart soon drew the Regency-Councillor
Flamin into their Cartesian vortex; they had hardly been there eight
days, when they had held with him a club at the Chaplain's. He promised
them for Easter a sight of their countryman Sebastian; and the noble
Matthieu he had at the very beginning brought with him. Mat's
liberty-tree was merely a satirical thorn-bush; his satires supplied
the place of principles. Only a single one of the three twins,
whom the very evil one with horns and buck's feet,--namely, the
Satyr[14]--rode, could properly like the biting _Evangelist_ and false
_Apostle_ of liberty; for in a clear, bright head every word of wit and
lightning from another, assumes a greater lustre, as glowworms gleam
brighter in dephlogisticated gas.
When Matthieu saw the parsonage coachman and the hired lackey of the
Englishmen, the bellows-blower Zeusel,--the twin-brother of the
Apothecary,--he devised something which I will presently relate. The
Apothecary was notoriously obliged to be ashamed of his veritable
brother, because he was a mere bellows-blower, and raised no other wind
than musical,--and because, furthermore, he had bad inner ears, and, as
to outer ones, none at all. Nevertheless, as respects the latter he had
protected himself with a judicial certificate which stated, to his
credit, that he had lost his acoustic volutes in an honorable way by a
surgeon who undertook to help his difficulty of hearing. But his head
was his ear. If he held a staff in contact with the speaker or his
seat, or if one preached directly over his head, he heard very well.
Haller relates similar examples, e. g. of a deaf person who always
thrust a long stick against the pulpit as conductor and bridge of
devotion. His deafness, which called him rather to the post of a
highest state servant than to that of a hired servant, was the very
thing which secured him the victory over the competitors, because Cato
the elder--so the jolly Englishman styled himself--was pleased with the
fellow's droll posture.
The noble Matthieu, whose heart had full as dark a hue as his hair and
eyes, hung the three twins as bait-worms on his line, to draw the
Apothecary between his arm and Flamin's to St. Luna. Zeusel went
gladly, never dreaming of the misfortune that awaited him, namely, his
brother, with whom he had years ago agreed, for a certain
consideration, that they would absolutely not know each other in
company. Besides, the bellows-blower, in his simplicity, could not at
all comprehend how such a distinguished man as Zeusel could be his
brother, and adored him in silence afar off; only one thing he could
not endure, despite his stupid patience, namely, that the Apothecary
should pretend to be the first-born. "Am not I," said he, "a quarter of
an ell longer, and a quarter of an hour older than he?" He swore it was
forbidden in the Bible to sell one's birthright,--and then, like all in
whom a stupid patience gives out, he was no longer controllable.
The Apothecary, after his first terror at the presence of his brother,
saw with pleasure that no one knew his fraternity; he proposed,
therefore, to imitate the rest, and demanded of his servant-brother, as
coldly as any one, something to drink. The bellows-blower, as he bowed
down his head that his brother _overhead_ might give his commands,
surveyed with astonishment and real reverence the silver trellised-gates
and shackles on the feet of his kinsman, and his hip-pendant of steel
garlands of watches. Zeusel would gladly--if the page could have
been trusted--have made believe to the Britons that he was deceived,
and took the bending-down of the deaf man for overdone cringing before
courtiers; he would then have been able to add, that _Opisthotonos_
towards inferiors is a cramp of the same kind with _Emprosthotonos_[15]
towards superiors;--but, as was said, the Devil may trust court pages!
Meanwhile the Britons hardly noticed the fool with his money-purse on
his posterior, and merely wondered what he wanted there. Their
republican flames blazed up together with Flamin's, and in fact in such
a manner that the page would have taken them for Frenchmen and for
travelling agents and circular-messengers of the French Propaganda, had
he not been of the opinion that only a fool could have anything
to do with or believe in that. Matthieu had acuteness, but no
principles,--truths, but no love of truth,--sharpness of perception
without feeling,--wit without purpose. What he was after to-day was, by
letting fly grazing shot, to fix the Apothecary in the agonizing fear
that some connection of ideas or other would lead him every moment to
the subject of his present brother. Thus he incidentally with great
success laid the poor hare's-foot on the rack of the "larded hare,"
when he contended ironically--for nepotism.
"Popes and ministers," said he, "give important places, not to the
first chance-comer, but to a man whom they have narrowly proved,
because they have been almost brought up with him, namely, a friend by
blood. They have too moral a way of thinking to let them, after their
elevation, no longer know their kindred, nor do they hold the court to
be a heaven where one never inquires about his fellow-trenchermen
condemned to hell. Inasmuch as a minister can digest like an ostrich,
one wonders that he does not also, like the ostrich, toss his eggs,
full of relatives into the sand under the burning sun, and trust the
hatching to accident. But nothing accords less with genuine nepotism
than this; nay, the very ostrich, by night and in colder places, broods
in person, and only omits it where the sun broods better; so, too, the
man of influence provides for his cousins only in those cases where
great want of merit requires it. I confess, morality can as little
command nepotism as friendships; but the merit is so much the greater,
when without any moral obligation one covers, as it were, with his
family-tree, half the steps of the throne." This smelting-fume and
vapor of satire prepossessed the Britons in his favor, especially as
the fume implied noble metals, that is to say, the highest impartiality
on the part of a son whose father was minister.
While the Apothecary carved the _souper_,--Mat had begged him to act as
_grand écuyer tranchant_, his friend watched the moment when he had a
great turkey-cock on the fork, to carve him in the air, as herons do
fishes, and that, too, in Italian fashion; then the noble page took his
way over the partitioned turkey-cock, and Poland, through the
Electorates, till he arrived at the hereditary kingdoms, where he
stopped to make the remark, that very naturally the first great
Dictator will have raised up his own son to sit on his throne after
him: "So had he often, at the Flachsenfingen shooting-matches, enjoyed
seeing the children dance about with the crowns and sceptres which
their fathers had shot down, and toss and play with them." The deaf man
maintained by his gauging-rod and linstock, which he pressed against
the table, the freest intimacy with the whole club, and watched his
laboring brother, to see how he sawed and balanced. Matthieu, who loved
the chief-carver, but the truth still more,[16] could not for his sake
suppress his reflections upon crowned first-borns, but freely remarked,
that "One should at least among the reigning family, if not among the
people, have a free choice."
We do not now think even as the Jews do, with whom, to be sure, a
half-bestial abortion has still the rights of primogeniture, but not,
however, an entirely bestial one.[17]--The bellows-blower was
impregnated through the fallopian tube[18] of the staff with new ideas
of primogeniture,--his brother was more dismembered with agony than the
turkey-cock in the air. The Evangelist went on: "With the Jews, too,
the bestial first-born, because it can never offer a sacrifice, has the
best food, and is holy and inviolable,--the rest of the cattle belong
to the class of _younger sons_." ...
--Thereupon he suddenly and smilingly pronounced the compliment: "Only
my friend here with the turkey-cock makes the happiest exception to my
assertion, and his respected brother with the staff there the
wretchedest; they are, however, twins, and he is only a quarter of an
hour older than the deaf one." He turned composedly to him of the
staff, who had already mobilized[19] his face for war, "Am I not right,
a quarter of an hour older?"
"Yes, may God punish me," said he, "if I am not. What says my brother?"
The Apothecary, fainting, had to let fall the dividend on the fork,
though it had already been lightened by the cutting off of successive
quotients. The bellows-blower took a flying survey of all faces, and
detected on all a silent scepticism, which the page by his cold
assurances made still more legible. "There is nothing in the whole
joke," said Zeusel in a low tone, "that can possibly interest any one."
As the bellows-blower could not get hold, through his long auricular
organ, of the low murmured exception,--but he did not see how even then
he was going to maintain his case and his right of primogeniture,--he
entered upon his proof, and fetched out four long curses, as answering
to just so many syllogistic figures, and bent his head before his
brother, that he might hand in over it his replication. The Apothecary,
who wanted to invalidate, not the primogeniture, but only the claim to
be his brother, and who, on account of doubt as to his title, did not
care to address him, said imploringly to Matthieu, "Concede the point
to him, for he does not know at all what we have hitherto been talking
of."
Quickly and abruptly, then, but with an incredulous look, the page said
to him, "You shall be right, my friend," and added, under pretence of
wishing to divert him, "You look right fresh and young."
"By heaven!" replied he, flaming up, "_he there is younger_; but he
came behind me, as a fellow-traveller, into the world in the form of a
tobacco-pouch: he is woven and twisted together out of the little
beggar-men[20] that fell off from me."
The bellows-blower now fired off all the cannons on the wall of his
head, exasperated by the vinegar-glances and poisonous looks and
inaudibleness of his blood-friend: he therefore stretched out his thumb
and his little finger, and set them like the feet of a pair of
compasses on his own face by way of measuring it; then he set out to
apply the two as a long-measure to the face of his blood-friend: he
would then, as man is ten faces long, have held his own and the other
face opposite each other, and then from their difference in measurement
have easily inferred their respective statures; but the Apothecary
wabbled, and the bellows-blower quite incorrectly planted his thumb
above the jawbone. Here the thumb, which sought to press itself into
the soft cheek, was stopped by something hard and round, and the
servant of the bellows, by the slipping down of the thumb upon the jaw,
propelled out of the mouth a ball of wax with which the Apothecary had
stuffed out as with a padding his sunken cheeks, in order to swell up
the inlaid sculpture of his visage into relievo. The emerging ball
knocked over, like a nine-pin ball, the Apothecary, i. e. upset his
equanimity, and with flashing eyes he said to the deaf one, who was now
on the point of absolutely striding on to a history of his bald head,
only this much: "You, man, have no bringing up, and your elder brother
must plane you down first."
But as the Calcant[21] had already made some headway in the natural
history of the baldhead, Zeusel hurried off with the excuse that the
Court-Physician Horion was awaiting him this evening. The most serious
of the Englishmen stepped up very near to him and said: "Commend me to
the Doctor, and as he makes such good cures, tell him, in my name, you
are a great fool."
Hardly had he got out of the village, when the Calcant took pity on the
Emigrant, and would fain have done with his history of the bald head.
The Evangelist, therefore, despatched him after the enraged twin, to
catch him now in the dark; and took up himself in his place the
historic thread. On an evening--so the story ran--when the court was
not at the play, the Court Apothecary--Heaven knows how--poked out his
nut-cracker-face from one of the first boxes. Matthieu, who was then
still page, posted the bellows-blower in the zenith of his peruke,
namely, in the gallery exactly above him. The Calcant let down from
above by an invisible horsehair a little hook, which hung like a bird
of prey over the out-looking peruke, which I hold to be an ideal of
hair. For it seemed to have grown out from the head (from which locks
and vergette[22] had long since fallen off) as an indigene and shoot,
and no one took it for an adopted for. The bellows-blower let the hook
swing and sway like a pendulum above the peruke, till such time as
there was a certainty of its having fastened into the vergette.
Forthwith he made use of his hands as a drayman's windlass, and lifted
up (as the frost does other growths) the whole frisure by the roots,
and slowly drew the pig-tail wig like an ascending hair-balloon up into
the air. The pit and the chief-lover and the lamplighter were turned by
astonishment into lumps of ice, as they saw the tailed comet go up in
right ascension to the gallery. Upon the Apothecary, who felt his head
uncovered and blown upon by a cold wind, the few natural hairs lifted
themselves up with terror, like the artificial ones, and when he turned
round with his bald skull to look after the lifting of his head of hair
on the cross, his twin-brother (in order not to be discovered) let the
whole hairy meteor, which wanted to go after the hair of Berenice[23]
in heaven, actually fall down before his face among the people, and
looked composedly down at its culmination in the nadir, like the rest
of the gallery.
During our recital the twins have been pommelling each other. The
aspirant for primogeniture called out there, on the Flachsenfingen
road, which was covered with the darkness of night, in one continued
yell, "Mr. Court Apothecary!" and as he could not, of course, hear any
answer, he was obliged to knock his ear-trumpet against every object,
to hear whether it said anything. At last his probing-rod came in
contact with the firstborn, and he marched up to him to beg his
forgiveness and return. But the Apothecary was in such a boiling and
overflowing state, that, when the bellows-blower ducked his head to
take in his answer, he made up his hand into a ball and let it fall
like a bell-hammer on the sagittal suture of the bended head, whereupon
the diving-bell gave out a regular tone. The Apothecary, if one had
rightly understood him and given him time, would by this trip-hammer
have made the sutures on the deaf-head considerably more prominent; but
in this he was disturbed by his own brother, who bent his head down
like a bush,--for the bellows-blower would have inserted his fingers
like ornamental pins into the artificial hair and dragged him by that,
if the peruke had been made fast on his head,--so that he could lay his
hearing-tube as a second backbone so stoutly and yet so carefully along
the twin's first, that no one came off with compound fractures, except
the hearing-tube.--Thereupon he said good night, and recommended him to
keep to the left, in order not to lose his way....
--Had I known that this history would overshadow so many leaves, I
would sooner have thrown it away.--The next morning the impudent
Matthieu paid a visit to the cross-bearer, on whose hands the chiragra,
warmed into maturity by wrath, was burning; he was going now--for he
answered every reproach against his shamelessness with a greater--to
make the gouty hands cat's-paws again to take fresh chestnuts of fun
out of the fire. But the Apothecary, whose heart was only small, but
not black, felt himself too sorely injured, and when Matthieu, laughing
at his complaints, departed from him in silence, without even giving
himself the trouble of an excuse, then the chiragrist swore--and there
we have the fool again--to upset him.
Come forth again, my Victor! I yearn for fairer souls than these
foolish brothers have! None of us lives and reads on so carelessly
as not to know in what biographical period of time we are living;
it is, namely, eight days before Easter, when Zeusel is on the way to
St. Luna.--Flamin disclosed to our Victor the joke upon the sick
Zeusel. It displeased him altogether, just as writings like the
_Anti-hypochondriac_, the _Vade-Mecum_,[24] or the oral retailers of
printed jokes,--the stalest of all companions,--disgusted him. He could
never set on a bearbaiting between two fools: only the sketch of such a
battle-piece tickled his humor, but not the execution, just as he loved
to read and imagine cudgelling-scenes in Smollett (the master in that
line), but never cared to see them. Even of the incarnate bon-mots and
hand-pointings at another's body he thought too disparagingly, which I,
indeed, should be disposed to call dumb wit (just as there are dumb
sins), and which are the true attic salt of small towns; for true wit,
methinks, must, like Christianity, show itself, not in words, but in
works. He looked upon our follies with a forgiving eye, with humoristic
fantasies, and with the ever-recurring thought of the universal lunacy
of man, and with melancholy conclusions. When he had once deducted the
bad point, that Zeusel came bending before every nobleman as his hired
beast, till the latter cudgelled him back, as in Paris one can hire
lapdogs to go to walk with,--then the vanity of the man, especially as,
in other cases, it was good-natured, indulgent, and often even witty,
was something he had little to object to. No one tolerated vanity and
pride more affectionately than he. "What does a man get by it, then,"
said he, much too spiritedly, "unless he is a fool, or where then shall
he leave off being lowly? We must either think too well of ourselves,
or not at all."
Victor, therefore, with his sympathetic soul, paid at once a friendly
and a professional visit to his landlord. This mood of his fell in
grandly with the Apothecary's plan of securing the Doctor's influence
against Mat.
"For this I need nothing," said Zeusel to Zeusel, "except to let him
see the intrigues which the Schleunes family is playing against him;
for without me he is not _raffiné_ enough for that."
For, in fact, he holds the hero of the Dog-Post-Days--who very
willingly lets him--to be a little too stupid, merely because the
latter was good-natured, humoristic, and confidential towards all men.
In fact, life in the great world gave him, it is true, mental and
bodily flexibility and freedom, at least greater than he would
otherwise have had; but a certain external dignity, which he perceived
in his father, in the Minister, and often even in Matthieu, he could
never properly or long imitate; he was content to have a higher dignity
within, and felt it almost ludicrous to be serious on the earth, and
too small a thing to look proud. Perhaps it was for this very reason
that Victor and Schleunes could not like each other; a _man_ of talents
and a _citizen_ of talents hate each other reciprocally.
Before I allow the Apothecary to point out all the threads of the
Schleunes spider-web, I will merely explain why Zeusel was so
all-knowing on this subject, and yet Victor so blind. The latter was
so, because in the midst of his enjoyments he never set himself at all
to the guessing out of indifferent or bad people; in fact, like a bird
of paradise, he floated always in the air of heaven, far removed from
the dirty ground, and, as all birds of paradise do on account of the
looseness of their plumage, always flew _against_ the wind; hence, from
a want of communication, he did not get _oral_ court news till all the
Heyducs,[25] lackeys of pages, and stove-heaters had already read them
black,--often did not get them at all.--The Apothecary is in the
opposite case, because he has the bad eyes, it is true, but then the
good ears of a mole, and because in the _camera-obscura_ of his
congenial heart the forms of kindred tricks more readily image
themselves; add to this, that he applies two long ear-trumpets--two
daughters--to cabinets, or rather to their lovers, when they come out
therefrom, and overhears by the tubes many a thing, of which I can
avail myself grandly in the Third Part of this biography. There are
men--he was one--who will hunt up intelligence without the least
interest in its contents, and _personalia_ without _realia_, and
who, with no curiosity about learning, seek to become acquainted
with all learned men,--without any care for politics, to know all
great statesmen,--and without the least love for war, to know all
generals,--personally and by letter.
It may be that many a reader of fine sense has already, from the
foregoing, got wind of that which Zeusel will now disclose. I give the
Apothecary's _exposé_ in the following abridgment:--
"The Minister had never been able formerly to draw the Prince into his
interest, seldom to get him to his house; to be sure, he had sometimes
not omitted to give in marriage a daughter who might please him; but
either the diverse interest of the daughter's husband was always
unpropitious to his own, or else the influence of his Lordship was.
Hence he was more to be excused than condemned for espousing the cause
of the _weaker_ party, namely, that of the Princess, who at least, in
all events, was something, and who perhaps was only concealing still
her Italian arts. On the whole, then, it was not unjust, that one
should endeavor through Matthieu to attach the Princess, who has much
_frailty_, to the house of Schleunes, wherein they constrained
themselves to walk after her external grandioseness of virtue, while
they could make up to her by the court page for the coldness of her
spouse." ...
If the reader imagines to himself the worst, he will comprehend
Victor's incredulous staring and cursing; but he will let Zeusel have
his say out first.
"Fortunately the Court-Physician had done the family the honor of often
visiting them; and the Schleuneses probably had encouraged him in
_every_ way to a more frequent bestowal of his visits, especially as he
thereby made the Prince also a familiar guest. Deponent had a variety
of information on this subject from good authority." ...
Victor guessed, what Zeusel from politeness concealed, the allusion to
Joachime. "Singular,--is it not?" thought he, "that my father writes me
almost the same thing! But here is a fine complication of purposes! I
make the Minister my cloak of concealment in my designs upon the
Princess, and he makes me his in his designs upon the Prince." That is
what he ought to have known without me, that bad men never seek good
ones out of love, and that Joachime's heart is nothing but a bait in
the hands of the Minister; but poetic men, who keep the wings of fancy
forever on the stretch, are caught, like larks, by means of their
_outspread_ wings, even in nets which have the _widest_ meshes, through
which the smooth body of a bird might easily slip. Only one word more:
why did Victor demean himself toward the best persons--towards
Clotilda, his father, &c.--more finely, handsomely, and properly than
the best man of the world; and yet towards mediocre and bad people
conduct himself so clumsily; why?--Because he did everything from
inclination and regard, and nothing from selfishness and imitation;
worldlings, on the contrary, maintain always a uniform demeanor,
because they never shape it after other people's merits, but according
to their own designs. Hence his father, on the island, among those
rules of life which, taken together, were a fine covert prophecy of his
faults and fortunes, gave him this one: _One commits the most follies
among people whom one does not respect_.
"Now, as Clotilda pleased the Prince, this Matthieu, who had been a
suitor for her some years before, would seek to make her one of his
conquests, in order, through her, to achieve much more important ones."
Fie! cried Victor's whole soul, now I see for the first time all the
prickles of the crown of thorns which they are pressing upon thy heart,
thou poor Clotilda!
"Matthieu would long since have got farther on with his propositions of
marriage had he had his present prospects (of--an adulterous act)
nearer before him. Perhaps, too, Matthieu was further anxious about the
return of her brother (Flamin, on account of her diminished
inheritance), although the death of his sister (the source of the
inheritance, Giulia) slightly indemnified him. Hence the Princess loved
Clotilda, since the marriage of the latter with Matthieu was only a
matter of interest. But if it really came to an espousal, as was
probable, since Matthieu, if only by coarseness, would extort it from
the Chamberlain," ... (it is a peculiar trait of the Evangelist, that
towards the weak he was coarse, and often towards the same person rude
and then again refined,) ... "then might Matthieu and January exercise
themselves in mutual forgiveness; and the band of friendship would bind
at once four persons in different knots. This fourfold concatenation no
one would then any longer be able to dissolve, and all would go to the
Devil. The only _Deus ex machinâ_ who could still prevent the tying of
this knot was the Court-Physician. To him, perhaps, Herr Le Baut would
not refuse his daughter, as he had helped her get the place of maid of
honor, 'which, at that time, when I was not at liberty distinctly to
explain myself to you, was precisely my true intention, which you
guessed quite as well as you executed,'--and as the fate of the son
(Flamin, who, according to the general opinion, was not yet visible and
acknowledged) really lay in the hands of his Lordship. Nor did he doubt
about gaining the Princess, as he (the Doctor) had hitherto possessed
her favor, and she preferred him to Dr. Culpepper. The loss of Clotilda
and Agnola would clip the Schleuneses' wings." ...
Scoundrel! was the curse which Flamin would here have vented; but
Victor, who believed that only an entire life, not a single action,
deserved this moral besom, and who to the greatest intolerance of vice
joined a too great toleration of the vicious, simply said,--though with
more heat than one will now expect,--"O thou good Princess, the
_German_ scorpions sit around thy heart and wound it with their
stings, and for balm pour poison into the wound, that it may never
heal!--Abominable, abominable calumny!" Victor loved to praise and
defend his friends too ardently,--and, in fact, from his very
inclination to the opposite; for as, in the matter of his _own_ honor,
he calmly and silently opposed to the libels of the world the
commendatory letters of his own conscience, his inclination would,
indeed, have led him to defend the honor of his friends as coldly as he
did his own, but it was obedience to his conscience to do it (despite
the feeling of its superfluousness) with the greatest warmth.
The polite and triumphant smile of Zeusel was a second calumny; the
blockhead regarded Victor as a dial-plate-wheel or striking-wheel in
the matter, and himself as the pendulum. Therefore Victor said, with a
chagrin compounded of pride and melancholy: "My soul is too far exalted
above your court-littlenesses, above your court-knaveries; your stuff
inexpressibly disgusts me.--O thou noble spirit in Maienthal!----"
He went away with transpierced heart. The night-watchman, who always
reminded him in the higher sense of time, and of eternity too, called
up his teacher's form before his weeping soul,--and Clotilda came with
her pallid looks and said: "Seest thou not yet why I have such pale
cheeks, and hasten so to the holy vale of Emanuel?"--and Joachime
danced by and said, "I laugh at you, _mon cher_!" and the Princess
veiled her innocent face, and said from pride, "Defend me not!"
The reader can easily conceive that Victor held the name of Clotilda
too great to be so much as suffered to pass his lips in such a
neighborhood,--as the Jews only in the holy city, not in the provinces,
took on their lips the name of Jehovah. His soul fastened itself now on
the after-flora of his love, the Agnola besprinkled by Zeusel. It was
the thing he could have wished, that precisely at this time the
merchant Tostato was to arrive from Kussewitz to make his Catholic
Easter-confession in the city; he could at least insist upon his
silence in regard to the masquerade-part in the shop, so that he might
spare the abused Princess at least the pain she would feel at a
well-meant offence; namely, the declaration of love pasted into the
watch.
27. DOG-POST-DAY.
Eye-Bandaging.--Picture behind the Bed-curtain.--Two
Virtues in Danger.
In Passion-week Clotilda, released by the Princess amidst caresses,
went to St. Luna. In Easter-week she is to carry her heart, full of
concealed cares, to Maienthal, to more congenial souls, when she has
first passed through a purgatory, namely, through a brilliant ball
which the Prince gives her--or, to speak more politely, to the
Princess--on the third Easter-holiday.... If this flower shall be dug
out and transplanted by the melon-lever of death from my biographical
beds,--I throw away my pen and cudgel back Spitz,--I have come to be as
much accustomed to her as to a betrothed,--where shall I again discover
at court a female character which, like hers, unites _holy_ and _fine_
manners, _Heaven_ and _this world_, virtue and _ton_,--a heart which
(if it is allowable to compare it with anything small) resembles the
heart-shaped _montre à régulateur_ so tormenting to our hero, that with
the index-hand of the court hours combines an index-hand of the sun's
hours and the magnet of love?
Now, we are still together through all the Easter-holidays; for
Sebastian must go to Pastor Eymann's, to see him and the three British
twins, and his dear Chaplainess, and so much else that was dear. He
would gladly have followed the Regency-Councillor thither on holy
Easter-eve, (and it would have been as delightful to the biographer as
an Easter-pancake, for he is more than sated with cities and courts on
paper,) but the genius of the tenderest friendship beckoned to him for
the sake of Flamin and Clotilda, who had both so long wanted and so
longingly wished each other, and were now reciprocally bringing with
them to the meeting new wounds, to stay behind at least only till the
first Easter-day, as if he would ask, "Surely, the first glad looks of
brother and sister so long held asunder, my unhappy Sebastian will not
wish to disturb?"--"No, surely!" answered his tear.
The city was now emptied of his loved ones.--Passion-week was truly one
to him, not even the Princess, as it were the electrophorus of his
love-flame blown back upon his own heart, had for a long time been
visible to him,--for in this mood he could not go to Joachime's----when
the father-confessor of the Princess, who to-day had confessed to him
(on holy Easter-eve), called upon him and unfolded before him a medical
bulletin of the state of her eyes, and scolded at him in a friendly
manner, that the Court-Confessor, instead of bringing remission of sins
to the Court-Physician, had to bring the sins themselves before his
conscience. "I was on the point of making a journey to-morrow," said
Victor.--"Very well!" said the Pater, "the Princess desires your help
this very day."
On the way he said to himself: "Has, then, Tostato forsworn his Easter
confession, that now at evening he still has not arrived? and where the
devil will he be to-morrow?"--Here! answered--Tostato behind him.--Such
a jolly penitent no sacristy had ever yet seen. The child of fun and
deviltry and penance told the reason of his wild delight: "The Princess
had to-day, as his countrywoman, bought out half his shop." Before
Victor had arrayed on his face in rank and file _those_ serious looks,
with which he was going to entreat of him silence on the subject of his
mercantile vicariate,--I mean, his shop-keeping,--the skipping penitent
gladdened him with the news, that the Princess had inquired after his
and her countrymen, his _associés_, and that he had not at all
concealed from her, that somebody had once been of the latter without
being of the former, namely, her Court-Physician himself.--"Thunder!"
said the ...
The poor fool of a merchant meant it well, and there was nothing
further to be done about it than to investigate, whether Agnola's
questioning had not been mere accident; whether she still had the
watch, or had ever opened it; whether no wind had blown away the
declaration of love as a sister-wind!
After all it was a matter of grave consideration that the Pater and the
Merchant, the evil eyes and the good news, should fall upon precisely
the same time: this 30th of March, Easter-eve. As this visit is a very
memorable one for my hero, I beg every one to settle himself down very
comfortably, and split open beforehand the leaves of this narrative,
stuck together with bookbinder's gilding, and to listen like a spy.
When Victor reached the palace, the Pater encountered him, who said he
would go in too. It was fortunate; for without this guide he would
hardly have found his path through a labyrinth of apartments into the
altered cabinet of the patient. And with him went as a pewit through
all the rooms the apprehension of seeing on the face of the Princess an
indictment against the encased _Billet-doux_; but not so much as an
initial letter or the _rubrum_ of a sentence was seen upon her face, as
he came before her, and his thunder-cloud had passed aside. At least
his was repelled by one which hung over the Princess herself; that is
to say, she was ill, but not merely in the eyes; and a second message
which was sent to fetch him had just missed him. She received him in
bed,--not on account of her sickness, but of her station; for with
ladies of some rank the bed is the residence,--the moss-bank,--the
high-altar,--the royal palace,--in short, the princely chair and seat.
Like the philosopher Descartes, the Abbot Galiani, and old Shandy, they
can think and work best in this hothouse. Although she lay in bed,
nevertheless she was, as we said, not well, but was attacked with pain
in head and eyes. She had therefore to-day sent away all her domestics,
except a chambermaid who loved her very much, and the fly on the wall
who plagued her, and our Doctor who omitted one of the two things. I
should have been glad to reckon in a sedentary court-dame in a
picture-cabinet that stood open; but she sat so dumb and motionless,
that Victor swore she was either a knee-piece, or--a German lady,--or
both. It spared the scalded eyes of the Princess quite as much pain as
it gave well eyes pleasure, that the green light-screen, and the green
satin tapestry, and the green satin curtains in the sick-cabinet
conspired to shed an undulating _blue_ clare-obscure. A single wax
taper stood on a candlestick, which was enchased by all the seasons,
that is, in sculpture,--upon which custom of the great not to enjoy
nature except in counters, in _effigie_ and copy-paper, never _in
naturâ_ itself, I can here state neither my opinion nor its reasons,
because it would require a whole
EXTRA-LEAF
in order, among so many possible reasons why they everywhere--on
tapestry, on the _dessus des portes, des trumeaux_,[26] _des
cheminées_, on vases, on candle-sticks, on _plats de menage_,[27] on
snuffer-stands, in their gardens, on every trifle--love to see a
landscape which they never tread, a Salvator-Rosa rock which they never
climb ... I say, because among so many reasons why they do this and
concede to old Nature this _jus imaginum_, the true one could be picked
out only by an Extra-Leaf, as only such could fully decide whether it
arose from the fact that Nature, at the eternal parting had given them
her picture, as a mistress does to her lover,--or from the fact that
the artists love best to offer them, as to the old gods, precisely what
they hate,--or that they resemble the Emperor Constantine, who at the
selfsame time abolished the true cross, and multiplied and consecrated
images of the same,--or that from a finer feeling they fancy less
the enduring but mosaic pictures of Nature, in which whole mountain
ridges are the mosaic-pebbles, than the more delicate, but smaller
puzzle-pictures of the artists,--or that they would resemble people (if
there were such) who should cause to be painted on the theatre curtain
the whole opera with all the decorations, in order to spare themselves
the raising of the curtain and the seeing of the acts----and yet, if
the Extra-Leaf were in the very midst of deciding, every one would,
from canine hunger after mere incidents, take French leave and run out
after nothing but the confirmation of the incidents, and the
_End of the Extra-Leaf_.
The Princess had two coverings, of which he loved the one and hated the
other very much. The beloved one was a veil, which was a healing-bandage
to her inflamed eyes; but such a thing was to him the foil and
setting of the female face, and he pledged himself to defend, as
Respondent and Præses at once, the proposition, that virtue was never
better rewarded with beauty than in St. Ferieux[28] at Besançon; for at
the feast of morals there the best maiden gets a veil worth six
livres.--The hated covering was the gloves, against which he
universally threw down his glove of defiance. "Let a lady," he said in
Hanover, "once dare to draw against me, that is her hand, and fight
with that without the help of the Esau's hands against the Esau's
hands, and say, one must not take them off except in bed.--There, at
most, must she put them on, I might reply; but I will ask: Of what use
then; finally, are the loveliest hands which I see, if they always lie
under their wing-sheaths, as if we men were Persian kings? And is it
then too severe, if one tells those persons to their faces, who wear
such imitation-hands of silk or leather, that they resemble the Venus
de' Medici, even to the very hands?[29] I pause for a reply!"
In fact, in this dark green cabinet, almost everything--except Agnola's
beautiful Roman shoulders--is covered up; even two images of saints
were so. For a painted image of Mary with a real metallic crown--it was
not meant for an emblem of princes with mock-heads under genuine
crowns--was hidden by the cedars of the bed-plumes, and over a very
fine St. Sebastian by Titian--copied from the Barbarigo palace in
Venice--(the man looked, with his arrows, like a hedgehog, and yet hung
close by her pillow)--she had drawn the bed-curtain, when his namesake
without the arrows arrived, who rather adored than was adored. Many
have assured me since, that it was a Sebastian of Vandyk's, from the
Düsseldorf gallery; but farther on I shall show why not.
Except a female eye reposing behind a veil, no finer specimen of
nature's loveliness visits, methinks, us mortals (the Devil has got in
here six final _S's_ in succession) than one which is just in the act
of laying it aside. The poor Doctor had to meet the out-flashing of
such a lovely glow--when he was about to proceed as oculist--that he at
once proceeded as Protomedicus[30] of her head, in order to take her
hand and thereby save himself. For while she stripped off from her hand
the glove-callus--they were, however, only half-gloves with bare
fingers, or semi-wing-sheaths, i. e. _hemiptera_,--then was the Doctor,
because she had to look down at what she was doing, in the greatest
possible security, and the Greek fire shot quite by him. Hence has
there been inserted with just forethought in the fire-regulations of
morality a whole, almost too long article, which forbids young girls to
go about with their eyes exposed, as if with an uncovered light, in a
parlor of company, because there is so much inflammable stuff lodged
there,--all of _us_ in a body,--but they must bury them in a stocking,
which they are knitting, or an embroidery frame, or a thick book--e. g.
the Dog-Post-Days--as in a lantern.
--It is really a pity: since the public and I have been in the princely
chamber, one tail--I mean one digression _à la Sterne_--has followed
another.--
The princely pulse went at a somewhat more feverish rate than even his
who here describes it. Shortly before he came, she had taken off from
her eyes a warm bandage of roast apples. She desired a temporary
bandage, while they should be preparing that which the doctor
prescribed. But now in the darkness, in this confusion of the twilight,
he could not, in all the four corners of his brain, or the eight lesser
brains of the fourth central chamber, muster up a single oculist except
Dr. von Rosenstein, who started up within there and advised him to
advise the spreading of powdered saffron, one fifth camphor, and melted
winter-apples on lint of fine linen. The chambermaid was sent to
oversee or order the preparation of the recipe, after she had first
bound a black taffeta ribbon with the apple poultice before two of the
most beautiful eyes, which deserved a more agreeable bandage and
blindness. I am lively, when I write, that the poultice seemed to be
made of the apple of beauty--and the black ribbon of beauty-patches
pounded apart. The Pater also went away, so soon as he got from the
doctor the hope of a speedy recovery. But for the Medicus it was verily
now no child's play to sit opposite an Italian rose-cheek and
Madonna-face,--and that, too, so near that he could hear the breath
whisper, after having been able previously to see it grow,--to keep
himself opposite to a face (methinks, was no sport) on which roses are
engrafted upon lilies, like sunsets upon light lunar clouds, and which
a picturesque shadow, namely a black order ribbon, a priestly fillet, a
true _postillon d'amour_, so beautifully divides and sets off,--a
bandaged face which he can contemplate in one steady gaze, and which
supports itself (in a picturesque half-front) turned towards him, on
the pillow and on the hand....
I ought to have attempted a climax, have begun with Sebastian's soul,
which to-day out of its own melancholy, out of its sorrows, out of its
love for Agnola magnified by Zeusel's calumny, made nothing but lines
of beauty and flowing tints in order to paint into his own face as
beautiful a new one as ever a fair soul created on canvas, or on its
own head or on another's.
Agnola may well have had this perception sooner than I.
It furnished, of course, to the couple slender assistance that they
were (not under four eyes--for Agnola's were darkened--but) under only
two eyes; for the two other eyes, of the Court-dame in the cabinet,
about which Victor could not be sure, till now when the princely ones
were shut, and he could without questions investigate by glances and
smiles the stiff thing on the chair in there in the cabinet, were
really _painted_, and so was the body which bore them.
It struck him as singular now, that, against all Court-order, he was
suffered to be alone with the Princess; but, he said to himself, she is
an Italian,--a patient,--a lovely little child of fancy--(this last was
perceptible even in the unusual winter _negligé_ and Sicilian fire). He
could not possibly, therefore, (even to-day before the bandaging of the
eyes,) hit the right tone with her; for as she was too fine for a
German,--not tender enough for an Englishwoman,--too lively for a
Spaniard, he would certainly have written on her _p. p. p_. (_passé par
Paris_, which is inscribed on letters that come via Paris), he would
have done it, I say, had she not again been too impassioned for a
Parisienne. There was the rub.--But as two persons converse more
courageously and freely when one or both sit in the dark--and that was
Agnola's case:--Victor was, after all, to-day not absolutely as simple
as a sheep. Add to this that he took heart from the jewel-cupboard, in
which to his joy--she could not see him look round so impolitely--he
discovered among twenty watches no _montre à régulateur_. She asked him
whether she should be so far restored by the third holiday, that she
might contribute something to the Prince's pleasure at the ball. He
answered affirmatively, though he knew that she would contribute still
more to it by staying away, and although she knew it, too. Here he
began to pity her, and he would fain make a clean heart. He would not
exactly say plumply: "In Gross-Kussewitz I let the Devil so abuse my
good nature as to prevail on me to smuggle into your Highness's watch a
declaration of love"; but he would, in the finest outpouring of soul,
fall down with his beating bosom and say: "Not from fear of punishment,
but from fear lest the confession of my fault may contract some
similarity to a repetition of the offence, I have hitherto concealed
the fact that I once expressed, not so much too strongly as too boldly,
a profoundness of esteem in which I am permitted to imitate only your
Court, and not its sovereign; but the strength of feelings is easily
confounded with their lawfulness."
He still delayed this falling down, because he perceived behind
the curtain a gold strip which seemed to be the beginning of a
picture-frame. This border-work must surely run round something,--round
a picture, I fancy: and this was what he would like to know.
The cursed Court-Apothecary with his calumny had it to answer for, that
he had this wish; not as if he supposed that Mat's face hung in a
gilded frame behind the bed, but because to-day all sorts of things had
startled him. He could do it very easily, as the arras-door and
nunnery-grating of her eye was hung with black; he needed only to
support his left hand softly on the edge of the bed, and thus, bending
forward and hovering over her with suspended breath, reach across with
his right over the bed (it was narrow, and he tall) and pull the
curtain a little,--and then he would know what hung behind there. I
repeat, but for the Apothecary it would never have entered his head.
A slanderer causes one to demand of every action at least its
passport,--one does it merely to effect a most patent refutation of the
slanderer,--and as, often, the most innocent act has no certificate of
health, one shakes one's head and says, It is a real calumny, but then
I will still be on the watch.
He had made several attempts to reach over, but as she always had
something to say and he to answer, it would not do, unless he chose to
betray his nearness to her ears. The conversation related to the
ball,--the presence and illness of her maid of honor, Clotilda,--the
substitute of the latter, Joachime, upon whose appointment Victor
expressed himself with decided coldness; he could never, with Agnola,
get beyond court-news; all that was abstract and metaphysical she
seemed to hate or to ignore; and as to _talking_ of emotions with
her,--which he generally loved best to do with women, and for which the
husband's would have given him ample occasion and material,--that
seemed to him not much better than actually to _have_ them.
When he had given his cold answer about the promotion of Joachime,--a
coldness which formed a flattering contrast to his present enthusiastic
warmth and fulness of feeling for the Princess,--he would fain insert
in the half-bar-rest which followed, and which Agnola filled out with
thinking, the raising of the curtain. He rested on his hand, held his
breath, drew the curtain,--but the St. Sebastian was behind it, which I
have already mentioned above, and which was most certainly by Titian,
and not by Vandyk, because he looked so like our Victor,[31] that it
was credible to him that the Pater had copied it from his wax-statue
at St. Luna. The Saint appeared to him still worse than the
Evangelist,--not because he thought the portrait was his namesake, but
because it occurred to him _why_ the women in Italy sometimes _veil_
the pictures of saints. Tho reason can, notoriously, form the subject
of a wood-cut for the ten commandments--(Göschen and Unger ought to
edit the catechism with more tasteful cuts to the prohibitions than the
old ones are). Even the Mary over the bed was veiled with plumes and
everything.... Zeusel! Zeusel! hadst thou not calumniated, this whole
biography (so far as I can foresee) might well have had a different
course!
He supported himself by resting his right hand against the wall, in a
hovering posture above the blind fair one, because a little world-globe
attracted his centripetal force and drew him out of his returning
orbit.--For as the patient rested on her right side, one cloud after
another of dishevelled hair had flowed down over the heart and over the
lily hill which is lifted by sighs, and the locks falling towards the
other hill had not been able there to cover up so much as they had
here disclosed. The lace-veil sank slowly after the tresses, and
the heart-leaves and the ripe blossoms fell away from the protruding
apple-fruit.... Dear æsthetic hero of these Post-days, wilt thou remain
a moral one, hanging, as thou art, unseen over this veritable Belidor's
_globe de compression_,[32]--over this _waxing_ moon-globe, whereof one
never sees the other half,--near this commanding eminence, which, like
other eminences, one should not suffer round a fortification,--and that
too at a court where generally the _dress-regulations_ suppress
everything _elevated_?
When he is once away from the bed and the Paullinum, I will have a good
quarrel with the reader about the whole occurrence,--but now it must
first be related continuously and with a good deal of fire.
He was, as it were, fastened in the air. But at last it was time to
withdraw from a position which was the torrid zone of all the feelings.
Besides, a new circumstance enhanced at once the danger and the charm.
A long sigh seemed to surcharge and heave her whole bosom, and to
undulate like a zephyr through a bed of lilies, and the superincumbent
snow-hill seemed to tremble with the swelling heart that glowed beneath
it, and with the swelling sigh. The hand of the veiled goddess moved
mechanically toward the imprisoned eye, as if it would press away a
tear behind the bandage. Victor, in his fear that she would push aside
the bandage, withdraws his right hand from the wall, and the left from
the bed, in order, on tiptoe, to bend back, without grazing anything,
out of this enchanted heaven.
Too late!--The ribbon is down from her eyes,--perhaps his sigh had been
too near, or his silence too long.
And the unveiled eyes find above them an inspired youth, dissolved into
love, hovering in the beginning of an embrace.... Stiff as a statue he
hung in the petrified posture,--her eyes, inflamed with pain, suddenly
overflowed with the milder light of love,--ardently and softly she
said, _Comment?_ And too lame for apology, trembling, sinking, glowing,
dying, he falls upon the hot lips and the beating bosom. He closed his
eyes for rapture and confusion, and blind and love-intoxicated, bold
and fearful, he grew to her lips with his thirsty ones ... when
suddenly his ear, on the stretch for every approaching sound, heard the
night-watchman calling the hour of twelve, and Agnola, as with a
strange, intruding hand repelled him from her, to throw aside a bloody
chemise-pin.
Like a doomsday in the night-clouds the watchman's homely admonition to
think of death and of the twelfth spirit-hour of this midnight of life,
pealed into his ears, before which the blood-streams of the heart
rushed by. The call in the street seemed to come from Emanuel, and to
say: "Horion! Stain not thy soul, and fall not away from thy Emanuel
and from thyself! Look at the linen over her diseased eye, as if death
veiled it, and sink not!"
"I sink not!" said his whole heart; he unwound himself with respectful
forbearance out of the throbbing arms, and stiffening at the
possibility of an imitation of the wretched Matthieu, whom he had so
despised, he sank down outside of the bed on her hand, which he had
drawn out with him, and said with streaming tears: "Forgive a
youth,--forgive his overmastered heart,--his dazzled eyes,--I deserve
all punishments, any one would be to me a pardon,--but I have forgotten
no one except myself."--"_Mais c'est moi, que j'oublie en vous
pardonnant_,"[33] said she with an ambiguous look, and he rose, and as
her answer gave him the choice between the most agreeable and the
most humbling interpretation, he gladly punished himself with the
latter. Agnola's eye flashed with love,--then with anger,--then with
love,--then it closed;--he stepped back to the most respectful
distance,--she opened it again and turned her face coldly to the wall;
and by a secret pressure against the wall which, I suppose, commanded a
private bell in the apartment of the Chambermaid, gave the latter the
order to make haste,--and in a few minutes she came in with the
eye-band. Naturally (as in human life) they played out the fifth act,
just as if there had been no third and fourth.--Then he politely
withdrew.
There!--Now the reader and I begin to quarrel about the matter, and
Victor to think about it. His embrace was not right,--nor were his
voyage of discovery to the wall and his picture-exhibition,--but it was
_discreet_; for he could not, of course, really throw a backward
somerset, and say, "I thought Mat was hanging behind the bed."--To
this, to be sure, people of experience reply, "We do not quarrel with
him here for preferring discretion to virtue, but rather for this, that
he did not do so again after the kiss. That kiss is too small a fault
for Agnola to be able to forgive." I observe, these people of
experience are adherents of the sect who, in my book, reckon the
Princess, on account of so many half-proofs, among those women who, too
proud and hard for the love of the heart, only let the love of the
senses alternate flyingly with the love of domination, and who do it
only for the sake of making out of Cupid's bandage a rein, and out of
his arrows spurs and stirrups. I am very well acquainted, too, with the
half-proofs with which this sect backs itself,--the bigotry of the
Princess,--her confession-eve,--her previous attentions to my
hero,--the covering of the painted Mary, and the exposure of the more
living one,--and all the circumstances of my narration. But I cannot
possibly believe such a thing of a friend of Clotilda (unless the
latter, for this very reason, had taken leave of her, or from goodness
of soul had not at all comprehended those couriers of the temperament
more common with the male sex), until in the sequel manifest traces of
a more _exasperated_ than _afflicted_ woman compel me to it.
I am getting quite away from my promise, to present some
considerations, which would certainly, with impartial persons, if not
justify, yet excuse my hero, for becoming, after the kiss, virtuous
again, so to speak, and not full of the live Devil. I boldly set down
among the grounds of mitigation his want of acquaintance with those
women who, like the Spartans, bravely ask not about the _number_ of the
foes of their virtue, but about their _position_; he was often with
them, indeed, and in their camp, but his virtue hindered them from
showing him theirs. He is less excused by the influence of the
night-watchman, and the remembrance of death; for this needs itself to
be excused;--but then, on the other hand, it is only too certain, that
certain men of a philosophical or even a poetic organization, precisely
then, and in fact always, regard, instead of their own position,
general ideas, when others can understand nothing at all, and be
nothing at all but self: namely, in the greatest dangers, in the
greatest sufferings, in the greatest joys.
A fair man will throw all upon the Apothecary, who was Victor's moral
and mechanical bed-cord, or helper out-of-bed; for as he had prefigured
to him the noble Mat in a similar situation (but without the bed-cord),
of course the abhorrence which Victor, some days before, had felt of
the Evangelist's conduct, became in him a laming incapacity of copying
it in the least a few days after.--O if we could only, a couple of days
beforehand, see every sin, to which we are tempted by ourselves or
others, actually committed by a true scamp, whom we spit upon! Could we
then eagerly imitate the scamp?
Finally, one needs only to cast a glance at Victor in his balcony,
where he now sits in a singular barometrical condition, if one would
pass judgment on his previous state. His present state, namely, is a
mixture of emptiness, discontent (with himself and everybody), of
increased love for Agnola, justification of this Agnola, and yet the
_impossibility_ of imagining her a near friend, of Clotilda's.
For myself, I shall never repent the little which I have hastily
brought together, if I have shown up therein by a few happy hints how
well my hero, in regard to his conduct _after_ the kiss, which must
strike strict people of the world as singular, can plead a disagreeable
combination of constraining circumstances, and if I shall, therefore,
have succeeded in restoring to him, at the end of the twenty-seventh
chapter, the respect which he had forfeited, by not wrapping round the
princely ring; too large for his finger, the long silken threads of
love, so as to make it fit....
28. DOG-POST-DAY.
EASTER-FESTIVAL.
A dog-day so long and weighty as the twenty-eighth one may be allowed
to break up into three holidays.
FIRST EASTER-HOLIDAY.
Arrival at the Parsonage.--Club of the Three Twins.--Carps.
On the first day of Easter; Sebastian, full of snow-clouds as the
heavens above him, stole out of the farm-buildings of the passions,--I
mean the residence-city,--but not till towards evening, in order not,
to-day, with a heart whose very foundation had been washed away by a
half-year's rainstorm, to be long a burden to any friend. On the
mountain behind which Flachsenfingen drops down as by a sinking of the
earth, he turned round toward the dusky city, and let the remembrance
pass by as an evening mist before his soul, how, three quarters of a
year ago, in the refulgence of summer and of hope, he had looked out so
joyously over these houses,--I described it long ago,--and he compared
his prospects of that time with his present desolation; at last he
said: "Only say to thyself outright, what thou _hast_ and what thou
_meanest_,--namely, thou hast nothing more, not a loved or loving heart
in the whole city,--but thou meanest once more to march to St. Luna,
and, all impoverished as thou art, to take the _second_ leave of the
pale angel whom thy robbed and ruined heart cannot forget, as thou
climbest after the sun, and, having already seen his setting from out a
valley, once more seest him sink, from a mountain." ...
Five half Sabbath-day's journeys from the village he espied the
Court-Chaplain, pursued by a Catechumen (as well of the tailoring craft
as of Christianity). In vain did he and the young tailor seek to
overtake the hotly hunted shepherd of souls. The shepherd came
not to a stand until the youngster had got into his house. A
hundred-and-twenty-pounder (that is my physical weight) gets no
addition to his æsthetic weight by keeping so long to himself the
insignificant cause of this insignificant running, and not saying till
now that the Chaplain could absolutely hear no one coming after him,
because he was afraid the man would smash him from behind. Now the
apprentice wanted to tread in the footsteps of his spiritual master and
come up with him,--the more fiercely the master dashed forward through
space to leave the other behind him, so much the longer leaps forward
did the scholar take to overtake him,--that was the whole scrape, but
so do men chase men.
Victor ran with outflying arms to a pair of hanging ones, which the
owner in his agony could not raise. But in the parsonage two warmer
ones folded themselves around his frozen bosom, those of his
countrywoman; nor did the parson's wife disturb his and her
resurrection-joy with a single complaint of his long absence,--this
delicacy of friendship, which spared another unprofitable apologies, he
reciprocrated with double warmth, and with a voluminous bill of
accusation against his own follies. She led him up a stairway in the
joyful parsonage, which to-night was one pierced-work of lighted
stories, to her dear son's embrace, and into the presence of the three
kindred sons from one mother-country, the three twins....
O ye four men of one heart, press my forlorn Victor's to yours warmly,
and make the good youth glad only for one evening!... I myself have
verily been so, since the paschal Exodus from the Flachsenfingen Egypt:
I will therefore make the twenty-eighth chapter as long as the
watering-village itself is. A weightiness will thereby be imparted to
my work with true critics,--but with postmasters, too, who, when I
despatch it to the bookstore, will draw something considerable from me
for their weighing.... But shall an author be so shabby as to abridge
his sentiments, for the sake of postage, merely because a post-office
clerk weighs them more according to his own than the postal rates? And
am I not encouraged to the opposite course--that of protracting my
emotions--by the electoral, princely, and city-benches in Ratisbon,
inasmuch as the said benches by an imperial recess allow me a deduction
of two thirds of my postage for printed matter, in order, as they hope,
to give encouragement to literature and to sentiment?
The noble Evangelist, to be sure, was also up there among the rest,--he
and Joachime having politely escorted the maid of honor to the house of
her parents;--but here in the _country_, where there are fewer moral
weeds than in _cities_ (just as there are fewer botanical in _fields_
than in _gardens_), and where one enjoys pleasures without _maîtres de
déplaisirs_,--here where in Victor love of country appeased the longing
for all other love,--no one could be unhappy but he who deserved to be.
Mat disappeared there like a toad among tulips. Victor would have loved
the English, even without the blood-relationship of nationality, and
would have given a bad name to the Dutch, even with that relation; to
this is to be ascribed his inconsiderate speech, that these nations
pictured themselves in their tobacco-pipes, inasmuch as the English
ones had _upright_ heads and the Belgian _hanging_ ones.
All three were of the opposition party, and lost the coldness of their
blood at the ice-coldness of Pitt's. The correspondent of the Dog-Days
does not write me, whether it was because the Minister had offended
them,--or whether they took a nearer interest in the frightful
judgment-day and resurrection of the dead in France, where the sun
broods at once over Phœnix-ashes and crocodile's eggs,--or what the
reason was. In fact he reports to me nothing further about them than
their names, namely, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar,[34] which were
the names of the three holy kings from the East.
The one who took the whim of calling himself Melchior concealed under a
phlegmatic ice-crust an equatorial glow, and was a Hecla, that splits
its ice-mountains before it flings out flames; with cold eye and
languid voice and pale brow he spoke in a monosyllabic, sententious,
condensed style,--he saw the truth only in a burning reflector, and his
ink was a tearing waterspout. The second Englishman was a philosopher
and German at once. The elder Cato, who likewise represented the
Moorish king, every one knows. I am as glad as if it were I myself,
that my hero was the very one who was distinguished from them all by a
greater serene considerateness of free-thinking. I mean that Socratic
bright eye which glances round freely over and through the garden of
the trees of knowledge, and which chooses like a man, whereas others
are exclusively impelled by instinct toward some one proposition, some
one apple of these trees, as every insect is to its fruit. Moral
freedom operates no less on our opinions than on our actions; and
despite all grounds of decision in the understanding, and all grounds
of motive in the will, still man _chooses_ as well his system as his
conduct.
Hence, almost even before supper, the three twins had become cold in
affection toward Sebastian, merely because he was so in judgment. He
was to-day for the first time in a case with them, into which he fell
three times every day with Flamin; certain men can better worry down
unlimited contradiction than limited concurrence. The case was this:
Matthieu, by his satiric exaggerations, gave to the slight
dissimilarity between Victor and them an ever-increasing prominence. He
said (not for the purpose of making allusion, but only of seeming to)
that princes to whom, as from the Chinese king, their subjects prayed
for political weather, helped themselves like that rector who himself
composed the almanac, and allowed his scholars (in this, case the
favorites of the princes) to make the weather for it. He said, too,
that the poets could _sing_ for Liberty, indeed, but not _speak_ for
it; that they imitated in a timid plight under the mask of tragic
heroes the voice of the heroes, just as he had often witnessed a
similar joke in the case of a roasted calf's head, which seemed to the
whole table to bellow like a living calf, whereas there was nothing
inside but a live tree-toad, which sent forth its croaking. "But it
were a still greater cowardice," said Victor, "not even to sing; only I
know men are now neither _barbaric_ nor cultivated enough to enjoy the
Poets and follow them; _Poets_, _Religion_, _Passions_, and _Women_ are
four things which live through three ages, whereof we are just in the
middle age,--that of _despising_ them; the past age was that of
_deifying_ them; the future will be that of _honoring_ them." The
indignant trio of twins were of opinion that religion, and women
particularly, were merely for the state. Besides, Victor's republican
sentiments were ambiguous in their eyes, if only by reason of his
aristocratic relations. And now, when he actually added that the
freedom of states had nothing at all to do with retrenchment of
expenses, with greater security of property, with increased comfort of
living, in short, with the promotion of material welfare, that all this
was found often still more abundantly in monarchies, and that that for
which one sacrificed property and life must of course be something
higher than property or life;--when he further said, every man of
culture and virtue lived under a republican form of government,
notwithstanding his physical relations, just as prisoners in
_democracies_ enjoyed nevertheless the rights of freedom;--and when he
made himself, not so much for the Minister and the Upper House as for
the English people, armor-bearer and _Contradictor_, because the
principles of the first two had from time immemorial combated those of
the latter and not yet determined them; because the complaint of to-day
was as old as the (English) revolution; because the ground-plan of this
last could be torn to pieces only in a formal counter-revolution;
because all acts of injustice were committed _according_ to the _show_
of law, which was better than a justice _against_ the _show_ of law;
and because the _nunnery-grating_ which had now been built around the
freedom of the English press[35] was no worse than the Athenian
prohibition of philosophizing, but better than the permission of the
Roman emperors to make pasquils upon them,----
The English love long coats and speeches. As he began with "when," so
must, in his as in my period, a "then" follow....
Then was there not a devil of them satisfied, and Cato the Elder said:
"If he should deliver these principles in the Upper House, there would
arise the greatest uproar on the subject, but from approbation, and
every hearer would still cry, _Hear him!_" Victor said, with the
modesty of a man of the world, he was as warm a republican and Old
Briton as any of them, only he was incapable to-day of "proving from
these principles that he resembled them;--perhaps at the next club!"
"And that can be held," said the Court-Chaplain, "on my birthday, in a
few weeks."--If we live to see it,--I and the reader,--it is to be
hoped they will invite us, too, as old godfathers; the first time (on
the sixth Dog-Post-Day) we were, as is well known, a part of the
company.
My hero exacted of men (especially as he did not give himself the
trouble) too little respect. He labored, to be sure, for these wages;
but if they did not give him any, he knew how to make a thousand
excuses for men, and drew out his mint-stamp and struck off for himself
a medal of honor, swearing meanwhile, "I'll be hanged, if the next time
I don't behave myself more proudly, and less indulgently, and
altogether more seriously, so as to excite a certain reverence." The
next time is yet to come. He therefore forgave the twin-trio so
beautifully, that they at last folded the philanthropist with
passionate embrace forever to their souls.
After such a commencement-disputation there was nothing he loved to do
better than something really nonsensical, gallant, childish,--this time
it was going to the kitchen. Catinat said, he only was a hero _qui
jouerait une partie de quilles au sortir d'une bataille gaynée ou
perdue_,[36]--or, after winning in a disputation, could go to the
kitchen. "Either all or nothing has weight in this mock-life," said he.
Into the kitchen, which was not so dirty as a French bedchamber, but as
clean as a Belgian cattle-stall, another festal hare and envoy
extraordinary had already made his entry, the Court-Chaplain, who had
there his calling to attend to. He had to see whether his four-pound
carp,--a native of the pastoral pond, and wintered expressly for the
adopted son Bastian,--not so much whether it was properly scaled (he
passed over that question entirely with very little philosophy) as
whether the tail was properly tucked up. It could not surely be a
matter of indifference to him, but as a man he must at once feel and
fight down his sorrow on the subject, if a carp of as many pounds as a
mortal has brains were so miserably slit open that the one quotum of
the tail should be no smaller than a hair-bag, and the other no bigger
than a fin. And this entire nominal terrorism[37] is after all of small
consequence compared with another real terrorism (so much does
important trouble fade before greater) which tormented the Parson with
the threat that they would crush the four-pounder's gallbladder.----His
own would have at once emptied itself after the other. "For God's sake,
more considerately, Appel! _Embitter_ not my first Easter-day," said
he. Gall is, according to Boerhaave, true soap: hence the satirical
kind washes half the reading world clean and shiny, and the liver of
such a man is the soap-ball of a quarter of the world and its colonies.
However, it turned out gloriously. But, by Heaven! the world should for
once perceive (after the printing of this book) that a carp of four
pounds--so long fed in the fish-box, so skilfully gutted--weighs more
in the fish-scales of _contentment_, than the golden _fish-bones_ in
the red field of the arms of Count Windischgrätz!
Could he then stay long in the kitchen,--that widow's seat of his old
departed youth,--among so many female friends of Clotilda, who all
bewailed to him her sinking and going away (in a double sense), without
having the oxymel of regretted pleasures run over his lips, and the
pang of sympathy shoot through his heart,--although he had to-day in
the second story spread the disputation on Freedom, as a true
scattering medicine, as an arquebusade-water,[38] at least as a bandage
over his open veins? I asked whether he could long avoid thinking of
the good soul. But I absolutely would not give the answer, from
sympathy with the innocent Victor I absolutely would not disclose
before so many thick-skinned souls--who in their empty breasts approve
the poetical joys of love, and yet not its poetical sorrows--how often
he again and again mixed fate's sugar of milk with memory's sugar of
lead, were I not obliged to for the reason--
--that little Julia came back from the castle and brought with her the
promise that Aunty (Clotilda) was coming to-morrow. This promised,
then, that the Minister's daughter would leave to-morrow. Let no one
think hardly of the parsonage-people for their importunity about
Clotilda: for on the third holiday she goes to the ball, on the day
following to Maienthal,--and all they had left was to-morrow and
to-day.... Our Flamin had brought along with him little Julia herself,
being well pleased with her office of penny-post. I am morally certain,
the Chaplain's wife saw in my hero as much as I write of him, and she
loved him so much, that, had she been obliged to decree instead of
Fate, she would have died for sorrow, before she could have brought
herself to bless the son at the expense of the friend. So very much did
he win, by a beautiful blending of refinement, sensibility, and fancy,
the fairest and tenderest hearts,--I mean those of women.
This tiny Julia, the after-flora of the faded Giulia, twined together
in Victor's soul roses and nettles, and all his flowers of to-day's joy
had their roots in tears deep buried in his breast. Even the kiss of
Clotilda's friend, of Agatha, affected him. He thought of the Stamitz
concert, and of their sitting side by side, and of the crape hat which
veiled the grief of two beloved eyes. He begged Agatha to borrow that
hat of Clotilda, and make him an exact copy of it, because he wanted to
give it as a present. "When she is gone," he said to himself,----"no,
when she is dead,--then I will weep without concealment, and tell all
men openly that I loved her." My dear fellow, at the _souper_--a parson
can give one--they will ascribe the glistening of thine eyes more to
thy self-discharging wit than to the repressed flood of tears, and, if
I were at the table, I could not look upon thee for emotion, when
during the hammering and "hardening" of the red eggs I saw thee try to
fix thy overflowing and downcast eye, half shut, steadfastly on
the pole of a red egg, and silently place thy egg-gable under the
cross-block of Eymann's egg, in order to gain time for victory over thy
voice and eye-socket! And yet I cannot see what important advantage
thou wilt then think to gain by this mask, when Old Appel sends thee by
the little Iris and express, Julia,--she can never, herself, undertake
it,--a stained, tattooed egg, a real, boiled, allegorical picture, and
when thou readest over in the fragile shell the flower-pieces etched
into it with aqua-fortis, and thy name bordered with forget-me-nots; I
say, what help can thy previous dissimulation be to thee, when thou
now, in order not to think out the thought "Forget-me-not," hurriest
from the room under the double pretext of having to thank Apollonia,
and on account of exhaustion, to retire thus early to rest? Ah, the
thanking thou wilt! undoubtedly do, but rest thou wilt not!...
SECOND EASTER-HOLIDAY.
Funeral-Discourse on Himself.--Two Opposite Sorts of
Fatality to the Wax-Statue.
The snow-heavens had fallen and lay upon the landscape. The snow made
me melancholy, and reminded one of the wintry lace-knots of Nature. It
was the 1st of April, when Nature, so to speak, made the season itself
an April fool. Victor had long ago learned manners (_mores_) enough to
teach him that, when one is visiting a Court-Chaplain, he must go with
him to sermon. And then, too, he loved to march to sacristies for the
same reason that he loved to steal away to the huts of shepherds,
hunters, and fowlers. It did not strike him as overwrought that the
Chaplain (as he himself did at last) should place his mounting of the
pulpit,--merely on account of the multitude of preparations he made for
it,--in point of importance, side by side with the scaling of a wall.
Nay, he disputed with him during the long hymn about the surplice-fees
of a stillborn fœtus, and proved by a short argument that a parson
could demand of every fœtus--and though it were five nights old--the
appropriate burial-fees, whether the miserly parents bespoke a funeral
sermon for the thing or not. The Chaplain made a weighty objection, but
Victor removed it by the weighty proposition that a clergyman (for
otherwise he would be cheated out of his best fœtuses) could make
every couple pay him burial-fees as often as it could pay baptismal
moneys. The Chaplain replied: "It is stupid that the best pastoral
Theologies hurry over this point like a pinch of snuff in the wind."
With all the humor of my hero, and with all the gayety of my
parson,--who on every holy eve scolded and, condemned like a
revolutionary tribunal, and who on every first holiday softened, till
on the third he became absolutely an angel,--the world should promise
itself something different from what nevertheless is coming: namely,
that Victor saw gleaming out of every hour of the approaching evening
which was to bring Clotilda for the last time but one into his company,
a protruding sacrificial knife against which he must press his wounded
bosom. She was invited to-day, as it were to a farewell-supper,--the
three twins of course.
At last she came at evening on the arm of the misunderstood
Matthieu.--If, as Ruska asserts, the number of devils (44,435,556) who,
according to the assertion of _Guliermus Parisiensis_, flank a _dying_
Abbess, is made much too small,[39] one can readily imagine how many
devils may form the escorting squadron of a _living_, a _blooming_ one.
I, for my part, assume as many devils around a fair one, as there are
male persons.
When Clotilda appeared with that face of hers smiling down into its
fading beauty, with the exhausted lute-voice, which sorrow draws from
us, as a peculiar pianoforte variation, by the pressure of the
stop,--but is it not with men as with organs, of which the _human
voice_ goes most finely with tremolos?--when she thus appeared, then
had her noblest friend the choice, either to fall down before her with
the words, "Let me die first," or to be, to-day, right funny.
He chose the latter (excepting with her) by way of drowning his dreams.
He therefore flung about him with stories and healthy observations.
Therefore he threw into the imperial military chest against
sentimentalism this satirical contribution, that it was the March-gall
or moist-gall in the human field, i. e. a spot that always remained
damp, and on which everything rotted. As this availed nothing, he
entered into alliance with whole states, and promised himself some help
from remarking concerning them, that their summits, like forest-trees,
had grown into each other, and that it had no effect to saw one through
down below,--that the equality of kingdoms was a substitute or a
preparation for the equality of ranks,--and that gunpowder, which had
hitherto been the _sticking powder_ of the great powers, would finally
burn out and heal the hydrophobous wounds of the human race. At last,
when he plainly perceived that it helped him very little, as he
expressed the conjecture that Europe would one day become the _North
India_, and the same North which had once been the breaking-tools and
building-materials of the earth would be so once more, but the North in
the other hemisphere, he struck, with his chemical process, into the
wet road, and (like a secretary of legation) instead of politics
took--punch.
But only cares, not melancholy nor love, can be drowned by drinking.
The other spirits, dissolved in the nervous spirit, array themselves in
a magically sparkling circle around every idea, around every emotion,
which thou hast therein, as in breweries the lights, by reason of the
steam; burn in a colored circle. The glass with its hot cloud is a
Papin's digester[40] even to the densest heart, and decomposes the
whole soul; the draught makes every one at once more tender and bold. A
soft heart was of old ever associated with a bold, hardened fist. As it
kept on snowing, he offered Clotilda for to-morrow his shell-shaped
sleigh and himself (as he was, besides, invited to the ball) as
knight-errant,--whereby he compelled the Evangelist to offer himself as
sledge-gondolier to the stepmother.
Clotilda withdrew now from the merry male company into the adjoining
room, where her Agatha and all were,--it was not done from disapproval
of decorous, manly festivity,--still less from embarrassment, as it is,
in fact, easier, and made easier for her sex, to behave itself
naturally under forty eyes than under four,--still less from inability
to disguise her sisterly love towards Flamin; for her flying soul had
long since learned to fold together its wings and hide its tears and
wishes, brought up as she had been among _strangers_, trained in thorny
relations and between discordant parents. She did it merely, like the
Parson's wife, because it is a _British_ custom, that the ladies shall
take themselves away from the men and their incense-kettle of punch.
When she was out of Victor's sight,--and when, from her _present_ look
of _increased paleness_, he drew the conclusion that the vale of
Emanuel would hardly restore her spring-colors, since the prospect
of the journey had brought no healing influence,--and when this
_short absence_ held before him as it were in a pocket-mirror the
death-apparition of an _eternal_ one,--and when, at last, to be sure,
the swelling heart carried away the dam of dissimulation,--then he
rushed out into the winter,--bared his inflamed breast to the cooling
flakes, and tore wider the clefts into which fate grafted its
sorrows,--and ran up through the white night to the observatory;--and
here, covered with the snow-avalanche silently descending from heaven,
he looked out into the gray, whirling, trembling, flickering landscape,
and in the broad snow-pierced night,--and all the tears of his heart
fell, and all the thoughts of his soul cried: "So looks the future! So
glistening fall the joys of men from heaven, and dissolve even while
they fall! So does everything melt away! Ah, what air-castles I saw
shine around me on this eminence, and how they gleamed in the evening
red! Alas! all are buried under the snow and under the darkness of
night!" He looked down into Clotilda's garden, in whose dark bowers,
now whitened with snow, he had found and lost again the Eden of his
heart. "The tones which flowed over this garden are dried up, but not
the tears which streamed after them," thought he. He looked down into
her brother's garden, where the tulip-C had dropped its leaves, and the
blooming names had passed away into obscurity.
With such a soul, which had looked into this landscape as into the
charnel-house of mouldered days, he returned to the joyous club. The
alternation of cold and warmth had kept up his similarity to the
punch-union, which meanwhile had gone on drinking. He and all had
touched the limits of drinking, where one laughs and weeps in the
same breath; but I am glad that man can after all extract true
nourishment of mind and heart (though not from a cloister-kitchen or
cloister-library, yet) from a cloister-cellar; that he drinks the
health of his wit; that every cup (not merely on the altar) spiritually
strengthens him, and that, if serpents take off their crowns upon
drinking,[41] he puts his on during the process; and that the vine
sheds tears not merely of itself, or from the eyes of a Catholic image
of the Virgin, but also from those of a man, who has drunk of it. The
club hit upon the fancy of making parliamentary speeches. The Chaplain
proposed occasional discourses. Victor jumped up in a chair and said:
"I am going to deliver a funeral-sermon on myself,--I preached here
long ago in my childhood."
All drank once more, even the corpse, and the latter began the
following harangue:--
"_Most beloved and distressed hearers and brethren!_"
A mortal, deeply-afflicted hearers, may sink into the next world,
without having a mourning-steed prance after him, just as he makes his
entrance into this, without having a festive-nag trot before him. We,
for our part, have jointly taken the _funeral-cup_ beforehand, in order
to be able to go through it all; for man expands by moistening, and
shrinks up when he is dry, I mean, when he takes only solid food, like
the bloodsucker, which, when out of water, loses four inches in length.
And I hope I and the deeply afflicted funeral-procession have _toasted_
the deceased sufficiently.
"And so then I see before me" ... --Here he beckoned to the Parson to
toss out his nightcap, that something death-like might lie there on
which his emotion could "vent itself--
"I see lying before me him, the never-to-be-forgotten Mr.
Court-Physician, Sebastian Victor von Horion, and dead he is and is
about to go down under the covering of earth, into the place full of
long repose. What do we see still lying at rest before us but the
diving-bell, wherein the covered soul descended into this vapory
life,--what but the dry shell of a kernel which is sown for the first
time in a second planet,--what but his hull,--what but (so to speak)
the cast-off nightcap of his awakened spirit?
"Behold, weeping hearers, this emblematic pale cap! Here it lies, the
head is out of it, which once mused therein. Our Victor is gone and is
hushed, who talked so often of mathematics, clinical medicine,
heraldry, precautionary jurisprudence, _medicina forensis_,
Sphragistics and their auxiliary sciences. We have lost much in
him--who shall console you for this loss, excellent Herr von Schleunes,
and the other gentlemen likewise? One has not however, absolutely, in
this absurd life, which may well be a sort of ante-death, time enough
to administer proper consolation. Not merely church-pews are often
built on tombstones, but also princely chairs--_they_ particularly--and
even pulpits.
"Can it be supposed that thy soul, deceased Sebastian, in its
intermediate state after death, should know anything of its body, from
which it is unpacked, as out of its hat-box, and of the last honors
which we here pay to its case? If it still has consciousness and an eye
for this room, wherein it has been so often, then will it be glad that
the three holy kings, of whom the Moor is Cato the Elder, are standing
round its worm-bag, hardly willing to let the bag go; it must be
pleased, that we are unitedly lamenting: where is his equal in
common chemistry, in physiognomies and physiognomy,--in the modern
languages,--in the _doctrine of ribbons_, from which he imbibed a love
for all kinds of ribbons? Who sought less than he that strict
concatenation of ideas, which misleads the Germans to cement good ones
with bad ones, and to use more mortar than stones? Not even the
Court--hence he never liked to go thither, when fun was going
forward--could break him off from a certain serious sedate way, which
he ran even into a ridiculous one, which last was always his aim.----By
heaven! through the hour-glass of death, through which he peeped, as
through a pocket spyglass, everything came out so small to him, that he
knew not why he should be serious--I hope I may not be standing here
alive and well, if in the aforesaid glass all the _steps_ of the throne
did not appear to him as diminutive as the thumb-long _wood-stair_ of
the tree-frog in his preserving jar.
"He was a very good preacher, particularly of funeral sermons, hence
even a very good preacher asked him for godfather, and the godson
stands among the present company and takes his part in the weeping, for
the stomach-ache.... Only great court preachers, who deliver the
princely funeral oration in the Cathedral Church, can boast of what I,
to my greatest satisfaction, now hear, that they make the mourning
company laugh, and this is to me an earnest that my consolation is
effectual....
"And yet one who lies upon the death-bed has more consolation than one
who only stands at the foot of the bed. The souterrain of the earth's
crust is peopled only by still, reposing human beings, who draw close
together; but above the souterrain stand their uneasy friends, and long
to go down to the beloved arms of dust; for the linen on the eye of the
dead is truly a padded hat for the cold brow, the coffin is a parachute
to the unhappy, and the winding-sheet the last bandage of the widest
wounds. Ah! why does weary man love better to sink into the short than
into the long, undisturbed, sure sleep? Take, then, good Sebastian, the
death-certificate as an eternal peace-instrument from the hand of
gentle nature....
"But, the Deuse! where then is our dead man? what has the white cap to
do down there? I see the corpse in the looking-glass opposite--it must
be somewhere--I must fetch it":----with a shudder running through his
soul he sprang down; an exalted frenzy passed, through the stages of
tears, of smiles, of torpor, up and down his face. He ran behind a
screen which had been placed before his wax statue--and brought
out the waxen man--and threw him down as a corpse--and a veil was wound
over the corpse--and with a distorted face he mounted the chair to
proceed:--
"This is the night-corpse,--the scorified, carbonized man,--into such
stiff lumps are conscious beings fastened and compelled to turn them
round. Why do you tremble at me, hearers, because I tremble, to stare
so at this overturned form of humanity?--I see a spectre hover round
this corpse which is an 'I.' ... I! I! thou precipice that in the
mirror of thought runnest back deep down into the darkness,--I! thou
mirror within the mirror,--thou terror within a terror! Draw the veil
away from the corpse! I will boldly look on the dead, till he destroys
me."
Every one shuddered in response; but one of the Englishmen drew aside
the veil from the dead.... Rigid, speechless, horror-struck and
quaking, Victor looked upon the unveiled face, which also in a living
shape hung round his soul; but at last tears gushed out down his cold
cheeks, and then he spoke in a lower tone, as if his heart were
melting:--
"See how the corpse smiles! why, then, dost thou smile so, Sebastian?
Wast thou perchance so happy on the earth, that thy mouth stiffened and
grew cold in a rapture of delight?... No, happy thou canst scarcely
have been,--joy itself was often to thee a seed-vessel of sorrow. And
thou saidst thyself very often, I am well contented and deserve hardly
my hopes and wishes, to say nothing of their fulfilment.----
"Flamin! look upon this assumed countenance here,--it smiles from
friendship, not from joy. Flamin, this extinct breast was arched over a
heart that loved thee without limit, and even unto death.
"And this, after all, is the only misfortune of the poor man now at
rest. In and for himself, and so far as concerned his original
condition and temper, the good Bastian might have fared well
enough; but he was too sensitive for joy,--too inconsiderate,--too
ardent,--almost too much a child of fantasy. He wanted even to love
(during his lifetime), and it could not be done. The flower-goddess of
love passed by him, she denied him the transfiguration of man, the
melodrama of the heart, the golden age of life.... Cold form, erect
thyself, and show men the tears that flow from a tender heart, which
breaks for love and finds none!...
"If our Horion was not happy, then, of course, it may well be a comfort
to him, if he is permitted even in the noonday of life to take his
siesta, if he is permitted to die, and released from the hotly-beating
heart, hushed by the death-angel, to lay himself down so early under
the long shroud, which the genius of humanity draws over whole peoples,
as the gardener draws the cover over the flower-bed to shield it from
sun and rain,--against the glow of our joys, against the gush of our
sorrow.... _Rest thou too, Horion!_" ...
His grief at these words from the old dream so overmastered and so
unmanned him that he passed over from it--by way either of excuse or of
relief--into an almost frenzied humor.
"The whole joke, however, is half against my taste, which at court I
wanted to cultivate. Life absolutely does not pay for one's scolding on
its account at our good friend Death, or fumigating him with the
incense of praise. The fear of dying excepted, there is nothing more
pitiable than the fear of living. People of true talents should get
drunk in order to see life in the right light, and afterward report it
to us. The wretchedest of all (but so that _human_ life in the
comparison turns out still passable) is _civil_ life, at which I could
let fly for years, because it has nothing but long troughs for the
stomach, from which hang down chains for the fancy,--because it
perverts man into a cit,--because it turns our fleeting existence from
a corn-field into a drill-plough,--because it exhales a pestilential
vapor which lies thick before the grave and over the heavens, and in
which the poor expeditionary committee-man, sweating, chewing, fat, and
besmeared, without a warm sunbeam for his heart, without a streak of
light for his eye, drives round, till the ramming-block of the
pavior[42] pounds him down on the marshy ropewalk. The only advantage
such a poor piece of marble has, out of which a _pavement_ is made,
instead of a _statue_, is that it looks upon the whole of human life as
something really edifying, which it cannot sufficiently praise. And
yet to us good fools the outer world could not appear so small, were
there not something eternal and great within us, whereto we contrast
it,--were there not a sunlight in us, which falls into this
opera-house, just as the daylight, sometimes, when a door opens, falls
in upon the nightly stage,--were it not that, like men in old pictures
of the resurrection, we are half bedded in the earth and half out of
it,--and if this ice-life were not an _Aiguille percée_,[43] and had
not an opening out into an eternal blue.... Amen!
"I have, however, still to announce to the sorrowing assembly, that I
have been making an April-fool of it; for the dead man, whose funeral
sermon I have been delivering, is really myself." ...
But here all his friends embraced him, in order to set limits to his
ingenious frenzy,--and to press such an impassioned, true British heart
to their own. The embrace softly warmed all his cold wounds, and he was
healed, though exhausted; another's life grew into his, and love
conquered death. The Englishmen, in whose eyes stood the tears of a
double intoxication, could hardly tear themselves away from the
humorous darling.
Clotilda, who with her female friends overheard the funeral oration in
the adjoining chamber, at first held them back beseechingly from
opening it. But when Victor said, "Cold form, erect thyself, and
show men the tears which flow from a tender heart that breaks for
love,"--then she took leave of them with a hasty "good-night," unable
to master an emotion which upheaved her whole being. When they reported
to him the time of her withdrawal, then did he, who was now already so
weary, weak, and tender, become inexpressibly so,--all the lights which
his effort had brightened on his countenance seemed to melt away in
love like moonlight in dew-drops,--he waited not for his chamber to be
empty, but showed that which Clotilda in hers would conceal,--he could
even contemplate the unveiled wax statue with softened spirit, and said
smilingly: "I fancy, the reason why I have let the _whole_ of me be
repeated in wax is the same for which the Catholic does it with single
limbs, in order to hang them on a saint, and thereby give thanks or
pray for recovery; or like the Roman Emperors, whose wax statues the
physicians visited after the death of the original."[44] The company
went away, and he was at last alone. The moon, which had risen at 11
o'clock and 57 minutes, just began to throw its still low and waning
light up against the windows of Clotilda's sitting-room. Victor put out
his night-lamp, and, in order not to sink with his still tossing,
dreaming heart into the dreams of sleep, seated himself at the
window, almost in the wonted place of his wax copy and in a similar
attitude----when fate ordained, that he, who to-day had given out the
wax mummy to be his own person, should now inversely be looked upon as
the image--by Clotilda! She stood at some distance from her window, on
which no light fell but that from heaven; Victor, as this latter could
not yet reach him, was quite in shadow, and turned towards her with
five quarters of his profile. Scarcely had he observed that she fixed
upon him an unchanging glance, that seemed as if it would not only take
him in but go through him, when he guessed that she confounded him with
the man of wax; he also observed out of the corner of his eye that
something white fluttered around her, i. e. that she often dried her
eyes. But how would it have been possible for his fine feeling by the
least motion to take away from her her error, and to make her blush
with confusion for her innocent gaze! Another, e. g. the misunderstood
Mat, would in such an emergency have composedly straightened himself up
and looked indifferently out of the window; but he ossified himself, as
it were, in his attitude of lifelessness. But only the night and the
distance could conceal from her his trembling, when her tears shed for
his corpse seized like a hot stream his dismembered heart, and softened
and dissolved the little of it which this evening had still left whole
into a burning wave of love. Children's tears flow more freely, when
one shows them sympathy; and in this hour of exhaustion, Victor, who
was generally made more hard by another's sympathy for him, grew
softer; and when Clotilda seated herself at the window, to lean upon it
her weary head, it seemed to him as if something exhorted him now to
verify that which he had said to-day to the statue: Cold form, erect
thyself, and show men the tears which flow from a soft heart.
Clotilda at length closed the curtains and disappeared. But he still
cautiously acted for some time longer the part of his image, and just
when he made less effort to play the statue he succeeded better. All
his thoughts flowed now like balm over the lacerated spots of his inner
man, and he said: "Though thou art only my friend, I am satisfied, and
thou canst appease this bosom's tumultuous yearnings. O, besides, this
full heart would fly to pieces, if it should entertain the thought that
thou lovest me!" For the rest he took home to himself to-day for the
first time the improbability of his recent supposition, that a person
so reserved as she could have demeaned herself in so unreserved a
manner towards the blind Julius, and he asked himself: "Is there not,
then, sufficient explanation of her departure from the court, in
January's and Matthieu's unholy love, and the holy love of Emanuel?"
But that she might not in the morning discover her erroneous
confounding of things, he gave his wax figurant exactly the position
which he had occupied at the window.
THIRD EASTER-HOLIDAY.
F. Koch's double Jews-harp.--The Sleigh-ride.--The
Ball--and....
The reader will wish, with me, that the third Easter-holiday ended
something worse than the long 28th Dog-Post-Day.
The sleigh went tolerably, so far as could be foreseen.----I however
foresee yet something quite different: that half a million of my
reading-customers (for the other half I will answer) cannot find out
what is in my hero. It is therefore my office to tell them only so much
as this: Victor was never pusillanimous, man's subjection to the yoke
of fortune disgusted him; once every day Death took him up on the
Sublime Arm, and let him, looking down therefrom, remark how diminutive
were all mountains and hills, even graves. Every misfortune hardened
him to steel, the Medusa's head of the death's-head turned him to
stone, and the melting sun-glance of joyful emotion always vexed him in
the remembrance. His sportive humor, his ideal of female perfection,
the want of opportunity, and the shield of Minerva, had helped
him along over the wind-months of feeling, and he had hitherto
worshipped no other sun than the one which is twenty-one million miles
distant,--till Heaven or the Devil brought along the nearer one, just
in the year 1792. Still things would have gone quite tolerably, and the
misfortune would have been easy enough to get through with, if he had
been discreet or cool; I mean, if he had not said to himself: "It is
fine to weep never for one's self, but yet for another; it is fine to
worry down every loss, except that of a heart; and which will a
departed friend from his lofty place count greater, if I deliver
consolatory sermons to myself on his decease with true composure, or if
I sink, yearning, after the loved one, in voluntary, overmastering
sorrow?"
Thereby,--and from unacquaintance with the over-powering influence of
noble but untamed feelings,--and because he confounded his previous
accidental calm of the heart with a voluntary one,--and from an
overflowing love of humanity,--he had intentionally let the feelers of
his inner man up to this time grow too large,--and thus, by the whirl
of all the previous influences, the previous bereavements, the previous
emotions of these Easter-days, of this fair village of his youth, he
had been driven so far out of his course, that, notwithstanding his
considerateness, his court-life, his humor, he forfeited (at least for
Easter) somewhat of his old dissimilarity to those geniuses who, like
the sea-crab, stretch out feelers which a man can hardly span with his
arms....
That sympathetic look of Clotilda which yesterday, after his previous
heat, had been a cooling balm, was to him to-day a very burning one;
the thought of her eye full of tears for him conjured up all the days
of his love for her and her whole image in his heart. I am convinced
that not even the Regency-Counsellor, who, for the rest, might by
yesterday's funeral-sermon have lost something of his jealousy,
as well as, by the republican diversion, somewhat of his love for
Clotilda, failed to note the drunken and dreamy look of his eye. The
parsonage itself was fortunately to-day an exchange, or a spiritual
intelligence-office and recruiting-house; the Chaplain registered--not
any of your French _car tel est notre plaisir_, but--the catechumens
who were to confess at Whitsuntide.
He would not go over to the castle--his misunderstood friend Mat
had already by ten o'clock called to him out of the window a
morning-greeting and congratulation upon the snow-storm--until his
sleigh had come from the city, so that he might start off at once,
because he would not show over yonder any ridiculous emotion. Since the
great world had become for him a work-day world, to disguise his
feelings from it became harder; one conceals one's self most easily
from those whom one respects.
But the three twins and Franz Koch carried him over earlier than he
would have gone, as early as half past five o'clock in the afternoon.
The name of Franz Koch in the Dog's papers made me jump off of my feet.
If any one of my readers is a guest of the Carlsbad waters, or should
happen to be his Majesty, the King of Prussia, William the Second, or
one of his court, or the Elector of Saxony, or the Duke of Brunswick,
or any other princely person, he has heard the good Koch, who is a
modest pensioned soldier, and travels round everywhere with his
instrument and plays on it. This instrument, which he calls the double
Jews-harp, or mouth-harmonica, consists of an improved pair of
jaw-drums, or humming jaws-harps, played at once, which he shifts
according to the piece he is playing. His handling of the buzzing-irons
bears the same relation to the old Jews-harp playing as harmonica-bells
do to servants' bells. I am under obligation to induce such of my
readers as have wren's wings to their fancy, or at least, from the
heart upwards are _lithopædia_ (petrified fœtuses), or have the
ear-drum membrane for nothing but to be drummed on,--to induce, I say,
with the little oratory I have, such readers to tumble the aforesaid
Franz out of the house, if he undertakes to come and buzz before them.
For it amounts to just nothing, and the wretchedest bass-viol or rebeck
screams louder in my opinion; nay, its hum is so low, that he played at
Carlsbad before not more than twelve customers at once, because one
cannot sit near enough to him, particularly as in his leading pieces he
has the light carried away, that neither eye nor ear may disturb the
fantasies. If, however, a reader is differently constituted,--a poet,
perchance,--or a lover,--or very tender,--or like Victor,--or like me;
then, indeed, let him without scruple listen with still and melting
soul to Franz Koch, or--for to-day is just the time when he is not to
be had--to _me_.
The jolly Englishman had sent this harmonist to Victor with the card:
"The bearer of this is the bearer of an echo which he carries in his
pocket." Victor preferred, therefore, to take him over to the friend of
all sweet tones, that her departure might not deprive her of this
melodious hour. It seemed to him like going through a long church, when
he entered Clotilda's Loretto-chapel; her simple chamber was like
Mary's sitting-room, enclosed with a temple. She had already completed
arranging herself in her black ornamental dress. A black costume is a
fine eclipse of the sun, wherein one absolutely cannot take one's eyes
away from it: Victor, who, with his _Chinese_ regard for this color,
brought with him to-day to this magic a defenceless soul, an enkindled
eye, grew pale and confused at the radiant face of Clotilda, over which
the trace of a trouble that had rained out, hovered like a rainbow over
the bright, blue sky. It was not the cheerfulness of light thoughts,
which every maiden takes on when she dresses herself, but the
cheerfulness of a pure soul full of patience and love. He trembled lest
he should tread on two kinds of thistles,--on the painted ones of the
floor, over which he took care to step, and upon the satirical ones of
the fine observers around him, with which he was always coming in
contact. Her stepmother was still upon the stucco-work and finishing of
her worm-bag,[45] and the Evangelist was in her toilet-chamber as
assistant-priest and collaborator in the finery department. So that
Clotilda had still time to hear the performer on the mouth-harmonica;
and the Chamberlain offered himself to his daughter and my hero for he
was a father of good breeding towards his daughter--as part of the
audience, although he could make little out of music, table- and
ball-music excepted.
Victor now saw for the first time, by Clotilda's delight in the
musician he had brought with him, that her harmonious heart loved to
tremble in unison with strings; in fact, he was often mistaken about
her, because she--like thee, dearest * * *--expressed her highest
praise as well as her highest censure by silence. She begged her
father, who had already heard the mouth-harmonica in Carlsbad, to give
her and Victor an idea of it,--he gave it: "It expressed in masterly
manner, not so much the _fortissimo_ as the _piano-dolce_, and, like
the simple harmonica, was best adapted to the _adagio_." She
answered,--leaning on the arm of Victor, who led her into a still
chamber darkened for the occasion,--"music was perhaps too good for
drinking-songs and for mirthful sensations. As sorrow ennobled man,
and, by the little cutting pangs which it gave him, unfolded him as
regularly as they do the buds of the carnation, which they slit open
with a knife that they may bloom without bursting; so music as an
artificial sorrow took the place of the true." "Is the true so rare?"
said Victor in the dark chamber which only _one_ wax-taper lighted. He
came close to Clotilda, and her father sat opposite to him.
Blissful hour! thou--that didst once, with the echo-strains of this
harmonica, pass through my soul,--glide along by me once more, and let
the resonance of that echo again murmur around thee!
But scarcely had the modest, quiet virtuoso put the instrument of
enchantment to his lips, when Victor felt that now (before the light
was removed) he should not dare to do as at other times, when he
pictured to himself at every adagio appropriate scenes, and underlaid
every piece with peculiar fantasyings for its texts. For it is an
unfailing method of giving tones their omnipotence, when one makes them
the accompanying voices of our inner mood, and so out of instrumental
music makes as it were vocal music, out of inarticulate tones
articulate ones, whereas the fairest series of tones, which no definite
subject arranges into alphabet and speech, glides off from bathed, but
not softened hearts. When, therefore, the sweetest sounds that ever
flowed over human lips as consonants of the soul began to well forth
from the trembling mouth-harmonica,--when he felt that these little
steel-rings, as if they were the setting and touch-board[46] of his
heart, would make their agitations his own,--then did he constrain his
feverish heart, on which, besides, all wounds came out to-day, to
shrink up against the tones, and not picture to itself any scenes,
merely that he might not burst into tears before the light was gone.
Higher and higher swept the drag-net of uplifting tones with his heart
in its grasp. One melancholy remembrance after another said to him in
this short ghostly hour of the past, "Crush me not out, but give me my
tear." All his imprisoned tears were clustered around his heart, and in
them his whole inner being, lifted from the ground, softly swam. But he
collected himself: "Canst thou not yet deny thyself," he said to
himself, "not even a moist eye? No, with a dry eye receive this sad,
stifled echo of thy whole breast, receive this resonance from Arcadia,
and all these weeping sounds, into a broken heart."--Amidst such a
secret melting away, which he often took for composure, it always
seemed within him as if a breaking voice from a far region addressed
him, whose words had the cadence of verses; the breaking voice again
addressed him: "Are not these tones composed of vanished hopes? Do not
these sounds, Horion, run into one another like human days? O, look not
on thy heart; on the dust-cloud of the crumbling heart, as on a mist,
the gleaming forms of former days cast their image."--Nevertheless he
still answered calmly, "Life is truly too short for two tears,--the
tear of woe, and the other." ... But now, as the white dove, which
Emanuel saw fall in the churchyard, flew through his imaginings,--as he
thought to himself, "This dove, truly, once fluttered in my dream of
Clotilda, and clung to the ice-mountains; ah! it is the image of the
fading angel beside me,"--and as the tones fluttered more and more
faintly, and at last ran round in the whispering leaves of a
death-garland,--and as the breaking voice returned again and said:
"Knowest thou not the old tones? Lo! they sounded in thy dream before
her birthday festival, and there made the sick soul beside thee sink up
to her heart in the grave, and she left nothing behind for thee but an
eye full of tears, and a soul full of grief"----"No, that was all she
left me," said in broken tones his weary heart, and all his suppressed
tears gushed in torrents from his eyes....
But the light was just then carried from the chamber, and the first
stream fell unseen into the lap of night.
The harmonica began the melody of the dead: "How softly they slumber."
Ah, in such tones do the far-wandering waves of the sea of eternity
beat against the hearts of darkling mortals who stand on the shore and
yearn to put forth! Now art thou, Horion, wafted by a wave of harmony
out of the mist-rain of life over into the light of eternity! Hear,
what tones murmur round the broad fields of Eden! Do not the strains,
dissipated into breaths, reverberate from distant flowers, and float,
swollen by echo, round the swan-bosom, which, blissfully dissolving,
swims on pinions, and draw it on from flood to flood of melody, and
sink with it in the distant flowers, which a cloud of fragrances fills,
and does not in the fragrant dusk the soul glow again like a ruddy
evening, ere it sets in bliss?
O Horion, does the earth still abide under us, drawing its circle of
death-hills round the breadth of life? Do these tones tremble in an
earthly air? O Music! thou that bringest the Past and the Future with
their flying flames so near to our wounds, art thou the evening-breath
of this life, or the morning air of the life to come? Ay, thy sounds
are echoes, which angels snatch from the second world's tones of
gladness, to convey down into our mute hearts, into our dreary night
the faint spring-melodies of heavens flying far above us! And thou,
dying harmonica-tone! verily thou comest to us out of an peal of
exultation, which, driven from heaven to heaven, dies at last in the
remotest mute heaven, which consists of nothing but a deep, broad,
tranquil, and eternal bliss....
"Tranquil and eternal bliss," repeats Horion's dissolving soul, whose
rapture I have hitherto made my own, "ay, _there_ will lie the region
where I shall lift up my eyes toward the All-gracious, and spread out
my arms toward _her_, toward this weary soul, toward this great heart.
Then shall I fall upon thy heart, Clotilda, then shall I clasp thee
forever, and the flood of tranquil and eternal bliss will close around
us. Breathe again toward life, earthly tones, between my breast and
hers, and then let a little night, an undulating shadowy outline, swim
along on your light waves, and I will look toward it and say, That was
my life;--then shall I say more softly, and weep more intensely, Ay,
man is unhappy, but only on the earth."
O, if there is a human being over whom, at these last words, memory
draws great rain-clouds, to him, to her, I say, Beloved brother,
sister, I am, to-day, as much moved as thou; I respect the sorrow which
thou hidest,--ah! thou excusest me, and I thee....
The tune stopped and died away. What stillness now in the dark! Every
sigh took the form of a long-drawn breathing. Only the nebulous stars
of sensibility sparkled brightly in the darkness. No one saw whose eye
had been wet. Victor looked into the still, black air before him, which
a few minutes ago had been filled with hanging-gardens of tones, with
dissolving air-castles of the human ear, with diminished heavens, and
which now remained a naked, black firework-scaffold.
But the harmonica soon filled this darkness again with meteorological
apparitions of worlds. Ah, why, then, must it needs strike precisely
that melody which woke such restless yearnings in my Victor, the
"Forget-me-not," which sounded out to him the verses, as if he repeated
them to Clotilda. "Forget me not, now that fate sternly calls thee away
from me. Forget me not, when the cool earth one day rests lightly upon
this heart, that fondly beat for thee. Think it is I, when some soft
voice shall whisper to thy thought, Forget me not." ... And O, when
these tones intertwine themselves with waving flowers, when they flow
backward from one past to another, when they ripple more and more
faintly through the past years that repose back of man's memory,--at
last only murmur under the dawn of life,--only well up inaudibly under
the cradle of man,--and stiffen in our cold twilight and dry up in the
midnight, when each of us was not,--then does man, deeply moved, cease
any longer to conceal his sighs and his infinite pangs.
The still angel at Victor's side could no longer veil them, and Victor
heard Clotilda's first sigh.
Ay, then he took her hand as if he would sustain her, hovering over an
open grave.
She gave up her hand to him, and her pulse throbbed trembling in unison
with his.
Finally only the last lingering tone of the song still flung out its
melodious circles in the ether, and its wake undulated away over a
whole past,--then a distant echo wrapped it up in a fluttering breath
of air, and wafted it away through deeper echoes, and finally over to
the last which lay round about heaven,--then the tone expired and flew
as a soul into one of Clotilda's sighs.
Then the first tear escaped from her, and fell like a hot heart on
Victor's hand.
Her friend was overpowered,--she was carried away,--he pressed the soft
hand,--she drew it out of his,--and went slowly out of the chamber, in
order to come again to the help of the too tender heart, over whose
sweet signs night hung her veil....
The light which was brought in took away these dream-worlds. Matthieu
and the Chamberlain's lady appeared also. We will not, however, in this
soft mood, when one is precisely the severest against evil natures, say
or think anything about the new couple which cannot help its contrast
to our tenderness. Victor said this to himself, too, but more than
once; because the Apothecary's lyingly alleged engagement of Clotilda
to Matthieu impressed itself upon him in the liveliest colors, as
resembling that platonic union, in which the pure spirit, driven out of
its ether and with crooked-up wings, is immured in an unclean body.
Clotilda came back. She was in a state of embarrassment towards Victor,
merely because he was in one, or was to be still more so by her side in
the sleigh,--the swollen ball of her eye she withdrew from the light.
As condensation of tears, like inspissation of milk, oppresses and
destroys; his sadness, repressed and drawn back into his innermost
being, sought an outlet through the voice, which was vehement and
abrupt; through the motions of the body, which were quick; even through
vivacity of expression;--in short, it was well that they started.
He thought the opposite again, when he stood behind her on the sleigh.
The night seemed to have withdrawn behind the clouds, whose wide arch
occupied the heavens. He could not hunt up any subject of conversation,
let him think as much as he would,--he ran through Clotilda's,
Victor's, all his acquaintances' lives,--nothing occurred to him. The
reason was, that his thoughts, which he sent out on this errand,
returned every minute without his knowledge, and hung like bees on
Clotilda's noble profile, or on her soft eye, or buried themselves in
that tear of hers which had fallen on his hand, and in the whole
ethereal sea of to-day's tones. The dark heaven above him finally put
into his head Emanuel's last communication, and he could relate to her
out of that the blind youth's initiation into the highest thought of
man. Clotilda listened to him with delight, and at last said: "No one
is more fortunate than a pupil of such a teacher: but he must never go
into the world,--there he will be so no longer. His teacher has given
him too soft a heart; and a soft heart, as you yourself say, hangs,
like soft, fruit, so low down, that every one can reach and wound it;
the hard fruits hang higher."
They had arrived now at the hard fruits of the capital, and her
remark was her own history. But the new scenes,--the rattling
carriages and rustling dresses,--the much ado about little or
nothing,--the hall-lights like systems of fixed stars,--the double
mouth-_un_harmonicas,--the masculine court-fauna,--the feminine
court-flora,--the whole mobilized pleasure camp,--this din of a fair
drowned the muffled echo which passed to and fro between two harmonious
souls.
Our hero was received by the Princess in a more friendly manner than
even by the Prince. Joachime, Clotilda's lieutenant in office, had, in
addition to her cold angry friendliness, a _montre à régulateur_ rich
in jewels. In a public place it costs less than in a cabinet to cover
the inner man with the outer as with a theatrical mask. Victor, on
whom, besides, every _sorrow_ produced the witty effect of
_intoxication_, betrayed the former at most by the exuberance of his
vivacity.
A woman betrays herself by the opposite,--Clotilda by nothing. He
expressed to her in the singular stunned state into which outer tones
of joy and inner fantasies put one, when they come together like two
streams meeting, the following ideas: "Were I the Goddess of delight
(if there is one), I would have it strike three; round the chandeliers
I would draw prismatic colors, or in fact would hang them up in the
cabinets and diffuse through the dancing-hall with incense a magic
twilight,--then I should have to set back the tones of the orchestra
through so many apartments, that nothing of the music should find its
way hither but a soft echo,--and then if in the glimmering maze,
breathing throughout with melodies, the people did not, after some
silent movements, feel like sinking away with ecstasy, I greatly
mistake." ... "Add further," said she, "in order that we too may have
one, that we stay here and observe the dissolving."
But his composure hardly ever at any ball survived the minuet. After
the first din was over, at least about the witching hour, his whole
soul was always dissolved into a poetic melancholy which hardly left
him the mastery of his eyes. Besides the tones, I can further adduce
the _motion_ as an explanation of this phenomenon: all motion, in the
first place, is sublime,--that is to say, of great masses; or rather
every quick motion imparts to the object the greatness of the space
hurried through: hence, in contrast with the end in view, objects in
motion are more comic than those at rest. Secondly, the movement of men
imaged to him their fluttering by, their fleeing into graves; often at
night he would stop in sad musing under the windows of houses, where
they were dancing in the second story, and look up, and the gliding by
of heads in their movement was to him the mad dance of _ignes fatui_ in
the churchyard.
To-night with his melted, overflowing soul, he felt this sooner than
ever. The Anglaise, in which one couple after another disappears from
the column, was the very image of our shadowy life, into which we all
march out with drums, and encircled with thousands of playmates, and in
which we grow poorer and poorer every year as we move onward, every
hour more solitary, and in which we hurry to the end forsaken by all
except a hired man, who buries us behind the goal. But death spreads
out, as it were, our arms, and folds them around our beloved brothers
and sisters; a human being feels for the first time on the brink of the
tomb, when he comes upon the realm of unknown beings, how much he loves
the known ones who love him, who suffer like him, and like him die.
As a woman in no way discloses to us more touchingly the whole blessed
past, than when she lifts her eyelids and shows us her beaming eyes,
accordingly he could not well help, during the dance, at least,
looking into an eye, which pictured to him nothing but heavens that had
set,--and to-night all was to set for him, even the eye itself. And as
Clotilda usually grew pale with dancing, he entered through her eyes
into her innermost being, and counted there the tear-drops that hung
undisturbed on the still soul,--the many incisions made by the
grafting-knife of fate for new virtues,--the clipped roots which fate
shortens in this flower as we do in lowlier plants, before
transplanting into another soil,--and the thousand honey-vessels of
sweet thoughts. And as he thought on all her hidden virtues at once, on
the supremacy of her womanly reason over her sensibility, on her easy
consent in regard to the ball which the Prince now imposed upon her, as
well as in regard to the rouging on which the Princess had before
insisted, and on her ready compliance, whenever she had to sacrifice
nothing but herself;--and as he held the thought before his mind how
she, not like the women of court and city, who, like shrubs at the
window of the greenhouse, spread themselves out after the light, but
like spring flowers, loved to bloom in the shade, and yet made as
little show of her fondness for country life as of her modesty;--he had
to turn away his eye from the delicate, upright flower, on which death
threw down the gravestone; from that loveliest soul who never yet saw
her worth in the glass of an equal; from the dying heart, which
nevertheless was not happy.
And then, to be sure, the thought before which he shrank into himself
sprang up like a storm: "I will tell her to-day how good she is,--O, I
shall certainly never see her again, and she will die, otherwise
unknown to herself! I will fall at her feet and confess my
inexpressible love. She cannot be angry; God knows I crave not her holy
heart, which no man deserves; I will only say, Mine shall never forget
thee, but it desires not thine, only it will break more gently when it
has trembled and bled and wept and spoken before thee." ...
Close behind this thought came to him Clotilda herself, hand in hand
with her step-mother, and, the face robbed of its color by the warmth
as roses are by the sun, the tired and more sick-looking features put
forth the silent prayer to come out into the fresh air and go home.
She went; her step-mother followed her at a distance. What a change of
scene! Under the eastern gate of heaven stood the moon, who had taken
off the funeral veil of cloud from the milky-way and the whole blue
abyss. She gradually laid out a ground of silver, and sketched upon it
with gleams and shadows a growing night-piece. The frost seemed to
condense her light into body, into white meadows, into tumbling
streams, into floating flakes; it hung glistering as white blossoming
foliage on the bushes, it glimmered up the eastern mountains, which the
sun had cast into ice-mirrors. And all above man and around man was
sublimely still,--sleep played with death,--every heart rested in its
own night.
And here, at this entrance, as it were, out of the turmoil of earth
into the still twilight-shrouded underworld, cold thrills and after
them glowing thrills ran over Victor's nerves. This happens when the
soul of man is too full and too sorely agitated, and all the threads of
the trembling web of the fleshly organism sway with it. His sleigh
became now a flying gondola. The night-air blowing against him kindled
all his flames. O the stream full of ice-points, if it had only swept
over him! the cool coverlet of snow, if it were only laid upon him! A
voice was continually crying within him: "Thou art bearing the still,
the patient one with her black veil to death; it is her hearse: the
noble pearl-diver has given heaven her sign that she has collected here
below enough sorrows and virtues, that it may draw her up again to
itself." The procession of mountains gliding by, the trees that whirled
past, the fields that fled away, this flight of nature seemed to form
together one great cataract that carried all before it, and man first
of all, and left nothing behind it but time. And as he rolled down into
the valley, where the city disappears, as did a year ago his female
escort, and the moon behind the trees began seemingly to scud through
the heavens, then he lifted his eyes toward the stars, and, bent
backward in a rigid gaze, spoke aloud as out of a shattered heart to
the heavens: "Deep blue grave over men, thou hidest thy broad nights
behind crowded suns! Thou drawest us and our tears upward like vapors.
Ah, cast not poor short-sighted mortals so far asunder, so infinitely
far! And why cannot man look up to thee without thinking: who knows
what loved heart I may not a year hence have to seek up yonder!"
His darkened eyes fell painfully from heaven--upon Clotilda's, which
were lifted over against his. The tear which had just fallen from her
eye down to her cheek she could neither conceal through the veil, nor
make believe to be a snow-flake which had melted on her face, since the
veil kept off the flakes; but such a tear needed no veil. Clotilda had
thought lie meant merely Emanuel, and therefore she was touched and
softened.... Like two parting angels, the two now beheld each other
with tearful eyes. But Clotilda withdrew hers, and her sinking head
bent. Nevertheless, she turned round again, and with her heavenly face
and heavenly voice presented to him the sweet prayer: "Bestow this warm
friendship upon my brother also; and forgive his sister today this
prayer, as I may not for a long time have an opportunity to renew it."
He bowed himself down low, and could not answer.
But when now her place of residence and her castle, from which the
silver rain of the moon ran down, gleamed before their eyes,--as the
moment came on, darker and darker, in which the parting (perhaps the
mask of death) was to take this still angel from his side,--as every
indifferent formula of leave-taking which he could imagine to himself
lacerated his sick heart,--as he saw how she leaned her head on her
hand and on the veil, in order, unobserved, to remove or check the
first signs of her farewell,--then did the whole cloud which had so
long been letting fall single drops into his eyes, rent asunder, rush
down upon him and flood his heart.... Suddenly he stopped.... He looked
with still gushing eyes toward St. Luna.... Clotilda turned round, and
beheld a colorless face, a brow full of sorrows, and a quivering lip,
and said bashfully, "Your soul is too good and too tender." Ay, then
his over-full heart burst in twain. Then gushed up all the depths of
his soul in which old tears had been so long accumulating, and lifted
up from the roots his swimming heart, and he sank down before Clotilda,
radiant with heavenly love and streaming sorrow,--mantled with the
flame of virtue,--transfigured by the moonlight,--with his true,
helpless breast, with his veiled eyes,--and the dissolving voice could
only utter the words: "Angel of heaven! the heart breaks at last which
loves thee inexpressibly. O, long indeed have I been silent. No, thou
noble form, never canst thou pass out of my soul.--O soul from heaven,
why have thy sufferings and thy goodness, and all that thou art,
inspired me with an eternal love, and with no hope, but with an eternal
sorrow?" Her agitated face lay bent aside from him in her right hand,
and the left covered only her eyes, but not her tears. A dying sound
implored him to rise. They heard the second sleigh far off.
"Never-to-be-forgotten one! I torment thee, but I will remain where I
am till thou hast granted me a token of forgiveness." She extended to
him her left hand, and the gesture disclosed a holy countenance full of
emotion. He pressed the warm hand to his flaming face, into his hot
streams of tears. Trembling, he again asked: "O, my fault grows greater
every moment! Will you, then, wholly forgive it?" ...
Then did the blushing face bury itself in the folded veil, and, turning
away, stammered: "Ah, then I must share it, noble friend of my
teacher."
Blessed, blessed man! After this word, the whole of earthly life has no
greater heaven to offer thee! Rest now in silent rapture with thy
overpowered face upon the angelic hand, into which the noblest of
hearts pours the blood that kindles for virtue! Shed all thy tears of
joy upon the dear hand which has given them to thee! And then,--if thou
canst for rapture or for reverence,--then lift up thy pure, glistening
eye, and show her therein the look of sublime love, the look of the
love which is eternal and speechless and blissful and unspeakable!
Ah! he, who had ever been loved by a Clotilda, could now read no
farther,--write no farther,--for ecstasy ... or else for pain!
Silent and sanctified he now sped along the fair road; the moon hung
down from heaven like a dewy morning overlaid with white blossoms;
spring stirred its meadows and its flowers under the veil of snow;
rapture throbbed in Victor's heart, swelled in his breast, shone in his
eye; but speechless reverence controlled his rapture.... They arrived.
And when, in the harmonica-chamber, where in the evening he had grasped
her hand for anguish, they now stood alone face to face, so changed, so
blest for the first time, two such hearts,--she like an angel who had
descended from heaven, he like a mortal who had risen from the earth,
to fill on the heart of the timid angel, and, speechless, to go back
with her to heaven.... What an hour! O, only for you, ye fair souls,
who have never experienced such an hour, and yet have deserved it, do I
go on picturing this one!... Like two risen ones before God, they look
into each other's eyes and souls,--like a zephyr, which two swaying
roses prolong, breathes between the trembling lips the speechless sigh
of bliss, drunk in by the bosom in quick inspirations, and issuing with
a tremulous thrill of glad awe in long expirations,--they continue
silent, to look at each other, they lift their eyes, to see through the
drop of joy, and cast them down again to dry it away with the
eyelid.... No, it is enough: O, there is another tear that now lies
heavily on the fair heart, which is silent and would say, I was never
happy, nor ever shall be!
Victor had so much to say to her, and had so few minutes more left for
it; and yet not so much joy as reverence made him dumb,--for sacred to
the loving heart is the form that has said to it, I am thine. But think
not he would make any such rude request to her, as that she would stay
here on his account; only the _question_ whether he might visit her in
_Maienthal_, only the _prayer_ that she would take thought of her
recovery, can he venture upon. Clotilda had only one to make to him,
which she could not sufficiently veil over, namely, that, for the sake
of her jealous brother, he would not see her in Maienthal.
During the lingerings of rapture, they hear the bells of the second
sleigh. Haste necessitated courage. Victor transformed his _prayer_
into the _wish_ that spring might favor the design of her journey
(restoration to health), and the _question_ into the _joyful thought_
how happy she would be in Maienthal by the side of Dahore, how blest he
had once been there, and how little he had once dreamed that one could
ever be still more so there. Clotilda answered (probably to his wish of
following her thither): "I leave behind quite as much to you,--my
_brother_ and your _friend_; forget not my former prayer."
Not until the approaching parents reminded Clotilda to throw back her
veil, and admonished her beloved to take his first leave of the heart
which he had won,--not till then did they both look far into the great
Eden which had opened around their life,--and the bright moment which
now darted by in the stream of time projected into eternity the images
of two heavenly forms,--one unveiled, pale-red, transfigured with
tears, and one glorified by love, radiant with the reflection of hope.
And now let no longer the hand sketch souls, which not even the great,
glowing eye of love can portray....
When the parents came, he felt, but he forgave, all possible contrasts.
He soon took his leave, that he might at home, in the silence of night,
throw the first prayerful glance over the stream of his future life,
which now glided on toward the grave in lines of beauty, and in which
gay minutes played like goldfishes.
In the stillness of night, not far from his wax-mummy, the happy one
thought to fall down before the Infinite Genius and thank him, with new
tears, for this night, for this friend, of whom he is the first love.
But the thought of doing it is the deed, and O, how could our touched
heart, which even before men is dumb, find any other words before the
Infinite than tears and thoughts?
And in this resigned frame, full of deep tranquillity, wherein I lay
down the pen, mayst thou, dear reader, lay aside this book, and say
with me, There may well be more sad days that will conclude like the
Twenty-eighth Dog-Post-Day.
* * * * *
PREFACE TO PART III.
(_Which in the first edition came on a dozen sheets earlier_.)
As the Intercalary Day this time falls in with the Preface, and as it
begins, too, with the letter V,[47] both indeed can, with uncommon
felicity, be despatched together.
SEVENTH INTERCALARY DAY.
End of the Register of Extra-Shoots.
U. V.
Unfeelingness of Readers.--Vol. III. (Preface to.)
There were once happy times, when one had nothing to suffer from his
fellow-savage and neighbor, except being struck dead,--when the hail
was the only knout-master of the skin, whereas now the trade-wind of
the visiting-fan is to us a whirlwind, and the cool breath over the
teacup a sea-breeze,--when one took less interest in another's trouble
than in his fodder,--when the ladies never wounded the gentlemen in
bear-skins in any way (least of all with glances, charms, tresses),
except with clubs, and when, to be sure, they possessed themselves, as
well as to-day and to-morrow, of the heart of an honest man, but only
in this way, by first stretching out the proprietor of it on an altar
and regularly slaughtering him, before they cut out the heavenly globe
from his chest.
These times we have now all forfeited; in those which are upon us,
things look badly. By heaven! one really needs not much less than
everything to make him happy, and little more than nothing to make him
unhappy,--for the former he requires a sun, for the latter a particle
of sun-dust! We should be well off, and have the key to large
apartments in all pleasure-castles, if fate had provided for us that we
should endure, say as many degrees of torture as the Jurists have,
namely, three,--no more plagues than the Egyptians underwent, namely,
seven,--no more persecutions than the first Christians stood out,
namely, ten. But for such drawings of fortune a man of sense does not
look; at least, no one promises himself such prizes, who like me sits
down and considers our humming-bird stomachs,--our soft caterpillar
skins,--our ears tingling of themselves,--our eyes which are their own
tinder,--and our _culs de Paris_, which can be pierced, not by a
crumpled rose-leaf, but by the very shadow of a thorn,--and our fine
complexion, which without a moon-umbrella would blacken in the
moonlight.... And yet in this account of our troubles,--because I am
diligently intent upon lessening them,--I have not included other quite
different, most accursed items, but have left out riches, e. g.,
entirely, that smart-money for so many thousand gashes and fractures of
the breast, and in fact millions of wounds which would make our riddled
self absolutely transparent, were it not fortunately clothed from head
to foot in English court-plaster.... But I left out all such stuff,
because I knew it would after all amount to nothing, if I should set it
off against a quite different purgatory and tempest into which we
male-kind particularly are thrown, if we are so unfortunate as to
keelhaul ourselves, that is to say, fall in love, which in my poor
opinion is a slight foretaste of hell, as well as of heaven. Let the
best peeress in this department write to me, and enclose it post-paid
to the publishing office in Berlin, and give me her name, if she was
capable of not flaying and impaling her poor _pastor fido_, nor
persecuting him with backbitings, nor filling his heart full of bruises
with the compression-machines of her hands, his head full of fissures
with the bastinado of the fan, his breast full of blisters with her
eyes, nor of giving him, as they do to tobacco, a mellowing with her
tears.... At least I myself at this present moment come straight from
such a house of correction and baiting-house, and my skin looks as
pitiably as if I had a scalped one over my limbs.
We will say no more of this. My intention in all this is to brace up
the reader, because a wholly new rainy-constellation (Pleiad) which I
have not at all named is rising in his horizon, to snow upon him.
This will rage worse than all that has gone before. What I mean is
this: An imperial citizen may be just giving the finishing touch to
everything,--his coffers[48] and his enemies may have been already
overturned, and his labors right well received by the public or the
board,--his pleas for delay have been allowed, and the quinquenniats[49]
of his debtors refused,--his youngest daughter, who, like the eldest
of the French king's brother, is called Mademoiselle, may already have
got through with the measles and her betrothal afterward; it avails him
nothing, the worst of all, a whole Gehenna still awaits him on his
book-shelves; for there may the fair spirits (let him have swallowed as
he may all bitter salt of fate) have sliced for him, under the name of
romance-manna, a hard tear-bread, which I, for my part, should be glad
neither to bake nor to chew,--truly they may (to use another metaphor)
have composed and placed in readiness for him dead-marches and funeral
cantatas, which shall utterly upset him and make him so warm that his
eyes shall run over.
And unfortunately warm-blooded and soft-skinned excellent men are just
the ones least remarkable for steadiness and moderation in bearing the
poetical sorrows which authors send them. I cannot, therefore, possibly
leave this third part, which will too easily affect people, wholly
without a preface in the way of counterpoise, unless I am willing to be
myself the cause of innocent persons weeping over the best scenes of
this part, and suffering from sympathy. Such too sensitive persons, to
whom Nature has denied æsthetic apathy to cases of great distress in
tragedies and romances, should,--unless they are fat, for sorrow is
good for fatness as a fasting-cure and _lapis infernalis_,[50]--these
should make themselves cold, and arm themselves against the tragic poet
with philosophy; they should console themselves during the reading of a
great affliction and say: "How long does such a printed misery last?
How soon a book and a life are over! To-morrow thou wilt think very
differently. The unhappy condition into which I am here brought by
Shakespeare exists, in truth, only in my own imagination, and my sorrow
over it is indeed, according to the stoic, only illusion. One must not,
says Epictetus in his handbook, bewail that which lies not in our will,
and the sad scene of Klopstock here is, in fact, an external thing,
which thou canst not alter. Wilt thou let thyself be shamed by a North
American, by a saltwork-man of Halle, by the rabble, by the Cretin from
Gex,[51] who bore that whole scene from Goethe's Tasso quietly and
composedly, without the moistening of an eye?"
I assure the readers that I take the field here only against their
wives and sisters; for among readers of our sex stout-hearted
spectators of æsthetic woes have never been wholly wanting, and still
less than among the vulgar themselves; and least of all would I have
the appearance of disputing the great majority of business-people,
reviewers, criminal-lawyers, and Dutchmen, the possession of great
composure during the reading of sad crape-clad scenes, which I and
others give to the press. Much rather do I fondly persuade myself
that--if there ever was hope of the like--it is precisely now, when the
German promises to put on that Belgian stoicism, that noble
insensibility, which so becomes him, and through which he is made
bullet- and blade-proof against Melpomene's dagger, and goes through
Dante's hell, as Christ did through the real one, without suffering. We
never, to be sure, had the sensibility of the French, and their Racine
would never have been for us anything more than a prince's jester; but
we are now, if an author does not absolutely push the matter too far
and bring in too many battle-fields, and cups of rat-poison, and
gallows-trees,--for that takes hold of us,--but if he only half
good-humoredly trots along--I seem really to see him at this moment
riding--on a mourning-steed, and shakes with one hand a death-bell, and
with the other swings (ah, woe!) a funeral-marshal's baton; or if,
finally, he only delineates the invisible, stanched gashes of the
tenderer, more delicate soul;--then are we now already in a condition
to maintain our merry humor, and to show what a German can endure.
People of more moderate force _sleep_ at least, so as not to _suffer_
over a Goethe's _Iphigenia_, because sleep sets sufferers right; or we
absolutely forget such elegies, because, according to Plattner, we have
no memory for sorrows, and because oblivion--as a prince wrote--is the
only remedy for sorrows; or Heaven sends us, as after sorrow joy, after
a Messiad (of which a good travesty were to be desired for us) a
Blumauer's parody, over which we can easily forget the preceding
epopee.
W.
Women.--Ye sweet, soft spring flowers and angel shoots by the side of
us hard winter-cabbage-stumps, I have indeed already, under the former
letter, remembered you and your tenderness in contrast to the German
_immeltableness_! What shall I further say, except that, when you are
good, you are so in the highest degree, and that you and the Cornwall
tin have one and the same kind of stamp,--namely, the figure of an
angel?
X (see I K S).--Y (see I).--Z (see T S).
Tz.
Spitz.--Poor Spitz likes as well to be in Prefaces among Extra-Shoots
as his Master, and comes in just right with the Twenty-ninth Chapter. I
can talk for hours with Pomeranian dogs, as Yorick did with asses. I
will now set the messenger of the gods on his hind-feet and hold him by
the fore-paws, that he may listen to me in an erect posture.----"Stand,
nimble beast!--I talk with thee about something only that I may place
thee in the third Preface. It deserves, Spitz, to be remarked, that
thou art a rogue as men are, and like them wilt not remain _straight_,
but _crooked_ and bowed down, merely for the sake of eating well; thou
and they will, like Faro-cards, win by _bending_ and _crooking_, as the
common English bend their bad silver money that it may not be passed
for less, namely, two pieces for one. Thou hast false eyes, but
nevertheless thy actions are good. The reviewers, impatient cattle,
say, if they were in thy place, they would bring along the biographical
building-stuff more industriously, that the biography might be over
before it snows;--meet them not with the counter-assertion, that I
might do like Baronius, who began his annals without a beard and ended
them with a gray one. In that can only reviewers (but not I) imitate
him, who have time to polish, and who can begin a work beardless, on
shaving day, and not till three days after finish it, when they are
lathered.---Just fall down, Hofmann, and eat; thou art at least not
wholly without sense, and givest more heed to an harangue, after all,
than a Dauphin-fœtus, and at least waggest thy tail, which the
fœtus does not. I have now to talk with quite other people, and the
fewest possible among them wag their tails in token of appreciation,
Spitz!"
JEAN PAUL.
29. DOG-POST-DAY.
Conversion.--Billet-Doux of the Watch.--Crape Hat.
In the morning Clotilda went off to her poplar-Island, and at noon
Victor departed to his Pontine marsh,--both contented with a separation
which made them worthy to enjoy a reunion. The first thing to which the
court-physician gave himself in Flachsenfingen was--afterthought, or
rather after-feeling. Man is the Iceland-spar of time, which shows all
scenes twice, side by side. Memory caught once more in her mirror the
moonshine of last night, and the angels which floated in it, and turned
the mirror with this lustre, with this perspective, towards my Victor.
He thought over Clotilda's past conduct, in which he--as I hope my
reader has--discovered the traits of the purest love, which looks with
only one eye out of the veil, together with the traces of a decided
mastery of woman's feelings over woman's wishes. She comes on the 1st
of May from Maienthal with a weeping heart, which, torn away from a
dead companion, still bleeds on from its open wounds.--The pupil of
Emanuel meets her, and she hastens back again to the grave, there to
quench in tears of mourning her first love.--But Emanuel communicates
his holy fire to this love by his own, by his praise of the beloved, by
his open letter full of germinating love, which the latter had written
to him on the birthday festival of the 4th of May.--She returns
unrestored, towards the time of his approaching departure.--But her
good Emanuel, with the cruel kindness of friendship, impresses the
image which makes her heart too uneasy still more deeply into its
wounds, by reporting to her Victor's life in Maienthal and his
confession that he loves her. Victor is silent before her, but she
thinks he is so because he has no permission from his father to speak
with her about Flamin's relationship.--He goes to court, and seems to
forget her, nay, he puts upon her the chains of the court office, which
nevertheless, as he knows, oppress her soul even to blood. Her parents,
either by way of sounding her, or of flattering her secret suitor
Matthieu with her female veiling of herself, extort from her by a
tyrannical question the unhappy No, which deceives her brother and
repels her friend. Victor steals away, on her festal evening, from the
garden, without speaking to her, thereupon visits her parents again,
and grows entirely cool. Now she hears nothing more of him excepting,
at most, of his pleasures at court and his visits to Joachime.----Ay,
thou good soul, thus, in conflict with wishes and with troubles, in
sick pining after the loved soul, must all thy joys go to sleep and thy
hopes die out, and thy innocent cheeks grow pale!----As, now, Victor
thus thought over this sad past, and remembered how, in the playhouse,
where he revealed to her his knowledge of her sisterly relation, the
last bloom of her cheek, the last twig of hope, fell off, because she
could regard his previous silence as owing to a command of his
father,--and as all these traits conspired to form the image of a
heavenly queen before whom it is easier to kneel down than to embrace
her,--and as he further reflected that this noble heart, improved by an
Emanuel and worthy of an Emanuel, nevertheless gave itself with all its
heavens to the fickle heart of the pupil----and that the good soul
could not have even this modest wish fulfilled, because fate delayed
the blossoming of her love like that of a rose-bush by transplanting
it, by setting it in the shade, by clipping the buds in _spring_ and
_autumn_,--and as he saw that nevertheless this noble one had gone off
to Maienthal with her finger on her lips, with her hand on her heavy
heart, without a hint of her bitter disappointment, and that moral
coldness _lifted up_ this flower, as physical cold does other flowers,
but tore from it thereby the roots of life,--and as, finally, his dream
on the third Easter-holiday, when it appeared to him as if he saw her
rise singing from the earth on a light veil of mist, passed by before
him like a great rain-cloud, and the dream with her faded hues paused
before his pining soul, and a voice out of the dream asked him, "Wilt
thou long continue to love her, when angels yearn for her and lift her
out of her sorrow, and leave thee nothing but the grave of the too long
misinterpreted heart?"----As all these thoughts, in glowing procession,
like mountain chains of ruddy evening clouds, moved around his soul,
then was his heart, like an altar, covered by a sacrificial fire
falling from heaven, and all his earthly desires, all his stains, were
consumed in this fire,--in short, he resolved to amend himself, in
order, by virtue, to be worthy of a virtuous woman.
He was converted on the 3d of April, 1793, towards evening; when the
moon--and the EARTH--were under his feet in the Nadir.
The reader may have laughed at this chronometer; but every man in whom
virtue is anything higher than an accidental _water-sucker_ and
wood-shoot, must be able to tell the hour wherein she became the
Hamadryad of his inner being,--which the theologians call conversion
and the Moravians the _breaking-through_. Why should not time mark off
our spiritual sensations, when in fact it is only they that mark off
its periods?
There is--or comes--in every man who is more solar than planetary, a
lofty hour when his heart, amidst violent commotions and painful
rendings, at last, by a lifting-up, suddenly turns round towards
virtue, in an indescribable transition like that in which man lifts
himself over from one system of faith to another, or, suddenly,
from the highest point of wrath to a melting forgiveness of all
faults;--that lofty hour, the birth-hour of the virtuous life, is also
its sweetest hour, because it is to man as if his oppressive body were
taken off from him; because he enjoys the bliss of feeling in himself
_no contradictions_; because all his chains fall; _because he fears
nothing more_ in the awfully sublime universe.--The spectacle is great,
when the angel is born in man; when, thereafter, on the horizon of
earth, the whole solar warmth of virtue falls upon his heart
unobstructed by a cloud.
But poor mortal man, the prisoner man, immersed in blood, encased in
flesh, soon feels the difference between his raptures and his powers;
he who was going to subdue the promised land, when its clusters of
grapes came to meet him, hesitates, when he has to march against its
giants (the passions). I do not, however, reject even the extravagance
of that enthusiasm; Man, like buildings, must be _screwed up into the
air_, in order to be _rebuilt_; a syllogism does not lead off the blood
streams of our desires. It is singular that the devil in us must have
alone the right to spend blood, nerves, beverage, passions, upon his
military operations and for his imperial treasury, but the angel
not....
So it is, however; men are vicious, because they look upon virtue as
too hard, and they again become so, because they held it easier than it
is. Not reason (i. e. conscience) makes us good: that is the
outstretched wooden arm on the road to virtue; but this arm can neither
draw nor drive us thither,--reason has the legislative, not the
executive force. The power of loving these commandments, the still
greater power of giving one's self up to them, is a second conscience
by the side of the first; and as Kant cannot indicate with ink that
which makes man bad, so neither can that be set forth which keeps his
heart upright above moral filth or lifts it out of it.
Who can explain the fact, if there are men who, from youth up, either
possess or do without a certain sense of honor,--in the female sex this
line of division is still sharper and more important,--if there are men
who, from youth up either experience or forever live without a certain
yearning for the super-earthly, for religion, for the nobler principle
in man (and for systems which seal this nobler quality instead of
disputing it)?----(With children a warm feeling for religion is often a
sign of genius.) Man does not become good (though he does grow better)
because he is converted, but he gets converted because he is good.
Were virtue nothing but stoicism, then it were a mere child of reason,
whereas it is at the highest her foster-daughter. Stoicism represents
virtue as so useful, so reasonable, that it is nothing more than a
conclusion; it gives one nothing to conquer but errors. As (according
to the stoical principle) it is, not the highest, but the only
good,--as, according to that principle, all desires aim at an empty
nothing--it follows that virtue is no merit, but a necessity. E. g. if
there is nothing odious: then love and the victory over anger towards
an enemy are not harder or more meritorious than towards a friend, but
all one.
What then has the Stoic to sacrifice to Virtue according to his notion,
but mock-goods, air-castles, and fever-images? Nevertheless Stoicism
renders Virtue, as criticism does genius, negative services; the
stoical _chill_ calls forth no spring, but it destroys the insects
which gnaw it; the stoical winter, like the physical, removes the
_pestilence_, ere the warmer months come, which bring new life....
Although Victor said: "Thou dear one, no heart can be pure, still,
tender, and great enough for thine, but the weak one which thou
endurest will sanctify itself through thine and come to thee improved";
still mere love was not the source of his virtue, but the reverse was
the case, only virtue could manifest itself by such a love. But even
without taking that into account, a half-selfish change of purpose
becomes by action a disinterested one, as the love which starts from
beauty of face ennobles itself at last into love for beauty of soul.
His separation from Clotilda gave him joy in the thought that so long
as it lasted he should spare the delusions of her jealous brother.
_General love_ now led the way to friendship for the better sort of
women, and tolerance toward the worse. He annulled his satirical
intolerance--which, however, was not half so great as that of young
wags of authors--by toleration-mandates of his own. He read Gulliver's
last journey into Horse-land (Houynheim), as a recipe against lying
when one goes to court. His Kubach[52] and jewel-casket and his
_collegium pietatis_ consisted of three dissimilar volumes,--Kant,
Jacobi, and Epictetus.
I could wish, however, that he would not make himself ridiculous. Of a
man who had been nine months at court, one was surely justified in
expecting that he would behave differently, and not offend against that
equality of ranks and of vices; as men practise sins best in common, as
in Swiss churches the hearers must cough simultaneously, or as recruits
on their march must make water at the same time. At least, the
well-bred man seeks to conceal his love for his religion, as well as
that for his wife.--I return to the story.
Victor determined now to make only visits that annoyed himself and
pleased his neighbor. The first was an extraordinary tribute of a visit
to the Princess (for his daily portioning-tax[53] of calls on her now
ceased). To be sure, the thick hour-watch of old Bee-father Lind was
every minute an alarm-clock to hold up before him his former foolhardy
jokes, his watch-enclosure, and love-letter to Agnola. I cannot avoid
the apprehension that the reader may make a slip, and not dream with
what heart Sebastian went to the Princess;--O, with one full of dumb
apologies and--exculpations, with a distended breast full of proud
confidence, and yet full of sympathetic mildness. Whence came this?--It
came from the fair soul which now, reconciled and filled up with
another's _love_, could wish nothing more but _friendship_, and which
was now too happy to be inexorable. But he found in her apartment two
cold, refined faces, which it is quite as hard to apologize to as to
forgive,--namely, her own and that of Count von O. from Kussewitz, in
whose house her transfer had taken place. Victor blushed; the Count
appeared not to have the least knowledge of him,--they were not
introduced to each other,--but talked together as genially as if they
had been (especially as it made no difference),--and so, with cold
feelings, and with the greatest indifference about their own and each
other's anonymousness, they politely separated. Only Victor afterward
worried himself with doubts whether he had not sooner than Agnola
called the unknown Count by that title.
For the rest, he now, for the first time since he had loved Clotilda,
found the partition-wall between _love_ and _friendship_ with women to
be very _visible_ and very _thick_: before that he could see through
the partition-wall well enough. A woman cannot choose for herself a
firmer or purer friend than another woman's lover.
Victor must now also, and for still more urgent reasons, visit
Joachime. The evil spirit, which, like the youngest councillors, always
gives its voice first in man, made the motion that "he should indulge
Joachime in the slight illusion of believing that he loved her."--As
this did not pass, the _filou_[54] took another voice, and proposed
that "he should punish her for her former ambiguity by the most
unambiguous signs of his hatred."--But he followed willingly the good
spirit which led him by the hand, and said on the way, "Go now to
her,--disengage thyself from her without giving her any pain,--let thy
hand glide gradually out of hers, and clear one finger after another,
as maidens do with their natural hand, and assume the attitude neither
of her enemy nor of her lover." He went to her house without any
selfish consideration; for the latter would rather have prompted him to
stay at home, and enjoy and turn over the leaves of the past and
future, or else to quit the house and go to St. Luna, to sit down by
Agatha beside the crape hat of Clotilda which she was studying.
In order, however, not to let his visit have too much weight in the
eyes of Joachime, he proposed to himself to beg of her for some weeks
the views of Maienthal, which hung in her room. O Maienthal, how much
thou must have, if the very sketch of thee makes one so happy!--But his
visit turned out singularly. He wished on the way that he might find in
her toilette-chamber the fine fool and the fragrant fool and more
stuff;--there was nothing there. She received him with a careless
gayety, as if she were the Columbine[55] and the Medicus the clown. He,
however, was going merely to execute the gradual weakening or
_diminuendo_ of his moral dissonances; therefore he became, by his
constant looking off at his note-stand, and at the score of his inner
harmony, somewhat stiff and awkward in his playing. Women easily
distinguish the coldness of reason (if only by the very want of
extravagance) from coldness of mood. Now he asked for the views.
Joachime did not grow cooler, but warm, i. e. serious, and lifted up
her watch in the hollow of her hand, and said, looking at it, "I give
you as many minutes' grace as you have stayed away days, to excuse your
staying away." Victor accepted without embarrassment--like every one
who acts only according to _one_, either good or bad, principle--the
allowed time for decision, and took the _montre à régulateur_ from
under the looking-glass, that Joachime might not cheat him. This cursed
watch of the Princess grinned at him everywhere, like a percussion-ball
and powder-mine under his feet. He wound it up just to have a chance to
open this Nuremberg egg (as they used to call watches), and finally for
once to examine whether the love-declaration, i. e. the _punctum
saliens_ of love, or the Cupid,--who also, according to Plato, came out
of an egg,--was still in there. "I know well enough--he said to
himself--it has been gone this long time, but I'll just try it."
There might have been, indeed, a question whether it was the same
watch, as the one in Tostato's shop had no diamonds,--had there not
come fluttering out from this Pandora's box, so soon as it was opened
at the window, a little thin piece of paper half as big as a
butterfly's wing, and as long as the stamen of a tulip.--The little
leaf took flight at every breath of wind.----Joachime caught the
thing,--read the thing,--found the declaration of love still
there,--took it for one which he was just making to _herself_, by way
of atoning for his absence, and which, for the sake of the wit (he
might allude to its heart-shape), he had been trying to incorporate
into the watch....
Every one can imagine how he felt about the matter.--He would have got
through it very well, if he had dared to lie terribly, or if he could
have ventured at least to imitate the few courtiers who, into the
twenty-eight pounds of blood which irrigate their bodies, have not
instilled twenty-eight drops of honest blood,--of which a single one
may, as a _liquor probatorius_, leave behind in the remaining mass
confounded precipitates. But his soul loathed this new bait to lure him
to a lie. The reader cannot possibly yet know that Victor shot aside
from the mark,--that is to say, that, on account of the remoteness of
Joachime's suspicion, he did not guess it at all, but fell upon the
nearer one, that Joachime had nosed out his whole whimsical trick upon
the Princess. He was never capable of holding up another's body as a
shield against the arrows which were aimed at his own,--a habit on the
Court-Moriah, which, not, like the Old Testament plan, redeems an
_Isaac_ with a _ram_, but a ram with an Isaac; he was to-day least of
all capable of sacrificing the Princess to save himself; but neither
could he bring himself even to _this_, to sacrifice Joachime for
the sake of saving _her_, i. e. to recoin the devil's-billet into a
sweet-billet (_billet-doux_) to Joachime. The Satan in him screamed
himself hoarse to get him only so far along, that he at least would lie
by silent expression of countenance, and justify hers, wherein there
began to be less and less appearance as if she supposed it directed to
another lady.
He told her right out plainly what he was,--a fool. He narrated the
whole business in Kussewitz. He concluded by saying that it was lucky
for him that the Princess had not at all detected the crazy insertion
into the watch.... As now he recited all this monotonously without a
single flattery, out of which some sort of a new and improved edition
of the insertion might possibly have been made, he was fortunate
enough, at his departure, to leave the enlightened Joachime in a state
which, after such magnetic passes, expresses itself with cultivated
women in a fine, proud _exaltation_, and with uncultivated ones in the
attempt to put the sculptor's last touch to a man, just as the Greek
artists did to their models,--namely, with the finger-nails. Victor
took his leave with two very different sorts of _views_, those of the
future and those of Maienthal.--
She kept the billet. Not fear, however, but the bitter feeling that his
former follies ended only in another's heart with an abortive hope,
this trickled with bitter drops into the sweet, rejuvenating sensation
of having acted right at his own expense. An emotion, a tear, is an
oath before Heaven that one will be good;---but a single sacrifice
steels thy soul more than five tears of penitence and ten penitential
sermons.
I have not the courage to guess why the Princess should have given the
watch with the enclosure which she (even by the showing of her
conversation with Tostato) must have read, into the hands of Joachime;
but to the suspicious knaves whom I thought of when writing the chapter
of her eye-bandaging and kiss, this is a windfall: the present of the
watch confirms them entirely in their knavish creed; for they can
now--despite all my efforts to the contrary--allege the gift as a sign
of the Italian revenge which Agnola had proposed to herself to take
upon her rival Joachime (to whom she must needs ascribe Victor's
resistance) in the fact of communicating to her his declarations of
love in other quarters.
Victor proposed to himself, as he took the greatest physical strides
homeward, to take similar politic ones, and to confess plumply to the
Prince: "It is not much over nine months since I troubled your
Illustrious Highness's bride with a flimsy declaration of love, which
she certainly cannot have ever read, and which now changes hands." But
at present the opening of the affair of the watch-letter was
impracticable: January was a little vexed at Clotilda's withdrawal;
Victor had also for some time been less about him than usual, which
certainly with an honest favorite ought not to be so, as, e. g., the
famous Count von Brühel[56] watched, like a mother, around his master
from morn to midnight. January seemed in this loneliness to think more
of his children, and Victor had no tidings to impart to him from his
Lordship. The main thing, moreover, was his spring sickliness, which
made him again the credulous disciple of Dr. Culpepper and the gout.
This doctor's trunk under a doctor's hat, whose brain-fibres were
twisted to bass-strings, extolled his simplicities, merely by the
solemn pomposity with which he delivered himself of them, beyond
their value; of certain persons, e. g. physicians, financiers,
economical-agents, even people of fine manners require stiff ones, and
make more account of a pointed wig than of a hair-bag as big as a
buckle or a Titus's-head.[57] Sebastian appeared to people much too
waggish to allow them to think that he had learned anything. In the
article of physicians--as in every main article of property or of
life--the most distinguished vulgar think as the lowest, and prize men
and lapdogs according to shaggy wildness of exterior. Besides, Victor
had the fault of bringing himself and the physicians under suspicion of
a thirst for glory, in that he praised them outright; e. g. "By their
impressment of sailors and dead men they were a sort of buyers-up of
souls for the next world, and served for nut-crackers to the good
angels, who desired the kernel without the bodily shell, in order to
transplant it. How often do we not obviate," he continued, "the most
dangerous _transfers of maladies_ by an easy _transfer_ of the patient?
I might appeal to the _refugiés_ from this world, whether our
sandbox and inkstand (the implements of our receipts) are not the
sowing-machine and waterpot of the winter-crop of humanity; but the
survivors shall speak and answer whether, for the benefices, the
regiments, the estates in fee, the order-ribbons, which fall to them,
they have not to thank our recipes and Uriah's-letters, and whether
they or even kings would sit _high and dry_, without our frequent
_ditching_ and draining in the churchyard.--And yet, methinks, our
renown in the way of healing and bringing to life is quite as great, if
not greater; this glory--as well as the lists of mortality on which it
is based--has remained for many centuries the _same_,--our theories,
specifics, judgments, may _change_ as they will."
Such satires made the Prince right merry and incredulous. Dr.
Culpepper, on the contrary, stood upon his dignity, and would have
drawn his sword against a satirist who had talked of the slow
decimation of physicians, and by a swifter one have completely refuted
him. I advise every one who wants to be anything in the world (that
is anything different from what he is) to appear among men as a
funeral-bidder,--with women, as a godfather-bidder.--The Prince in the
sickly spring held himself, for two reasons, to be possessed with the
gout again: first, because I have never yet known a nervous weakling
who, when I had talked a disease out of him in summer, did not the next
sickly winter get it into his head again; secondly, because January
calculated that he had fallen on his knee before ladies often enough to
feel the traces of his adoration still lingering in the shape of
_gonagra_ or knee-gout.
So stood matters, when a little accident made our Victor happy again.
Only I must say beforehand that, independently of that, he was not at
all unhappy: for a lover never worries himself about anything,
certainly not about a court; he has on Cupid's bandage, and willingly
forgives Fortune and Justice theirs. And the moral Easter-eve
bonfire melted--just as superstition ascribes to the physical one a
peculiar power--all the ice wherewith they dammed up Victor's blood
into the lymph of joy; the Easter-wind--which, according to the
weather-prophets, continues till Whitsuntide--set his old joy-flowers
in motion, and wafted forth from them the pollen of future ones; the
snow dissolved on the hot spring awaking from its winter sleep, and the
first flowers and the thousand buds gave all hearts energies and hopes
and love. O when Victor looked out of doors toward the green-growing
path which, with fresh sap-colors, (for in spring the foot-paths grow
green first,) would fain lure and lead him out of the midst of the
after-grass heath to the Eden of Maienthal,--and then when he turned
round glowing and thirsting, and ran over into the sketched Maienthal,
into the borrowed views, and there climbed every colored mountain, and
encircled every dotted-out garden with his fingers and fancies,--then
he did not think himself that a little accident could make him still
more joyous.--And yet it did.
It is not well done of me that I always--and it is a thing I have
become very much accustomed to in this biography--call that an
_accident_ which is a direct great-grandchild by blood of former
chapters, and which really must come. For the crape hat--that was the
accident--must indeed come, because it was bespoken. It was, however,
the--original itself. Besides, in so small a time no hat could have
been made by the nimblest master-builder of finery; and yet Sebastian
never would have thought, had not traces of powder and opened
lace-lattices compelled him, to distinguish the old hat from a new
one. In short, Clotilda had given it to Agatha, who could not conceal
from her for whom she was taking the copy, _before_ the _third_
Easter-holiday, for the purpose of letting her copy it, and _after_ the
aforesaid day had written to her to send her the copy and pass off the
original upon the Medicus for the imitation, (as in the case of the
wax-statue,)--and why, perhaps?--O, of that her friend had a sweet
consciousness; she was sorry that she could not give a shy, delicate
heart anything, not a sound, nor a glance, nor a joy, nor a
reminiscence of the fairest evening, except its mere autumnal
after-flora, mere silk-flowers sewed together in imitation of that
flower of joy, the taffeta shadow of a taffeta-shade.... No, she did
violence to herself, in order to give the mute darling at least more
than a copy of the shadow. O, if the loving, closed heart of a good
woman should open before a man, how much controlled tenderness, how
many veiled sacrifices and dumb virtues, would he see reposing therein!
--One must, at any rate, with the German Diet and its cross-benches;
make no mystery of the fact, that Victor would not accept the ninth
Electoral hat, or in fact the eighth and last, on condition of parting
with the _crape hat_.... What can the thickest, heaviest crowns, said
he, which have been exhibited to me in my travels, weigh in the one
scale,--even supposing one should throw in also several tiaras and
doges' caps with bows and papal hats,--if Clotilda's crape hat weighs
down the other? As the reader has quite as much intelligence as I, let
him decide the question.--This hat gave him an inexpressible longing
for Maienthal, and was to him a dedicatory copper-plate which (as by an
_investitura per pileum_) first presented Clotilda to him; he stood
before this crown as an heir to the crown--every minute drew his
coronation-chariot--with two big drops of joy, which the happy eye
could not hold, and said slowly, gently shaking his head: "No, kind
destiny gives me too much.--Ah, how can I deserve this soul from
heaven?--I will merely say to her, I am thine! and by and by, some
day, Thou art mine!" And when his fancy actually opened behind the
crape-latticework the two great eyes which had once concealed behind it
the tears of a rejected heart, and when he let the remote voice
discourse again out of shadowy threads behind this nunnery-grating,
then he could no longer restrain himself from writing,--so that he
might thus go to Maienthal,--as he sat opposite the hat, his first
letter to her, which I shall certainly get from the dog by to-morrow
evening's post.--
I believe I have not yet said that Agatha handed him the hat, and that
she invited him--it is now towards the end of April--to the birthday of
her father on the 4th of May. Victor thought on the melancholy 4th of
May of the year '92, and grew still more full of yearning for the
friend who was torn from him.
Before closing the chapter, I will only say to the younger Clotildas,
the Vice-Clotildas, the illegitimate Clotildas, and the
Counter-Clotildas, who have me and my chapters in their laps: Be cool.
You cannot possibly carry the coldness of virtue too far, unless you
absolutely set no limits to it. I will, on your account, dress up this
doctrine in wise sayings and witty sentences, that it may be the better
adapted to fans and albums.
Love, like the seed of the Auricula, must be sown on snow; both are
warmed through by ice itself, and then spring up so much the more
vigorously.--You must never give yourselves as a mere present, but as a
lady's acknowledgment of thanks to her knight.--You receive and deserve
exactly as much respect as you demand, and you can, though you should
be _alloyed_ as much as you pleased, take your mint-die or coin-stamp
out of your pocket and coin yourselves therewith as a _lady d'or_ for
one gentleman, or as a miserable little _fat-mannikin_[58] for
another.--A rake indicates in a company, like a measurer of the purity
of the air, by the different degrees of his boldness, the different
degrees of female merit, only in inverse relation....
Even if it did not belong to the female point of honor, one must still
desire, merely for the sake of having one trouble more,--because, my
sex thinks on this subject entirely with me, who desire a daughter from
no recruiting-house of sons-in-law, where at least the parents have not
something against me;--and let it hereby be known (therefore I do not
insert it in the newspaper) that I expect of parents, who in their
auction-room of daughters, in their love-inoculation-hospital, have one
or two subjects to dispose of, and to whom a Mining-Superintendent,
Justice, Music-Master, and Biographer--such may be my few offices--is
no too contemptible match,--that I [I repeat] expect of such parents,
that (if they mean the thing seriously) they will at least forbid me
the house or frequent correspondence:--that enlivens sons-in-law.
30. DOG-POST-DAY.
Letters.
Had I or any one else been lying in wait behind a bush or in a narrow
pass, and had we darted out in the nick of time, we might have taken
away the two letters, sealed up one into the other, which Victor was
sending to Maienthal, from the hands of the messenger, who understood
no German, namely, his Italian servant. The letter to Emanuel was the
wrapper of the letter to Clotilda,--friendship is always the envelope
of love. Of the wrapper I will give only an extract before I
communicate in full the letter to Clotilda. He begged his Emanuel to
take this only as a letter-cover, and to hand the enclosed to Clotilda
alone;--he told him without further explanation he was held not by his
own wishes, but by flowery chains which drew him back from the other
chains of flowers in Maienthal, and that a manifold fettering with
garlands was something one _could_ not break through, because one
_would_ not,--he was intentionally obscure in regard to his new
connection with Clotilda, because he could not presume upon her
permission of the contrary;--he playfully begged his friend to beg his
lady-friend to command him to make the journey to Flachsenfingen, that
they might get a sight of each other,--(I lose my way in this period if
I show the design of this way of putting the thing);--he erased again
in his head the question, whether Clotilda still needed the physician,
merely because he was one for her in a double sense, and only asked
whether she had recovered.--Finally he concluded thus:--
"And thus then I flutter with tolerably dusted butterfly's[59] wings in
the immense temple which to our butterfly[60] eyes breaks up into
smaller ones, and the leafy ornaments of whose columns we take for the
columns themselves, and whose rows of pillars become invisible from
their greatness; there flutters the human butterfly[61] up and
down,--strikes against windows,--rows through dusty cobwebs,--flaps his
wings at last around a hollow flower,--and the great organ-tone of the
eternal harmony tosses him about with merely a _dumb_, rising and
falling tempest, which is too great for a mortal ear.
"Ah, now I know life! Were not man even in his desires and wishes so
_systematic_,--did he not in all things aim at roundings-off as well of
his Arcadias as of the kingdom of truth,--then he might be happy and
brave enough for wisdom. But a looking-glass wall of his _system_, a
living hedge of his _paradise_, neither of which lets him _sally_ or
_see_ into the infinite, fling him back forthwith to the opposite side,
which receives him with new railings and throws in his way new
limits.... Now, when I have gone through such various states,
passionate, wise, foolish, æsthetic, stoic; now that I see that the
most perfect of them crooks and cripples either my earthly roots in the
earth, or my twigs in the ether, and that, even if it did not do that,
still it could not last over an hour, to say nothing of a life;--as,
therefore, I clearly see that we are a fraction only and not a unit,
and that all reckoning and reduction of the fraction is only an
approximation between numerator and denominator, a change of the
1000/1001 into 10000/10001, I say: 'Well, for all me--be it so! Let
wisdom, then, be for me the _finding out_ and _enduring_ of merely the
_least_ gaps in our knowing, enjoying, and doing.' Accordingly, I no
longer let myself be led astray, nor my neighbor either, by that most
common illusion, that man regards every change in himself--every
improvement at all events, but also even every deterioration--as
greater than it afterward proves.
"--Enough! but since this observation--and still more since high
destiny has given me joys, _in order that_ I might deserve them--new
morning-light has fallen on my shady path, and I have new courage to
improve myself. The clear stream of time runs over a sloping flower-bed
of fair hours, on which I once stood, and upon which I can distinctly
look down.--O when this Eden-lawn once comes up again, and I can take
thy hand and walk upon it, and kneel down beside thee and look
gratefully now to the morning-sky and now over the waving flower-fields
of this life; then will I fall back upon thee speechless, and
gratefully embrace thy breast, and say: 'O my Emanuel! only through
thee do I indeed deserve it all.' Nay, I say it to-day, beloved
teacher, and do thou stay a good long while by the side of thy scholar
on the earth, even until he is worthy to accompany thee out of it."--
* * * * *
Long as this letter was, still Victor after all loved his teacher
too much,--and hated too much the princely rudeness of making men
tools,--not to have told him outright, that this letter owed--not so
much its origin as--its birthday to the letter to his beloved. Here is
the one to Clotilda, into which with the following words he brings his
request to see her:--
"If I knew that I should even for a moment oppress or disturb by this
sheet the beloved soul, which will now be enjoying itself by the side
of the lofty Emanuel, in the presence of spring and amidst its fair
thoughts, O most gladly would I sacrifice this blessed hour, in order,
perhaps, to deserve it. But no, my friend forever! your tender heart
desires not my silence! Ah, man must so often conceal coldness and
bitterness, why, too, even love and joy?--Nor should I be able to do it
today.
"O, if an inhabitant of earth had in a dream gone through Elysium; if
great unknown flowers had waved above him; if a saint had handed him
one of these flowers with the words, 'Let this remind thee when thou
awakest that thou hast not dreamed!'--how would he pine for the Elysian
land, as often as he looked upon the flower! Never-to-be-forgotten one!
you have, in the glimmering night, when my heart twice succumbed, but
only once from pain, given a mortal an Eden, which reaches out beyond
his life; but to me it has seemed till now as if I were waking more and
more out of the receding dream-night,--when, lo! I received from the
paradisiacal dream a flower,[62] which you left behind for me, that I
might remain inexpressibly happy, and that my longing might be as great
as my bliss. Why does this crape draw up all the hot tears out of the
depth of my heart, why do I see behind this woven lattice the eyes
open, which are so far from me, and which so move my inmost being to
sadness? O, nothing appeases the loving soul, but what it shares with
the loved one; therefore do I gaze upon the spring with such a sweet
stir of emotion; for she enjoys it, too, I say,--therefore it is that
thou pleasest me so, dear moon, with thy evening star; for thou
weavest the web of thy silver-threads round her shadows also and her
May-flowers,--therefore it is that I so love to bury myself in every
shaded dell of your Eldorado; for I think, in the magnified shadows, in
the fragrance-breathing blossoms of these pictures, she is now roaming,
and the moon-sickle deflects the softened lightnings of the sun upon
her eye. Then when I am too full of joy, when the _evening-rain_ of
memory falls upon the hot cheeks, when my rapture rocks up and down on
a single long trembling tri-clang of the harpsichord, then does the
trembling and the silence and the infinite love too heavily oppress
with woe the tumultuous heart, then do I yearn for the least sound,
wherewith I may tell the beloved of my heart how I _love her_, how I
honor _her_, that for _her_ I will live, for _her_ will die!----O my
dream, my dream steals now like a tear into my heart! In the night of
the third Easter-holiday I dreamed: Emanuel and I stood in a dusky
nocturnal region. A great scythe on the western horizon flung flying,
reflected flashes at the high lawns, which forthwith dried up and
turned pale. But when a flash flickered into our eyes, our hearts,
sweetly fainting, drew themselves up in the breast, and our bodies grew
lighter for soaring away. 'It is the scythe of Time,' said Emanuel,
'but whence does it, haply, catch the reflection?' We looked toward the
east, and there hung far in the distance and high in the air a broad
dark-glowing land of vapor, which occasionally lightened. 'Is not that
Eternity?' said Emanuel. Then fell before us light snow-pearls, like
sparks. We looked up and three gold-green birds of paradise poised
themselves overhead and swept round incessantly in a little circle, one
after the other, and the falling pearls came from their eyes, or were
their eyes themselves. High above them stood the full moon in the blue,
but on the earth there was still no light, but a blue shadow: for the
blue of heaven was a great blue cloud, opened only in one place by the
moon, which poured down radiance on the three birds of paradise, and
down below on a bright form averted from us.--_You_ were that form, and
turned your face toward the East, toward the hanging landscape, as if
you would presently see something there. The birds of paradise
sprinkled their pearls faster and faster into your eyes; 'They are the
tears which our friend must shed,' said Emanuel; and then, too, they
fell from your eyes, but more brightly, and lay glittering on the
flowery ground. The blue on the earth suddenly grew brighter than the
blue in the heavens, and a steep cavern, whose mouth yawned towards
Eternity, sank back deeper and deeper through the earth towards the
west, down even to America, where the sun shone from below into the
opening,--and a stream of evening-red, broad as a grave, shot upward
out of the earth, and diffused itself with its evening sheen over the
far haze-land of the vapory Eternity like thin flames. Then trembled
your outspread arms, then trembled your songs full of blissful longing,
then could we and you see perfectly the illuminated Eternity. But it
shifted with playing colors under the gaze, we could not retain even in
thought what we saw; they were elusive forms and dissolving hues,
they seemed near, seemed far, seemed to be in the midst of our
thoughts.---Little clouds going up from the earth floated around the
glowing Eternity, and each bore a human being, standing upon it and
singing, up to that luminous island, which clove itself open toward the
earth, with only an endless row of white trees, moulded of light and
snow, and instead of blossoms putting forth purple flowers.--And we saw
our three shadows lying sublimely projected on the radiant white grove;
and on Clotilda's shadow the purple flowers hung down as garlands; an
angel hovered round the lovely shadow and smiled upon it tenderly and
touched the place of the heart upon it. Then didst thou suddenly
tremble, Clotilda, and turn round towards us, fairer than the angel in
Eternity; thy whole ground gleamed under the fallen tears and became
transparent. And now when thy dropping pearls dissolved the ground into
a rising cloud, then didst thou hastily reach thy hand to us, and say,
The cloud takes me up, we shall see each other again.--Ah! my fainting
heart no more retained its blood: I knelt down, but I could say
nothing; I would fain have melted my soul into a single sound, but the
fettered tongue could not frame one, and I stared at the ascending
immortal with infinite and inconsolable love.--Ah! thought I, life is a
dream; but I could perhaps say to her how I love her, were I only
awake.
"Then I woke. O Clotilda, can man say how much he loves?
"H."
* * * * *
His character and the contents of this dream shut out the suspicion of
invention.--For the rest, even if Clotilda refuses his veiled wish to
see her in Maienthal, still she must do it with a leaf of paper and
three lines, which he can then read a thousand times over, and with
which the cabinet of pictures and seals, wherein already are contained
the hat and the views, will be considerably enriched. Meanwhile he
stood in his fair Alpine valley between two high mountains, on each of
which was mustering material for an avalanche,--one is perhaps already
started up there in its crushing course, and he is not yet able to see
it. The first avalanche, which the least sound of his may topple down
upon him, is his crazy relation with his court acquaintance. He can
boast of having angered them in a body: the Princess, Joachime,
Matthieu. But, even independently of that, some conductor or
other--merely because he stands not with the rest on the social
isolating stool of the throne--must soon dart a diminished flash at his
fingers or his eyes; at boards and at courts no one can stand upright
without connections; it is there as in galleys, where all the slaves
must move their oars together, if no one is to feel the cutting of the
chain. But Victor said to himself, "Be not a child! be not the reversed
fox who pronounces _sour_ grapes, because he cannot reach them by
leaping, to be _sweet_! I flatter myself, thou canst dispense with
courtly hearts, which like their viands must first be warmed over a
chafing-dish full of flickering spirits of wine.--By heaven! a man will
surely be able to eat, even though that which he puts on the spit is
not fetched by a guard from the kitchen, then handed to a page, then
served up by a chamberlain or some other regulation-cavalier.--Only my
father,--if it makes no difference to him!" That was just it: in the
son there was nothing to be felled, but there was in the father,[63]
for whom they will probably let the uplifted woodman's and sacrificial
axe hover, till he stands under it with his head, which without his
return is not to be had.
But deuse a bit does a Pastor-fido care for the first avalanche. On the
harmonica-bells of his fancy the external dissonances of fate, as the
rolling of carriage-wheels over the pavement does on the strings of a
musical instrument, die away in softly ascending murmur. With him, as
with the astrologers, April, like my book, was dedicated to the
evening-star, i. e. to Venus.
On the contrary, the other avalanche lay already beforehand on his
breast,--the possibility of a breach with Clotilda's brother. A
jealous man the twelve Apostles and the twelve minor Prophets cannot
convert;--if he is cured on Sunday, then on Monday he is sick again, on
Tuesday he is raving mad, and on Wednesday you can loose him again; he
is weak and cunning and----only lies in wait. The cancer of jealousy on
the breast can never wholly be cut out, if I am to believe great
masters of the healing art. This time, furthermore, there was something
true at the bottom; and then too the jealous man insures it in good
season; jealousy enforces infidelity, and the provoked woman will not,
so far as in her lies, leave the man in _error_. I cannot give myself
the trouble (but the reader may) to enumerate in my biography all the
little crannies and wood-holes through which he has hitherto let his
Flamin see and _hear_ into his love-smitten heart: these knot-holes are
so much the larger, as he was _before_ the _third_ Easter-holiday more
improvident, for the very reason that he was more innocent, or, rather,
more unhappy.
To this add, that Flamin--who every day thought the dear Evangelist
Mattheus more honest and _open_ (like a burnt-out _touchhole_)--every
day looked upon his faithful Bastian as more artful and impenetrable. I
could wish the Regency-Councillor were more discerning; but crowded
souls like Victor's, that have more powers, and for that very reason
more sides, than common, seem, of course, to be less _porous_, just as
authors full of meaning seem less clear. A man who exposes to you with
frankness all the colors of his heart playing into each other, loses
thereby the glory of frankness;--one who like Victor, from humor,
collects and shows up other people's tricks, seems to imitate them;--a
changeable, an ironical, a fine man is in the eyes of narrow ones a
thorough-going false thief. Then, too, Victor, when it could be done
without noise, jumped out of the way of any long mentionings of
Clotilda, i. e. long dissemblings; and this very flight from artifice,
even his present increased human-kindliness toward Flamin, precisely
overshadowed his noble form; and nothing consoled him for the
distortions of suspicion, but the sweet reflection that to please the
brother of his beloved and of his heart he had turned his back upon the
fairest days in Maienthal.
31. DOG-POST DAY.
Clotilda's Letter.--The Night-Express.--Rents and Gashes
in the Band of Friendship.
I was going to have inserted in the Magazine of Literature, that I
needed _Herrnschmidt's osculologia_[64] for my (learned) labors,--that
is for this Chapter. I wanted to find out from it, how in
Herrnschmidt's times they managed with women. In Jean Paul's times,
they treat them miserably, that is to say in romances. Only an
Englishman can portray excellent women. In the hands of most German
romance-founders, the women turn out men, the coquettes w----, the
statues lumps, the flower-pieces kitchen-pieces. That the fault lies
more with the artists than with the models, not only the models
themselves know, but also the Mining-Superintendent, even from the
fact, that the female readers of romances are all even more romantic
than the heroines of them,--more refined and reserved. The
Mining-Superintendent will here--without any design of having eight
distinguished women in Mayence bear him to the grave, as they did the
women's minstrel and meister-singer, Henry Frauenlob--swear a printed
oath (or simply _swear_ in print) that he has found most of his
contemporaries better than the good, open, but empty and rough head of
the author of the Alcibiades and Nordenschild[65] can draw them. In
fact, if women did not forgive men everything, even authors, (and in
truth they do it seventy times a day, and offer the other cheek, when
one has been offended by a kiss,) then no circulating-library keeper
could explain how it is that human beings, whose head nevertheless is
heavier, whose pineal gland is smaller, and who have six more annular
cartilages to the windpipe,--that is, in all, twenty, probably for the
sake of their more speaking,--whose breast-bone is shorter, and whose
breast-bones are softer than men's,--how such human beings of the
female sex can still send their maid or footman to a circulating
library with the commission: "A romance of chivalry for my
mademoiselle!" My colleagues of the quill--in reference to women I am,
according to miners' language, one of the _feather_,[66] not of _fire_
nor of _leather_--are elected for the education of female readers, as,
according to Lessing, the Jews were for the education of the nations,
for the simple reason that they are ruder than their pupils.
Every woman is finer than her station. She gains more by culture than
the man. The female angels (but so also the female devils) are kept
only in the highest and finest human drawers; they are butterflies, on
whom the velvet-wing between two rough man's-fingers becomes a naked,
skinny flap; they are tulips, whose colored leaves a single grasp of
fate rubs down into a smutty leather.----
I bring forward all this, in order that Herr Kotzebue and the shameless
Poets'-corner in Jena[67] and the whole romantic crew may not take it
ill of my Clotilda that she imitates more her own sex than the
aforesaid tribe, and so much the more, as she can allege in her
defence, that she has not yet read this.
Through Agatha came very soon an answer from Clotilda, superscribed by
Emanuel, which was inwardly sealed in the style of ambassadors,
geometrically cut, and calligraphically written, because ladies execute
all things that require the attention of the senses better than we, and
because they--for hardly four of my acquaintance need I except--are
exactly the opposite of men, in that the better they think, the finer
they write. Lavater says the handsomest painter produces the handsomest
pictures; and I say, fair hands write a fair hand.
Clotilda's letter sets itself with an ornamental belt and a live hedge
full of blossoms across our Doctor's path and shuts him off from
Maienthal. For it runs thus:--
"MOST WORTHY FRIEND,--
"Perhaps no maiden is so happy as a poetess; and I think, here in this
charming valley one at last becomes both. You are happy everywhere, for
you can be a poet even at a court, as your beautiful poetic epistle
shows me. But fancy loves to paint from paint-boxes,--the true
Maienthal cannot give yours so much as you know how to put into the
three landscape-pictures of it. As often as you and I are obliged to
make good the absence of the same things by imagination: only with you
is the compensation greater than the sacrifice.
"If I could by persuasion have procured you the pleasure of seeing Herr
Emanuel, gladly would I have done it; but I was at last, from
conscientious scruples, not eloquent enough to induce him to make the
journey, which would expose his weak breast to the danger of bleeding
to death. Regard him as a Spring, for which every year one must wait
nine months.
"Ah, my anxiety for my unforgettable and irreplaceable teacher casts a
shadow over the whole present Spring, as a monument does over a
flower-garden. I have never looked upon a Spring so gladly and joyfully
as on this.--I can often, even by moonlight, go out along the brooks,
and look for a flower which trembles beside the liquid mirror, and
around which a moon above and another below fling their lustre, and I
represent to myself the floral festival in the East, at which (as they
say) a mirror and two lights are placed by night around every
garden-flower. And yet I cannot look over to the flower-beds of my
teacher, without being too much affected by the thought, Who knows
whether his tulips will not stand longer than his crippled form? Has
then the whole medical art no remedy that shall frustrate his hope of
death?--It seems to me he is gradually attuning me to his melancholy
tone, whereby I should make myself ridiculous before any other than the
friend of Emanuel; but a still, hidden joy loves to break out even into
melancholy. 'Only in the cold, not in the fair season of our destiny,'
you once said, 'do the warm drops pain us, which fall from the eyes
upon the soul, just as only in winter one must not sprinkle flowers
with warm water.' And why should I not disclose to your open heart all
the weaknesses of mine? This chamber, wherein my Giulia ended her
beautiful life, even this looking-glass which, when I turned away for
pain from her dying, showed me once more my pale and fading sister, the
windows, from which my eye so many times a day must fall upon a mournful,
thornful rose-bush, and on an eternally closed mound, all these may,
indeed, cause my heart some sighs more than a happy one should
otherwise have. I know not whether you or Emanuel said, 'The thought of
death must be only our means of improvement, not our end and aim; if
the earth of the grave falls into the heart, just as when it falls into
the heart-leaves of a flower, it destroys instead of fructifying
it';--but on my leaves fate and Giulia have already thrown some
earth.--And I gladly bear it, as I can now, since gaining your
friendship, flee for refuge to a heart, before which I may dare to open
mine, in order to show it therein all the woes, all the sighs, all the
doubts, all the questions of an oppressed soul. O, I thank the
All-Gracious, that as much as he threatens to snatch from me in the
person of my _teacher_, so much he gives me again already in advance in
the person of his _friend_.--My friendship will reach after our Emanuel
even into the next world, and will accompany his darling through this;
and if one day the double stroke of his death should fall on us both,
then would we shed more patiently our united tears, and I should
perhaps say, Ah! his friend Sebastian has lost more than his friend
CLOTILDA!"
* * * * *
The beating of my own heart, a stranger's, is to me a measure of the
beating of the happier one. But before I relate what at the outset
disturbed, and then doubled Victor's joy over this letter, let me be
allowed to make two good observations. The first is: the enhanced
sensibility, in a proud bosom (such as Clotilda's), which otherwise
would call back sighs and send out only female satires at us lords of
the creation, is the fairest token that her heart is melting in the
sunshine of love. For this sentiment reverses women; it makes out of a
Columbine a female Young, out of an orderly a disorderly one, out of a
fine woman a frank one, out of a maker and wearer of finery a female
philosopher, and so _vice versâ_. And do thou, dear Philippina, prove
the second remark, for thou answerest here as well as thy own brother:
Is not the concealment of love the sweetest confession of it? Does not
a veil--a moral one, I mean--show the whole face, and is it not
permeable to everything except the wind,--the moral wind, I mean?--Does
not the glass case of a lady's watch reveal the whole varnished
watch-portrait at the bottom, and exclude merely _soiling_, not
_seeing_? And what observations wilt thou make, when I rehearse to thee
these two!
The letter strengthened at once Victor's wish to be about Clotilda, and
his power to give it up,--until, the next day at supper-time, an
accident changed all. Matthieu, who paid almost more visits to enemies
than to friends, came up from the Apothecary's. He saw the views of
Maienthal and the crape hat; and as he knew that his sister Joachime
had both, he said jokingly, "I fancy, you are going to dress yourself up
in borrowed robes, or somebody has been disrobing." Victor fluttered
away over the subject with a gay, vacant "Both." He was unwilling to
take upon his lips the name of love or of a woman before a man who had
no faith in virtue, least of all in woman's, who, to be sure, as other
spiders do on other music, let himself down by his threads upon love,
but who, as mice do, from love for the tones, crept over the strings
and snapped them. Victor never loved (before his court-life) to be with
such philosophical defamers among blameless maidens, because it pained
him even to be reminded of their point of view. "They must not," said
he, "learn so much as the existence of a daughter of mine, because they
insult a father in the very act of imagining her to themselves."
Matthieu spoke of the next Patriotic Club (on the 4th of May, the
birth-day of the Parson) and asked whether he would be there. Agatha,
however, had already reminded him of it yesterday (the last day but one
of April). At last Mat proposed his question, "Whether he would not
also be of the party at Whitsuntide. He had planned a little excursion
with the Regency-Councillor (Flamin), who always needed holidays for
that purpose, to Grosskussewitz to the Count of O.'s. He had business
there, to pay for some lodgings of the court to the Kussewitzers, and
put the Count of O. in tune for an amicable adjustment of the recent
misunderstanding; therefore he must have the lawyer with him. Perhaps
the Englishmen would be at this Congress,--the travelling corps might
then have as great entertainment as a _corps diplomatique_, after
having first had just such occupation as theirs. The Count of O., in
fact, loved Englishmen very much, though he did not like to ride
English horses,--for he had been very sorry that he had lately talked
with the distinguished Court-Physician at the Princess's without
knowing you." Sebastian had concluded his long, dumb attention with a
cold "No!" because the perspiration of this false, flying cat[68]
overspread his unprotected heart with an eating poison. "What have I
done to this man," thought he during that invitation, "that he pursues
me eternally,--that with a knife, of which one side is poisoned, or
both, he cuts away, amidst the double pangs of both of us, my youth's
friend from my soul,--that he runs out his mines even to strange
places, in order in all situations to have me over his powder?" Victor
had, namely, after all, reason to fear that the Whitsuntide journey was
a voyage of discovery, upon which Joachime might propound to her
brother, as Chevalier Michaelis[69] did to the Oriental travellers,
questions about the case of the watch-letter, about Tostato, &c., in
order, perhaps, to form out of it all an impeachment before the Prince.
He held the lower side of his card, i. e. of his _virtuous pain_, in
such a way that Matthieu could not quite see it, so as to deprive him
of a _malicious pleasure_. The latter, who wore not a lace mask, but an
iron one, and besides one with a neck, showed often such coldness, that
one did not comprehend his furious wrath and _vice versâ_,--but the one
(the coldness) he had in camp, the other (the wrath) in the fight
against the foe. If any one immediately enraged him, it was a good
sign, and meant that he had no design against him.
After the evacuation of the Evangelist,--when he had done scolding at
himself for letting him find the crape hat, which, in fact, he would
have kept more concealed if Flamin had came oftener,--he looked round
for Clotilda's profile, that the charming shadow might cool his wrath.
It was not to be found: his first hypothesis was that Mat had quietly
stolen it, which was the more likely, as he had cut it. If he has
really pocketed the profile, then must the Evangelist--for, as is well
known, the silhouette was made over _to me_ at the very beginning of
this story--be actually my corresponding fellow-member Knef, and it is
he who sent me the advice-boat,--namely, the Pomeranian dog.--Odd
enough it is that my correspondent himself by such intelligence sets me
upon the suspicion.
While Victor took the dear crape hat into his hand as a compensation
for the likeness, and dreamily contemplated it, there sprang forth on
the hat wholly new, fresh flowers for his soul. "What!" he said to
himself, "must I then have only the profile to look at? Can I not
choose the--original itself for that purpose?" In short, the hat became
an urn of fortune, from which he drew a joyous hour, that is the
determination to travel on Whitsuntide, but to--Maienthal. He seriously
reflected, that for him and Clotilda this excessive indulgence of a
jealous brother, whose mistaken hopes no sister indeed was obliged to
strengthen, was besides aggravated and frustrated by the misanthropic
suggestions of Matthieu,--that, therefore, their separation was as
little of an alleviation as their meeting was a crime,--that,
meanwhile, it would be a fine thing to spare the brother and to take
merely the time of his absence for a suspicious excursion, till one day
the drawing down of the bandage should disclose in the unfaithful one
the sister, and in the rival the forbearing friend,--and that it was at
all events better to talk with her in Maienthal than, at his return,
when he was near,--and that a brother enlightened in regard to his
origin would certainly one day have nothing to reproach him with,
except that he had taken from him no other illusions than, at most,
disagreeable ones.--O, Love and Virtue have a naked conscience, and
apologize for their heavenly pleasures longer and more than other
qualities do for their infernal ones!
When Victor further thought on _this_, how soon leaf and blossom drop
off from the days of love, and that Emanuel, and even Clotilda, were
two flowers moved close to the brink of the grave, whose loose, naked
roots already hung down dead, then was his resolution fixed, and he
wrote to Emanuel the intelligence of his intended arrival at
Whitsuntide, in order not to anger Clotilda by a surprise, and in
order, besides, to allow her the opportunity of a countermand. The way
in which he put it was this: "If his Socratic genius would allow it
(i. e. Clotilda), who always told him what he must _not_ do, then he
was coming on Whitsuntide, as, besides, the town would then be
deserted, as Flamin was to be gone for four or five days to Kussewitz,
&c."
When he had finished the letter, it occurred to him that this very day
a year ago; on the 29th of April, he had travelled all night, in order
with the first of May in the morning to enter through the mist into the
parsonage. "I can, verily, again spend the sultry zephyr-night, not
under the coverlet, but under the stars. I can take one steady gaze
into the evening-red towards Maienthal's mountains. I can, indeed,
better still, go half the way over them,--or in fact the whole. I can
post myself on a hill and look down into the hamlet. Truly I can then
deliver my billet here incognito to some Maienthaler, and take flight
again before it is yet day."
At seven o'clock in the evening he went, like the sea, from east to
west. Orion, Castor, and Andromeda glisten in the west, not far from
the evening-red, over the fields of the loved one, and, like her, will
soon sink from one heaven into another. His heart agitated by nothing
but hopes, the _heated_ chambers of his brain, on whose walls Maienthal
sketched with _sympathetic_ ink came forth in ever clearer outlines and
brighter colors, this inner and almost painful din of joy deprived him
at first of the power of taking in the temple of Spring, built up in
Grecian beauty, with a still, luminous soul. Nature and Art are best
enjoyed only with a clean eye, from which both kinds of tears have been
wiped away.
But at last the outspread _night-piece_ covered over his hot
_fever-images_, and heaven with its lights, and earth with its shadows,
made their way into his expanded heart. The night was without
moonlight, but without clouds. The temple of nature, like a Christian
temple, was sublimely dimmed. Victor could not make his way up out of
the trenches of long valleys, out of the glooms of woods, and out of
the mists of meadows with their play of colors, till the midnight hour,
when he climbed a mountain like a throne, and there lay down on his
back in order to plunge his eyes into the heavens, and cool off from
his dreaming and racing. The low-hanging blue of heaven seemed to him
to be a thin blue cloud, a sea dashed into blue mists, and one sun
after another with its long rays slightly parted this blue flood.
Arcturus, who stood over against the reclining man, was already
descending from the battlements of heaven, and three great
constellations, the Lynx, the Bull, and the Great Bear, marched far in
the van under the western gate.--These nearer suns were encircled by
remote milky-ways with a swimming halo, and thousands of vast heavens
flung into eternity stood in our heaven as white vapors a span in
length, as faintly luminous snow-flakes out of immensity, as silver
circles of hoar-frost.--And the strata of suns crowded together, which
only before the thousand-eyed eye of Art let fall their misty veil,
played like streaks of _our_ little particles of sun-dust in the
glowing sunbeam of the Eternal that burned through the immeasurable
space. And the reflection of his throne, glowing through and through,
lay bright on all the suns.----
--Suddenly, nearer at hand, molten cloudlets of light, nearer mists,
which had flown upward out of dew, take their stations, during their
silvering, low down before the suns, and the silvery gleam of heaven
comes on apace with scattered dark fleeces.----Victor cannot comprehend
the supernatural kindling, and starts up, enchanted, to his feet....
and lo, our good neighbor and kinsman, the moon, the sixth grand
division of our little earth, had silently, and without the morning's
cry of joy, entered _beside_ the triumphal gate of the sun into the
night of her mother earth with her _half-day_.
And now, when the shadows ran off from all the mountains, and glided
through the discovered landscapes only in brooks between trees, and
when the moon gave the whole dark spring a little morning in the
midnight,--then did Victor, not with nightly melancholy, but with
morning rejuvenescence take the great round play-room of the annual
creation into his awakened eyes, into his awakened soul; and he
surveyed the spring with an internal cry of joy in the midst of the
wide realm of profound silence, with the feeling of immortality in the
circle of sleep.----
Earth also, and not Heaven only, makes man great!
Enter into my soul and into my words, ye May-feelings that throbbed in
the bosom of my Victor, as he looked over the budding, swelling earth,
covered with suns above his head, enclosed in a net of green life that
reached from roots to tree-tops, from mountains to furrows, and borne
up by a second spring under his feet, as he imagined to himself behind
the transpierced earth-crust the sun standing with a day of splendor
under America.--Climb higher, moon, that he may see more easily the
gushing, swollen, dark-green spring, which with little pale spears
crowds upward out of the earth, till it has lifted itself out, full of
glowing flowers, full of waving trees,--that he may descry the plains
which lie under rich leaves, and on whose green track the eye ascends
from the upright flowers on which the cloven charms of light grow
and fix themselves to the bushes bursting into blossoms, and to
the slow trees whose glistening buds sway up and down in the
spring-winds.----Victor had sunk into dreams, when all at once the cold
fanning of the spring-air, which could now play more with little clouds
than with flowers, and the murmur of the spring brooks, which darted
away beside him from all the hills and over every patch of darker
green, woke and bestirred him.--There was the moon that had gone up
unseen, and all the fountains glistened, and the lilies of the
valley came out in white bloom from the green, and round the lively
water-plants danced silver-points. Then did his bliss-burdened look
lift itself in order to rise to God from the earth and from the green
borders of the brooks, and climb up the curved woods, out of which the
iron-sparks and smoke columns[70] leaped above the summits, and far up
the white mountains where winter sleeps in clouds;----but when his holy
sight was in the starry heaven, and was about to look up to God, who
has created night and spring and the soul,--then, weeping and reverent
and lowly and blissful, he fell back with drooping wing.... His heavy
soul could only say, He is!--
But his heart drank its fill of life from the endless, welling,
breathing world around him, above him, under him, wherein force reaches
to force, blossom to blossom, and whose fountains of life shoot from
one earth to another, and whose void spaces are only the paths of the
finer powers and the residence of the lesser ones,--the whole
immeasurable world stood before him, whose distended cataract, spraying
into fragrances and streams, into milky-ways and hearts, between the
_two_ thunders of the summit and the abyss, rapid, starry, flaming,
descends out of a past eternity, and leaps down into a future one,--and
when God looks upon the cataract, then the circle of eternity paints
itself thereon as a rainbow, and the stream does not discompose the
hovering circle....
The blessed mortal rose up and journeyed on in the feeling of
immortality through the spring-life pulsating around him; and he
thought that man, in the midst of so many examples of immutability,
erroneously translated the distinction between his sleep and waking
into the distinction between existence and non-existence. Now his
vigorous, exuberant feelings welcomed every noise, the stroke of the
trip-hammer in the woods, the rush of spring-waters and spring-winds,
and the whir of the partridge.--
At three o'clock in the morning he looked down on Maienthal. He came
upon the mountain relieved by five solitary fir-trees, on which one can
see through the whole village, and again over to the other mountain,
where the weeping birch shades his Emanuel. The embowered cell of the
latter he could not discern, but all the windows of the convent where
his loved one dreamed glistened in the sparkling moonlight. The rapture
of night was still in his breast, and the burning glow of dreams on his
countenance;--but the valley drew him out to the earth, and only gave
his flowers of joy a _firmer_ soil; and the morning-wind cooled his
breath, and the dew his cheeks. The tears rose into his eyes, when they
fell upon the white-curtained windows, behind which a lovely, a wise, a
loved and loving soul was completing its guileless morning-dreams. Ah!
dream, Clotilda, of thy friend, that he is near thee, that he is
turning his overflowing eyes toward thy cell, and that he will vanish,
if thou appearest, and that, nevertheless, he is growing more blessed
from moment to moment,--ah! he too, indeed, is dreaming, and when the
sun rises, the beloved vale will have sunk like thy dream with the
starry heaven.--O, the mountains, the woods, behind which dwells a
beloved soul, the walls which enclose her, look upon man with a
touching magic, and hang before him like sweet curtains of the future
and the past.
The mountain brought before him the image of the painter who had once
been here for the purpose of sketching Clotilda's charms, like a
golden age, as it were, only from a distance, and so of drawing them
nearer,--and this again led his eye into the days of her earlier youth
and her still, pure life at the convent, and it grieved him that a time
had once been, and been lost, in which he had not been able to love
her. As he looked around him, and thought to himself that on all these
paths, by these brooks, under these trees, she had walked, the whole
region became to him holy and living, and every bird that glided over
it seemed to seek his friend, and to love her as he did.
But now with every star that sank back into heaven overhead, a flower
and a bird woke down on the earth,--the way from night to day was
already laid with half-colors,--little clouds came up on the coast of
day,--and Victor was still on the mountain. His fear that the white
window-veil might stir and betray him, was as great as his wish that
the fear might grow greater and greater! Occasionally a curtain swayed,
but none rose.--All at once the throats of the birds woke a magic flute
at the foot of his mountain, and the still Julius came to meet the sun,
that no more shone for him, with his morning-tones. Then, suddenly,
Clotilda's window unveiled itself, and her fair, bright eyes took the
freshened morning into her holy soul. Victor, not considering the
distance, stepped behind one bush after another; but his flight from
the beloved eyes led him nearer to the flute; he was, however, full as
unwilling to appear before Emanuel, whom he supposed to be in the
vicinity of the blind one, as before Clotilda herself. When now only a
few bushes separated him from the tones, he espied on the mountain his
friend Emanuel under the weeping birch. Now he hastened, glad and
trembling, down to Julius, whom he found, with his lily-face, fair as
the younger brother of an angel, with birds flying and singing around
him, leaning against a birch-tree: "What forms, what hearts," thought
he, "adorn this Paradise." How could he, on such a morning, on such a
holy spot, toward so good a youth, have disguised himself, and handed
to him, say, with the imitated voice of his Italian servant, the letter
to Emanuel!--No, that he could not do; he said with a low voice, in
order not to alarm him, "Dear Julius, it is I!"--Then he sank slowly
upon the tender being, and embraced in one breast three hearts, and
handed him the letter with the words, "Give it to thy Emanuel!" and
with the warmest pressure of the dear hand flew farther down the
mountain and away.--
Just at this hour, on this day, a year ago, Giulia also disappeared
from Maienthal, and took nothing with her of the fair flowery ground
but a--grave-mound.
And now when he had escaped behind bushy avenues from the place of the
blessed, his nightly elation gave way to an uncontrollable sadness. The
rising sun drew all the bright colors out of his nightly dream. "Have I
then really seen Maienthal and Julius and all the loved ones, or is it
all only a play of shadows that passed by before me on a cloud whose
colors flickered in the moonlight, and which has melted away?" said
he,--and the brooding day warmed the fresh night-air of his soul into
the sultry fanning of a south-wind. Whereas man generally, like
Raguel,[71] hews out graves in the midnight, and in the morning sun
fills them up again, Sebastian today reversed it.----
Strictly speaking, it was not quite so: but the swift emerging and
reabsorption of the beloved forms, the aggravated longing for them, the
touching contrast between the din of morning and the pause of night,
between the fire of the sun and the moon's twilight, and the dreary
exhaustion of sleeplessness joined to the weariness of the fancy and
the body, all these things wrung from the heart and the tear-glands of
our somnambulist involuntary sweet tears, which had no object, which
flowed neither for joy nor for sorrow, but for yearning.
All at once the fair, cloudless first May-day made to pass before him
the remembrance of the one a year ago, when, like a spring and an
Homeric god, he arrived in a cloud,--and the good man looked with
dew-drops in his eyes upon the dew-drops in the flowers, and said,
inexpressibly touched: "Ah! a year ago I came so happy, became so
unhappy, and now am so happy again,--O ye flying, playing, echoing,
trembling years of man!"--and the holiday-hum of bells from all the
villages (it was St. Philip's and St. James's day) with the soft thrill
of an echo set all his mourning-strings into a responsive quiver.
"O, a year ago," all the bells sang to him, "we escorted Giulia, as we
now do thee, out of Maienthal." Then, as the sun unfolded his white
blossoms in the sky, the warm thought dissolved his heart: "A year ago
this morning thy Flamin went to meet thee, and shed on thy glowing
breast so many tears of joy,--and at the end of this very day he drew
thee again to his heart, and said as if with a presentiment, 'Forget me
not, betray me not, and if thou wilt forsake me, then let me perish
with thee!'--
"O thou faithful one," said all his thoughts, "how it consoles me
to-day, that I once gladly sacrificed all my wishes to thine, in order
to continue true to thee.[72]--No, I cannot conceal anything from him,
I will go to him at once."--He went straight to Flamin, in order
(though without perjury towards his Lordship, and with forbearance
toward jealousy) to confess that he was going at Whitsuntide to
Maienthal. His dismembered heart needed so much an eye that should weep
responsive to it,--his delicate sense of honor scorned so much to make
another's journey the screen of his own,--his renewed love was pained
so at the thought of the least concealment from his friend,--Matthieu
was so completely thrust out from this heavenly-blue Eden under the
walls of the brain,--that the longer he thought and ran, the more would
he lay open. He would, namely, even disclose to his Flamin that he had
this very night delivered with his own hands the note of invitation to
the blind youth: by an illusion, the future Whitsuntide journey was
made more certain through to-day's, and this his own point of view he
looked upon as another's.
But his dreamy and _night-intoxicated_ soul did not carry so far its
dangerous effusion, which might do so much the more harm, as Flamin in
his anger was unable to listen any longer to distinctions and
justifications, and even rejected again old ones which he had before
allowed. For at his entrance a May-frost on Flamin's face closed a
little the opening blossom-cup of his heart. He begged Flamin with his
contrasting warmth of face to take a walk on this bright day. Out of
doors the contrast grew still more sharp, as Flamin thrust his cane
into the ground even to the point of cracking it, beheaded flowers,
whipped off leaves, stamped out footprints with the heel of his boot,
while Victor sought to discourse in one steady stream, in order to
maintain his soul in the warmth which he had brought with him.
One thing about him gratifies me, that he was going to pour out his
heart, overrunning with to-day's renunciations, into the very one which
he had to charge with those renunciations. At last he said, hurriedly,
just for the sake of throwing off from his soul the confession which
hall become so hard to utter, "At Whitsuntide I am going to
Maienthal,"--and then flyingly passed over to the words, "O just a year
ago to-day thou wentest with me."
Flamin interrupted him, and his icy face, like a Hecla, was cloven with
flames: "So! so!--at Whitsuntide? Thou dost not go with _us_ to
Kussewitz!--Let me once for all speak right out, Victor!"--Then they
stopped. Flamin stripped the blossoms and leaves from the branch of a
wild plum-tree with bloody hand, and looked not at his gentle friend,
lest he should be softened himself. "A year ago to-day, sayest thou?
Yes, that very evening I went with thee up to the watch-tower, and we
promised each other either truth or death. Thou sworest to me to throw
thyself headlong with me, whenever thou shouldst have taken all from
me, all,--or, say, _her_ love; for in thy presence she hardly looks at
me any more.--By the Devil, am I then blind? Do I not see, then, that
the machinery of her journey and thine has been all planned out?--What
hast thou to do just now with the Maienthal landscapes? To whom does
the _hat_ belong?--And what am I to infer from all this?--To whom,
whom? say, say!--O God, if it were true!--Help me, Victor!"--In the
eyes of the misused, to-day exhausted Victor stood the bitterest tears,
which Flamin, however, who exasperated himself by his own talking,
could now bear. Never did the latter in a rage accept remonstrances:
nevertheless he expected them, and was astounded at his being in the
right, and at the other party's silence, and desired to be
contradicted. He crushed in his bleeding hand the sloe-thorns. His eye
burned into the weeping one. Victor bewailed his firm oath to his
father, and looked on the trembling balance wherein the oath and
indulgent friendship hung in equipoise. He collected once more all his
love into his breast, and spread his arms wide open, and fain would
draw with them the struggling one to himself, and yet could say nothing
but "I and thou are innocent; but till my father comes, before that I
cannot justify myself."--Flamin repelled him from him: "What is this
for?--So it was at the garden-concert, too, and thou hast since that
been daily with her, and at Easter-balls and in sleighs, without me.
Say rather outright, wilt thou marry _her_?--Swear that thou wilt
not?--O God, hesitate not,--swear, swear!--Ay, ay, Matthieu!--Canst
thou not yet!--Well, then, lie at least!"
"Oh!" said Victor,--and eclipsing blood-streams shot through his brain
and over his face,--"thou shalt not insult me quite too much; I
am as good as thou, I am as proud as thou,--before God my soul is
pure"----But Flamin's blood on the sloe-bush repressed Victor's
indignant exaltation, and he merely lifted a sympathetic eye full of
the tears of friendship to the brighter, softer heaven.--"Only
marriage, forsooth, dost thou not forswear?----Good, good, thou
hast strangled me,--my heart hast thou trampled on, and my whole
happiness.--I had none but thee, thou wast my only friend, now will I
go to the Devil without one.--Thou dost not swear?--Oh, I tear myself
away from thee bloody and wretched, and as thy foe--we part--only
go--away! it is all up--all!--Adieu!" He rushed away, striking his
stick into the ground as he went, and his distracted friend, lying at
the feet of Truth, who lifts the flaming sword against Perjury, and
dying in tears before Friendship, who casts upon the soft heart the
melting look full of entreaties,--Victor, I say, cried, as with dying
voice, after the fleeing friend of his soul: "Farewell, my faithful
Flamin! my never-to-be-forgotten friend! I was indeed true to
thee!--But an oath lies between us.--Dost thou still hear me?--do not
hasten so!--Flamin, dost thou hear me? I love thee still, we shall find
each other again, and come when thou wilt." ... He cried after him more
vehemently, although with stifled, smothered tones: "Honest, precious,
precious soul, I have loved thee very much, and do still and
still,--only be right happy.--Flamin, Flamin, my heart breaks now that
thou art my enemy."--Flamin looked round no more, but his hand seemed
to be on his eyes. The friend of his youth vanished from his sight like
youth itself, and Victor sank down _unhappy_ under the fairest heaven,
with the consciousness of innocence, with all the feelings of
friendship!--O, Virtue itself gives no consolation, if thou hast lost a
friend, and the heart of a man, stabbed by _friendship_, bleeds on
mortally, and all the balm of _love_ avails not to heal or to soothe!--
32. DOG-POST-DAY.
Physiognomies of Victor and Flamin.--Boiling-Point of
Friendship.--Splendid Hopes for us.
Who would have thought it of Cicero (if he had not read it) that a man
of so many years and so much sense would sit down in his St. John's
Island, and manufacture _beginnings_, introductions, pre-existing germs
in advance for the market? However, the man had this advantage, that
when he wrote a torso on any subject, he had his choice among the heads
lying ready made to his hand, of which he could screw one on to the
trunk according to the corpuscular philosophy.--As to myself, who have
nothing sedate about me, no one can wonder that I on my Moluccian
Frascati[73] have reeled and twisted beforehand whole skeins of
beginnings. When Spitz afterward brings a Dog-day, I have already
commenced it, and have nothing to do but just to clap the historical
remnant on to the introduction.--This very beginning itself I have
selected for to-day.
At first, however, I had a mind, to be sure, to take this one:--
Nothing torments me about my whole book except my anxiety as to how I
shall be translated. This anxiety is not to be blamed in an author,
when one sees how the French translate the Germans, and the Germans the
Ancients. At bottom it really amounts to one's being expounded by the
lower classes and their teachers. I can compare those readers and these
classes, in respect of their spiritual fare, which passes first through
so many intermediate members, to nothing, except to the poor people in
Lapland. When the rich in that country intoxicate themselves in the
tippling-room with a liquor which is decocted out of the costly
toadstool, the poor people watch around the house-door, till a Lap in
easy circumstances comes out and makes----; this translated beverage,
the _Vulgate_ of distilled liquor, the poor devils enjoy greatly.
This beginning, however, I am keeping for the Preface to a translation.
It is one of the juggling tricks and _lusus naturæ_ of chance, of which
there are very many, that I should begin this Book just in the night of
St. Philip's and St. James's day, 1793, when Victor undertook the
witch's-journey to the Maienthal Blocksberg, into the midst of the
enchanters and enchantresses, and when, in 1792, he arrived from
Göttingen.
I cannot say, The reader can easily imagine how Victor lived or grieved
through the first May-days; for he hardly can imagine it. Perhaps we
all held the bands which bound him to Flamin to be a few thin fibres or
unsensitive cords of custom; in fact, however, delicate nerves and firm
muscles form the lattice-work[74] of their souls. He himself knew not
how much he loved him, until he was compelled to cease doing so. Into
this common error we all fall, hero, reader, and writer, on the same
ground: when one has not been able for a long time to give a friend,
whom one has long loved, any proof of that love, for want of
opportunity, then one torments one's self with the self-accusation of
growing cold towards him. But this accusation is itself the finest
proof of love. With Victor yet more things conspired to persuade him
that he was becoming a colder friend. The vesper-tilts about Clotilda,
those disputations _pro loco_, did, besides, their part; but he was
always afflicting himself with the self-criticism that he had sometimes
refused his friend little sacrifices; e. g. the neglecting of a
pleasure-party on his account, the staying away from certain too
distinguished houses which Flamin hated. But in friendship great
sacrifices are easier than small ones,--one would often rather
sacrifice to it life than an hour, a piece of property than the
gratification of some petty bad habit, just as many people would rather
present you a bill of exchange than a piece of _blank_ paper of the
same size. The secret is, great sacrifices inspiration makes, but
little ones, reason. Flamin, who himself never made little ones,
demanded them of others with heat, because he took them for great ones.
Victor had less to reproach himself with on this point; but Clotilda
shamed him, for her longest and shortest days, as is the case with most
of her sex, were nothing but sacrificial days.--Then, too, his natural
delicacy, which had now gained by his court-life the addition of the
conventional kind, was wounded more deeply than ever by his friend's
sharp corners.--The fine people give to their inner man (as to their
outer) by bran of almonds and night-gloves soft hands, merely for the
sake of feeling better the under side of the cards, and for the sake of
giving neat ladylike half-boxes-in-the-ear, but not in order, like the
surgeons, to handle wounds with them.
Unfortunately this delusion about his growing cold prescribed to him a
friendly external effort to show warmth when with Flamin. Now as the
Regency-Councillor did, not consider that even _constraint_ may full as
often arise from _sincerity_, as unconstraint from falseness:
accordingly the Devil had more and more his game of Bestia (in which a
friendship was the high stake) till on witches' day he actually won it.
But on the 4th of May he is to lose all again, I think. For Victor,
whose heart at the least motion bled through the bandage again,
undertook not only, on the 4th of May, to be present at the
birth-festival of the Court-Chaplain in St. Luna, but also to celebrate
a birthday of renewed friendship with Flamin. He would gladly take the
first, second, third, tenth step, if his friend would only stop where
he was, and not take a step backward. For he cannot forget _him_, he
cannot get over a compulsory renunciation, however easy for him
generally the voluntary one was. He pressed every evening Flamin's fair
image, which was made out of his love for _him_, out of his
incorruptible honesty, his rock-like courage, his love for the state,
his talents, even his excitability, which originated in the double
feeling of injustice and of his own innocence,--this glowing image he
pressed to his lacerated heart, and when in the morning he saw him
going to his public duties, his eyes ran over, and he congratulated the
servant who carried his papers behind him. Had not the 4th of May, the
great day of reconciliation, been so near with its expiatory offering,
he would have been obliged to accustom little Julia to himself, as a
third estate between the two others, as a key-note between conflicting
tones. Only the hope of May applied to his thoughts, instead of burning
stings of nettle-points, at least rose-briers.--The friend of thy
youth, dear reader, thy school-friend, is never forgotten, for he has
something of the brother about him;--when thou enterest the school-yard
of life, which is a Schnepfenthal educational institute, a Berlin
scientific school,[75] a Breslau Elisabethanum, a Scheerau
Marianum,[76]--then for the first time thou meetest friends, and your
youthful friendship is the morning divine service of life.
Victor was sure beforehand of Flamin's placability; he even saw him
very often standing at his window, and glancing across toward the
balcony, from which a friendly eye, untroubled by all the
misconstructions of the point of honor, looked freely and directly
toward the Senior's;--this, however, did not take away his tender
yearning, but it was increased by the first returning sight of the
face, so fair, so lamented, and so loved. Flamin had a tall, manly
form; his compact and receding narrow forehead was the eyrie of spirit;
his transparent blue eyes--which his sister Clotilda also had, and
which harmonize very well with a fiery soul, as, indeed, the old
Germans also and the country people have both--were kindled by a
thinking intellect; his compressed, and for that very reason the more
darkly red, over-full lips, were settled into the kindly elevation for
a kiss; only the nose was not refined enough, but was juristically or
Germanly built. The nose of great jurists looks sometimes, in my
opinion, as wretchedly as the nose of Justice herself when its flexible
material is drawn out and twisted and tweaked under too long fingers.
It is not to be explained, by the way, why the faces of great
theologians--unless, indeed, they are something else great--have about
them somewhat of the typographic magnificence of the Kanstein Bibles.
Victor's face, on the contrary, had, less than any other, either these
Bursch-like trivial features of many jurists, or the dead-gold of many
theologians; his nose--its edge and the indentation of the nasal bridge
deducted--descended in Grecian straightness; the angle of the thin,
closed lips was (in case he did not happen to be laughing) an acute
angle of 1^{_um_}, and formed with the sharp nose the order-sign and
order-cross, which satirical people often wear;--his broad forehead
arched itself to a radiant and roomy choir of a spiritual rotunda,
wherein a _Socratic_ equally, illuminated soul dwells, though neither
this brightness nor that brow consort with _inborn_ wild tenacity,
though they do with that which is acquired;--his fancy, that great
prize, had, as often happens, no lottery-device on his face;--his eyes,
colored like Neapolitan agate, spoke and sought a loving heart; his
soft, white face contrasted, like court with war, against Flamin's
brown, elastic countenance, which served as the ground for the two
glowing cheeks.--For the rest, Flamin's soul was a mirror which flamed
under the sun from only a single point; but on Victor's several
powers were ground out into flashing facettes. Clotilda had all this
tinder-box and these sulphuric mines of temperament in common with her
brother; but her reason covered all up. The rushing blood-stream, which
with him dashed from rock to rock, glided along with her still and
smooth through flowery meadows.
I should be glad to see it, if he were to renew again with the Regency
Councillor the treaty of friendship: I should then get to describe his
Whitsuntide journey to Maienthal, which perhaps is the Septleva[77] and
the best thing to which the human understanding has yet attained. But
nothing will come of this Septleva, unless they make peace again; by
the side of every flower in Maienthal, by the side of every delight,
the grief-worn face of his friend would appear and ask, "Canst thou be
so happy, while I am so far from it?"
It were a wiser course, if both were monks or courtiers; then they
might be expected, as friendship is the _marriage_ of souls, to remain
continent in a _celibacy_ of souls....
Just at the very conclusion of this chapter the dog brings the new one,
and I simply weave both together and go on:--
Without any remarkable vexation at the delay of the answer from
Maienthal, Victor went alone on the 4th of May to St. Luna, and with
every step that brought him nearer, his soul grew more soft and
placable.--When he arrived:----
There are in every house days, which were forgotten in the
Litany,--cursed, devilish, deused days,--when all goes criss-cross,--when
everything scolds and growls and wags its tail,--when the children and
the dog dare not say, Pugh![78] and the liege-and-manor-lord of the house
slams-to all the doors and the house-mistress draws the bass-register
of moralizing,[79] and strikes the silvery tone of dishes and the bunch
of keys,--when one does nothing but hunt up old grievances, all
forest-offences of mice and moths, broken parasols and fan-sticks, and
that the gunpowder and the perfume-powder, and the elegant note-paper
have become damp, and that the sausage-sledge is worn out by sitting to
a wooden hobby-horse, and that the dog and the sofa are shedding
hair,--when everything comes too late, everything is roasted to death,
everything is over-boiled, and the chamber-donna sticks the pins into
my lady's flesh as into a doll,--and when, after they have, in this
_scurvy sickness where nothing is the matter_, vexed themselves to their
hearts' content without cause, they become good-natured again without
cause.----
When Victor arrived at the parsonage, he heard the birthday hero of the
day, the parson, lecturing and screaming in his study. Eymann was
pouring out his holy spirit into the long ears of his catechumens, into
whom no fiery tongues were to be got. He had in hand a female dunce
from a hermitage (a solitary house in the woods), and was trying to
explain to her the distinction between the loosing-key and the
binding-key. Nothing, however, could be done with her: the chaplain and
the convert had already spent a half-hour over the school-time with the
explanation; the dunce was constantly confounding the keys, as if she
were a--_lady of the world_. The chaplain had set his head upon
illuminating hers;--he set before her every consideration that might
have moved iron-wood and iron-stone,--his birthday festival of to-day,
the embittering of the general joy, the surplus half-hour,--in order to
persuade her, that she must comprehend the difference,--she did not,
she could not see it;--he condescended to entreaties and said: "Jewel,
Lamb, Beast, daughter penitent, understand it, I beseech thee,--do thy
spiritual shepherd the pleasure of repeating to him the extraordinary
difference between binding- and loosing-keys. Am I not dealing fairly
with thee?--But my office as parson requires of me not to let thee go
like a cow, without knowing a key.--Only take courage and just say
after me, word for word, dearly-bought christian beast."--She did so at
last, and when she had done, he said joyfully, "Now thou pleasest thy
teacher, and attend further."--Out of doors she recapitulated it
all, and had comprehended it all very well, except that instead of
"Bind- und Löse-Schlüssel" (keys) she always caught it "Bind- und
Löse-_Schüssel_" (dishes).--
The three-twins had a miserable plan of not coming till after
dinner.--The soul of the red Appel was exhaling for this very occasion
a wild-game flavor, and smelt like burnt milk-porridge, and complained
that she alone had all the labor on her shoulders, and when Agatha
offered to fly to her assistance, she said: "I can do it, thank God! as
well as thou!" The Regency-Councillor had arrived, but unfortunately
had run out into the fields again till dinner-time,--Agatha's face had
been crystallized into a rock-cellar by the coldness of her brother
towards Victor,--only the parson's wife was the parson's wife; not
merely one mother-country, but one breath of love linked her heart to
his, and it was impossible for her to be angry with him. She loved a
maiden, if he praised her; had she been without a husband, she would
have been either his love-letter-writer or his letter-carrier.
--Thus do women love--without measure! often, too, they hate in the
same way.--To this my correspondent adds further, that he could draw
from the watering-village a whole protocol of depositions in evidence
that the Parson's wife not merely always, but even on the present
Ventose and Pluviose[80] day, was able to endure and live through it
with the unvarnished composure of a Christian woman, if any one let
anything fall, a cup or a word. For such a state of mind,--for apathy
under the present, entire loss of a soup-tureen, or rinsing-bowl, or
fruit-dish,--there is needed perhaps as much health as reason.
--At last in the evening, the Page came in and said, Flamin was still
in the garden. Victor received it, as if it were said to him, and went
out carrying his oppressed heart to meet another troubled one: Flamin
he found in an embowered nook staring up with all his eyes at the
wax-image of the rejected friend; Victor's heart moved heavily as if
through tears in his overladen breast. Flamin's face was covered, not
with the panoply of wrath, but with the funeral veil of sorrow. For
here in the foreground of a bright, warm youth, as it were on the
classic soil of a former, irreplaceable love, he became too warm and
too tender,--in the village he revoked his hardness in the city,--and
what was still more, only friends of his friend, only affectionate
eulogies on the despised darling, overwhelmed and warmed his
impoverished heart, and he could here still more easily excuse than
spare him. Victor welcomed him with the soft voice of a subdued heart,
but he only half spoke either his thoughts or his words. Victor gazed
deep down into the soul which mourned for friendship; for only a heart
sees a heart; so only the great man sees great men, as one sees
mountains only from mountains. He held it therefore as no sign of
resentment, when Flamin slowly walked away from him; but he must needs,
left so alone there, turn away his eyes from the consecrated corner of
the garden, where their friendship had once opened its blossoms, and
from the sacrificial bower where he had interceded with his father for
Flamin's and Clotilda's union, and from the high observatory, the Tabor
of friendship's transfiguration, from all these burial-places of a
fairer time he must needs avert his eyes, in order to endure the poorer
present. But that which he would not look upon, he represented so much
the more vividly to his mind.
Now the Vesper-bell extended its melancholy vibrations even to the
hearts of men,--past times sent the tones, and the evening-lamentations
sank like ardent entreaties into the souls of the sundered friends: "O
be reconciled and walk together! Is then life so long that men may
venture to be angry with each other? Are then good souls so numerous,
that they can fly from each other? O these tones have floated around
many a heap of the ashes of mortality, around many a stiffened heart
full of love, around many closed lips full of fury,--O transitory
creatures, love, love each other!"--Victor followed willingly (for he
wept) after his friend, and found him standing by the bed whereon
Eymann caused the F of his name to grow green on the cole-rape-plants,
and he was silent, because he knew that for all _sympathetic_ cures
_silence_ is needed. O, such an hour of deepening silence, when friends
stand beside each other like strangers, and compare the silence with
the old outpouring, has too many heart-stings, and a thousand smothered
tears, and for words sighs!
Victor, so near to his friend, and as during the talking his better
soul, like nightingales during concerts, grew louder and louder, would
fain, from minute to minute, have fallen upon that noble face, on those
lips rounded for the kiss of reconciliation,--but he started back at
the thought of the recent repulse. He saw now how Flamin stepped
farther and farther into the bed, and slowly trod down the heart leaves
of the cole-rape, and crushed them asunder; at last he observed that
this trampling out of the blooming name was merely the dumb language of
disconsolateness, which wanted to say: "I hate my tormented self,
and I could crush it as I do my name here: for whom should it stand
here?"--This snatched blood from Victor's heart and from his eye tears
which had been brushed away, and he took gently the long withdrawn
hand, to lead him away from the suicide of his name. But Flamin turned
his quivering face side-wise toward the waxen shadow of his friend and
rigidly crooking his head away stared up at it.--"Best Flamin!" said
Victor with the tone of the deepest emotion, and pressed the burning
hand. Then Flamin tore it out of his, and with his two fists pressed
back the tear-drops into his eyes, and breathed loud,--and said in a
choked voice, "Victor!" and turned round with great tears and said in a
still more muffled tone, "Love me again!"--And they rushed into each
other's arms, and Victor answered, "For ever and ever do I love thee,
thou hast indeed never offended me"; and Flamin, glowing and dying,
stammered, "Only take my beloved, and remain my friend."--For a long
time Victor could not speak, and their cheeks and their tears united
burned on each other, till at last he was able to say: "O thou! O thou!
thou noble man! But thou art in error somewhere!--Now will we forsake
each other no more, now will we remain so forever.--Ah, how
inexpressibly shall we _one day_ love each other, when my father
comes!"
At this moment the Parson's wife, who was perhaps anxious about both,
came to call them in, and Flamin in his softened mood honored her,
which he seldom did, with a filial embrace; and from four eyes swollen
with weeping she read with delight the renewal of their imperishable
covenant.
Nothing moves man more than the spectacle of a reconciliation; our
weaknesses are not too dearly purchased by the hours of their
forgiveness, and the angel, who should never feel wrath, must envy the
mortal who conquers it.--When thou forgivest, then is man who inflicts
wounds on thy heart the sea-worm that drills through the shell of the
mussel, which closes the openings with pearls.
This reconciliation drew after it one with fortune, as it were,--the
_Brumaire_-evening became a _Floréal_[81] evening,--the three-twins ate
of the remains of Appel's roasted glory,--the Parson had nothing to do
any longer with any other keys than the loosing-keys, the spiritual
music-keys,--and the birthday feast had bloomed out into a feast
of the covenant, an opposition club, where all, but in a higher sense
than that of Quakers and merchants, called each other _friend_. The
three-twins delivered old-British speeches, which only freemen could
understand. Victor wondered at the universal frankness before such a
stinging gad-fly as Matthieu,--but the Englishmen cared for nothing.
The Parson sent off heart-felt prayers, and said: "He, for his part,
took little notice of what they did, and only begged them to harangue
more softly, that he might not get the name of allowing pietistic
conventicles in his parsonage; meanwhile he relied entirely upon
Messrs. the Court-Physician and the Court-Page, who would certainly
insure him against a fine; otherwise he would not let wife and son join
in the conversation." The Parson's wife preferred reminiscences of her
free native land to the best calumnies and fashions. Victor must needs
to-day keep his promise of putting his Republican Orthodoxy beyond
question; and as he gave the same in our hearing, we will also help see
how he keeps it, and whether he is an old-Briton.
He imitated mostly the style which he had last read or--as
to-day--heard; therefore he spoke in the sententious manner of the
burning-cold Englishman of the three.
"No state is free but that which loves itself; the measure of
patriotism is the measure of freedom. What, then, is now this Freedom!
History is the _Place La-Morgue_[82] where every one seeks the dead
kinsmen of his heart: ask the mighty dead of Sparta, Athens, and Rome,
what freedom is! Their perpetual festival days, their games, their
eternal wars, their constant sacrifices of property and life, their
contempt of riches, of trade, and of mechanics, cannot make the
fiscal prosperity of a country the goal of freedom. But the logical
despot must assiduously promote the material well-being of his
negro-plantation. The tyranny or the mildness, the injustice or the
virtue of an individual, constitute so little the distinction between a
servile and a free form of government, that Rome was a slave under the
Antonines, and free under Sulla.[83]--Not every Union, but the object
of the Union, not the uniting under common laws, but the import of
those laws, give the soul the wings of patriotism; for otherwise every
Hansa, every trade-league, were a Pythagorean Society and would create
Spartans. That for which man gives blood and goods must be something
higher than either;--not in defence of his own life and property
has the good man so much valor as he has when he contends for
another's;--the mother risks nothing for herself and everything for her
child;--in short, only for what is nobler than self in himself, for
virtue, does man open his veins and offer his spirit; only the
Christian martyr names this virtue _Faith_, the Barbarian, _Honor_, the
Republican, _Freedom_.
"--Take ten men, shut them up in ten different islands: neither of them
(I have not selected cosmopolites) will love or defend either of the
others, if he meets him in his canoe, but will merely, like an innocent
uncultivated beast, let him pass unharmed. But throw them together on
_one_ island,[84] then they will make mutual conditions of living
together, of common defence, &c., i. e. laws; now they have
more frequent enjoyment of use and right, consequently of their
personality, which distinguishes them from mere tools, consequently of
their freedom. Before, on their ten islands, they have been rather
_unrestrained_ than _free_. The more the objects of their laws rise in
dignity, the more they see that law concerns the inner man more than
the rubbish heap it protects, right more than property, and that the
noble man fights for his goods, his rights, his life, not on account of
their importance, but on account of his own dignity.--I will look at
the matter on another side, in order to defend the proposition with
which I began the discourse. When a people hates its constitution,
then the object of its constitution, i. e. of its union, is lost.
Love of the constitution, and love for one's fellow-citizens as
fellow-citizens, are one. I start with this principle: If all men were
wise and good, then they would be all alike consequently friendly. As
that is not so, accordingly Nature makes up for this goodness by
similarity of motives, by community of object, by living together, &c.,
and by these bonds--of connubial, of brotherly and sisterly and of
friendly affection--holds our smooth, slippery hearts together at
different distances. Thus she educates our heart to the higher warmth.
The State gives it a still greater, for the citizen loves the man even
more in the citizen, than the brother loves him in the brother, the
father in the son. The love of country is nothing but a restricted
cosmopolitan love; and the higher philanthropy is the philosopher's
enlarged patriotism for the whole earth. In my younger years the mass
of men was often painful to me, because I felt myself incapable of
loving 1000 millions at once; but the heart of man takes more into
itself than his head, and the better man must needs despise himself, if
his arms should reach only round a single planet...."
* * * * *
--Now, as in a drama, I set only the names of the players before their
remarks. The coldly-philosophical _Balthazar_: "Then must the whole
earth become one day a single state, a universal republic; Philosophy
must approve wars, misanthropy, in short all possible contradictions to
morality, so long as there are still two states. There must one day be
a national convention of Humanity; the kingdoms are the
municipalities."
_Matthieu_: "We are only just living now, then, in the 11th of October
and a little in the 4th of August."[85]
_Victor_: "We see, like David, our Solomon's Temple only in dreams, and
in our waking hours the tabernacles of the Covenant; but it were a
sorrowful philosophy which should require nothing of men but what they
had hitherto rendered without philosophy. We must fit reality to the
ideal, not the reverse."
The ardently-philosophical _Melchior_: "Most modern movements are only
the starts of one sleeping under the ear-wig[86] and grasping at his
bloody scalp.--But the falling stalactite of regentship forms at last
with its drops one column with the ascending stalagmite of the people."
_Flamin_: "But do not Spartans imply Helots, Romans and Germans Slaves,
and Europeans Negroes?--Must not always the prosperity of the whole be
based upon individual victims, just as one class must devote itself to
tilling the soil, that another may apply itself to knowledge?"
_Cato_ the elder: "Then I spit on _the whole_ if I am the victim, and
despise myself if I am the whole."
_Balthazar_: "It is better that the whole suffer voluntarily for the
sake of a single member, than that he should against his just vote
suffer for the whole."
_Matthieu_: "Fiat justitia et pereat mundus."
_Victor_: "In plain English: the greatest physical evil must be
preferred to the least moral evil, the least unrighteousness."[87]--
_Melchior_: "The physical inequality of men produced by nature no more
excuses any political inequality than pestilence does murder, or a
failure of crops corn-monopoly. But inversely political equality must
be the very compensation for the want of physical. In a despotic state
enlightenment as well as prosperity may be greater in inward contents,
but in the free state it is greater in outward contents, and is
distributed among all; for freedom and enlightenment reciprocally beget
each other."--
_Victor_: "As unbelief and tyranny do. Your assertion shows to nations
two ways, one slower, but more just, and one which is neither. Wild
clutchings at the _dial plate-wheel_ of Time, which is turned by a
thousand little wheels, dislocate more than they expedite it; often
they break off its teeth.[88] Hang thy own weight on the _weight_ of
the clock-work, which drives all the wheels; i. e. be wise and
virtuous, then wilt thou be, at the same time, great and innocent, and
be building up the city of God, without the mortar of blood, and
without the stone blocks of death's-heads."--
Here we strike the bell that closes this political sermon, during which
Victor, despite his Socratic continence and moderation, made all these
wild heads friends of his own. With Matthieu alone jest was the only
object, to which he turned everything serious, instead of the reverse.
He had in a characteristic degree that shamelessness of rank, at the
same time to commit and to ridicule certain follies, to seek and to
despise certain fools, and to avoid and praise at once certain
philosophers. Wherever he could, he covered the good Prince of
Flachsenfingen with satirical cockle-buttons[89] which he threw at him,
and showed hostility to the husband, which is generally the sign of too
great a friendship for the wife. Thus he said to-day in reference to
Jenner's or January's _penchants_, which contrasted with those of the
month and saint from which he derived his name: "For the St. Januarius
in Puzzolo[90] a fish was the Dr. Culpepper."--
I confess, I have, during the whole session of the Club, again had the
freakish thought, which, wild as it is, I have often before been unable
to drive out of my head,--for it is, to be sure, a little confirmed by
the fact that, like an atheist, I know not whence I am, and that with
my French name, Jean Paul, I was impelled by the most wondrous
accidents to a German writing-desk, on which I one day will copiously
report them to the world,--as I was saying, I hold it myself to be a
folly, my sometimes getting the conceit in my head, that it is possible
since thousand-fold examples of the kind are extant in Oriental
history--that I might be actually the unknown son of a Kniese[91] or
Shah, or something of the sort, that was trained for the throne, and
from whom they concealed his noble birth the better to educate him. The
very entertaining of such an idea is of itself folly; but so much is
nevertheless correct, that the examples are not to be erased from
universal history, in which many a one, even to his twenty-eighth
year,--I am two years older,--knew not a word of it, that an Asiatic or
some other throne awaited him, wherefrom he afterward, when he came to
it, wielded a magnificent sway. But let it be assumed I was changed
from a Jean Lack-land to a John With-land,--I should go forthwith to
the billiard-room, and tell everybody whom he had before him. Were one
of my subjects there joining in the game, I should forthwith govern him
on the spot; and if it were a female subject, without scruple. I should
proceed with considerateness, and invest only subjects from my
billiard-shire with the weightier offices, because the Regent must be
acquainted with him whom he appoints, which, as is well known, he can
best become at the gaming-tables. I would strictly command my vassals
and all by a general _règlement_ for all times to be happy and
well-off, and whoever was poor, him I would put as a punishment on
half-pay; for I think, if I interdicted poverty so emphatically,
it would come at last to be the same as if Saturn and I ruled
together.--Like a Sultan in his harem, so I in my state, would desire
no physical mutes or dwarfs, but, as occasion required, moral ones.--I
confess, I should have a peculiar predilection for geniuses, and should
appoint to all, even the wretchedest places, the greatest heads. I
should fear nothing (enemies excepted) but dropsy on the brain, of
which a crowned or mitred head must always be in an agony of dread, if,
like me, it has read in Dr. Ludwig's, or else in Tissot's, treatises on
the nerves, that it comes on at first with close bindings around the
head, which I should fear still more from my crown, especially if the
head which was forced into it was _thick_ and _it_ was _tight_....
We come back to the story. The next day Victor and Flamin, in the fair,
newly assumed bonds of the covenant of friendship, returned to
Flachsenfingen. Now could Victor enter through the heavenly gates
of Maienthal, if Clotilda did not bolt them. All depended on
Emanuel's answer. The May-airs breathed, the May-flowers exhaled, the
May-trees rustled. O how this fanning kindled the longing to enjoy
all these blisses in Maienthal, and to get from his friend the
admission-ticket to the finest concert-hall of nature. None came; for
it had already--come through the Bee-father Lind of Kussewitz, who as
feudal-postilion had been sent by Count O. to Matthieu, and had taken
the route through Maienthal. It was from Emanuel:--
"Horion!
"Come sooner, beloved! Hasten to our valley of Eden, which is a
summer-house of nature, with green-growing walls between nothing but
avenues running out of heaven into heaven. The light, flowery hours
move by before the eye of man as the stars do before the optic tube of
the astronomer. Blossom-snares of honeysuckle are laid for thee, and
covered with fragrances; and when thou art caught in them, the
up-welling incense envelops thee in a cloud, and unknown arms press
through the cloud, and draw thee to three hearts full of love! I have
already taken up lilies of the valley out of the wood, and planted them
near me.--Thy city is indeed also a wood around thee, still lily of the
valley! I have already transplanted two balsamines and five summer
carnations; but my first transplanted Balsamine was Clotilda. Thou
seest how spring, with its exuberant, swelling juices, penetrates
through my budding soul also, and May splits open therein, as I am now
doing on the carnations, all the buds.--Appear, appear, ere I become
melancholy again, and then tell thy Julius who the angel was that
handed him the letter for me.
"EMANUEL."
Julius had probably thought on this occasion of that other letter
which a hitherto unknown angel had given him to unseal on this
Whitsuntide.--But what have I to do here with angels and letters? Write
by courier is what I will now do, that so I may have got through the
32d Chapter before the dog appears with his 33d Whitsuntide Chapter,
which, not merely because it has thirty-two ancestral chapters, but on
account of the probable effusion therein of a holy spirit of joy,
or on account of a whole dove-flock of holy spirits, and on account of
the historic pictures it will contain,--and by reason of my own
exertions,--must be (it is believed) a chapter like which in each
Dionysian[92] period hardly half a one, and in each Constantinopolitan
hardly a whole one, can be written.--The Whitsuntide dog-day may turn
out long, but it will be good and divine,--Philippine will shake her
brother and say (she loves to flatter): "Paul! St. Paul was _also_ in
the third heaven, but he never described it like this in his Epistle to
the Romans!" I myself could wish that I might read my 33d dog-day
before I had made it....
The much in little which, with my previous haste, I have still to throw
out, is, according to the gourd-documents, this: Victor set his heart
full as much as I do on the Whitsuntide-gospels. His conscience placed
not the thinnest pasture-bars, not the lowest boundary-stone, in the
way of his enjoyment, and he could go like an innocent pleasure to the
beloved Clotilda, and say to her, Accept me. He paid now his farewell
and professional visits regularly at court, and cared nothing for any
word full of human caustic, or any eye full of basilisk's poison. He
redoubled his fairer visits to Flamin, in order to reward his noble
reconciliation with a warmer friendship, and he stamped upon the past
history and on the subject of jealousy the privy-seal of forbearing
silence. His dreams did not, to be sure, on their stage full of
shadow-plays and airy apparitions, present Clotilda's form (the most
loved faces are just those dream denies), but by conducting him into
the old, dark, rainy months, when he was again unhappy and without love
and without the dearest soul, they gave him by means of the rained-out
night a brighter day, and redoubled melancholy became redoubled
love.--And when in the morning after such dreams of the past dream he
walked out through the May-frost, and by the swollen joy-drops of the
vine-leaves, and under the morning wind, which rather wafted than
cooled him, in order to touch with his yearning eyes as precious
relics the fixed western woods, which hung a green curtain before the
opera-stage of his hope,----a reviewer, who shall put himself in my
place, cannot possibly expect me with this shortness of time, and in my
extra post-coach to the carriage of Phœbus (now in the shorter
days), to give this long antecedent member of the period its
conclusion.
Even the perpendicular climax of the barometer, and the horizontal
streams of the east wind, swelled the sails of his hope, and wafted him
into the silent sea of the Whitsuntide-future, and into the Almanach of
1793, to see whether the moon fulled on Whitsuntide.--By Heaven, it
will at least be half full, which is much better still, because one
will have it at hand in the middle of heaven when one is about to begin
his evening....
I have, after all, by extraordinary racing, brought matters so far,
that I have done with the 32d dog-post-day before Spitz with his goblet
of joy on his neck has made his way across the Indian Ocean.--And as,
besides, according to the _capitulatio perpetua_ with the reader, (at
which, notoriously, the benches of princes and cities bite the dust,) I
must now make an Intercalary Day: I will spend the Dog's vacation in
that way; but I earnestly beg all my day-electors, those of my
subscribers who have hitherto skipped across the Intercalary Days on
the leaping-pole of the index-finger, not to do it in this case, first,
because I agree to be shot, if in this Intercalary Day I in the least
exercise my intercalary-day privilege, though confirmed under several
governments, of delivering the wittiest and weightiest matters,--and,
secondly, because the dog even on the Intercalary day may run
into port, and bring me facts which I may serve up not in the 33d
Dog-post-day, but already in the----VIIIth _Intercalary day_, or in the
VIIIth _Sansculottide_.--The contents of this, like the present, are a
rambling overture to the Future.--
I must say, if, in the first place, as Bellarmin (the Catholic champion
and contradictor) asserts, every man is his own Redeemer,--whence
follows, in my judgment, that he is also his own Eve and serpent for
his old Adam,--if, secondly, the pen of an extraordinarily good author
is the snuffers of truth, just as, inversely, to Herr von Moser in
prison the snuffers were a pen,--if, thirdly, Despotism may at last,
instead of the living tree-stems (for it saws right into the world as
if blind,) saw into the throne-saw-horse itself,--further, I must say,
if, fourthly, every action (even the worst) has, like Christ, two
unlike genealogies,--if in fact, fifthly, one and another reviewer
carries his critical eye, wherewith he surveys everything, not on the
apex of his skull (as Mahomet's saints are said to, in order not to see
_beauties_), nor, like Argus, before and behind, but actually in front,
under the stomach, over the gut, in the midst of the navel; if this
man, in addition thereto, possesses no other heart than the linen one
which the seamstress has stitched in the corner of the shirt-frill, and
which lies over the pit of the heart, which one would call more
sensibly the pit of the stomach,--finally I must say (at least I can do
so), if, in the sixth place, true coherence, strict _concatenation_ of
paragraphs, is perhaps the greatest ornament and soul of the so-called
_unbound discourse_, or prose, which, however, is like a _bound_
harpsichord, and if, therefore, the sense, like an epic action, must
begin at the end of the (rhetorical and temporal) period, because
otherwise there would not be any at all....
--But neither will there be any to come.--These four points, however,
look like the _hare's tracks_ in the snow.--In short: the Pomeranian
dog, my biographical hod-bearer and forwarder, is already lying under
the table, and has discharged some Elysian fields and heavenly
kingdoms.--As, besides, I did not wholly know in the above paragraph
what I was after (I hope not to sit a well man before the public, if I
knew)--accordingly the dog did me a true labor of love in actually
biting off, so to speak, the tail, or second member. It was, besides,
my plan merely to make caprioles in a period of an ell's length until
the dog should have removed my anxiety about the doubtfulness of the
Whitsuntide journey.--In fact, I never wanted to lay out words and
thoughts together, but to save the _latter_, while I spent the
_former_; Peutzer wrote long ago to the men of Ratisbon and Wetzlar,
Many thoughts need a small stream of words, but the greater the brook
is, so much the smaller can be the mill-wheel.--An honest reviewer is
offended also by a laconic book if only for this reason, (not merely
that the public does not understand it but) because a German has in the
jurists and theologians the very best models before him for writing
prolixly, and indeed with a diffuseness which perhaps--for the thought
is the soul, the word the body--establishes among _words_ that higher
friendship of men, which, according to Aristotle, consists in this,
that _one_ soul (one thought) inhabits several bodies (words) at
once.----
--I now begin Victor's vigils, the holy eve of Whitsuntide. It was
already Saturday,--the wind (like the sciences) came from the
east,--the quicksilver in the barometer-tube (as it does to-day in my
nervous-tubes) almost leaped out at the top.--Flamin had parted in
peace with his friend on Friday, and was not to return for five
days.--Victor will to-morrow, on the first day of Whitsuntide, sally
forth before the sun, in order to come back again on the third, when he
alights in America.--(I wish he would stay longer.)--It is a fine
_blue-Monday_[93] in the soul (every blue day is one), and a fine
dispensation from the mourning of life, when one (like my hero) has the
good fortune on a holy even-tide, during the tolling for prayers, and
when the moon is already up above the houses, to sit tranquil and
innocent in Zeusel's balcony in the presence of the prospects of the
fairest Whitsuntide-days and the fairest Whitsuntide-faces, to take a
first cut of all the preparatory dishes of hope, to gather all the
bosom-roses and signs of the fairest morning, and, amidst the noisy
booth-preludes to the Festival, to read the second part of the
_Mumien_[94] precisely in the Sectors of joy in which I sketch
my own and Gustavus's entrance into the heavenly Jerusalem at
Lilienbad.----All this, as was said, my hero had....
But when he who found out so much affinity between his
Whitsuntide-journey and that journey to the watering-place in the book,
came at last with his agitated soul to the destruction of that
Jerusalem; then, with the first sad sigh of to-day, he said: "O thou
good Destiny, never lay such a sacrificial knife on the heart of my
Clotilda; ah, I should die, if she became so unhappy as Beata."--And he
further reflected how the ruddy morning clouds of hope are only high,
hovering rain, and how often sorrow is the bitter kernel of rapture,
like the golden Imperial Apple of the German Emperor, which, to be
sure, weighs three marks and three ounces, but inwardly is filled up
with earth....
By Heaven! we are here needlessly embittering with night-thoughts the
holy evening, and none of us knows why he sighs so.--I assure the
reader I have the whole Whitsuntide-festival before me in copy, and
there is not a single misfortune there, unless Victor joins on a fourth
Whitsuntide-day as after-summer, and in that there should something be
developed. I confess I like to be an æsthetic _frère terrible_, and to
point the sword at the breast of the world, which is reading deep into
my Invisible (mother) Lodge, and play other like tricks,--but that
comes from the fact that in youth one reads and owns the Sorrows of
Werther, of which, like a mass-priest, one prepares a bloodless victim
before one enters the Academy. Nay, if I this very day were composing a
romance, I should--as the blue-coated Werther has in every young
Amoroso and author a quasi-Christ who on Good-Friday puts on a similar
crown of thorns, and ascends a cross--myself also do the same over
again....
But it is time I opened my Maienthal, and let every one in. Only I will
no longer make a mystery of it that I am minded to present outright
this whole Paphos and knightly seat to the reader, as Louis XI. cast
the Duchy of Boulogne at the feet of the Holy Mary. I think thereby to
tower, perhaps, above other writers, who bestow only their quills upon
their readers, full as much as the king does above old Lipsius, who
made over to Mary only his silver-pen. In the beginning I meant
to retain for myself this Elysium with thrice-mowed meadows and
pine-groves, because I am in fact a poor devil, and really have no more
income than a Prince of Wurtemberg formerly, namely ninety florins
Rhenish of appanage-money, and ten florins for a coat of state, and
because, as to the two square miles of land set off to me by God and
equity,--for so much does the whole earth at an equal division,
according to a good plan, lay off to each man,--verily I make so small
account of that, that I would gladly give up my two miles to any one
for a miserable sheepfold.--And what most kept me back from making this
presentation of my Maienthal to living men, was the fear that I should
turn over a _feudum_ to people, readers, provincial deputies, who are
possessed of a thousand times greater palatinates and patrimonial
estates, and whom one would provoke, if one should make them resemble
the holy Mary, who from a Queen of Heaven became a Duchess of Boulogne,
or the Roman Emperor who must on the day of his coronation become at
the same time a member of the Order of Mary at Aachen.
But what then can all their _majorats_,--their Teutonic-knights'
estates,--their mesne-tenures,--and their _patrimonia Petri_ (an
allusion to _my patrimonium_ PAULI),--and their grandfathers' estates
and all their cargoes stowed into the ship of earth,--in short, their
European possessions on the earth,--what, I say, can all these Dutch
farms yield, in the way of products, that could stand even at a
distance before those of Maienthal? And do there grow on their
crown-estates heavenly blue days, evenings full of blissful tears,
nights full of great thoughts? No, Maienthal bears loftier flowers than
those which cattle pluck off, fairer apples of the Hesperides than are
laid up in fruit-cellars, super-terrestrial treasures on subterranean
rival-pieces to Eden, like Clotilda and Emanuel, and all that our
dreams paint and our tears of joy bedew.--
And this is just my excuse, if I deny the Maienthal domain of joy to a
thousand rival claimants, if I as its fee-provost cannot invest with
this Swabian reversionary fief such people as are not fit for a proper
_feudum_, morally blind, lame, minors, eunuchs, &c.--And here I must
make myself many enemies, when, from among the vassals and joint
subjects of investiture to whom Maienthal, with all its poetic
privileges, is given in fee, I expressly exclude old gabblers who can
no longer make the _knight's leap_ of fancy,--forty-seven inhabitants
of Scheerau and one hundred of Flachsenfingen, whose hearts are as cold
as their knee-pans, or as dogs' noses,--the greatest ministers and
other grandees, in whom, as in _great_ roasted lumps of meat, only the
middle is still raw, namely the heart,--one half billion economists,
jurists, exchequer and finance-counsellors, and plus- i. e.
minus-makers,[95] in whom the soul, as in Adam's case the body, was
kneaded out of a clod of earth, who have a pericardium [or heart-bag],
but no heart, cerebral-membranes without brain, shrewdness without
philosophy, who, instead of the book of nature, read only their papers
for law-cases and their tax-books,--finally, those who have not fire
enough to kindle at the fire of love, poetry, religion, who for _weep_
say _blubber_, for _poetry_, _rhyme_, for _sentiment_, _craziness_....
Am I then crazy that I work myself up here into such a rage, as if I
had not before me on the other side the finest college of readers,
which I am promoting to the _primus adquirens_ of the freehold and
apron-string-hold of Maienthal; a mystical, moral person, who
discerns that utility is only an inferior beauty, and beauty a higher
utility?--It is peculiar to all emotions (but not to opinions) that one
thinks he alone has them. Thus every youth holds his love to be an
extraordinary celestial phenomenon which has been only once in the
world, as the star of love, the evening star, often looks like a comet.
But the world is not all Flachsenfingenites and Dutchmen, who climb the
Alps less to have great thoughts and elevations than to get
_sedes_,[96] or go to sea, not to throw a poet's glance over the
sublime ocean, but to escape consumption.... but there are everywhere
to be found, in every market-town, on every island, fair souls who rest
in the bosom of nature,--who reverence the dreams of love, though they
themselves have awaked from their own,--who are encased with rough men,
before whom they have to veil their idyllic fantasies about the second
life, and their tears over the first,--who give fairer days than they
receive,--to this whole fair society I finally make a present of the
_Feudum_ of Maienthal, of which there has been already so much talk,
and go in at the head with some friends of both sexes and my sister as
investing fief-provost.
_Postscript_ or autograph bull of dispensation:--The Mining
Superintendent cannot deny that the S. T. author of this biography, by
the fact that the dog is lazy, and that these post-days are more than
commonly voluminous, and that in this chapter he has actually melted
two into one, is sufficiently excused with those who have the right to
ask him why he has not ended the 32d Post-day till the middle of
September or Fructidor. He still sits with his description four months
distant from the history, 1793.
J. P.
33. DOG-POST-DAY.
FIRST WHITSUNTIDE-DAY.
Police-Regulations of Pleasure.--Church.--The Evening.--The
Blooming-Cavern.
Hardly had Victor waked from his sleep, though not from his dreams,
when the low talking of all his thoughts, the Elysian stillness that
pervaded his whole heart, told him that to-day his _Sabbatical weeks_
came on. Without reproach or design of a misstep, without a sigh of his
conscience, he went guilelessly to meet joy and love. The tenderer and
more delicate a flower of joy is, so much the clearer must be the hand
that plucks it, and only cattle pasture can bear filth; just as those
who pick Imperial tea deny themselves beforehand all gross fare, that
they may pluck the fragrant leaf unsoiled.--Victor had, out of doors,
hardly dawn enough to see on his broad hour-watch of Bee-father Lind's
the first hour of his Sabbath; but this watch, the step-marker on the
so beautiful road of the Bee-father's life, and the morning-service of
nature, which consists in stillness, fortified his purpose of prefixing
his present life to the second life after death as a still, cool,
starry spring-morning.
"By you I swear,"--said he, as, by degrees, more and more larks soared
up singing out of their dew into the morning-hora,[97]--"I will even in
joy remain composed for thirty whole years together, at least for
three whole Whitsuntide days,--I will be a university-friend and
house-friend, but not a Wertherish lover of enjoyment.--Does not man
act as if his path of life must be a bridge of connected honey-combs,
through which he has, moth-like, to chew his way, as if his hands were
only sugar-tongs of pleasure?--I will again apply the sportive faculty
as a bridle to my pleasures and my pains. The warm tears of melancholy,
especially those of rapture, a sort of hot vapor which propels and
decomposes more mightily than gunpowder and Papin's[98] machines, I
will indeed shed, but cool them a little beforehand.--And if I do not
get sight of Clotilda every forenoon, I will simply say, A man cannot
be always in the third heaven, he must also sometimes stay over night
in the first."--He has, perhaps, more reason than power; but, it is
true, health of heart is equally removed from hysteric spasms and from
phlegmatic torpor, and rapture borders more nearly on pain than on
tranquillity. But no tranquillity or coolness is worth aught but that
which is _attained_,--man must have at once the _capacity_ and the
_mastery_ of passion. The _freshets_ of the will resemble those of
_rivers_, which for a time muddy all the _springs_; but take away the
rivers, and the springs are gone too.--
The increasing dawn veiled one distant sun, after another; and when at
last the near one had risen, or rather nature, then could Victor see
and read and take my work (the well-known _Mumien_) out of his pocket.
A book was for him, in the midst of free, stimulative nature, a pair of
_garden-shears_ to his wantonly up-shooting dreams and joys. This
morning sparkling with a whole spring, this flashing on all brooks,
this humming out of blossoms into blossoms,--this blue hanging sea,
over which the sun sailed like a Bucentaur,[99] in order to throw on
the bottom of that sea, the earth, the marriage-ring,--such a Present
beside such a Future would even now at the third hour have deprived him
of the strength, in obedience to his new constitution, to rule over his
ecstasy, and to preserve steadily so much repose as is needed for a
_mezzotint_ between a rapturous and a dull day,--I say he would not
have had that power without his biographer, I mean, if he had not had
my book before him, in the second part of which he had still the
schoolmaster Wutz[100] to read. But this learned work--I venture
without self-conceit to flatter myself--set the proper limits to his
rapture. For thus,--as he walked along reading,--(as others, e. g.
Rousseau and I, read while eating, and take a bite now from the plate
and now from the book,)--as he contemplated the life of the
schoolmaster till a new valley or a new wood opened,--as he listened
now to this printed chorister, and now to a living one before whose
Whitsuntide songs he passed by: in this way he could keep his
ideas, with all their rondos and knights'-jumps, in such a fine
ball-room-order and church-discipline, that he was as happy as the Wutz
he was reading of. Besides, I was still crying to him on the stretch
out of my _Mumien_, to be discreet, and to give heed to my little
schoolmaster as a file-leader in the arts of happiness, and to _get the
kernel_ out of every day, every hour. "Besides, I am a reprobate," said
he, "if I do not do it; good God, is not then the very sense of
existence,[101] and the first sweet breakfast after every waking, a
_standing_ enjoyment?"--He reflected, to be sure, that culture gives us
spectacles, and takes away in return the papillæ of the tongue, and
compensates to us for our pleasures by the better definitions of them
(just as the silk-worm, as caterpillar, has _taste_, but no _eyes_,
and, as butterfly, has eyes without taste), he confessed to himself,
indeed, that he had too much understanding to have so much contentment
as the Auenthal schoolman Wutz, and that he philosophized too deeply
besides; but he also insisted upon this: that "a higher wisdom must
nevertheless (because otherwise the all-wise would be necessarily the
_all-unhappy_) find a way again out of the sweltry parterre of the
lecture-room into a parterre of flowers. Lofty men produce, like
mountains, the sweetest honey." ...
Although, even while he was in the last village, the suburbs as it were
of Maienthal, he heard the last tolling, still he was not provoked at
the belated arrival. Nay, to show himself that he was the philosopher
Socrates, he passed on with a diligent increase of slowness, and did
not, like the Athenian, make a libation of the cup of joy, but did not,
in fact, yet fill it up. "Float on," he said to a little cloud formed
of collected lily-pollen, "and be wafted before me in advance over the
_good hearts_, thou pillar of cloud at the entrance of the promised
land!--And may thy little shadow silhouette for them the more fixed
one, which follows more lazily, and which is absorbed later by the blue
of heaven!"--And ere the winding footpath placed him before the
flower-curtained gate of the valley, wherein stood the beloved cradle
and nursery-garden of his fair three-days future, he was arrested by a
closed thistle, around whose sealed honey-cups a white butterfly was
drawing his third parallel,--and the mosaic thistles on Le Baut's floor
started into life before him, and showed him the stings of the past;
then he felt it incomprehensible how he had been able to endure his
sorrows, and easier to bear the heaven of joy....
He took out Lind's watch, in order to know the birth-hour of his
honeymoon or honey-week,--precisely at 11 o'clock he came out before
the neat village, before the green-house of his heaven, before the
colony of his hope, before Eden.... Ah, the murmuring little village
buried in foliage seemed to throw all its blooming twigs, like arms,
around, and knit himself to itself; it was green and white and
red,--not painted, but overspread with leaves and blossoms. And when,
as the ringing died away,--in order avariciously to hoard up for
himself the embrace of his Emanuel, and in order to come upon the
Maienthal church music with a heart opened by Nature,--he stole into
the long, clean village, and ran Friendship's toll for a few minutes at
Emanuel's house, it seemed to him as if his peacefully glad heart in
the still lanes rocked with the birds on the cherry-twigs that latticed
the window-panes, and hovered with the bees in the cherry blossoms.
"Come right in," all seemed to say, "thou good man, we are all happy,
and thou shalt be so too."--He approached the shining church, whose
dazzling stucco flung by contrast upon the blue of the sky a sublime
darkness, and his beating heart trembled blissfully with the waves of
the organ within, and with the rustling birch-tree fixed in the ground
before the church-door, and with the dry May-pole, in the middle of the
village, bowed by the morning-wind....
"But," says my reader, "could then his eye so long deny itself the
fairer prospects, and his heart the more beloved beauty, and, instead
of the Abbey, seek out only the church?"--Oh, he looked after that the
very first thing of all, and his eye ran trembling around all the
windows of his sun-temple; but as he found all of them open and empty,
and all the curtains drawn up, he guessed that its fair conclave of
sisters, and among them the conclave-sister of his heart, were there
where he sought--and found them,--in the temple. He went up unheard,
during the tramping down of the church-goers, into the front-stall of
the nobility, which from without appeared empty, that flower-stand of
the convent-nuns. There was nothing there but dropped birch-leaves; for
the body of nuns and the Abbess and Clotilda stood--below in the
Church, and encircled the altar with a choir of singing angels, and
took the sacrament there.--With a thrill of joy he beheld the queen of
his heaven, the so dearly loved and undeserved, the shining angel,
melting her vestment of earthly snow with heavenly warmth to tears, in
order soon to become invisible.----His spirit bowed itself as she
knelt: "Drink heaven's peace," he said, "out of the sacred chalice of
the great man, among whose thoughts was never a cloud nor a sigh,--and
may the thought which thou now contemplatest with such steadfast
devotion be destined to become more and more luminous and immovable,
like a sun, and always to throw a warm evening-light over the weary
soul!"--This angel in mourning-attire called forth in his inner being
by an awakening of the dead all the virtues of his life and all its
faults, and gave those a heaven and these a hell; he was, therefore,
now too holy to disturb a saint by making his appearance, even
supposing her tranquil eye, absorbed in pious emotions, which did not
so much as fall on the nearer devout beauties to the height of the
waist, had been able to lift itself to him. The birch at the first
window of the loft he kept before him as a leafy fan;--this green veil
playing on his cheeks covered his attentiveness and his tears of joy
from the whole church. The place where he was so happy seemed, to judge
from an inscription on the glass, to have been once the usual stand of
Clotilda; for Giulia's was near by, as I know for certain, because on
the stall-window a G and C, enclosed by a wreath, had been cut in with
the words by Giulia: "Thus are we united by the flowers of life and the
circle of eternity." ...
Victor slipped away unseen and early out of this niche of removed
goddesses, and bore his heart filled with love to the open breast of
friendship,--to Emanuel. He saw already the latter's tabernacle of the
covenant in the temple of Nature,--when his rapture was delayed by one
of earlier date. Julius lay in the blooming grass with its waves
rippling over him, and holding a cherry-twig full of open honey-cups in
his hand, in order to draw the bees to him, and to delight himself with
their murmurous hovering over the blossoms. Victor embraced him, and
forgot in the ecstasy to name his name,--"Art thou my angel?" said
he.--"I am only thy Victor!"--"O come! O come!" said the blind youth,
trembling like a melody, and drew his friend to Emanuel's house; but he
led him, behind the cloud of his blindness, the longer way, and,
besides, he turned round at every fourth step for a renewed embrace.
When they came to the water-wheel, which loudly emptied its
sprinkling-cans on the flower-beds, and whose shivered lightnings
flitted against Emanuel's windows and ceiling, then the blind one said,
"Embrace me once more right heartily."--But amidst the din of the
rain-shower, and amidst the stupefaction of love, they were pressed
together by other arms than their own, and the two young hearts were
linked to a third, and the East Indian gazed like a god of love from
one to the other, and said: "O ye good youths, remain ever thus, and
weep on in your blissful love!--Blessings on thee, my Horion, and a
welcome in the great spring round about us!"--And when Emanuel and
Victor sank on each other's necks, then was it as if all the
flower-beds bowed down for rapture, as if all the waves flamed more
radiantly under super-earthly lightnings flying over them, as if the
zephyrs swelled with sighs of love, as if higher beings must needs
whisper in the over-measure of joy: O ye good human beings, verily ye
love like us!--
An arm out of a river of Paradise lifted and bore this loving trinity
into the leafy rooms, and here, for the first time, Victor saw that the
spring was on Dahore's cheeks and the summer in his eyes, as well as
twelve May months in his heart. The white mourning-roses on his cheeks,
which always seemed to bloom like _mural crowns_ of death against St.
John's-day, had given place to the red ones,--in short, Emanuel's face
gave the hope that he had been, in regard to his death, a false
prophet.--
In this waving apartment, whose golden wall borders were linden-boughs,
and whose splendid tapestries were linden blossoms, and over whose
door, as door-paintings, flickered the reflection and the mock-suns of
the flashing water-wheel, in this four-walled island, surrounded by
Nature's roaring sea of joy, through whose open windows the zephyrs
flung bees and butterflies over the window-flowers among the lindens,
my hero, to whom, besides, the noonday hum of bells appeared like a
ringing call to a peace-festival of the earth, felt himself wading
through flowers of joy up to his heart.--Emanuel's poesy sounded to
him, in this epic intoxication, like prose; he was, as it were, sunk in
a thicket of flowers, and, lifting his eyes, saw overhead a healed
immortal who bent apart the blooming envelopment,--and still higher up
an eternal Whitsuntide sun in the infinite blue,--and nearer above him
the sprouting of the flower-leaves, and above this the swarming of
bees,--and a golden morning-red, wound as a living frame round about
the whole variegated incense-breathing woodland....
--By Heaven! only to lie in a _literal_ flower-wood of this kind were
of itself something,--to say nothing of lying actually in a
_metaphorical_ one!--Victor was devout with joy, still from
overfulness, contented from gratitude. The aspect of their common
teacher gave, it is true, to Clotilda's image warmer colors, and to his
soul higher flames, but imparted to his wishes no insatiableness and no
impatience.
Emanuel immediately began speaking of that beloved pupil of his;
not at all as if Clotilda had clearly described to him the third
Easter-holiday, or as if Emanuel had guessed it, but this guileless man
simply knew not the difference between love and friendship, and he
would have said of himself as well as of Victor, that he loved her. And
just this childlike _naïveté_, which, through the open chamber of a
woman's heart, watched for no right of transit nor for any breaches,
but laid bare his own, and which fished for no confessions, found fault
with none, took advantage of none,--this quality must have been just
what would bind with the Gordian ganglion of sympathy the shyest female
soul to so open a manly one. Nay, I believe Clotilda could more easily
have made known her love to her teacher than to her beloved.--As this
Emanuel now told him how he had pictured to her all the scenes of his
former sojourn here,--and all his raptures,--and his confession of
friendship for her,--how he had read to her his letters, and how the
second (that disconsolate one on the night of the Stamitz concert) had
forced so many tears into her eyes,--and as Victor saw how very much
his friend had by his breathing on it drawn her love open like a
closing tulip-cup,--all this kindled his love for her, his friendship
for him even to devotion, and in a blissful embarrassment he kissed the
blind one. By this double love he now explained to himself Clotilda's
easy consent to his Whitsuntide journey.
He would have held it all Angel's- and a Peter's-fall from friendship,
not to propose directly the question to Emanuel, when he might see this
beloved--of Virtue.--"Now!" said the latter, who, despite his
respectful East-Indian gentleness toward women, knew not the
nose-rings, binding-keys, and dampers of our Harem-decency. But Victor
acted otherwise and yet thought just so. He had already asked when
abroad: "Why do they suffer the wretched police-regulation to stand for
maidens, that they, e. g., must never walk out singly, but always, like
Nuremberg Jews, under the escort of an old crone, or like the monks, in
pairs?" Not as if this would in any manner embarrass me, if I acted a
romance, but that it would, if I wrote one, where I should have to keep
to the female rules-of-march at the expense of the critical, and trail
round with me a convoy of auxiliary-women through the whole book as an
abattis to my heroine. Should I not be obliged, if I would so much as
get her out beyond the house door-steps, to march along beside her
with a crown-guard of female keepers of the seal? Should I not be
obliged by this confounded co-investiture and trading in company with
Virtue--there would be no such thing as doing business on one's own
account--to foist female friends on my heroine contrary to all
probability? I should think hard, to be sure, of a Spanish maiden if
she showed me her foot, and of a Turkish, if she showed me her face,
and of a German, if she went _alone_ to see the best young man; but
just because the most fanatical _blue laws_, which surely are blue
vapor on blue Mondays, become a real moral law for them, therefore am I
vexed at this deplorable pusillanimity, and wish to see nothing
forbidden but--waltzing and falling!... He has here, perhaps,
satire _in petto_; for, to speak seriously of the matter, this
sanitary-ordinance, that maidens must with us, as petitions with
princes, always present themselves in duplicates, has manifestly the
design of accustoming them all to one another, because they must have
each other's friendship for visits;--secondly, brothers and sisters
must be out of each other's hair, because they do not know whether they
shall need each other as collateral securities of their virtue and
second exchange-bills of love;--thirdly, these human ordinances give to
female virtue by the _minor_ moral-service (because great temptations
are too rare) daily exercise in religion, and higher importance, and
bear the same relation as the articles of the Talmud do to the Bible,
although a right Jew would sooner transgress the Bible than the
Talmud;--fourthly, we owe to these symbolic books of propriety the
earlier culture of that female acuteness for which we unhappily furnish
no other opportunities of attention than the oath they swear on those
books affords.
Victor at once blamed and followed, like a good girl, the female rules
of the order; court life had made him more courageous, but also more
refined, and, like the court itself, he was, among women, reconciled
to the writing-lines of the ceremonial. Therefore he purposed not until
the second day of Whitsuntide to make his regular diplomatic appearance
at the Abbess's, since to-day it was too late for anything, and besides
that he would not fly into the sweet, holy emotions over yonder like a
comet. And then too, his contentment told him, indeed, how little the
_neighborhood_ of a loved heart differs from its _presence_, which,
besides, is nothing but a nearer neighborhood.
Meanwhile he mastered himself at least so far as to go out with his
twin-brothers of the heart into the Colosseum of Nature, although he
did not conceal from himself that he should be in dread out there of
meeting Clotilda. And Emanuel lessened this fear but poorly, when he
confessed to him that she had hitherto with her wounded life gone every
day round the ponds as around magnetic healing-tubs, and through the
lawn as through field-apothecaries'-shops.--Hasten forth at last, ye
three good souls, into the Jubilee of Spring, which the Earth
celebrates yearly in memory of Creation. Haste, ere the minutes of your
life, like the broad waves on the two brooks, now still fleeting, and
flashing, and sounding, fly to pieces and extinguish themselves on a
weeping-willow,--haste, ere the flowers of your days and the flowers of
the meadow are veiled by evening, when instead of the vital oxygen they
shall exhale only poisonous air,--and enjoy the first day of
Whitsuntide ere it trickles away!
--And it has trickled away, and a summer already lies upon it to-night
as a grave; but the three dear hearts have hastened and enjoyed it,
before it faded.... They sauntered on among the zephyrs, those
sowing-machines of the flowers, as they came fluttering out of all the
bushes,--they came before the five pocket-mirrors of the sun, the
ponds, (the rivers being pier-mirrors and the gay shores the
pier-tables,)--they saw how Nature, like Christ, conceals her miracles,
but they saw also the bridal torch of the marriage-making May, the sun,
and a bridal chamber in every singing tree-top, and a bridal bed in
every flower-cup,--they, the wedding guests of the earth, turned not
away the bee, who drunk with honey revelled around them, nor did they
scare up the food-bringing mother, before whom the young bird with
trembling wings melted into invisibleness,--and when they had climbed
all the earthly steps of the eternal temple, whose columns are
milky-ways, the sun sank, like the thoughts of men, to meet another
world....
The fountain in the _garden of termination_,[102] which rears itself
half-way down the declivity of the southern mountain and gleams away
high over the mountain, already bore on its thin crystal column
a shaft recast by the evening sun into a ruby, and this glittering,
full-blowing rose contracted itself, like other flowers that had gone
to sleep, to a red point,--and the hanging columns of gnats in the last
beam seemed to say: To-morrow it will be fair again; go back; ah, you
play longer in the sun than we.--
They went back; but when Victor saw the five high white columns at the
western end of the beloved garden blink in the light of evening, his
exalted heart felt a yearning and a burden, and he restrained it not
from sighing: "Good Clotilda! ah, I should be glad indeed to see thee
even to-day; my heart is full of tears of joy over this holy day, and I
would fain pour it out before thee."--And when the whole park of the
Abbey reared itself proudly beside the evening-heaven, and took
possession of their hearts, then all at once said Emanuel,--who was
always like himself even in his raptures,--"I will tell the Abbess this
very day, so that Clotilda may lay up joy for to-morrow," and he
separated from them.... Noble man! thou that in four weeks hopest to
leave this flowery spring and mount to the stars above thee,--thou
thinkest more of immortality than of death,--no threatening Orthodoxy,
but the Indian love of flowers, hath trained thee, hence art thou so
blessed; thou art free from wrath, like every dying man, free from
greed and from anxiety; in thy soul, as at the Pole when every morning
the sultry sun stays away, the _moon_ of the _second_ world never sets
day nor night!--
Victor, alone, led the blind youth home, and both were silent and
embraced each other with brotherly tears behind every screen, and asked
each other neither for the reasons of the embrace nor of the tears.
When they had passed through the still village, and as they came along
by the park of the Abbey, Victor saw his Emanuel pass out of the last
bower into the dazzling convent. It seemed to him as if every one
therein already recognized him, as if he must hide himself. The garden
of inspiration was to be in the valley only the flower-bed in a meadow,
and not violently contrast itself with nature by sharp limits, but hang
over into it softly as a dream into waking hours with blooming,
embowered borders, and flow over into it with hop-gardens, with green
thick-set hedges around corn-fields, and with sowed-over children's
gardens. A large wide colonnade of chestnuts, set in silver by two
brooks, opened broad and free toward the five ponds with their pierced
work of blossoms. The northern mountain lifted itself up over against
the park like a terrace, and seemingly continued the Eden over unseen
valleys.
Victor avoided every opening window of the convent by means of the
chestnut-trees under which he led his blind one, and behind which he
could, unobserved, observe more nearly. On the shed-roof of the avenue
woven of green roof-laths the evening lay like an autumn gleaming
through with red streaks of splendor. He went, despite the danger of
detection, to the very middle, where the avenue divides into two arms;
but here he chose the right arm of the leafy hall, which bent away with
him from the convent, as well as from a nightingale which, in the midst
of the garden, sent out from a consecrated thorn-hedge her young and
her tones. The arbor rendered to him by its softening distances from
the bravura-airs of the feathered Prima Donna the services of a pedal
and lute-stop;--gently was he led on by the windings which the gradual
darkening and narrowing of the alley concealed, through the tones of
the nightingale that floated after him, through the thinner trickling
of the evening rays among the leaves between the two brooks, which now
glided away _inside_ of the chestnut-lane.--The brooks came closer
together and left room only for love.--The portico closed in more
coseyly.--The scattered flowers of the two banks crowded together and
passed over into bushes.--The bushes grew up into a garden wall and
touched each other at first in summits hanging towards each other,
loose and transparent, and at last darkly knit together.--And the
avenue and the arbor which had grown up under it blended their green
together, so as to make with their coinciding blossom-veils only a
single night.--Then in the green twilight was the arbor stopped up by a
web of honeysuckle and nest of blossoms, but five ascending steps
invited to the tearing asunder of the blooming curtain. And when one
parted it, one sank into a blossom-cleft, into a narrow, tangled vault,
as it were into a magnified flower-cup. In this Delphic cave of dreams
the cushion was made of high grass, and the arms of the seat of
blossoming-twigs, and the back of flowers massed together, and the air
of the breath of dusting dwarf-fruit-trees. This flowery Holy of Holies
was peopled only with bees and dreams, illuminated only with white
blossoms; it had for evening-red only the purple of night-violets, for
heaven's blue only the azure of elder-blossoms, and the blest one
therein was lulled only by bees' wings and by the five mouths of the
brooks meeting around him into the slumber in which the distant
nightingale struck the harmonica- and evening-bells of dream....
--And as Victor to-day, beside the blind one, trod the five steps, and
opened the blossom-woven tapestry door of the heaven: lo!--there--O man
beatified this side of death!--reposed a female saint with weeping
eyes, absorbed in Philomela's expiring plaints.... It was thou,
Clotilda, and thou thoughtest of _him_ with softened soul and
heightened love,--and he on thee with reciprocal love! O when two
loving ones meet each other in the _selfsame_ emotion, then and not
till then do they respect the human heart and its love and its
bliss!--Hide not, Clotilda, with any blossoms the tears under which thy
cheeks blush, because they should fall only before solitude! Tremble,
but only for joy, as the sun trembles, when he comes out of a cloud on
the horizon! Cast not down yet thy eye curtained with flowers, which
for the first time falls so calmly opened and with such a stream of
love on the man who deserves thy fair heart, and who rewards all thy
virtues with his own!... Victor was struck with the lightning of joy
and must needs remain immovable in the sweet smile of rapture, when the
beloved rose behind the flower-clouds like the moon behind an Eden
standing in full bloom, and in the womanly transfiguration of love
resembled an angel dissolved into a prayer.
The blind youth knew nothing as yet of the third blessed one. She moved
her hand, in sweet confusion, towards a too thin twig to raise herself
from the deep grass-bench; it seemed to her lover, as if this hand
reached to him out of the clouds of the second life a second heart, and
he drew the hand to himself and sank with his mute, overflowing face
down through the blossom on her throbbing veins. But hardly had
Clotilda bade _both_ a stammered welcome during the coming out from the
green closet, when there appeared to them the angel--Emanuel, who had
hastened from the convent to seek his friend. He said nothing, but
looked on both with a nameless rapture, to find out whether they were
right joyful, and as if to ask, "Are you not, then, now right happy, ye
good souls? do you not, then, love each other inexpressibly?"----Oh,
only a mortal is needed for sympathy in sorrow, but an angel for
sympathy in joy; there is nothing more beautiful than the radiant
Christ's head, on which the laying aside of the Moses' veil shows the
still, glad interest in another's blameless joys, in another's pure
love; and it is quite as godlike (or still more so) to contemplate the
love of others with a mutely congratulating heart, as to have it one's
self.... Emanuel, thy greater praise is kept in kindred souls, but not
on paper!--
On the cross-way of the alley the fair society parted, and the left
branch of the same led Clotilda along by the nightingale back to the
abode of gentle hearts. Victor, dissolved by his heightened love for
three human beings at once, arrived at the dusky apartments of Emanuel,
lighted only by setting stars, and found there a spread table which the
refined Abbess had sent to the guest or to the host, for Emanuel at
evening ate only fruit. One wishes to share everything with one's love,
even the kitchen. Emanuel after Easter never lighted a light. In the
clar-obscure, made of the fusion of lunar silver and linden green, the
blissful trefoil[103] bloomed under the evening star. Victor, by his
professional pictures of the night-cold, put his invalid friend out of
conceit with night-walks, and went alone with the blind one at this
late hour out to the dormitory of hushed Nature.... Blessed is the
evening which is the fore-court of a blessed day. The May-frost had
cleansed the stars from the warm breath of the vapor, and deepened the
blue of the celestial hemisphere, to make a beautiful night the earnest
of a beautiful day. All was silent around the village, except the
nightingale in the garden and the rustling May-chafers, those heralds
of a bright day.--And when Victor went home with an upward sigh of
thanks for these Whitsuntide hours, of which each handed the next the
box of powdered sugar to sweeten the short moments of a still mortal;
as he passed along before the muffled confession-hymns, which here a
twelve-years-old little man who to-morrow was to take the sacrament,
and there one by the side of his mother, sang; and when, finally, a
vesper-hymn breathed out from the Abbey, and, swimming forth as it were
on a single lute-tone, brought the fair day with a swan-song to its
close, and when nothing more was left of the soft day except its
resonance in the heart of the happy one and in the evening song of the
convent, and its reflection in the fleeting evening-red of heaven, and
in the contented and still smiling face of the sleeping Emanuel;--then
did the mute joys in Victor's face look like prayers, the undisturbed
tears like overrunning drops from the cup of gladness, his stillness
like a good deed, and his whole heart like the warm tear of joy shed by
a higher genius.
Victor led the beloved blind one softly to his place of slumber, where
dream restored his disordered eyes and arrayed the little landscapes,
of his childhood, with morning hues, more brightly around him.--He
then laid himself down without undressing himself, opposite to the
moon which hung low above the horizon, and sank to sleep on the
building-ground of our fairer air-castles, on the sounding-board of
childhood, where morning-dreams lead consecrated man out of the
wilderness of day to the mount of Moses, and let him look over into
the dark, promised land of Eternity....
The first Whitsuntide day, dear reader, in this tri-clang of rapture,
has died away; but in these three high festivals of joy, as with those
in the almanac, the second is still fairer, and the third the fairest
of all. I shall not at all hurry with the movement of my pen through
these three heavens,--nay, if I could certainly know that the acting
persons in this history would never get to see my work, I should shift
the boundaries of this Eden, by adding much that, on nearer inspection,
would not prove historically true.--
34. DOG-POST-DAY.
SECOND DAY OF WHITSUNTIDE.
Morning.--The Abbess.--The Water-Mirror.--Dumb Action
for Libel.--The Rain and the Open Heaven.
At two o'clock the morning-wind swept in more loudly and coolly through
Victor's open chamber, and shook already dew-drops from shiny foliage,
and the near whisper of leaves murmured through his ears into his
dreams. The lark, as the overture of the day, flung herself high up
into the gray of heaven, and rang in the morning's feast of trumpets.
This alarmist became in his dreaming the hovering after-echo which
blended with the morning; amidst the soft in-fall of the neighboring
sounds he slowly opened his eyes and dreamed on, and closed them again,
and was more awake, and sleep did not pass off like a thick shroud made
of night, but floated upward like a veil of morning perfume; and his
soul, without making a single movement of the body, opened with the
still awaking of a flower-cup in the presence of the morning....
--Now I am again already at boiling and blazing point,--and yet, as
often as I dip my pen in the ink, I make up my mind to gain the good
graces of the critics, and to write with my pen as with an icicle. But
it is impossible for me,--in the first place, because I am getting into
years. With most men, it is true, as with birds, singing ceases when
love does; but with those who make their head a hot-house of their
ideas, years, i. e. the days of drill therein, give the fancy as well
as the _passions_ a higher growth. Poets resemble glass, which, when it
is old and breaks, takes on motley colors.--But secondly, though I were
just blooming in my twentieth year, still I could not now write
frostily, seeing winter is at the door. Rousseau says that in prison
he produced the best poem on Liberty,--hence the French, those
state's-prisoners, used to write better prose on the subject than the
free Britons,--hence Milton poetized in winter. I have often carried
out my writing-tablets in summer, and undertaken to press it to this
silhouette board, and then take its profile; but fantasy can lay only
Past and Future under its copying-paper, and every actual Present
limits its creative power,--just as, according to the old naturalists,
the water distilled from roses loses its virtue precisely at the time
when roses bloom. Therefore I always had to wait till I became
unfaithful, before I could go at love with my drawing instruments....
On the contrary, a man who now, towards after-summer, on a Molucca
Island, primes and sketches the spring, must, for the foregoing
reasons, and for the further one that the flying-summer is the
regretful after-echo and silver-wedding of spring, hand it over to the
Gallery-inspectors with much too bright sap-colors.--
The gayly-embroidered description of Victor's sojourn in Maienthal may
well get to be as long as that of Voltaire's in Paris, with the
publisher's compensation for which the lean wag might have cleared the
rent of his _chambres garnies_. For just at this moment the dog has
actually handed in a fourth Whitsuntide day, and expanded the trinomial
root of the given _power_ of joy into a quadrinomial. As in this
quadruplicate of joy again, there is no wailing, no murder, no
pestilence, but only good, I joyfully catch the remaining images of
this spring in my camera-obscura, nor hover in anxious suspense, lest I
should have to drag out my hero (Knef has made over to me all the
Whitsuntide-days, and is only to send a little supplementary page
afterward) somewhat as I did my Gustavus,[104] from the collapsed
rubbish of his pleasure-palace and summer-house.--
Emanuel despatched in the forenoon his day's work of writing in his
astronomical tables, in order to spend the whole afternoon with his
guest at the Abbess's; he also offered him a little collaboratorship at
his flowers, namely, to pluck out the rosemary blossoms, and spread the
sunshade over the carnation-stand. With Emanuel, even in the prosaic
repose of the day, the wings always protruded far out from under the
half-wing-shells. Victor took the requests of his teacher as gifts. As
he picked away out there at the rosemary, the rising sun opened the
valves of the wind, and then, under its breath, all the registers of
the great organ of being began to go, and the tremolo of the brooks
rolled its waves on his ear, the flute-work of the birds pealed, and
the thirty-two footed pedal-register of the woodland roared. One little
parishioner's head after another, as he carried his twelve years
together with the same number of Herculean labors of memory to the Holy
Sacrament, creeping along behind its father, embroidered and stiffened
up with a wreath-knob, and generally with gold-spangles, passed by
before him. What a beautiful second Whitsuntide-day, which is generally
full of rain-clouds, have you, ye little folks, to-day!--Victor right
gladly indulged the grandees of the village, i. e. the drivers
of a full span and the schoolmaster's son, the hair-modeller and
queue-preacher Meuseler, who on the second Whitsuntide-day frizzled the
neighboring villages, and who with his holy-(powder)-sprinkler effected
the last effusion upon the little heads, which the Parson had been
moistening these six weeks. Victor's heart beat for joy, as if he had a
child, or were himself a child among them, when the motley, powdered,
animated chain, with dancing spangles, with long-stemmed nosegays, with
black-glistening spiritual _Musen-annuals_, marched in under the
commander's staff and shepherd's crook of their two consuls, singing
and besung and rung in and trumpeted in through the triumphal gate of
the church.--Ah! joy sits still more beautifully on children than on
us, just as an unhappy, a begging child, whose first child's-garden
fate has trampled down, and before whose eyes, at the first bursting
into existence, nothing hangs but black, misshapen morning cloud,
afflicts our heart more than his father beside him.--
"Pluck, like a berry, _every_ minute of your first day of triumph, ye
good children, and I wish the sermon would be right long, that you
might keep on so much longer your handsome dress!" said Victor, and
looked round toward the convent, whose windows were full of
unrecognizable spectatresses; he proposed to himself, on the return of
the juvenile procession, to seek out for himself from among the windows
with a pocket spy-glass the one with the fairest contents.--Just go,
kindly man, who lovest fair souls like fair nature, and endurest cold
ones like the winter-landscape, and who never revengest, just walk up
and down by the brooks, for there is the footpath of the fishers, and
because on thy poetic ring-races thou wouldst not harm a peasant by
trampling down so much as a forked wagon of hay, such as the children
braid out of hazel-rods! Fill the interval between the first heaven and
the third, when thou wilt sit down not with Abraham, but with thy
Clotilda at the table of the Abbess,--fill it up with a second, namely
with the embrace of all nature, which never looks more sweetly into the
soul, than when on it, not far from the soul, a beloved dwells!--
A stroll between two brooks that mingled their flashings and between
their lackered willows snowed over with foam-worms[105] overspread
the whole inner man even to every corner of a dark tear with
morning-splendor.--In addition to that Victor kept looking across the
meadow up at Emanuel's open window, and letting a smile float down from
it like a running wave full of light.--In addition to that, he did not
stop there, but went up twice and disturbed him in the midst of his
writing with a childlike embrace.--In addition to that, he put
seven-leagued boots on his eyes, and ran over the whole landscape, here
rising, there sinking, here shining, there shadowing, in order to catch
and size even here in anticipation a postal and travelling map of the
finest places for the afternoon-rambles with Clotilda, because in the
afternoon the raptures themselves will perhaps spoil the choice of
raptures!--And thus did Nature create over again in his spirit her
morning and her spring out of the earth-clod of the first spring, i. e.
out of the hot sun, out of the cool brook, out of the butterfly, whom
May shelled out of his hull, from the motley flies which the prolific
earth hatched out of the larva-seed like winged flowers.--Then he
closed his eyes amid the din of sparrows and swallows in the village,
and amidst the watch-cries of the larks, and against the dazzling waves
of the brooks, and let his soul dive down into the ringing sea and into
the chiaroscuro painted by the eyelid; but then would his heart have
been overwhelmed by creation's flood, which swept over it out of all
pipes and beds and mouths of life around him, out of the tangled
vein-work of the stream of life, which shoots at once through
flower-runnels, through tree-channels, through white flies' veins,
through red blood-canals and through human nerves, ... he would, in the
impotence of enjoyment, have been drowned in the deep, broad ocean of
life, which life-streams cross and fill, had he not, like every
drowning man, heard a peal of bells far down into the waves.
In short--church was out, and he had to go behind a leafy
hunter's-screen, in order, when the Panists[106] of the Lord's Supper
should march by out of the church, whose organ-music still followed,
and under the tower that still trumpeted after them, that then he might
see with his pocket-glass _who_ looked out of the convent. Clotilda's
face floated, as if called forth by magic out of the second world,
close to the glass, and he could, without fear of being driven away,
close his butterfly-wings around this flower; he could freely sink into
her great eyes, as into two flower-cups filled with the splendor of
dew. Never did he see so pure a snow of the white around the blue
heaven's-opening, which went far into the soul, now fairer than ever;
and when she cast down her eye toward the garden, the great veiling
eyelid with its trembling lashes stood just as beautifully over it as a
lily over a fountain. _Love_, like _drawing_ and like the germ of man,
begins at the _eye_.--When the children had gone by, then Clotilda
slowly and freely turned her face toward Emanuel's cottage, and gazed
across with the far-reaching, longing look of love....
And with such a love, beating like a heart in his innermost
consciousness, Victor with his two friends arrived up at the convent.
The Abbess (her name is not reported to me at all, not even her
pseudonyme) received him with a stately air, which her station had not
imparted to her, but had attempered. Her soul was born crowned. The
Princess of ----, whose chief governess she was, loved sometimes to
play the child (children inversely reciprocate, and represent their
representatives): but although she possessed a pride of thirty years,
she checked her hobby-horse so soon as the monarchical chief governess
appeared, than whom no one in the land (the swans excepted) carried her
head back so high. A lady like her, whose looks were throne-insignia,
and her words _mandata sacræ cæsareæ majestatis propria_,[107] had from
the hands of Nature herself the allegiance-medals and the throne
scaffolding, so as to weigh her imperial apple against young maidens'
apple of beauty,--such a one could rule and mould a Clotilda. Her soul
was painted by three masters:--the back-ground by the world,--the
foreground by the church,--the middle-ground by Virtue. Her æsthetic
parts placed her in a singular manner in a certain elective-affinity
with Emanuel's East Indian ones.
I know nothing more touching and beautiful than a woman's obeisance
when it springs from that deep respect with which alone good maidens
venture to speak their love.--Happy Victor! thy Clotilda received thee
with as much reverence as her teacher. Only the coquette is made by
love more dictatorial[108] (a silicious juristic word!); but the proud
one it makes modest and gentle. Never did he take a meal more
delightedly than in this bright pleasure-villa, before whose open
windows reposed a blue horizon and nearer at hand murmuring avenues,
filled with music, than in this decorated orangery of blooming
girls,--(whereas a gymnasium is a menagerie and a house of sisters an
aviary.)--Victor, who understood how to manage women even better than
men, felt himself as well in the busy ant-hill of these lively maidens,
as in an ant-bath,[109] and he was a second Bee-father Wildau, who
constructed for himself out of the swarm of bees now a beard and now a
muff. More manly sense is required for a certain refined gallantry,
than they have who in their satires confound it with the insipid kind;
just as only mountains afford the sweetest honey. Earnest must be the
groundwork of jest; respect and kindliness, of praise. Victor could
more easily before two than before thirty-two female eyes fall into
embarrassment, which, by the way, is the grossest blunder and Germanism
in female grammar. He had long since learned to combine the volatile
salts of woman's wit with the fixed ones of man's, as well as the art,
in great circles, of setting every soul, every caterpillar, on the
right leaf for its nourishment.
To him who had once said, "I wish I had to converse at least four times
a year with ladies, with whom one should have to apply so much
_tournture_,[110] that one actually would not know what he wanted, and
who were fine even to nonsense,"--to him a high lady like the Abbess,
whom, since the laying down of her high governess-ship, one could
confound a very, very little with a _précieuse_,[111] was a true
refreshment; for he could sketch her at least the physiognomical
fragments of the court with a thousand turns, i. e. a full face with
_five_ dots. But he had in this the still nobler design to draw off his
adoring attention, his heart that sometimes started in the shape of a
tear to his eye, from his beloved Clotilda, in order to spare her a
wholly different attention from his own. In a singular manner his
satirical feeling, precisely, always drew off the Moses' veil from his
serious feelings, from his softened soul,--that is to say, he was not
ashamed of a tear, simply because he knew that his humor could protect
him against the suspicion of exaggeration and against the mocker; just
as, on the other hand and inversely, his playing and flashing of wit
under tears, like phosphorus under water, conserved and nourished its
light.--
Fortunately, at this point, Emanuel, who in the midst of dinner had
gone out into the garden, came back and proposed taking a walk. For in
his soul great ideas were all that remained standing of life, as of old
Egypt only temples were left behind, no houses; and his ignorance in
little things must be ridiculous to _little things_.[112]--The Abbess
had taken Clotilda beside her on the throne as under-queen of
the fiery nuns. Victor represented in his single person the board of
wards of the Electorate of Brandenburg among these fluttering graces.
Clotilda gave over the blind one just to a whole dove-flock of the
liveliest way-guides, because they all sued for the boatman's and
forefinger's-office with the blind youth; they all loved him on account
of his heavenly beauty, but (as he could not see theirs) only in the
same way as they would caress a beautiful boy of five years.... At
another time Victor would certainly have looked round and made the fine
allusion that _beauty_ was leading _blindness_; but to-day he only
looked round for other reasons.
--At last the Island of the Blest, which had already gleamed far, far
out through the mist of his childhood's dreams, was now the ground
under his feet, and he made the voyages of discovery through his
heaven;--he and Clotilda were silent for some minutes, because their
hearts began to be softly agitated with joy, that they were at last
alone together and stood before the great esplanade of spring. Amidst
the blissful smiles, the dumb alphabet of rapture, and amidst trembling
respirations, that holy sanscrit of love, they had already arrived at
the first pond, over whose crystal mirror a bridge winds like gilded
foliage-work.--They stopped dazzled in the midst of this moon-disk and
looking-glass, because the parasol could not screen from two suns at
once, reckoning the one in the water; they turned half round, and
sought with their eyes in the picturing water the deeper heaven's-blue,
and two still, blissful forms, that looked at each other with their
moist eyes. O, his eye rested warmly in her reflected one, like the sun
upon the subterranean sun, and his trembling look was the long tremolo
and continuance of a single tone; for the goddess dwelling in the water
sank with her eyes to meet his soul, because she would fain avail
herself of the doubled distance of his form, which amounted to ten
feet.--To conclude at last the overmastering rapture, he withdrew his
eyes from this glass-painting and directed them (i. e. he merely
redoubled it) to the archetype itself; and the mutual inflowing of
glances, the trembling together of souls, threw into the short moment
the fields of a long heaven.--And they saw that they had found each
other, and that they had loved each other, and that they deserved each
other. As they went on, Victor could only say, "O that you might be
to-day as inexpressibly happy as I am."--And she answered softly,
softly as a zephyr exhaled from among tender, leafless blossoms, "I am
so indeed." ... Ah, I have often pictured to myself, if we all loved
one another as two lovers do, if the emotions of all souls, as these
are, were _tied_ notes, if Nature drew from us all at once, the
resonance of her strings stretching even beyond the stars, instead of
moving only a loving couple as a double harpsichord,--then should we
see that a human heart full of love contains an immeasurable Eden, and
that Deity itself created a world in order to love one.
But I will write again, as Clotilda spoke, who manifested the poetic
spirit only by actions, not by words, like players who know how in
speaking to evade the rhyme and metre of their poet.
The village, or rather the inn, gave their Jacob's ladder a _fourth_
round, the fourth Whitsuntide-day.--The Englishman, Cato the elder, who
had run away from Kussewitz and from his club with a travelling
orchestra of virtuosos from Prague, came out to see Maienthal also. He
could never in his life wait for anything. He told Victor he was coming
to see him to-morrow, to-day he should survey the cultivated prospects
and he was waiting with the overture of the Prague musicians only for
the close of the vesper-sermon. At last he told him that Flamin and
Matthieu were going a journey day after to-morrow, and were going back
again to Kussewitz, and consequently would stay there longer than they
had intended. This presence of the Englishman and the delayed return of
the jealous one settled all at once in Victor his last will, to
stretch the fourth Whitsuntide-day also as the fourth string on this
tetrachord of joy. And as on this fourth day the riddle about the angel
running through all the parts of this book is brought into the
deciphering-office of time, because Julius delivers the letter of the
said angel to Clotilda to read, he could make believe to himself he
stayed merely for that reason, and say to himself: "For the novelty's
sake surely one should tarry, to see what the state of the case is
about the angel."--Good hero! thou confoundest every angel with thine,
nor do I know why thou shouldst not!...
Now a shadow of a cloud flitted over them, a sort of forerunner of a
darker one which was seeking their souls. For Victor, who before a fair
heart could never shut up his own, who in the consecration of love
scorned all dissimulation, related to Clotilda, with that heartiness
which so easily marries itself to refinement, the reasons of Matthieu's
journey, namely, his own little folly in Kussewitz, when he played into
the Princess's hands the little billet-doux. He would at any rate have
been obliged, too, to make this disclosure, by way of obviating the
extraneous one of an accuser. But he presupposed too hastily on the
part of Clotilda a calculation of the chronology of his little annual
registers, and did not remark that he had written the billet before he
knew that Clotilda was not Flamin's _sweetheart_, but only his
_sister_.[113] She was silent for some time. He feared this pantomime
of anger, and did not dare to convince himself of it by looking into
her face. At length, on her favorite green spot, where in the greatest
depth the vale's green shadow rocks its painted twigs in the sheen of
sun and water, there she begged him with a voice neither cold nor
proud, but almost a voice of emotion, to let her rest a little on her
favorite grass-bench, whose arms were great flowers. As he stood before
her, he saw with alarm in her animated face--not a resentment wrestling
with courtesy, but--the touching struggle against the destiny which
darkened for her the darling of her soul, the unselfish grief at the
closed scar, which she wished away from his virtue. She felt, he felt,
as if the former year lifted itself up again from its death-pillow of
flowers of joy, which it had trampled on for both; they were right
sad,--Clotilda had hardly the mastery of her eyes or Victor of his
tongue,--till at last upon the latter the misunderstanding dawned. He
therefore said softly to her and in English: "Had his father made all
his disclosures to him earlier, he would have spared him more than one
conflict, more than one dark hour, and first of all the foregoing
folly."
In the higher love anger is only sorrow over the object. Clotilda
continued, however, the solar-eclipse of her fair features; but it
proceeded not from the continuance of the previous sigh, nor from the
usual inability to carry over at once a reconciled soul into an angry
face, but her discontent with her own hastiness always looked like that
which has another's for its object. She rose up therefore to give him
back her arm, and, as it were, the heart which lay near it. Victor did
not allow himself to break the doubled-voiced silence.--Emanuel came
after, and then Clotilda said with emotion, as if she were just
answering what had been said before: "Ah, I am only too closely
related to my brother on the side of my faults."--Did she mean
Flamin's jealousy, or suspecting nature, or more probably his
temperament?--Victor turned to her, as if to beg her pardon for what
she had said,--and her eyes said, "O, I ought not to have misunderstood
thee,"--and his said, "I ought not, even though unknown, to have denied
thee,"--and their hearts made peace, and the olive-branch twining among
the old flowers of joy bound their souls to each other.
Emanuel led them, as their guiding star, to his dear mountains, those
front boxes of the earth,--only from his mountain with the weeping
birch he kindly turned them aside for unknown reasons,--and his easy
climbing gave them joy over the restoration of his breathing. At last
they came out upon the throne of the region, on the mountain where
Victor, on the morning after the night spent in travelling, had looked
down upon Maienthal. O how the living plain of God, the foreground of a
sun and of an Eden, stretched far away in such untamable, blooming,
breathing, undulating masses! How did heaven hang full of mountains of
incense, full of ice-fields of light! And a gentle morning-wind stole
out from the eastern gate overhung with cloud-bloom and played with
heaven and earth, with the yellow floweret and with the broad cloud
above them, with the eyelash under a tear and with the cornfields it
searched through!--How the eye dilates, when chased night-pieces of
cloud-shadows cut through the bright sunshine of the earth! how the
heart enlarges, when the morning-wind hurls the winged shadows
now over mountains, now into ponds of splendor, now into bowed
grain-fields!--But round upon the woods still ice-mountains of clouds
had settled themselves.--Ah, this field flecked with day and night,
this wall of nebulous glaciers, put Victor's heart into the old dream
again, in which he saw Clotilda on an ice-mountain with outspread
arms!--Ah, on this rocky peak rising above the southern mountain he
could see the _Isle of Union_, lying darkly with its tree-tops and its
white temple, and the thirsty heart staggered full of the mingled
draught of yearning and melancholy and love.--
Then he was glad to tell her that he had seen her that morning when he
gave the blind youth the note to Emanuel, and yet that he had denied
himself a visit to her,--only give him, Clotilda, a great, warm,
thankful look for his sparing of thy brother, for the nobleness of his
loving, and for his hiding of that love with a veil! She looked on him,
and when her eye grew warm with a tear, heaven bowed itself and came
down to them on a sunny cloud and touched the kindred beings with hot,
fluttering drops.--O thou good earth! thou good Nature! thou
sympathizest oftener (and always) with good men, than good men do
themselves!--Before him the dream passed in which Clotilda's tears
resolved the ground into an uplifting cloudlet....
But the approach of evening and the little shattered pearl-strings of
rain-drops rattling down called the fair group back to the cottage. The
girls; who with the blind one had not even quite climbed the mountain,
went no farther, but turned about and took the advance. Emanuel
withdrew himself to his hill of mourning, in order there to uncover his
flowers to the rain. When our loving couple reached the smoking vale
below, how heavenly was the evening and the earth!--In the great
evening-heaven above them waved tulip-beds of red clouds, between which
ran blue strips like dark brooks.--Behind them stood under the sun
mountains like Vesuviuses in flames, and the woodland like a burning
bush, and the prairie-fire running over the flowers caught the
cloud-shadows.--And all the larks hung with their [114]_ripieno_-voices
of Nature near the red ceiling-piece of evening, and every deeper
sunbeam held a humming chain-of-being made of happy insects.--And in
the sheepfold on the mountain a hundred mothers at once called lovingly
to a hundred children, and every sheep hastened bleating to its thirsty
kneeling lamb.----
Great evening! only in the Vale of Tempe thou still bloomest and dost
not fade; but in a few minutes, reader, all its blossoms for the first
time will open magnificently!--
Clotilda and Victor went along more closely and warmly, linked together
under the small sun-shade, which walled _both_ in from the transient
shower. And with hearts which beat more and more strongly, and, instead
of blood, sent round as it were devout tears of joy, they reached the
park; the warm tones of the nightingale came to meet them, the tones
wafted away from the musical retinue wherewith the Englishman was just
passing across the mountains floated after them like perfumes exhaled
from flowers.----But lo! while the earth still wore its gilding in the
fire of the sun, while the evening-fountain still blazed up like a
torch, when in a great oak-tree of the garden, in which motley glass
globes had been grafted instead of fruit, twenty red suns sparkled out
of the leaves,--then a warmed cloud melted asunder and came all down in
drops into the fire of evening and on the gleaming water-column....
The nuns who were nearer to the trees flew under the foliage; but
Clotilda, who deemed a slow gait more beautiful and becoming for a
female soul, went without haste to the neighboring "Evening-bower,"
which, raised above the garden, nowhere opens its thick leaf-work
except to the setting sun.--No, it was an angel, it was Clotilda's
sister, Giulia, who reposed on the tender cloud and let fall through it
her tears of joy, in order to compel her friend, whose arm rested on
her lover's as in a bandage, to the glimmering bower, where two blessed
hearts were to be most blest. Clotilda still lingered under the rain of
pearls and golden sand, and resembled the still doves around her, who
on all the roofs flung open their pure wings like variegated umbrellas
and held them under the bath,--and before entering Victor drew her
back, who said, oppressed with bliss, "Thou all-gracious one!" and
looked over to Emanuel's bower, on which the gate of Paradise built up
of mosaic stones, the rainbow, abutted itself and arched across through
heaven over the evening-bower and enclosed in its heavenly magic circle
the three loving souls.
And when they stepped into the dark bower which had only a small
opening toward the sun that blazed in through the rain, there lay
before the opening the evening-field, with the swaying fiery columns,
between which dashed the golden flood of the molten sun, and with
the lawns which stood even to the flowers in a sea of luminous
globules.--And fallen rainbows lay with their ruins on the blossoming
trees.--And little airs fanned the running-fire in the meadow flowers
and threw sparks out of the blossoms.--And the heart of man was swept
onward by the stream of rapture and swam burning in its own tears.
Like a transfigured saint Clotilda looked into the sun, and her
countenance was exalted at once by the sun and by her soul. And her
friend disturbed not the fair soul; but he took the white handkerchief
out of her hand and softly wiped away the colored particles dropping
from the foliage, encircled with flower-dust, and she gave him
voluntarily her hand. When she turned her eyes full of tears upon him,
he let the tears stand; but she herself removed them, and looked upon
him with a love over which soon the old ones glided, and said with a
smile that flowed forth blissfully: "My whole heart is inexpressibly
moved; pardon it, dearest friend, to-day everything in which it has
hitherto not been like yours!" ...
--Lo, then was the warm cloud emptied into the garden as if it were a
whole river of Paradise and on the streams angels playfully floated
down, ... and when bliss could no more weep and love could no more
stammer, and when the birds screamed for joy, and the nightingale
warbled through the rain, and when the heavens, weeping for joy, fell
with cloud-arms on the earth, aye, then two inspired souls met
trembling and rushed breathless on each other with quivering lips and
cheek pressed to cheek in glowing, trembling ecstasy,--then at last
gushed forth, like life-blood out of the swollen heart, great tears of
bliss out of the loving eyes over into the loved ones.--The heart
measured the eternity of its heaven with great throbs heavy with
bliss,--the whole visible universe, the sun itself had sunk away, and
only two souls throbbed against each other alone in the emptied,
glimmering immensity, dazzled with the glistening of tears and the
splendor of sunshine, stunned with the roar of the heavens and the echo
of Philomel, and sustained by God in dying of rapture.
Clotilda bent her head aside, to dry her eyes; and her mute darling
sank down and knelt before her, and pressed his face upon her hand, and
stammered: "O thou heart out of my heart, O thou for ever and ever
beloved one,--ah, that I could bleed, could die for thee!"--Suddenly he
rose, as if lifted by an immeasurable inspiration, and said in a lower
tone, looking upon her: "Clotilda, I love thee, God, and virtue
forever."
She pressed his hand and said softly: "Oh, how could man and fate wound
such a heart? But mine, Victor," she said still more softly, "will never
more do it wrong."----They came out from the bower,--heaven, like
their hearts had exhausted itself in tears of joy, and was merely
serene,--the sun had gone down simultaneously with the great moment.
Victor went _slowly_, as if he were passing along before a wide
Elysium, bearing in his heart the received Eden, home to Dahore's quiet
dwelling. Dahore, who had sunk to sleep in a sitting posture, swayed
softly to and fro, and Victor, although he would gladly have let his
heart cease its beatings on a second, congenial bosom, nevertheless
denied himself,--and slowly leaned against his swaying teacher. He held
for a long time the slumbering head on his tumultuous breast. His
tempest of joy cooled itself off into serene sky, and the refreshed
flowers of joy opened the incense-cups of memory. Dahore flung his arms
around his darling, and then, and not till then, woke up: for he had
dreamed he was embracing him, and when he woke, he was delighted that
it had not been merely a dream.
Enough!--And you, O ye human beings whom I love, take your rest on the
lap of memory or of hope, when, as I do, ye lay down these little
leaves!
35. DOG-POST-DAY.
THIRD DAY OF WHITSUNTIDE,
OR
BURGUNDY-CHAPTER.
The Englishman.--Meadow-Ball.--Blissful Night.--The Blooming Cave.
With men, as with misers, it never strikes anything but quarters of the
happy hour; like a bad clock, it never strikes full the Arcadian hour
of our hope. But in respect to the Whitsuntide days this is utterly
false,--they are magnificent, and as the outpouring of the Holy Spirit
was formerly represented in the old churches by the flinging down of
flowers, so do we shadow forth those of Maienthal by throwing out
flowers of speech. I have therefore actually unsealed a flask of
Burgundy, and set it beside my inkstand, in order, in the first place,
by my greater fire in this chapter, to bring over the critics of art
and nature to my side, who would rather break the staff over authors
than a lance with authors,--and secondly and simply to drink the wine,
which of itself is final object and teleology enough. A true Paradise
and kingdom of heaven we should have, if the reader also would himself
take something spirituous in such chapters. When the author alone gets
drunk, half the impression goes to the d----ogs; and it is a misfortune
that the reviewers have nothing to nibble and nothing to drink, else
they might minister to me as to a star by refracting me through their
_atmosphere_ and show me _higher_ and _broader_ than I stand.
Victor had hardly run out into the wet grass of the morning, when he
came upon the Englishman with his head under the sprinkling-pots of the
water-wheels. He gladly forgave this Cato the elder all his
singularities and the idiosyncrasy of his extravagant nature and his
comet-course; for he had himself in his eighteenth year been such a
hairy star, and so looked upon this man as a comet-medal struck for
himself. Although the Briton _affected_ singularity, Victor knew from
his own experience that it arose not from vanity, (one can, if one
will, extract vanity from all, even the most innocent, actions, as well
as _air_ from all bodies,) but it proceeded from humor, for which the
enjoyment of an eccentric part, whether we shall _read_ or _play_ it,
has full as many charms as it has for the sense of freedom and of
inward power. Vain men succumb to the ridiculous, which the whimsical
man defies; and the former hate, the latter seek their likenesses. The
only thing which Victor had against him was that he would not show
others little indulgences, for the simple reason that he never desired
any either; and this very war, inseparable from humor, with all the
little weaknesses and expectations of men, had given the humane Victor
a dislike to this eccentric path. Misfortune, therefore, more easily
makes odd men than prosperity.
His delight at the pictures which Cato drew him of Flamin's similar
heavenly ascensions and _feux de joie_ inspired him with the thought of
earning his Quatraine[115] of beautiful days in some other way than by
his foregoing gloomy ones,--namely, by making those of others like his
own. In short, he concerted with the elder Cato, to whom the idea was
most agreeable,--to employ the Prague company for some useful purpose,
namely, in giving in the cool of the evening a ball on the green
to the Maienthal children. What needed either for this purpose more
than--which they immediately did--to thrust their hands into their
pockets and their fingers into their purses and give the night watchman
_loci_ more than the hay of his great meadow might be worth on St.
John's day, which would have to be mowed to-day for a ball-room?
Besides, the man gave it with a thousand pleasures, because his
son was to-day to be--married. The twenty May-poles which Cato proposed
to plant in the hall stood already incarnate there as autochthones.
And when they had, further, gone to the parents of the neat
village,--generally, however, the poor ploughman resembles the swine,
which, according to Ælian,[116] invented his ploughing for him,--and
unitedly and with the greatest earnestness--for peasants and ladies do
not understand singularities--begged and extorted from them the young
dancing-partners: then all was right.
The trio of friends found, at the dinner-table of the Abbess, yesterday
over again. Victor was immediately at home in all points; he would not
continue a guest, so that the other might not continue the host. In
general, maidens are seldom found again as one left them, just as their
reception is always warmer or colder than their note previous; but in
Clotilda's dissolving features an infinite charm announced the memory
of yesterday, when she had, for two reasons, surrendered her heart to
all his flames consecrated on the altar of nature and of virtue. In the
first place, she was warmer yesterday, because she had previously been
colder in the little quarrel which only her face had had about the
Kussewitz watch affair: nothing makes love sweeter and tenderer than a
little previous scolding and freezing, just as the grape-clusters
acquire by a frost before vintage thinner skins and better must.
Secondly, in a high degree of emotion and love the best girls behave
just like--good ones.
I have only taken three coffee-cups of Burgundy, because I shall not
perhaps need any more for the carnation and red crayon drawing of the
afternoon--but O heavens! the night!--It is not my fault if it does not
get to the ears of posterity, that most persons in the afternoon, on
account of the heat, stayed out of the garden. But they see from the
chambers the meadow, the timber-yard of a beautiful evening, where the
children were already running round beforehand, carrying off the grass,
and opening the feast of trumpets with horn-blowers on beer-siphons. It
would be too trifling, if I should remark that several youngsters were
stretched out dead by having red caps or crowns shot at them, because
they represented hares, the cap-shooter the hunter, and the rest
greyhounds; one can, however, take it metaphorically, and then it
becomes satirical and edifying enough.
The joy of tender natures is bashful; they would sooner show their
wounds than their raptures, because they do not think to deserve
either, or they stow both behind the veil of a tear. So was it with
Victor, and in every joy he looked with a sigh to the west; I know not
whether he thought of the setting of stars and of men, or of the blacks
whose chains clank across even to our hemisphere, or on the nearer
whites whose sundered chains they resolder with blood.----But this
looking towards his _Keblah_[117] constrained him to _earn_ his
rapture. That of yesterday and of to-day was so great, that he said
with emotion to the genius of the earth: "Such greatness my feeble
virtue cannot attain."--It availed him naught, that he sought to
magnify himself to his conscience, and represented to it how many fair
moments and happy pulsations he here in this _Valley of Seifersdorf_
imparts to his friends and to her, his friend, who through him regains
her health, and to the children whom he sees already skipping about and
who at evening will do so still more,--it had some effect on his
conscience, but still not enough, when he asked it whether, then, he
should stop his ears to the sphere-music of these days; whether he had
not conquered his passions, and whether the enlargement of a man's
sphere and the increase of his activity were not simply in proportion
to the greater number of passions he had mastered; so that,
accordingly, a maid of honor, nay, even a king, possessed no smaller
circle of efficiency than the most useful citizen; and whether man,
like very small children, had not been sent into the school of earth to
learn to be _still_,--but the sacramental religious war between the old
and the new Adam was ended merely by a delight, namely, by the
determination, so soon as his father should release him from the
manacles and ankle-fetters of the court, to do more cures than the city
and country physicians and all _gratis_ and mostly among the poor.----
Only one word, reader! Virtue cannot make one _worthy_ of felicity, but
only _worthier_, because existence of itself with us as with the
non-moral creatures gives a right to joy,--because Virtue and Joy are
incommensurable qualities, and one knows not whether a happy century is
earned by a virtuous decade or the latter by the former,--because
the years of pleasure forerun the years of virtue, so that the
virtuous man, instead of the future, would have first to deserve the
past,--instead of heaven, would have first to deserve the earth.
The afternoon glided away like a bright rill, over motley trifles as
over golden sand, over little joys and over great hopes, over delicate
attentions and over the flower-dust of benevolent refinements which is
the best sticking-powder of the heart. Victor felt that a mistress who
has much intelligence imparts to love a peculiar piquant taste; she
herself felt, that the heart which one has plucked with soft, covered
hands, and not with rough clutchings, keeps better, just as Borsdorf
apples keep longer which one has picked only with gloves on. Although,
according to my tables, love stands the highest precisely on the day
after the first kiss, that is at 112° Fahrenh. or 10° De l'Isle: with
Victor's love, however, his reverence had risen at the same rate,--and
love exalts, when the favors which are shown therein make one not
bolder but shyer!--
Our friend felt how happy in joy _self-continence_ makes one, and how
much the foaming beaker of joy is cleared up and improved by throwing
in a few knife-points of sedative-powder. After an afternoon when the
whole hours were charming, without one's being able to single out into
prominence any extraordinary minutes,--as the feathers of the pheasant
shine not singly, but in whole bunches,--after such an afternoon all
went into the garden, but Emanuel first. The East Indian, like
ground-sparrows, could not endure the confinement of a room, and was
silent therein or only read, and that too merely--which does not
surprise me--the tragedies of Shakespeare....
Under the great evening-sky, which no cloud limited, their souls opened
like night-violets. Emanuel was the cicerone and gallery-inspector of
this picturesque garden. He led his friend and the others to his little
flower-garden, which lay highest in the park. That is to say, the park
ran down the mountain with _five_ landings and stories slid out as it
were from the latter in the manner of drawers. These five plains, these
cut-in green steps, bore just so many different gardens, orchards, and
shrubbery-gardens, &c.,--hence with every new point of view, as by a
kaleidoscope, a new garden was put together out of the old one. The
sloping park was enclosed on both sides by two serpentine walks of
tall, flaunting, flaming flowers, like two balustrades flowing
downward, and behind each flowery serpentine line curled down from the
mountain above silvery veins of bright, thin water leaping up and
down,[118] which in the evening sun became a gold-snake or artery of
ichor lying there in upright sinuosities. On the last and uppermost
terrace stood the _evening_- and the _morning-arbors_, like the poles
of the garden, opposite to each other, and the _evening-fountain_
gleamed up over the former, and the _morning-fountain_ over the latter,
and the two looked across at each other like sun and moon.
And just at the evening-fountain Emanuel had his middle-garden. For he
loved, as an East Indian, physical flowers as he did poetic ones, and
to him in December a book of flowers was a gently waving flowery lawn,
and a catalogus of carnation leaves was to him the hull and chrysalid
of summer. He conducted his loved ones over the flowery region of the
mountain away through the innocent flowers, which, like good maidens,
take neither sun nor soil from another's life for their own,--along
by the gold tassel of the tulip,--by the miniature-colors of the
forget-me-not,--by the many-colored bells, which are also, like those
that _sound_, cast in the moulds of the earth,--by the ear-roses[119]
of August, namely, the roses,--by the Cato, not the jolly Englishman,
but an auricula that does not flame, (to be had of Herr Klefeker in
Hamburg,)--by the beloved Agatha, which reminded one of the other in
St. Luna, and which is a beautiful cowslip....
At last they arrived at the evening-bower and at Emanuel's flowers,
namely, at the snow-white hyacinths, in whose shadow the irradiated
evening-fountain tinged a pale red. O, how sweetly, how sweetly, there,
breathed the warmth of the evening sun and the coolness of the evening
wind!--But why droop thy eye and head, Clotilda, so sadly here toward
the flowers? Is it because the water-column is extinguished, because
the sun goes down?--No; but because the white hyacinths, in the
language of the florists, mean _Julia_,--O because the churchyard looks
over hither, whose tall, swaying wildflowers stand with their roots
over two beloved eyes, over the eyes of the pale hyacinth Giulia, who
has not lived to see to-day's festival.----But Clotilda concealed
herself, so as to disturb nothing.
The last sparkling gold of the water-columns and the evening-blaze
flung back from all the windows, turned all eyes toward the sun, who
sank behind his stage.--But a rolling fire-wheel of the allegro, with
which the harmonists on the meadow accompanied the retiring sun,
brought down the eyes to the level of the ears, and below on the veiled
meadow there rose a new theatre of joy with new players.... Two roses
were planted in heaven, the red, the sun, which unfolded its buds over
the second hemisphere, and the white, the moon, which hung low in ours;
but sun-gold and lunar silver and evening-slags were as yet absorbed by
a smoking magic-haze, and one could not separate the shadows from the
silver ground of the moonlight, and blossoms fluttering downward were
still confounded with night-butterflies.
The happy party went down through the chestnut avenue to the younger
happy ones, the children, who, made more bold by the presence of their
mothers, encircled and girdled twenty liberty-trees in changeable
groups, and waited only for deeper shadows to dance more briskly. The
Englishman was welcomed by Clotilda as a friend of her two friends. The
bridal pair, to whom the meadow belonged as an inheritance, had
exchanged their own music for this, and their feast of the covenant in
its solemnity brought nearer to our hero the joyous day when he too
should be able to call his Clotilda a bride; but he had not the courage
to turn his blushing face towards her, because he thought she was
thinking the same thing, and was red also. Only a lover can sympathize
with the inspiration of a bridal pair; and never did fairer wishes go
up for one than ascended for this one in two souls full of love. A
four-years-old sister of the bride attached herself to Clotilda,--the
former was the little Luna of this Venus in her walks,--and the latter
gladly discharged her love into the little hand which gave hers the
preference over a dancing partner.
And now the moon, by the reflection of the sun wherewith it silvered
this children's paradise, gave joy brighter colors, and under the
deepened shadows of the May-trees the children's courage grew. All was
happy,--all unfettered,--all peaceful,--no poisonous eye flashed
lightnings,--not a single roughness disturbed the metrical life,--in
melodious march the minutes went sounding onward with silver tone, and
sang themselves away, and lingered in the bursting rose-thicket of the
evening red.--The bland, fluttering ether of Spring drank its fill of
perfume from the blossoms, and bore it like honey into the breast of
man.--And as pulses beat fuller, dumb, cooling lightnings played round
the clouds of the horizon, and the moon drew vital air[120] from the
leaves, in order to convey more healthily thereupon the abstracted
spirit of their cups.
Victor and the Englishman and Emanuel and Clotilda, together with some
of her female friends, stood below as patron gods of joy beside the
children, and were intoxicated by the enjoyment of the young people's
delight. Our friend had too holy a love to show (especially to so many
strangers and to the Englishman), and laid a bridle on his
unmanageable, dancing heart. In noble love the sacrifice--and though it
were that love itself--is as agreeable as the enjoyment; but still
easier is it near an Emanuel, who--that is the gleaming order-cross of
the higher men--precisely in the hour of joy lifts his eyes to the
higher life and to the truth. This time, moreover, the feeling of his
improving health redoubled his pining after the predicted departure.
His glorified countenance, his super-earthly wishes, and his still
resignation, constituted, as it were, the second and higher moonlight
which fell into the more dim; and he disturbed not in the least the
growing elysium, when he said, for example: "Mortal man regards himself
as eternal here, because the human race is eternal; but the propelled
drop is confounded with the inexhaustible stream; and were it not that
new human creatures always spring up after us, each one would feel more
deeply the fleetingness of his second[121] of life";--or when he said:
"If man is not immortal, then no higher being is either, and the
conclusions are the same; in that case the abiding God would burn
solitary out of the struggling and expiring sense, like the sun which,
if there were no atmosphere, would blaze out of a black heaven, and
pierce, but not illuminate, the vaulted night";--or when he said: "The
gait of mankind toward the holy city of God is like the gait of certain
pilgrims, who, wayfaring toward Jerusalem, always after three steps
forward take one backward";--or, finally, when, upon his Victor's
remarking, that amendment only removed the great faults, not the fine
stings of remorse, and that a saint got as many reproaches from his
conscience as the bad man, when he said to this: "Our _distance_ from
virtue, like that from the sun, by exact reckonings we always find only
_greater_; but still, notwithstanding all our changeable calculations,
the sun always pours into our faces the _same_ warmth."
Suddenly the Englishman ran to the players and demanded of them--in
order to see the pranks and cranks of his ideas set to music--the best
adagio, and hastened up to the "Crape-Tent," which Lord Horion had had
built of iron arches, over which was stretched black double crape, in
order to convert, for his eyes, which were at that time ailing, the
sunshine into moonshine. As every heart at the first touch of the
adagio must needs dissolve in tears of bliss, the consequence was that
the rapture which sought to veil itself broke up the tranquil circle,
and all glided away from each other, in order (each under his own
arbor) to smile unseen and sigh unheard,--like patients visiting a
medicinal spring they parted, met, avoided each other in accidental
directions.
The beautiful blind youth was reclining above not far from the
nightingale, as it were at the fountain-head of the streams of harmony,
and Clotilda looked upon him pityingly, as often as she passed by him,
and thought: "Poor overshadowed soul, the sighs of music distend thy
yearning heart, and thou never seest whom thou lovest and who loves
thee."--Emanuel went up slowly the long way to his mountain with the
weeping birch and back.--Victor roamed about the whole garden; he
passed along before veiled obelisks, columns and cubes which better
filled the place of stone Fauns; he stepped into the dark evening-bower
shaded only by the evening-red, where he was yesterday too happy for a
mortal, and too susceptible for an immortal; he pushed through a ring
of bushes, out of which and above which towered a gleaming fountain,
and closed his eyes to the dazzling light, when he saw therein in
artificially embowered pier mirrors a water-bow saturated with lunar
silver, arched over a million times in receding and paling curves,
and reduced from white rainbows to moon-sickles, and at last to
shadows.----
Oh, how often in the dreams of his childhood, in his landscape-pictures
which he sketched to himself of the days of Paradise, had he not seen
this night and hardly wished for it, because he never hoped to live to
see it on the rough earth; and now did this Eden-night, with all
blossoms and stars hanging round it, stand out created before him?--And
who of us has not in some magically illumined spot or other of his
fancy and his hope set up just so grand a night-piece of a future
vernal night, when, as in this one, he is made happy _with all friends_
at once (not always alone),--when, as in this one, the night is only
thrown as a transparent veil over the day, when the red girdle which
the sun laid down on stepping into the sea remains lying till morning
glowing on the margin of the earth,--when the long, soul-like tones of
the nightingale float aloud through the adagio that melts asunder, and
start up out of the echo,--when we meet none but friendly souls, and
look on them with rapture, and ask by our smiles, "O thou too art
surely as happy as I?" and when the other's smile answers in the
affirmative,--a night, O God, when thou hast made our hearts full and
yet tranquil, when we neither _doubt_ nor _hate_ nor _fear_, when all
thy children repose on thy bosom in thy arms, and hold each other's
hands as brothers and sisters, and slumber only with half-closed eyes,
in order to smile on each other?----Ah, inasmuch as the sigh wherewith
I write and you read this reminds us how seldom such spring nights fall
upon our earth, take it not ill of me that I only slowly execute the
voluptuous picture of _this_ night that so I may some time in my old
days refresh myself by the painted hour of the present inspiration,[122]
and may haply be able to say: Ah, thou knewest then, perhaps, that thou
shouldst never live to experience such a night, and for that reason
wast thou so copious. And what else than petrified blossoms of a clime
which is not on our earth, do we dig up out of our fantasy, just as in
our North they exhume fossil palms?...
Victor went to the still Julius at the hedge of the nightingale and
laid night violets in his hand, and kissed him on the curtained eye,
which could not see, yet could weep for joy,--and neighbor nightingale
paused not during the kiss. He came up the garden, as Emanuel came
down; they looked on each other near the morning fountain, and
Emanuel's face gleamed in the reflection of the waves, as if he were
standing before the angel of death and dissolving, to die, and he
said: "The Infinite One clasps us to-day to himself,--why can I not
weep as I am so happy?"--and when they had separated again, he called
back to his Victor and said: "See, how blooming-red the evening goes
forth toward the morning like a dying man, as if the tones moved it
onward,--see, the stars, like blossoms, hang down out of eternity into
our earth,--behold the great deep, how many springs bloom to-night on
so many thousand earths wheeling therein!"--
The maidens, after short walks, had soon seated themselves on the
grassy banks of the terraces in pairs or in the number of the Graces.
Clotilda, who had strolled alone, at last did the same, and seated
herself beside a solitary friend on the fourth terrace, near the gay
solar rainbow of flowers, behind which the lunar rainbow of water
glistened. This friend appealed to Victor, approaching, as umpire of a
virtuous quarrel: "We have been disputing," said the friend, "which is
sweeter to good souls, to forgive or to be forgiven. I absolutely
assert, forgiving is the sweeter."--"And to me it appears," said
Clotilda with a touched voice, which betrayed all the affectionate
thoughts of her indulgent heart, all her grateful remembrances of their
last variance and of his beautiful forgiveness, "that it is more
beautiful to receive forgiveness, because love toward the forgiving
soul is made by its own lowliness _purer_, and by the other's goodness
_greater_." Never, perhaps, was anything lovelier said to our Victor.
His emotion and his gratitude made the decision hard for him; but
Clotilda prompted or corrected his dreams by this turn: "I have
reminded my good Charlotte already of _day before yesterday_, but she
sticks to her opinion." She meant the day of confession and communion,
when the fair hearts all asked and received forgiveness of each other.
Victor finally answered at once truly, significantly, and delicately:
"You both, I think, suppose impossible cases; no human being is either
all right or all wrong; and whoever forgives is at the same time
forgiven, and the reverse;--thus two beings who are reconciled always
share the joy of forgiveness and the joy of _purified and increased_
love with each other."--
Victor went off, in order to conceal an emotion through which he too
much heightened another's. But on his far and near ways among tones and
blossoms, feelings clung to him which doubled and glorified his love;
he felt that the _strongest_ expression of love takes not so firm and
deep a hold of the soul as the _finest_. But as he passed along by the
sun-dial, which with its measuring-rod of shadow counted out for us
other shadows our narrow fortunate islands, and as the moon weighed out
on the scale with her shadowy beam in equipoise the last minutes of
this glad hour, because she pointed toward midnight, as if she wrote,
It will presently be over,--just then the Englishman passed out alone
slowly and with downcast eyes from the crape-tent, and went in among
the tones, to lead them away with, the whole heaven around them.
Victor, who in the still sea of the deepest joy no longer steered for
countries, but contentedly tossed or rested upon it, and desired
nothing in the future but the present, only paced now to and fro
on the long terraces, instead of ascending and descending the
garden,--he stood just on the uppermost, on the flower-terrace, at the
morning-fountain, and looked along the glimmering way over to the
evening-fountain, and the fallen snow of the moon lay deeper and whiter
down along the blissful slope, and this blooming sugar-field appeared
to his dreaming heart like a point of land with which the island of the
blest stretched over into this earth, and he saw on all this enchanted
field nothing but blessed ones walking, reposing, dancing, here alone,
there in pairs, yonder in groups, and innocent men, quiet children,
gentle, virtuous maidens, and he looked up to the starry heaven and his
tearful eye said to the All-gracious, O give my good father and my good
Flamin also such a sight!----when all on a sudden he perceived that the
tones were wafted away, and saw the Briton moving on with the children,
and the swan-song of a Maëstoso was borne along before the fleeing
youth....
Victor went up with the tones that swam away, and the stars seemed
to swim with them, and the whole region to go with them;--all
at once he stopped at the end of the terrace of flowers, before the
emblems of Giulia, the white hyacinths, before the friend of Giulia,
before--Clotilda ... O moment! repeated only in eternity, wear not too
strong a lustre, that I may be able to endure it! move not my heart too
intensely, so that I may be able to describe thee!--Ah, move it only as
thou dost the two hearts to which thou appearedst; thou wilt meet none
of us any more ... And Clotilda and Victor stood innocent before God,
and God said, Weep and love as in the second world with me!--And they
looked on each other speechless in the transfiguration of night, in the
transfiguration of love, in the transfiguration of emotion, and tears
of bliss closed their eyes, and behind the illuminated tears
transfigured worlds rose around them out of the dark earth, and the
evening-fountain spread itself gleaming like a milky-way above them,
and the starry heaven closed sparkling over them, and the receding and
dying sounds washed their uplifted souls away from the shore of
earth.... Lo! then a little breath of air brought the escaping sounds
more warmly and closely to their hearts, and they wiped the tears from
their eyes; and as they looked round in the actual scene, the melodious
waving agitated all the blossoms in the garden, and the great night,
which with giant limbs slept in the moonshine on the earth, stirred for
rapture its wreaths of shadowed tree-tops, and the two beings smiled
trembling in unison, and simultaneously cast down their eyes and
simultaneously raised them without knowing it. And Victor at last was
able to say: "O may the noblest heart that I know be as unspeakably
blessed as I, and still more blessed! I have not deserved so
much!"--And Clotilda said in a soft tone: "I have remained the whole
evening mostly alone, merely for the sake of weeping for joy, but it is
too beautiful for me and for the future...."--Her companions turning
round came up the garden, and the two had to part; and when Victor
added with stifled sounds, "Rest well, thou noble soul,--may such tears
of joy have always to stand in thy eyes, may such melodious tones be
destined always to float around thy days!--Rest well, thou heavenly
soul!"--and when a look full of new love and an eye full of fresh tears
thanked him; and when he bowed himself low, low before the saintly,
still, modest one, and from reverence did not so much as kiss her
hand;--then in the invisibleness did her genius embrace his genius for
delight, that their two children were so happy and so virtuous.
O what comfort did his overwhelmed soul now find in his beloved Dahore,
whom he followed under the loud chestnut-trees, and on whose neck he
could fall with all his tears of ecstasy, with all his caresses of a
raptured heart: "My Emanuel, rest softly! I stay to-night under this
good, warm sky round about us."--"Aye, stay, good heart," said Emanuel,
"such a night will never pass through any spring again.... Hear'st
thou," he continued, as the tones receding into immensity, like evening
stars, as it were, of the sunken glory, like autumnal voices of the
departing summer-song, sent their call into the yearning soul, "hear'st
thou the sweet dying away of the strains? Lo, even thus may my soul die
away on the longest day, even so may thy heart lie on mine and say as
now, Rest well!" ...
Sinking from the arms of his last remaining loved friend, Victor went
reeling back in the confused twilight of inspired sadness through the
avenue pierced by moonlight, as it were dropping with rays, in order to
recline, in the blossom-cave, where he had here first found Clotilda,
his dreaming head on a pillow of blossom-cups.... And as he slowly and
alone and with Elysian remembrances and hopes staggered along through
the arbor which had grown into the avenue, between the lulling
rivulets, low waves of the departed melody still swam more into his
fancy than into his ears, and only the nightingale reigned aloud
over the inspired night. Then, unspeakably blest and burdened with
ecstasy, the last man of this night glided from the five steps of his
heavenly bed through the lattice of twigs into the dark thicket of
blossoms.----Bedewed leaves fell, cooling, on his fevered brow, he laid
his two outstretched arms on two supports of dwarf-trees, and closed in
rapture his burning eyelids, and the continuing tones of the
nightingale and of the five fountains around him wafted him some spaces
onward into the glimmering illusion of dreams,--but the nightingale,
screaming out in the jubilee of joy, warbled through his dream, and
when he opened his eyes, drifted away into half-dreams, the glimpses of
the moon shot through the white shrubbery,----nevertheless, satisfied
with the previous scenes, he only smiled half beside himself, and
closed his eyes again and sank completely into the harmonious slumber
... only a few broken tones he still sang to himself,--only a few times
more he stirred his prostrate arms for embraces ... and in the
euthanasia of slumber and rapture only obscurely stammered once more,
Beloved!...
And so sweetly, great All-gracious One, let the rest of us mortals sink
to sleep in the last night as Victor does in this, and let our last
word also be, Beloved!--
36. DOG-POST-DAY.
FOURTH AND LAST DAY OF WHITSUNTIDE.
Hyacinth.--The Voice of Emanuel's Father.--Letter from the
Angel.--Flute on the Grave.--Second Nightingale.--Farewell.--
Pistols.--Ghostly Apparition.
The appendix to the fourth day of joy has just come in.--Pausing only
to breathe the sigh wherewith one usually says, on the day after festal
days, that he is burying them, I come back again before the blooming
bed of my friend, and open the living-green curtain; not till toward
nine o'clock did a ground-sparrow twittering close to his hands draw
him with difficulty out of a deep sea of dream. But the shadowy shapes,
which the concave mirror of dream had erected in the air, were all
forgotten; only the tears, which they had wrung from them, still stood
in his eyes, and he could no longer remember why he had shed them.
To-day was Ember-day, which, like other changes of moon and weather,
makes the echo of our dreams louder and more polysyllabic.--In a
singular lassitude he opened his eyes before the white twilight of the
canopy of apple-blossoms, before the maze of the green web,--his hand
chased the ground-sparrow through the bushes,--it was sultry around
this shade, the tree-tops were mute and all the flowers erect,--bees
bent down from grains of sand into the springs around him and
sipped water,--white flocks dropped from the willows, and all the
smelling-bottles of the blossoms and the censers of the flowers
diffused over his place of slumber a sweet, sultry steam....
He raises his right hand to his moist eye and sees therein, to his
astonishment, a white hyacinth, which some one must have placed
there.... He suspected Clotilda; and she it had really been. Half an
hour before she had stepped up to this bed of flowers,--had gently let
the bushes immediately close again,--but then, however, drawn them
apart again, because she saw the tears of the forgotten dream run down
the face of the glowing sleeper,--her whole soul became now a tender
look and blessing of love, and she could not refrain from laying the
memorial of her morning-visit, the flower, on his hand,--and then
hastened softly back to her chamber.
He stepped hastily into the beaming day, to overtake the giver, whose
morning-offering he unhappily, for fear of destroying it, could no more
press to his heart than he could herself. O how it saddened him, when
he stood in the open air before the Moravian churchyard of the heavenly
night which had _gone home_, before the reposing garden, and when he
looked upon the bald, close-shaven, trodden-down dancing-floor, and on
the silent nightingale's-bush, and on the hills where the children were
tending sheep, disrobed of yesterday's finery! Then the forgotten dream
again appeared and said: Weep once more, for the rose-feast of thy life
concludes to-day, and the last of the _four_ rivers of Paradise in a
few hours will utterly dry up!--"O ye fair days," said Victor, "ye
deserve that I should leave you with a tenderness that knows no measure
and with unnumbered tears!"--He fled from the too harsh daylight into
the cell of crape, that it might recolor the brilliant foreground of
the day into a dim back-ground, overspread with the moonshine of
yesterday; and under this pall of the pale dead night he proposed to
himself to indulge his heart, so soon to be impoverished, with its last
joy, namely, its yearning, in utter overmeasure. He stepped out of the
tent, but the nocturnal moonshine faded not from the lawn; he looked up
into the blue heaven, which touches us with _one_ long flame, but the
veiled stars of the wintry night sent little outwelling rays to the
eclipsed soul; he said to himself, indeed, "The ice-mountain on which
hitherto my reason has delivered half sermons-on-the-mount, has shrunk
up under the glow of joy to a mole-hill," but he added, "To-day I care
for nothing."
He came to Emanuel with wet eyes. The latter told him that the first
link of yesterday's chain of flowers, namely the Briton with his
people, had already loosed itself in the night. But the longer he
looked on Emanuel and thought of the morrow,--for to-morrow before day
he too would softly close the garden gate of this Paradise behind, and
this afternoon he is to take leave of the Abbess and this evening of
his beloved, in order not to hinder her in the reading out of the
well-known angel's-epistle,--so much the more painful was the straining
of his eyes, and he preferred to go out, with a heart bleeding itself
full, into the open air, and led the blind one with him, who suspected
nothing, saw nothing, and before whom, besides, one loved to lay bare
his innermost heart as before a child.
But this time Julius was in the same softened state, because he had all
the morning seen the angel playing and hovering in his darkling soul.
The yearning for the angel brooded over his reposing heart and warmed
it even to beating, and he said with an unaccustomed sorrow, "If I
could only see, only something, only my father, or thee!" The
dust-covered remembrances of his childhood were shaken up; and out of
this cloud-enveloped period emerged before him into special prominence
one day, bright with morning, blue and full of song, and bore three
forms on its cloud-floor, Julius's own and those of the two children,
from whom before their embarkation for Germany he had parted,--drops
escaped from him without his perceiving it, when he described to this
Victor, the very one who had done what he described, how he had been
kissed and hugged and cried after by the one child, that loved him
most, and always carried him. "And I think," he continued, "that every
one whose voice I love to hear has the face of that good child, and
that _thou_ hast too. Often when I contemplate this form alone in my
darkness, and feel warm drops on my lips, and fall into a languishing,
slumbering rapture, I fancy it is blood trickles from my lips and my
heart is boiling,--but my father says if then my eyes were suddenly
opened, and I should look upon my angel, or the good child, or a
beautiful human being, I should have to die for love."----"O Julius,
Julius," cried his Victor, "how noble is thy heart! The good child whom
thou lovest so my father will soon lay in thy arms, and he will kiss
thee and love thee and clasp thee just as I do now."--
He led him back to dinner; but he himself remained till afternoon under
the open heaven, and his heart put on silent mourning under trees full
of bees, near thickets full of feeding birds, on all the former walks
and ecliptics of this dying festival,--and all the hours of childhood
rose out of the winter-sleep of memory and stirred his heart, but it
dissolved.--O when far distant moments sound on our ears with their
chime, then great drops fall from the softened soul, as the increasing
nearness of far-off bells sounding across betokens rain. I blame thee
not, Victor,--thou art, after all, only _feminine_, but not
_effeminate_,--if thy biographer can describe thy emotion and thy
reader can feel it, without relaxing the firm muscles of the heart,
thou canst do it quite as well, and only a man who can wring bitter
tears from others will scorn sweet ones and shed none himself.
At length Victor went to take his last pleasure, to the garden of
termination, in order to take leave with tender tears of all his female
friends at the Abbey. A singular incident delayed it a little: for as
he left Emanuel, he encountered Julius coming from the garden, who told
him, "if he wanted to find Emanuel, he was in the garden."--This raised
a friendly dispute, because each of them insisted on having just talked
with him. Victor went back with him to Emanuel, and Julius related to
his teacher every word of the alleged garden-talk with him: "e. g.
about Victor, about Clotilda, about the farewell he was to-day taking,
about his previous happy days."
During the narration Emanuel's face grew radiant, as if moonlight
flowed down from it,--and instead of representing to the beloved child
the impossibility of his appearance in the garden, he humored his
notion of the apparition, and said with delight: "I shall die,
then!--It was my departed father,--his voice sounds like mine,--he
promised me when he died to come back from the next world to this
before I should go hence.--Ah, ye beloved ones beyond the graves over
yonder, ye still then think of me.--O thou good father! break through
even now into my presence with thy fatal radiance, and release my
spirit in thy lips!"--
He was still more confirmed in his conclusion, because, Julius added
that the shape had demanded of him the angel's letter, but given it
back again after a short whisper. The seal was uninjured. Emanuel's
joyful enthusiasm at these telegraphs of death implied that he had
drawn dissatisfying inferences from his previous health. Victor never
set himself in opposition to the exalted errors of his teacher; thus,
e. g., he never arrayed the reasons he had, and which I will show in
the next Intercalary day, against the innocent delusion, that "from
dreams, and from the independence of the personal consciousness on the
body, one could infer its future independence after death,"--that "in
dream the inner diamond dusted itself and drank in light from a fairer
sun."--Victor was alarmed about the matter,--but for other reasons,
Julius took them both along with him to the place of the interview,
which was in the darkened avenue near the blossoming hollow. No one was
there, nothing appeared; leaves whispered, but no spirits; it was the
place of bliss, but of earthly bliss.--
Victor went into the other place of bliss, the Abbey. Clotilda was not
over there, but in the intricate labyrinth of the Park, probably for
the purpose of facilitating for its possessor, Julius, the opportunity
of hearing read the angel's letter. Just as the sun blazed over against
the window-panes, he took leave of the good Abbess with that refined,
feeling courtesy to which in her position the highest enthusiasm was
limited. The refined Abbess said to him: "The visit was so short, that
it would be inexcusable, if Victor did not make it good by persuading
her second spring guest (Clotilda) to lengthen hers; for she too was
going soon to leave them."--He took his leave of her with a heart-felt
respect: for his tender heart knew, quite as well behind the lace mask
of refinement and knowledge of the world as behind the leather-crust of
roughness, how to feel the tender heart of another.
But as he hastened to the garden, the tears of his heart gushed up
higher and warmer,--and he felt as if he must here in the face of the
sun embrace the rising moon, as he thought: "Ah, when thy pale fleece
hangs this evening brighter overhead there, when thou lookest down
alone, I shall have departed or be in the act of departing from my
pastoral world."--And below near the nightingale's hedge reposed his
Julius, shedding bright streams of tears,--for this whole evening
swarmed with greater and greater wonders[123] of chance,--he hastens
down to him, the letter of the so-called angel is opened in his hand,
Victor says softly, "Julius, why weepest thou so?"--"O God," said the
latter in broken tones, "guide me under a bower!"--He conducted him to
the crape one. Julius said, when they were under cover: "Good! here the
sun does not burn!" and flung his right arm around Victor, and gave him
the letter, and folded his arm round even to his heart and said: "Thou
good soul! tell me when the sun is down, and read me once more the
letter of the angel!"
Victor began: "Clotilda!"--"To whom is it?" said he.--"To me!" said
Julius, "and Clotilda has already read it to me; but I could not
understand her on account of her weeping, and besides I also was too
much distressed.--I shall die for sorrow, thou good Giulia, why didst
thou not tell me of it before thy death.--The dead one wrote it, read
on!"--He read:
"CLOTILDA!
"I cover my blushing cheeks with the funeral veil. My secret lies
hidden in my heart, and will be laid with it under the grave-stone.
But after a year it will force its way out of the mouldered heart. O,
then let it rest forever in thine, Clotilda!--and forever in thine,
Julius!--Julius, was not a silent form often about thee that called
itself thy angel? Did it not once, as the death-bell tolled for the
burial of a blooming maiden, lay a white hyacinth in thy hand, and say,
Angels pluck such _white_ flowers? Did not a mute form once take thy
hand and wipe away its tears therewith, and it could not tell why it
wept? Did not a low voice once say, Farewell, I shall no more appear to
thee, I go back to heaven? That form was I, O Julius; for I have loved
thee and even unto death. Lo! here I stand on the shore of the second
world, but I look not over into its infinite fields, but I turn my
face, while I am still sinking, back to thee, to thee, and my eye grows
dim over thy image.--Now I have told thee all.--Now come, quieting
death, crush slowly the white hyacinth, and rend the heart asunder
speedily, that Julius may see the love enclosed therein.--Ah, wilt thou
then take a dead one into thy soul? Wilt thou weep, when thou hearest
this read? Ah, when my covered, sunken dust can no more touch thee,
will my remote spirit be loved by thine?--But I conjure thee, O
ever-remembered one, go, on the day when this tearful leaf is read to
thee, then go, at sundown, up to my grave and offer to the pale face
below, which the old mound is already crushing asunder, and to the
dissolved heart that can beat for nothing more, then present to the
poor heart that has loved thee so much, and on thy account has hid
itself under the earth, thy funeral offering,--bring to it on thy flute
the tones of my loved song, 'The grave is deep and silent.'--Sing it
softly to the accompaniment, Clotilda, and thou too visit me.--Ah, poor
Giulia, lift up thy soul, and sink not now, as thou imaginest thy
Julius on thy grave!--When thou bringest thy offering to the dead, my
spirit will, it is true, already have gone up higher; I shall have
lived a year beyond the earth, I shall already have forgotten the
earth,--but nevertheless, but, O God, if Thou shouldst let the tones
above my grave penetrate into Elysium, then should I sink down and shed
hot tears and stretch out my arms and cry: Yes! here in eternity I love
him still,--may it fare well with him on the earth, may his soft heart
repose softly and long on life below there!--No, not long! Come up
hither, mortal, to the Immortals, that thine eye may be healed, and see
the friend who died for thee!
"GIULIA."
* * * * *
"I will go,"--said Julius hesitatingly, but with quiverings in his
face,--"although the sun is not down. My father shall console me till
sundown, that my heart may not beat so violently against my breast,
when I stand at the grave and make the offering to the dead."----Let me
say nothing, reader, of the choking heart with which I proceed,--nor of
this too sensitive Giulia, who like a morning sun-dial was ere noon in
shade and coolness, who, like a dove, unfolded her wings to the rain
and to tears,--nor of her soul's-sisters, who in the second decade of
life hang, the skeleton of death all over with flowers, that they may
not be able to see its limbs, and who rest their white arm merely on a
myrtle-twig of love as upon a bleeding-support, and watch calmly the
bleeding to death of its severed veins!--
I could not have said even this, if Victor had not thought it, whose
heart was mortally distraught by an infinite grief and an infinite
love; for ah! how far on the way was not his irreplaceable Clotilda
already, to follow her friend and hide her unloved heart in the earth,
as they lay down carnations in the frost?
The sun sank lower, the moon mounted higher,--Victor saw Clotilda, like
an ethereally embodied angel, reclining in a niche that opened towards
the west,--the little girl mentioned yesterday played, in her lap, with
a new doll,--it seemed to him as if he saw her soaring toward heaven,
and when she lifted her great eyelids, weighed down with tears for the
departed friend, whose secret she had long since guessed and concealed,
towards him, who to-day increased them by his departure; and when she
saw his face also melted in emotion; then did like sorrowful thoughts
drown in both even the first sounds of welcome, and both turned away
their faces, because they wept for the parting.----"Have you,"
said Clotilda, at least with a composed voice, "just spoken with
Julius?"--Victor did not answer, but his eyes said yes, in the simple
fact that they streamed more passionately and looked on her fixedly.
She cast hers down with a slight blush for Giulia. The little child
took the falling of the eyelids over the great drops for a sign of
sleepiness, and drew the little hay-stuffed pillow away from the doll,
spread it out for Clotilda, and said innocently, "There, lie down on it
and go to sleep!" A shudder thrilled through her friend, as she
answered, "Not to-day, dear; on pillows of hay only the dead sleep." He
shuddered, as he saw a snow-white pink, in the centre of which there
was a great dark-red point, like a bloody drop, trembling on her
agitated bosom. The fearful pink seemed to him to be the lily which
superstition formerly found in the choir-seat of the priest, whose
death was said thereby to be predicted.
She fixed her gaze painfully on, the low sun and the churchyard, behind
which in the May days it sank like a mortal. "Leave this prospect,
dearest," he said, though without a hope of obedience,--"a tender
integument is most easily destroyed by a tender soul,--your tears make
you too sad." But she replied: "Only in earlier years--but long ago it
ceased to be so--did they make my eye-sockets burn and benumb my
brain."--Suddenly, as the thought of the beclouded perspective of her
eyes exhausted with weeping wrung his heart out of his bosom, the
sunlight died upon her cheeks,--streams of tears broke violently
from her eyes,--he turned round,--over on the churchyard the veiled
youth had prostrated himself on the grave-mound of the veiled one
beneath,--the sun was already below the earth, but the flute had as yet
no voice, sorrow has only sighs,--no tones.... At last the beautiful
blind one raised himself erect, amidst convulsive sorrows, for the
funeral-offering, and the wailings of the flute went up from the closed
grave into the evening-redness,--three hearts melted away like the
tones, like the fourth heart that was buried below. But Clotilda lifted
herself up by force out of her dumb woe, and sang low as an offering to
the dead the heavenly song, for which the departed one had entreated
her and which I give with inexpressible emotion:--
The grave is deep and dismal,--
How solemn there to stand!
Below, in gloom abysmal,
There lies an unknown land.
There sounds, when daylight closes,
No nightingale's sweet tone;
And Friendship strews with roses
The mossy mound alone.
In vain the bride, forsaken,
May wring her hands and weep:
Nor orphans' wail may waken
The dead one from his sleep.
_Yet_ nowhere else can mortals
Attain the wished repose,
And through these gloomy portals,
Alone, man homeward goes.
O Salis! in that _yet_ are all our expired sighs, all our dried-up
tears, and they lift the aspiring heart from its roots and veins, and
it fain would die!
The voice of the noble singer gave way to sadness, but still she sang
the last of the strophes of this song of the spheres, though lower
under the--weight of overmastering sorrow:--
The weary heart, storm-driven,
There, where all tempests cease,
Finds home at length and heaven,
And everlasting peace.[124]
Her voice broke, as an eye breaks into tears or a heart in death....
Her friend veiled his head with the leaves of the bower,--the whole of
earthly life passed before him like a dirge.--Clotilda's sad past,
Clotilda's dark future, drew together before his vision, and cast, in
the darkness, the funeral veil over this angel, and bore her shrouded
into the grave of her sister.... He had even forgotten his farewell....
He had not the heart to look upon the great scene around him and the
bowed form beside him....
He heard the little one go and say, "I will fetch thee a larger pillow
to put under thy head."
Clotilda stood up and clasped his hand,--he turned round again toward
the earth,--and she looked on him with eyes worn with weeping, yet
tender, whose drops were too pure for this unclean world, but in those
large eyes stood something like the terrible question, "Do we not love
each other in vain for this world?" And her beating heart shook the
bloody pink. The moon and the evening star gleamed solitary, like a
past, in heaven.--Julius lay mute and prostrate, with outspread arms,
on the low mound which had been rolled upon the dust of his shattered
paradise.
The tones of the nightingale throbbed now like high waves on the
night,--then he gathered up his courage to bid her farewell....
Reader! raise not thy spirit to any pitch of rapture, for it will soon
stiffen in a spasm,--but I raise my soul thereto, because even the
fatal stumble at the gate of paradise is not unlovely when one is going
out of it!
The first call of the confiding nightingale was suddenly answered
still-higher by a new nightingale that had fluttered along and whose
voice was muffled by thick blossoms, who kept flying as she sang, and
now made her languishing melody flow out of the blossoming hollow. The
two lovers, who delayed and dreaded parting, wandered confusedly after
the receding nightingale, and were on the way to the blessed blooming
hollow; they knew not that they were alone; for in their hearts was
God; before their sight shone the whole second world full of risen
souls. At last Clotilda recovered herself, turned round before the
nightingale, and gave the mournful sign of separation.--Victor stood on
the shore of his late blissful island,--all, all was now over,--he
lingered, took both her hands, could not yet look upon her for anguish,
bowed down with tears, raised himself up again, when he was able to say
softly: "Farewell,--my heavy heart can say no more,--fare thee right
well, far better than I,--weep not so often as thou usedst to do, that
thou mayest not perchance have to leave me utterly.--For then I too
should go."--Louder and more solemnly he continued: "For we can no more
be separated,--here under Eternity I deliver to thee my heart,--and
when it forgets thee, then--may a sorrow crush it which shall reach
over the two worlds." ... In a lower and tenderer tone, "Weep not
to-morrow, angel,--and Providence give thee rest." Like a transfigured
one to a transfigured he inclined himself modestly to her holy lip, and
in a gentle, devout kiss, in which the hovering souls only glide
tremulously from afar to meet each other with fluttering wings, with a
light touch he took from the yielding, dissolving lips the seal of her
pure love, the repetition of his late Eden, and her heart and his
all----
--But here let the gentler soul, which the thunderbolts of fate too
sorely agitate, turn its eye away from the great yellow flash which
suddenly darts through the still Eden!
* * * * *
"Scoundrel!" cried Flamin, rushing out with sparkling looks, with
snow-white cheeks, with locks hanging down like a mane, with two
pocket-pistols in his hands,--"there take, take; blood I want," and
thrust the deadly weapon towards him; Victor forced Clotilda aside,
saying, "Innocent one! do not aggravate thy sorrows!"--Flamin cried in
a new kindling of fury, "Blood!--Faithless one, take, fire!"--Matthieu
fell upon his right arm, but the left, trembling, forced the weapon
upon Victor.--Victor snatched it towards him, because the muzzle was
swaying about Clotilda.--"Thou art in truth my brother," cried the
tortured girl, whose deathly agony alone kept her by its rack from the
death of a swoon.--Flamin with both arms flung all from him and said
with a horribly low and long-drawn voice in his raving exhaustion,
"Blood!--Death!"--Clotilda sank to the ground. Victor looked at her and
said, turning to him, "Only fire, here is my life!"--Flamin cried
aloud, "Thou first!"--Victor shot, lifting his arm high up, so as to
shoot into the air, and the splintered top of a branch was brought down
by his ball.--Clotilda came to.--Emanuel flew to the spot,--threw
himself on his pupil's heart,--from his breast for the first time in
years rent with passion the sickly blood gushed out. Flamin proudly
hurled away his pistol and said to Matthieu, "Come!--it isn't worth the
trouble," and went off with him.
When Clotilda saw Emanuel's blood on her lover's clothes, she supposed
him to have been hit, and laid her handkerchief on the blood and said,
"Ah, you have not deserved this of me!"--Emanuel breathed again
through his blood, no one could speak any more, no one could think,
every one feared to give consolation, the mortally crushed hearts
parted with suppressed woe; only Victor, whom the horrible word
"scoundrel" at every recollection of it pierced through like a dagger,
said to the sister: "I love him no more, but he is unhappier than we;
ah! he has lost all and kept nothing but a devil."
Namely, Matthieu. It was he who had to-day imitated the voice of
Emanuel, which had seemed to speak with Julius, and whose voice Dahore
had taken for his father's, and afterward the voice of the nightingale,
which Victor had followed, in order to convince the Regency Counsellor
through his own ears and eyes of Victor's love for Clotilda.
Victor led his weak teacher to the Indian cottage. He felt his nerves
now after so many relaxing days cooled and steeled by this tempest; his
anguish of soul and sacrifice had made his blood, as the confinement of
narrowing channels does streams, more swift and impetuous, and his love
for Clotilda had been made manlier and bolder by the thought that he
now entirely deserved it. There is nothing more beautiful than
magnanimity and gentleness, except the union of the two.
Emanuel was nothing more than faint, and, as the evening brooded with a
sweltering influence over all, he seated himself with Victor on the
grassy bench of his house in order to keep his palpitating breast in an
erect posture, and a tender joy gleamed in his features at every fallen
drop of blood, because each was a red seal upon his hope of dying. But
when Victor took the good man's weary head to his bosom and let him go
to sleep thereon, then in the still evening sadness came over him
again, and for the first time his heart pained him. He thought to
himself all alone there, how over at the Abbey hot swords would pass
hissing through the innocent bleeding soul,--he felt how now the
two-syllabled, two-edged word of Flamin's wrath had cut through the
whole bond of their friendship,--he represented to himself the blooming
theatre of beautiful days beside him deserted and desolate, and the
sweeping by of joys, which only play round us like butterflies in wide
circles, while the hairworm[125] of grief bites deeply into our nerves.
At last he leaned weeping on the slumbering father, and pressed him
softly, and said, "Ah! without friendship and love I could not bear the
earth."--And at length his distracted and exhausted soul also was
weighed and dragged down by the heavy body into the thick atmosphere of
sleep.
* * * * *
Reader! the last moment in Maienthal is the greatest,--raise thy soul
through awe and mount up on graves as on high mountains, in order to
look over into the other world!
At midnight when fancy draws the buried dead from their coffins and
sets them upright in the night round about her, and unknown shapes
drift to us from the second world,--just as indistinguishable corpses
driven from America to the coasts of the Old World announced to it the
New,--in the ghostly hour Victor opened his eyes, but with
inexpressible serenity. A forgotten dream had sunk far away to-day's
past with all its din and cloud;--the bright moon stood overhead in the
blue dark like the silvery fissure and sparkling fountain-like mouth,
from which the stream of light out of the other world breaks into ours
and comes down in ethereal vapor.--"How still and radiant is all!" said
Victor. "Is not this glimmering region a relic of my dream? is not this
the magic suburbs of the supernal city of God?"--A voice hurrying over
said, Death! I am already buried.
Emanuel opened his eyes at that, sent them through the foliage over to
the churchyard that overlooked the village and said, with a convulsion
of his being, "Horion, wake up; Giulia has left eternity and is
standing on her grave."--Victor cast a feverish glance up thither; and
all the warm thoughts and nerves of life grew hard and stiff in a
cutting ice-cold shudder, as he saw up there a white, veiled form
resting on the grave. Emanuel snatched himself up, and his pupil, and
said: "We will go up to the theatre of the spirits; perhaps the dead
one will lay hold on my soul and take me with her." ... Fearful was the
silence of the regions around their way.... Men start up out of the
ground like dumb-waiters, like serving-machines, and drop down again
when they are emptied.... The human race darts like a flying summer
through the sunshine, and the bedewed web hangs fluttering on two
worlds and in the night it passes away.... So thought both on their
pilgrimage to the dead one; they wondered at their own heavy
incarnation and at the noise of their steps. Emanuel fastened his gaze
on the veiled form that now knelt down; he thought she heard his
thoughts and would fly over to his heart through the moonlight....
The hearts of the two men rose and fell as if under two gravestones, as
they climbed the long, grass-grown steps to the churchyard, and touched
and opened the heavy gate which was painted with forms of risen saints,
half effaced by the weather. The warm earthly blood congeals and the
soft brain runs to a single image of terror, when the great cloud rolls
away from eternity and from the gate of the spiritual world; on the
stage of the dead Emanuel called as if beside himself: "Awful spirit, I
am a spirit like thee, thou too standest below God,--wilt thou kill me,
then kill me not by a stroke of horror, not by a crushing form, but
smile like men and quietly wring off my heart."--Then the veiled form
rose up and came,--Emanuel wildly grasped his friend, buried himself
in his face, and said clinging to him: "On thee I die, on thy warm
heart,--O live happy, unless thou wilt grow cold with me, ah! go with
me!" ...
"Ah, Clotilda!" said Victor; for she was the form. She was dumb as the
realm of spirits, for the dead one whom she had visited still clung
around her heart; but she was great as a spirit from that realm: for
the ethereal luminous nebula of the moon, the standing over the dead,
the look into eternity, the lofty night, and the mourning exalted her
soul, and one almost forgot that she wept.--Emanuel still held his
wings spread out over the scene, and looked sublimely over the graves:
"How all sleeps and rests here on this great green death-bed! I would
lie down there and die.--Did not something just speak?--The thoughts of
mortals are words of spirits.--We are night birds stealing through the
dubious atmosphere, we are dumb night-walkers who fall into these pits,
when they awake.--Ye dead! crumble not so mutely into dust; ye spirits,
ye that come forth out of your buried hearts, flutter not so
transparent around us!--O, man were vanity and ashes and a plaything
and vapor on the earth, did he not feel that he were so[126]----O God,
this feeling is our immortality"[127]----
Clotilda, by way of drawing him down from this desolating inspiration,
took him by the hand and said: "Farewell, O worthy of veneration! I bid
farewell this very day, because to-morrow I leave Maienthal. Live
happily,--happily till we see each other again; my heart will never
forget your greatness, but I shall see you again soon." ... Her
melancholy at the thought of his predicted death, her fear of an
eternal parting, stifled her remaining words, for she wanted to say
more and thank him more warmly. Emanuel said: "We shall never see each
other again, Clotilda; for I die in four weeks."--"O God! no!" said
Clotilda with the most heart-felt and impassioned tone.--"My good
Emanuel," said Victor, "torment not this tormented one.--Cheer thyself,
O tortured one, our friend will certainly stay with us."--Here Emanuel
raised his eyes to heaven and said with a look in which a world lay,
"Eternal One! Couldst thou hitherto have so deceived me?--No, no, on
the longest day thy stars will draw me upward, and thy earth will cool
my heart.--And thee, thou good Clotilda, thou soul from heaven, thee,
then, I certainly see to-day, God knows! for the last time with thy
lovely cheeks and in thy earthly form,--I bless thee and bid thee
farewell, but heavily and sadly, because I must still live so many days
without thee. Go through life with soft influences breathing around
thee, keep thy heart high above the many-colored mist of earth and
above its storm-clouds,--indeed, thou hearest me not, thou bitterly
weeping face; God pour solace into thy soul, let thy parting be more
glad!--Thy friend will be with me when I go hence."--Here Victor
grasped the hands of the trembling form, exhausted with weeping, who
vainly wiped away her tears to see her teacher once more and press his
image on her soul; and when Victor cried wildly, "Giulia! sainted one!
mitigate the woe of thy friend in this hour, hold this breaking heart,"
then said Emanuel, looking on both with indescribable tenderness: "I
bless you, like a father, holy pair of souls! never forsake, never
forget each other!--O ye blessed spirits here above the glimmering
mould of the crumbling coffins, give these two hearts peace and,
happiness, and when I am dead, I will float around your souls and quiet
them. And Thou, Eternal One, make these two mortals beneath thy stars
as happy as I,--O take nothing from them, nothing on the earth, but
life.--Good-night, Clotilda!" ...
--The Whitsuntide days are over!--
And I thank thee, kind Destiny, that Thou hast given me health for the
joy of sketching such a fleeting golden age, since my weak, unequally
beating heart deserves not to paint such raptures.--And for thee, my
dear reader, may the Whitsuntide feast have sweetened some ash-Sunday
or passion-week of thy life![128]--
FOURTH PREFACE,
OR, EXTORTED ANTICRITIQUE AGAINST ONE OR ANOTHER REVIEW,
WITH WHICH I MIGHT POSSIBLY BE DISPLEASED.
Clever Romance-writers create out of writing-ink and printer's-ink a
new and terrible tyrant, give him a throne either in Italy or the
Orient,--and then (unlike children who run away from the figure they
have drawn) they step up courageously before the painted, crowned
tyrant, and tell him the grandest, but boldest truths to his face,
which betray the free man, and which no crooked courtling could well
repeat before his sovereign. Such dare-devils remind me so often of two
abecedarians, when I pass a gate in Oat Lane in Hof, on which a painted
lion rears himself and his mane, and curls and sways his tail and his
tongue. For one of the aforesaid abecedarians said to the other as I
was hurrying by: "Hear me, I tell you I'll seize him by the tail, I'm
not a bit afraid." But the other tyro, who had a much bolder thought,
coolly mounted a corner-stone and said: "I first, Sir, I thrust my fist
right into his jaws,--so!"--
It is the same boldness with which an author often attacks on
paper, not only the aforementioned grim king of beasts, but also the
critical _feline race_,--which Linnæus reckons in the royal line of
lions,--while he shakes judicial chairs as coldly and boldly as if they
were painted thrones, and so in general scolds and assails Journals in
his Prefaces. A writer of power can do this. I, for my part, am perhaps
as audacious in this as any one, and paint out for myself expressly the
following review-cat, in order to grapple with her freely and
fearlessly, and to show by her what courage can do.
In the first place, the Reviewer who charges me with being indebted to
the amount of two whole Intercalary Days,--the one after the Fortieth
and the one after the Forty-fourth Dog-Post-Days,--cannot have seen
this Second Edition at all; the two Prefaces with which I have enriched
it, the first and this, will answer with all sensible men for true
Intercalary Days.
Secondly, my Reviewer will find fault (in future) with my indulging my
_manner_. But let him hear now the Philosopher (namely, myself): Manner
is of itself nothing but what follows: the æsthetic ideal and integral,
like every other, is reached only by an infinite power, but we with our
finite strength are incessantly coming _nearer_ to it, never so much as
_near_; Manner is, therefore, as the Philosopher takes it, a finite
mirror of infinity, or the expression of the relation in which every
_temperament_ and number of strings of any given Æolian harp stands to
the score of the infinite music of the Spheres, which it has to echo.
Every combination of human powers gives only a manner; and higher
spirits would find in Homer and Goethe the _human_ manner at least;
nay, the higher angelic hierarchy would find the lower manneristic, the
seraph the angel of the churches. But as I am not even an ordinary
angel,--not to say a seraph,--another Reviewer than he who will
criticise me would have presumed beforehand that I should have a
manner.--And such I manifestly have.--But yet more: as the _degree_ and
the _relation_ of our powers change from year to year,--and
consequently the product and proceeds of the same also, the manner--:
accordingly and unfortunately the manner of the fiftieth year generally
sets itself as the corrector of that of the twenty-fifth; or rather
there ensues a heterogeneous adoption of children of two marriages, in
which both are losers. Such a simultaneous Hysteron-Proteron[129] is
still worse than if one should undertake to clip and grind down the
Grecian statues of one of Winkelmann's ages of art according to the
statues of another. Pour rather a pure, flowing work into thy
present mould, and do not wait to force it in when it is cast and
hardened!--Even granting I should become hereafter another and a wiser
man, I would never graft the old man upon the youth.
Man regards himself in the concert-hall of the universe, if not as the
solo-player, yet as one of the instruments,--instead of a single
_tone_,--as in fact the Prince looks upon himself as an Oberon's or at
least hunter's horn,--the poet as an oaten pipe,--the author as a
composing-instrument,[130]--the Pope as the organ-works,--the belle as
Bestelmeier's hand-steel-harmonica, or as a quail-whistle,--my reviewer
as a pitch-pipe,--and I on myself as Maelzel's great Panharmonicon. But
we are all only _tones_, as in Potemkin's orchestra every one of the
sixty metallic flutes gave only _one_ tone. Therefore I am glad of
every individuality, of every manner, as of a new semitone in the
church music of natures.
Thirdly, I know nothing by which I can see more clearly my future
reviewer's perplexity for want of _materia peccans_ to censure, than
this, that he sticks to such pitiful trifles--in future--as the
following evidently are, that I, e. g., have appended this Preface,
that I have bound the work in four separate Parts, and by this
fourth part have made, for an earlier possessor and bookworm, the
sheet-worm[131] of the old edition wholly useless. From the like
specimens and sayings, wherewith such a Spartan Ephor Emerepes will
rob me of the fourth and highest string, which I stretch on my fiddle
full of rising fifths, let the indulgent reader form an idea how the
whole of the Review must look. I am ashamed to go on.
Fourthly, I find universally, that, if an author in his Preface charges
himself with a slight fault, which, however, he himself hardly
believes, then the critics forthwith adopt and double this charge, as,
among the Romans, a suicide who failed to accomplish the act was
afterward regularly executed. If the author, having his eyes thus
opened, strikes into another line, and bestows upon himself,
beforehand, some praise,--and that not apparent,--_this_ is not even
accepted, not to say doubled. In that case the Devil may be speaker of
the prologue!--
Meanwhile he seems also to be only Reviewer, and less a sly than a
coarse customer. Many and really glaring incivilities, however, I
willingly forgive my future reviewer, whereas I pardon nothing to a
Gallic or British one, because he knows how one should treat people.--I
play with him myself in this anticritique in no specially polite
manner, nor do I, as the peasant doffs his hat before higher
lightnings, doff mine before his. Besides, the judges after the Special
Recension address the defendant as "thou." A mild (critical) winter is
unwholesome to him upon whom it comes. For the rest, I simply wait
and watch for the hour when I shall be celebrated and have on
laurel-leaves: then I shall not, any more than other contemporaries who
have now set up laurel-trees, suffer any one to find fault with me; and
few will undertake it, just as on pictures which have been smeared with
_laurel oil_ no flies alight.
Fifthly and finally. It is well known that the deceased authoress,
Ehrmann, when the advocate Ehrmann had accepted and noticed with much
approbation one of her works in the Strassburg Gazette, married him on
account of the review. If the editor of some journal play his cards so
adroitly that a female coadjutor in the magazine shall welcome and
announce my Second Edition of Hesperus (or Star Venus) with the
admiration which the First Edition universally receives on account of
its charms; and if he will only tip me a wink as to the sex of my
reviewer,--in which connection, however, _this_ must be looked to, that
the critical person shall be, on the whole, still in the best blooming
period of a reviewer's life, wherein one can still readily feel and
impart and favorably review the fire of the Evening Star or Venus, and
so much the more, as even in physics only green wood is a conductor of
the electrical flame, but dry a nonconductor,--if the editor will see
to and execute all this, then the author of this anticritique pledges
himself with his signature to wait upon the coadjutress immediately
after the receipt of the review, and with the usual ceremonies to marry
her.
JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.
Hof in Voigtland, June 8, 1797.
NINTH INTERCALARY DAY.
VICTOR'S ESSAY ON THE RELATION OF THE SOUL TO THE ORGANS.
Victor was an enemy to the exclusive taste in philosophy quite as much
as in poetry. On all systems--even of the heretics of Epiphanius and of
Walch--the form of truth is imprinted, as the human form is in the
bestial kingdom, although in bolder and bolder lines. No man can
believe in nonsense proper, although he may speak it. Singular it is,
that precisely the _consequent_ or consistent systems, without the
atomic _Clinamen_[132] of feeling, deviate from each other the most
widely. Systems, like the passions, only at the focal distance throw
the brightest point of light upon the object;--how pitifully, e. g.,
does the great theory of self-subjugation run out of _Christianity_
over into _Stoicism_,--then into _Mysticism_,--then into _Monachism_,
till the stream spreads out and oozes away into _Fohism_, as the Rhine
loses itself in the sand!--The theory of Kant, with all logical
systems, has this tendency to run into sand, and has that
deflection[133] of feeling in common with the inconsequent ones, which
brings together the wasting arms again to a renewing fountain-head. The
two hands of the Pure Reason, which in the antinomy[134] scratched and
beat each other, the Practical Reason peacefully joins together, and
presses them, folded, to the heart, and says, here is a God, a
Conscious Person, and an Immortality!----
Victor first fructified his soul with great Nature or with poets, and
then, and not till then, awaited the dawn of a system. He discovered
(not invented) the truth by soaring and surveying, not by penetration,
microscopic inspection, and syllogistic groping from one syllable of
the book of nature to another, _whereby one gets its words indeed, but
not their sense_. That creeping and touching belongs, he said, not to
the _finding_, but to the _proving_ and confirming of truth; for which
he always took lessons of Bayle: for no one is a poorer teacher in the
discovery of truth, or a better one for the proof of it, than acuteness
or Bayle, who is its mint-assayer, but not its miner.
* * * * *
THE ESSAY.
If I wrote it in Göttingen, I might make it in paragraphs and more
thoroughly, because the Flachsenfingen folks would not disturb me.
Meanwhile it must still be written here, in order that I may have a
patron and advocate in my own person against the court-gentlemen, who
want to transform my soul into my body.
The Brain and Nerves are the true body of the "I"; the rest of the
environment is only the body of that body, the nourishing and
protecting bark of that tender pith.--And as all the changes of the
world appear to us only as changes of that pith or marrow, accordingly
the pith- and pulp-ball with its streaks is the proper world-globe of
the soul. The inverted nervous tree springs from the swollen brain of
the fœtus as from a kernel, which it also resembles in appearance,
and ascends with--sensitive branches as spinal marrow, even to the
anatomical summit of the horse-tail. This marrowy growth is grafted
upon the venous tree as a consuming parasitic plant. And as every twig
is a tree in miniature, accordingly--for all this is not a
correspondence of wit, but of nature--the nervous ganglia are fourth
cerebral chambers in small. The terminations of the nerves, in their
development, open out on the retina, on the Schneiderian[135]
membrane, in the gustative knot, &c., into leaf and flower. Hence,
e. g., we see not with the continuation of the optic nerve, but with
the delicate unravelling of its stamina; for the great dissolving
picture-gallery on the retina cannot possibly, by a movement of the
nervous spirit, (or whatever one will assume--for after all it comes
back to motion,) be slid back to the brain; in which case, besides, the
two galleries of the two eyes would have to pass through the two prongs
of the visual nerve and coincide at its handle to one picture.
Consequently the image in the eye, ear, &c., if it is to serve any
purpose, must be felt forward on the point of the nerve,--in one word,
it is even more absurd to shut up the soul in the locker[136] of the
fourth ventricle of the brain, i. e. in a pore of this tubercular
plant, than it would be if one who, like me, ascribes an animating soul
to the flower, should imprison the same in the ground-story of the dull
kernel. Rather would I, surely, locate the soul in the finest
honey-vessels of the senses, the eyes, than in the insensible brain, if
I did not, in fact, believe that, like a Hamadryad, it inhabits and
warms and stirs every nervous bough of this animal plant. The
under-tied or severed nerve conveys, it is true, no further sensation,
not however on account of the interruption of the connection with the
soul and residence chamber in the brain, but because the nutritious
spirit of life is cut off from it; for the nerves, like all finer
organizations, need so much a continuous supply of food, that the
arrested beating of heart and artery suspends in one minute all their
powers.
I go further and say outright, beforehand,--by way of contradicting two
errors: these organs do not feel, but are felt; secondly, the organs
are not the condition of all feeling in general, but only of a certain
kind.
The last first: as the organ (i. e. its changes), which is as much a
body as any gross object, whose own changes it brings in contact with
the soul, is nevertheless felt by the spiritual nature immediately and
without a _second_ organ: accordingly all corporeal substances give the
spiritual essence sensations as well as the nerves do, and an
unembodied soul is not possible, for the simple and sole reason, that
in case of the dissolution of the body it would then wear the whole
material universe as a heavier one.
My first assertion was, one should not say the _perceptive_, but the
_perceived_ organization. The nerves do not feel the object, but only
change the place where it is felt, and their changes and those of the
brain are only _objects_ of sensation, not _instruments_ thereof, nor
in fact sensation itself. But wherefore?--
I have more than one Therefore. A body is capable only of motion,
although, to be sure, that motion is only the show of the
aforementioned combination and the result of the powers concealed in
simple parts. The string, the air, the auditory ossicles, the auricular
nerves, vibrate; but the vibration of the latter no more explains the
sensation of a tone than the vibration of the string could, if the soul
were chained to that. Thus, despite all images in the eye and brain,
the _discernment_ of them is still not yet made out or explained; or
will you say, perhaps, that for some such reason as this, because the
senses are _mirrors_ full of images, therefore the spiritual _eye_ is
dispensed with or made good? And does not the change of the nerve
presuppose a second in a second essence, if it is to be perceived? Or
does another motion in this essence represent the first motion?
This brings me to the brain. That greatest and grossest nerve--the
sounding-board of all the others--shows up to the soul the delineations
of those images which are introduced by the rest. Upon the whole, I am
of opinion that the brain serves more the nerves of the muscles, the
veins of the limbs, which meet in the hand of the soul, and all, in
fact, more as nourishing root, than it serves as a case of instruments
to the pictorial soul. As most of our ideas are served up on visual
images, and take from them their ground color, it is probable we think
more with the optic nerve than with the brain. Why is it, as Bonnet has
observed, that deep-thinking wearies the eyes and sharp-seeing the
brain? Why do certain excesses blunt at the same time the memory and
the eyes? The fever-images playing their antics outside of the eyes of
the sick and people of lively fancy, like Cardan, who saw in the dark
whatever he thought vividly and glowingly, are explained in my
hypothesis.
In regard to the brain there are two errors; but Heaven save my friends
only from one of them. For from the other Reimarus can guard them, who
has fully proved that the brain is no Æolian harp with trembling
strings, nor a camera-obscura with sliding pictures, nor a barrel-organ
with pins for every idea, which the spirit turns, in order of itself to
play to and from itself its ideas. If now not even the pre-established
_harmony_ of the brain and the mind, nor the mutual _accompaniment_ of
the two, is conceivable, so is their _identity_ absolutely impossible;
and this is precisely the error from which the abovementioned Heaven
has to keep my friends. The materialist must first set up all that
which Reimarus has overthrown; he must petrify in the brain-pap the
millions of picture-cabinets of seventy years, and yet again make them
movable like _Eidophysica_,[137] and deal out the shuffled card-images
to every second of time; he must see to it that these _animated_
dancing images are forced into rank and file. And then, after all, and
only then, does his difficulty properly begin; for now--even if we
grant him that the images see themselves, the thoughts think
themselves, that every imagination darkly mirrors all others, and even
the conscious "I," as a monad, does the universe--now (we say) he must
first get him a generalissimo who shall command and array this
immeasurable, fluctuating host of ideas, a compositor who shall set up
the idea-book from an unknown manuscript, and, when dreams, fevers,
passions, have shaken all the letter-cases into _pi_, shall rearrange
all the letters alphabetically. This ruling unity and power--without
which the _symmetry of the microcosm_ is as inexplicable as that of the
_macrocosm_, that of _the ideal world_ as that of the _actual_--is
precisely what we call a spirit. To be sure, by this unknown power
neither the origin nor the succession of ideas is _mediated_ or
explained, but, assuming only the known force of matter, motion, all
that is not only incredible, but absolutely impossible; and
Leibnitz can more easily explain motion by dark imaginings, than
the materialist can imaginings by motions. In the former case motion is
only semblance, and exists only in the second contemplating being, but
in the latter the representation would be show and would exist in the
second--_representing_ substance.
I have often quarrelled with men of the world who make good
observations and miserable conclusions, because in case of the least
dependence of the soul upon the body--e. g. in old age, intoxication,
&c.--they made the one a mere repeating-work of the other; nay, I have
even said, no dancing-master was so stupid as to conclude: "Inasmuch as
I dance awkwardly in leaden shoes, more nimbly in wooden ones, and best
of all in silk ones, I see clearly from this, that the shoes have
special springs to communicate rapidity; and as with leaden shoes I can
hardly lift my feet, if I were barefoot I could hardly make out a
single _Pas_." The soul is the dancing-master, the body the shoe.
We cannot conceive any action either of bodies upon bodies or of monads
upon monads; consequently, of the organs upon the conscious being,
still less. This we know, that the cohesion and community of goods
between soul and body is always the same, or at most greater at the
times when others would expect it to be less; for the greatest
depth of thought, the holiest emotion, the highest flight of fancy,
are precisely what need the waxen wing-work of the body most,
as its consequent exhaustion also gives assurance; the more
incorporeal the object of the ideas is, so much the more corporeal
hand-and-draught-services are necessary to the holding of it fast, and
at most the periods of stupid sensuality, of spiritual enervation, of
blear imbecility, are the ones with which we must make coincide the
periods of liberation from the chains of the body. Even the moral power
with which we trample down wanton, upshooting bodily impulses works
with bodily crows and tools; and the soul in this case merely summons
the brain against the stomach.--Add to this, that the limits and
hindrances to such fettering and unfettering are as little to be
assigned as the causes of the same. Still less can the bonds of the
soul, as some think, grow looser and longer in dream. Sleep is the rest
of the nerves, not of the whole body. The involuntary muscles, the
stomach, the heart, keep on working therein, not much less than when
one lies down awake. Only the nerves and the brain, i. e. thinking and
perceiving, are suspended. Hence slumber refreshes men while riding and
driving, who therefore rest nothing but the nerves. Hence weak-nerved
patients, whom all rest wearies, are refreshed by dreamless sleep. By
the way, without the theory of _disorganization_ which assumes negative
and positive nervous electricity, the phenomena of sleep are
inexplicable;--e. g. it is inexplicable in that case, why opium, wine,
manipulation, animality, childhood, plethora, nourishing food,
perfumes, on the one hand, are precisely what promote sleep; while, on
the other hand, torture, exhaustion, old age, temperance, pressure on
the brain, winter, loss of blood, fear, grief, phlegm, fat, spiritual
enervation, also provoke it.----At most in deep sleep, when the
nerve-body rests, could we suppose the soul loosed from earthly chains;
in dream, on the contrary, it should rather be supposed the more
closely fastened, because dreaming, as well as deep thinking, which
also locks the gates of the five senses as well, is surely no sleeping.
Hence dreams wear out the nerves, to the inner overstrainings of which
they add outer impressions. Hence morning lends both the brain and our
dreams equal animation. Hence the sleeping animal--except the
effeminate tame dog--has no unhealthy dreams. Hence even Aristotle
assigns unusual dreams as forerunners of the sick-nurse. Hence--I have
now dreamed enough, and the reader has slept enough.--
37. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Amoroso at Court.--Preliminary Recesses of Marriage.--Defence
of Courtly Back-bending.
On the morning after that great night Victor took leave of this
consecrated burial-ground of his fairest days with unconcealed tears.
Often he looked back on these ruins of his Palmyra, till nothing of
them was left standing except the mountain-ridge as a fire-proof wall.
"When I come back hither four weeks hence," thought he, "it will only
be to see the death-angel lay my Emanuel on the altar and under the
sacrificial knife." He bethought himself how dearly he paid for this
feast of tabernacles by the death of a friend;[138] and how the latter,
without such compensation, suffered just as great a loss. For he felt
that the frightful word "scoundrel" had now come in as an eternal wall
of rock between their sundered souls.--He called to mind, indeed, and
right gladly, what there was to acquit his late friend, particularly
his being hounded on by Matthieu and his listening when _he_ swore
eternal love to Clotilda; nay, he even suspected that the Evangelist
had perhaps let poor Flamin see far in the background peculiar motives
(these suggested by the Apothecary) for a love, by whose object the
favor of the Prince was to be secured,--but his _feelings_ incessantly
repeated to him: "He still ought not to have _believed_ it!--ah, hadst
thou only," said he with emotion, at the sight of the city, "pierced me
with balls or with other terms of contempt, that I might have easily
forgiven thee!--But that thou shouldst have done it with just this
ever-gnawing venomous sound!"--He is right; the injury of honor is not
therefore the less, because the other inflicts it from full conviction
of right.--For the conviction is precisely the offence; and the honor
of a friend is something so great, that a doubt of it should hardly
dare to arise except by its own confession. But thus do separations
easily grow out of little concealments, as from March _clouds_ July
_tempests_. Only a perfected noble soul can forbear to try any longer
the tried friend,--can believe when the enemies of the friend
deny,--can blush as at an impure thought, when a dumb, flying suspicion
soils the gracious image,--and when at last the doubts are no more to
be conquered, can still banish them for a long time from one's actions,
willing rather to fall into an economical improvidence than into the
heavy sin against the Holy Spirit in man. This firm confidence is
easier to deserve than to have.
In the noisy foundery and mill of the city he felt as if in a dreary
forest. Accustomed as he was to tender souls, the city ones appeared to
him all so thorny and unpolished; for love had, like tragedy, purified
his passions in exciting them. All hung over so ruinous and moss-grown
as if on the verge of a collapse, whereas the clean mirror-walls of
Maienthal rose firm and radiant. For love is the only thing which fills
the heart of man to the brim, although with a nectar-foam that soon
sinks again; it alone composes a poem of some thousand minutes without
the rattling repetitions of the letter R, as the Dominican Cardone[139]
executed a poem upon it quite as long under the name _L' R_--
_sbadita_[140] without a single R,--hence, like crabs, it is finest in
the months without an R in their name.
The first thing he had to do in Flachsenfingen was to write to
Clotilda. For as the Evangelist Matthieu would now in all probability
go out into all the world and preach the gospel of the pistol-duel
between the two friends to all people, there was nothing else to do for
the sacred reputation of his beloved than to transform her into a
betrothed by a publicly declared engagement. Flamin's newly kindled
passion could not be considered at all in comparison with Clotilda's
justification. The exclamation, "Thou art my brother," which the
convulsions of anguish had wrung from Clotilda, had of course been
incomprehensible to Flamin, and had fallen unheeded on his ear; but for
the listening Mat it had become a grand text and _dictum probans_ of
his doctrinal system respecting their being brother and sister.--In the
letter, therefore, Victor besought his friend for a tacit assent to his
suit; he left it to her, by his silence, to guess the most
disinterested motives of his prayer.
He appeared now on the war-theatre of souls, of which one seldom
catches an exact map, the court;--to his heart, filled with paradises,
even the apartments seemed like glass cases of a stuffed aviary, which
one strews with powder-brass, conchs, and flowers, and the live
articles of the rooms like dried birds stuffed with wood or arsenic;
through the snakes wire was drawn, as through the tails of great
beasts, and the tree-runners on the throne stood on wire.----So very
much had he become through the Whitsuntide festival the antipode of us
who in colder blood easily remark what is sublime and noble about a
court.--The newest news he heard there was that the Prince in company
with the Princess was to take a journey to the mineral springs of St.
Luna, he to cure his gouty feet, she to cure her eyes. Victor was
really not quite tolerant, when he thought to himself, "If you will not
fare any better, then, for all I care, go to the D----." The Paullinum
was to him a slaughter-house, and every antechamber a chamber of
torture; the Prince treated him not with courtly courtesy, but with
coldness, which pained him so much the more as it proved that he had
loved him,--the Princess more proudly,--only Matthieu, who loved best
to talk with people who mortally hated him, had a face full of
sunshine. From him and from his sister and some unknown persons he had
to take and worry down some light snake-poison of persiflage about his
duel, which the stomach indeed digests, like other snake-poison, but
which injected into wounds dissolves the blood of life.----Does not
even my correspondent fall into a fury and send his fury to me through
his _Capsarius_,[141]--the Pomeranian dog, saying: "Let any one keep
cool, if he can, who is warm, that is to say in love, and whom death
has not yet made cold, let him keep cool, I say, before the stinging
smiles of a court-sisterhood at his sensitive love, especially before
those higher ladies who are Goddesses, and on whose Cyprian altar
always (as with the Scythians) a stranger is sacrificed, and to whom
(as the Gauls believed of their Gods) malefactors, _roués_, Orleanses,
are the most acceptable offerings!--Or, even if he can dispose of that,
let him composedly hear himself mocked for his love by an Evangelist
who invents and dresses up on the subject the following maxims: _La
décence ajoute aux plaisirs de l'indecence: la vertue est le sel de
l'amour; mais n'en prenez pas trop.--J'aime dans les femmes les accés
de colère, de douleur, de joie, de peur: il y a toujours dans leur sang
bouillant quelque chose qui est favorable aux hommes.--C'est là où la
finesse demeure courte, qu'il faut de l'enthousiasme.--Les femmes
s'étonnent rarement d'être crues, foibles; c'est du contraire qu'elles
s'étonnent un peu.--L'amour pardonne toujours à l'amour, rarement à la
raison_.[142]--Blessed are the adversaries [sighs Knef] who are at
liberty to cudgel one another."
The Evangelist threw a corrosive drop on the nerves of Victor's heart,
when, despite his knowledge of Flamin's noble extraction, he twitted
him with this, that like a modern French Equilibrist of Freedom, he
could not marry indeed a citizen, but yet could--fight with one. And it
went through his soul to see the friend who had been stolen from him so
sorely impoverished in friends, that this Matthieu was the last scion
and support of the line, who did not even before Victor take the
trouble in the higher circles to assume and continue playing the part
of a friend of Flamin. A good man has his sensitive heart screwed, as
it were, into a flattening press, when he is obliged to stand before
people (as Victor here is before so many) who hate and insult him,--in
the beginning he is cheerful and cool, and is glad that he cares
nothing about it,--but he unconsciously arms himself with more and more
contempt, by way of opposing something to the insult,--at last the
growth of the contempt announces itself by the disagreeable feeling of
love going out and hatred coming in, and the bitter aqua-fortis seizes
and devours its own vessel, the heart.--Then the pain becomes so great,
that he lets the old human love, which was the warm element of his
soul, run again in streams into his bosom. With Victor something else
was added to the embittering elements,--his previous softening; one is
never colder than after great warmth, just as water, after boiling,
assumes a greater coldness than it had before. Love, intoxication, and
sometimes the inspiration drunk from the sight of nature, make us too
kind towards our favorites, and too hard upon our antipodes. Now when
Victor in this bitter mood looked on at a card-table, and delivered to
himself internal lectures upon the whole assembly, _lectures on
heads_,[143] in which, instead of heads of pasteboard, he availed
himself of thicker ones: then the recollection of the still, humane
tolerance wherewith Clotilda had accommodated herself to these very
people out of love to her parents, made the whole ice-panoply which had
formed around his heart, as round a flower, melt down, and his warmed
heart said with the first joy it had known to-day: "Why then do I hate
these full as much tormented as tormenting shapes so bitterly? Are they
here only on my account? Have not they also their conscious being? Must
they not drag with them this defective, afflicted self through all
Eternity? Is not each of them still loved by some soul or other? Why
shall I then see in them only matter for detestation, and draw acid
from every look, every tone? No, _I will love men merely because they
are men_."--Yes, indeed! friendship may desire merits, but philanthropy
only the human form. Hence it is precisely that we have all such a cold
changeable love of man, because we confound the _worth_ of men with
their _claim_, and will not love anything about them, but virtues.
Our Victor felt as light as after a tempest; the bitterest thing which
insults can do to us is, that they compel us to hate. On the other
hand, he felt now how impure our resistance to evil, which we give out
for virtue, is, sand how disagreeable it is even to a noble soul to
combat enemies without bearing malice against them; for this is still
harder than blessing and protecting them without loving them.
Thus some weeks elapsed during his enforced landings at the hostile
court,--for the request of his father ruled his heart,--and vain hopes
of Clotilda's decision, and tearful retrospective yearnings toward the
suspended days of love and the _desolated_ days of friendship.
Clotilda's silence, however, was precisely an assent to his coming;
still he superfluously announced to her by a second letter the day of
the same. For the rest, to him, thus bound to the throne as to a
whipping-post, thus hurled out from all the objects of his love, thus
fixed upon nothing but a far-off thundering future, in which his
Emanuel after fourteen days sinks into the earth and his Clotilda into
a thousand sorrows, the present grew close and sultry. Around him
whirled an unripe tempest, and, as at the equinoxes, the clouds hung
immovably about him as a great thick mass, and the secret laboring in
the high element had not yet decided whether it was to run together in
tear-drops or break up into blue.
At last he went to St. Luna ... in sooth only sadly blest! O could he
glance at the Luna footpath or at the Parsonage, which covered the
stages of buried friendship, without turning away his overflowing eye,
without thinking how much vainer is the loving than the life of men,
how fate employs precisely the warmest hearts for the destruction of
the best (just as one uses only _burning-lenses_ for the calcining of
_precious stones_), and how many a silent breast is nothing but the
sunken coffin of a beloved and faded image?--It is a nameless feeling
to wish to love a friend for memory's sake, and be obliged to shun him
from honor. Victor _wished_ he _could_ forgive his infatuated darling;
but in vain: the arsenical word which pains me in his name remained
still, in spite of all sweetening juices with which he swathed it,
lying undissolved and corroding and deadly in his soul. Good Flamin! a
stranger could love thee, I, for example; but the friend of thy youth,
no more.
Victor strode along tremblingly before the picture-gallery and
music-hall of his mirrored and echoed childhood, the parsonage,
likewise before the scouring Apollonia, to whom he gladly gave a deeper
greeting than his rank allowed, and before old Mops, who mixed himself
up in no family feuds, but cordially invited him with his tail.--Not
his pride kept him back from visiting the (assumed) parents of his
adversary, but the anxious apprehension that the good people would
perhaps worry themselves to death before him in an embarrassing
conflict between politeness, between old love and new resentment. But
he resolved by a letter to the noble-souled Parson's wife to satisfy
his love and her sensibility.
Then he came into the presence of his beloved!--I remarked
day-before-day-before-yesterday, while reading the German-French
history, where, as is well known, the crowned name Clotilda also
reigns, by the redoubled beatings of my heart, how I should feel then,
when I came actually to see this Clotilda, whom for three quarters of a
year I have praised; for that Knef, and the dog too, are no knaves, and
that the whole history has not merely transpired, but is still
transpiring, I see by a hundred traits which no fancy can well invent.
If the biographer should get sight of the heroine, there would arise
nothing but a new volume and a new--hero, who would be--myself.
She was sick; that evening had pounced like a vulture upon her heart,
and had not yet drawn out its bloody claws. Her soul seemed only the
angel that guards the earthly casing of a saint, from which the soul
has fled. The Chamberlain met the Court Physician, as if he knew
nothing of any duelling. What mothers generally do, that the father
did; he forgave every one who was in high station and who wanted his
daughter. The proposal which Victor at last made to him surprised him
only because he had hitherto thought the latter postponed it merely on
account of uncertainty respecting Clotilda's inheritance and relations
in life. His answer consisted in infinite pleasure, infinite honor,
&c., and other infinities; for with him all was one; hence, too,
Platner asserts with justice that it is in fact only the finite of
which man cannot conceive.[144] Le Baut would have handed over his
daughter, even if he had not wished to; he could not refuse anything to
one's face, not even a daughter. Moreover, no one could come and sue
for Clotilda who would not have fitted into some one of his projects
(the four chambers of his brain were full of them up to the ceiling).
Naturally, therefore, a son-in-law was what he now most wished, since
his daughter might actually die without his having yet used her for a
leaping-pole and lever of his body,--and because, secondly, the
duel-talk preyed upon his heart; not as if he had not by healthy
_vermiform_[145] motions digested the _hardest_ things, but because,
like cultivated men without honor, he loved to appear on occasion of
slight insults with alarm-cannon and fire-drums, in order to steal the
right, in the case of complete but productive cases of dishonor,
pierced with veins of silver, to lie there still as a mouse. The only
thing which looked unpleasant to the Chamberlain, but which he
immediately got over by the fact of giving his word (regarding his
daughter) to the Court Physician, was, that he had previously given the
selfsame word (secretly) to our Mat. As his Lordship, who was soon to
return, could harm him and help him more than the minister could, he
gladly broke his old word, for the sake of keeping his newest; for not
only his _last will_, but _every_ will, man can change as he will, and
if he is a man of his word, he will be fond of making entirely opposite
promises, in order to oblige himself to keep one of them. If the lying
conduct of the Chamberlain, after such excuses, still needs one, he has
this in his favor, that he certainly hoped Clotilda, when _he_ had
given his Yes, would answer No, and dare and--suffer instead of him. At
least he held out this hope before his angry wife, and referred her to
Clotilda's former No, which had laid upon our Victor such heavy hours,
and to her unchangeableness. I wish one could have afterward petrified
or cast his face in plaster in the state into which it fell upon being
informed of Clotilda's Yes. What could the stepmother, the
Chamberlain's lady, who was always the esquire and ally of the
Evangelist, do in the matter further than to make a friendly face and
the remark, that "no one was harder to manage than a spouse whom
everybody managed"?
The formalities of the betrothal itself awaited the return of the Lord,
and other circumstances. Let me not say anything of the love of this
couple, exalted as it had been by so many sorrows. When, to love, the
love of man also is actually wedded (a thing which many a one will not
understand at all);--when in the breath of love all other charms of the
heart become more beautiful, all fine feelings still finer, every flame
for the sublime still higher, as in oxygen gas every spark becomes a
lightning-flash, and every glowworm a flame;--when the eyes of the two
lovers seldom meet, but their thoughts often;--when Victor almost
dreads to retain a heart to which he has cost so much, so many dark
days, so many anxieties and almost a brother;--and when Clotilda
divines this delicate shrinking and rewards _him_ for _her_
sufferings;--then is it impossible to convey to many persons a sketch
of such an ethereal flame, to say nothing of its colors; for the _few_
it is unnecessary.
In every new relation into which a beloved object enters, love begins
again at the beginning and with new flames; e. g. when we meet her in a
strange house,--or among new persons,--or as a traveller,--or as a
hostess,--or as a flower-gardener,--or as a dancer,--or (which has the
greatest effect) as a betrothed. This was Victor's case; for from the
hour when the wish of inclination is exalted into the command of duty,
and when the dear soul delivers herself and all her hopes, and the
reins of her whole future, into the beloved hands, there must in every
good man's heart be a voice calling: "Now she has no longer any one on
earth but thee,--now let her be holy to thee; O, now spare and guard
and reward the dear soul who believes in thee!"--Victor was
inexpressibly moved by this relation through the incidental
circumstance that this very Clotilda, this firm, proud ball-queen and
queen of heaven, who with so many energies and so much independence
went her way over the snares of men and under their laurel-wreaths, was
now by the betrothal giving her Declaration of Independence with a
gentle smile into Victor's hands, and wished now nothing more than to
love and to be loved; for this sweet condescension of so lofty a form
Victor knew no sacrifice, no wound, no gift, which would have seemed to
him great enough to repay her.--Thus should one love; and every new
right and sacrifice which chills the common man, makes the good one
warmer and more tender.
Although Victor by the rights of his new relationship found a more
domestic and comfortable life with his parents-in-law; nevertheless it
pained him that he was daily obliged to see the ever-memorable
parsonage-people in their garden, and yet that the iron fence of the
previous duel and the present betrothal shut him off from their hearts.
For the same reason must he also renounce the Britons and their
standing club. Le Baut however thought it an act of prudence: "for it
was known on good authority, that they were Jacobins, and Frenchmen in
disguise."--
But Clotilda's soul could no longer bear the deep sorrow which she felt
to be weighing on her friend, the Parson's wife; she invited her by a
note to a friendly walk. They met on the observatory; and Victor saw,
with the deepest emotion, how Clotilda immediately took the hand of her
oldest friend, and never, for the whole way, let it go from hers.
Clotilda came back with a countenance illumined with joy, and with eyes
which had wept much, and with heavenly features in which shone an
unnamable, not so much more ardent as more tender, love. Not for some
time could she sufficiently command her emotions to communicate to
Victor _something_ of the interview: for I think I can detect that it
was not _all_. The Parson's wife--Clotilda related--received her with a
look full of crushing sorrows, but neither with coldness nor suspicion.
At first neither could do anything but weep, and they spoke not a word;
Clotilda was still more overcome, and her tears still continued to
flow, when she began to relate her betrothal. She laid the hand of her
friend upon her heart, and said: "Now is our friendship severely tried.
I still believe in yours,--believe in mine!--O only this once, dear
friend, stand firm! Heavy secrets, over which I have no right and to
which I have only in a small degree the key, bring us all so near to
these dreadful misunderstandings. Only this time rely upon it firmly,
that you and I are changing _our relation_ to each other as little as
our characters."--Here the Parson's wife beheld her with a great look
in which the old love for Victor still gleamed on, and then embraced
her all at once with dry eyes and said: "Yes, I rely upon you, do you
what you will, and though I should at last be the only soul left."--The
last addition would at another time have offended Clotilda; ah, it
could not do so now; O, she was glad to have something to forgive!
After the narration she told her friend, that, in case the
invisibleness and the silence of his Lordship lasted much longer, she
should perhaps, rather than wait, undertake the toilsome journey to
London to her and Flamin's mother, in order to persuade the latter, as
the solution of all these dangerous riddles, to come to Germany.--Ah,
could Victor's self-sacrificing heart make an objection to the
sacrifices of others?--No! his woe was redoubled, but also his respect
and love.
In this situation of things there came to Clotilda a short letter from
Emanuel.
* * * * *
Last evening my Julius came to me with a basket full of garden-earth
and begged me for flower-pots and for hyacinths, because, he said, he
was bringing earth for both. He had fetched the soil for his flowers
from the hill of thy Giulia.----I drew his white- and red-blooming
face, which resembles the pink with the red point, to my breast and
said, 'Ah, who tends the flowers of man, when he has passed away?' And
I meant _him_ too with his tender bloom, into which may sorrow never
fling its heavy rain-drops!--O Victor and Clotilda, when the lilies of
the earth benumb me and put me into the last slumber, then adopt ye my
blind Julius, and let this soul full of love be guarded by your loving
souls!
"Clotilda! I now beg or wish something of you, which you perhaps can
hardly grant. Ah, come on the _longest day_ to Maienthal, thou fair
soul! Cannot thy heart bear it? Didst thou not accompany thy Giulia
even to the _blind gate_ of the grave and there see her soul soar up
and her body fall to the earth? O, if thou and thy friend, in the last
hour, when life folds up its flashing peacock-mirrors and lets them
sink heavy and colorless into the grave, could stay by me, as the two
first angels of the future world!--For at the moment when the whole
earth like a shell breaks off from the heart, the naked heart clings
faster to hearts and would fain warm itself against death, and when all
bonds of earth tear away, the flower-chains of love bloom on. O
Clotilda! how heavenly to close my life in the presence of thy Elysian
form! I should already be hovering around thee unfettered on the wings
of eternity, to look upon thee, and if I could not wipe away thy tears
with the ethereal hand, I would console thy heavy heart with a strange
rapture! Ay, if man were blinded in the forecourt of the second world,
still thy form would remain as an after-shining sun-image before my
closed eyes!--O Clotilda, if thou shouldst come! Ah, probably thou wilt
not come; and only the Eternal, who numbers the hours of the second
life, knows when I shall see thee again, on the second earth, and how
great are there the pains of longing. And so then farewell, and move
on, lofty soul, in thy path beneath the clouds,--when I behold thy
friend, thou wilt touchingly stand before me,--and when I die on his
heart, I shall pray for thee, and say to God: Give her to me again,
when on her head the flower-wreath of earth is great enough--or the
crown of thorns too great!--Clotilda, never change, and then I shall
not ask Destiny: How long will she smile down below there, how long
will she weep there? Never change!
"EMANUEL."
The two fell softly on each other's hearts and were silent over their
thoughts; Emanuel's love glorified theirs, and Victor had too great a
respect for his friend and his beloved to console the latter. He did
not once ask her, how she answered Emanuel's prayer; he knew that she
must refuse it, because otherwise her heart would break beside the
loved one.
When at last he parted from her and from St. Luna, and she was
compelled to reflect that in a few days he would go to Maienthal,--and
when in his eyes and hers tears stood which indicated more than _one_
sorrow, and which not, man dries away but death or God,--then Victor
during the farewell looked upon her with the mute question, "Shall I
say nothing to our beloved?"--Clotilda's soul remained most erect under
burdens, and she never appeared greater than through tears, as the
stars in a heaven full of rain come out brighter and larger; she looked
up to heaven as if asking, "Couldst thou, all-gracious One, crush us so
deeply?" then she weighed with oppressed heart the heavy grief,--then
she found it too great for utterance--and too great for endurance,--and
she no longer believed it, and said ambiguously, with wet eyes and with
ambiguous smile, "No, Victor, we shall surely all meet again!"
Victor went off not long before the two crowned bathing-guests arrived
with a considerable retinue.--I remark it with quite as little
resentment as Victor felt on the occasion, that Agatha, notwithstanding
the maternal example, broke off entirely, first with Victor, i. e. with
the Antipode and Anti-Christ of her beloved brother; secondly and still
more with Clotilda.
It may be stated, that I suppressed the foregoing letter of Emanuel in
the first edition, for the simple reason--for I had it in my hands
early enough, as well as many other documents of this history, which
nevertheless (for reasons) will never be published--that I feared it
would be affecting; a susceptible soul finds, as it is, too many
sorrows in this volume!--But for that very reason we will not leave out
what there was, in the first edition, of the comic, and accordingly I
proceed.
We readers will, with Victor, take leave of the Chamberlain, who, with
his half upright eyebrows,--they incline to each other at the bridge of
the nose in the form of the mathematical sign of the root,[146]--parts
from us with true, obliging courteousness. I know, when we are gone, he
will let us find justice, and will make too much out of us; for he
never calumniates either from malice or from levity, and whom he
calumniates, him he has a serious intention to destroy, because he
would rather make one unhappy than paint him black.--When I saw him
bend down so to us, I executed in thought a half-satire upon him,
whereof the true and serious purport may be this: that men are actually
created for the purpose of making themselves as crooked as the
_spiritus asper_[147] is. I do not exactly build much upon this, that
geometers have written: If the Gods assumed a form, it must be the most
perfect, that of a circle; I might, to be sure, draw this conclusion
from that, that a crooked back is at least an approximation to the
divine form, because it is an arc of a circle,--but I do not care to;
for the physical is child's play on this subject, and only of
consequence in so far as it partly indicates the crooking and creeping
of the soul, and partly (e. g. by the narrowing of the chest) promotes
it. Even at court they would dispense with the external bending, if
they could be sure that the inner and nobler crook of the disposition
were there, without the sign; for as, according to Kant, the subjection
and casting down of our self-conceit is a requirement of the purer and
the Christian morality: accordingly one who has absolutely no moral
excellences must with his self-consciousness thereof stoop still lower
than to lowliness, which even the virtuous has; he must sink to that
which I call a noble crawling. I confess I do not despise the practice
which the little rules of breeding insure herein, and which besides
undertakes to be nothing but virtue in trifles, the rules, namely, that
one shall bow when one contradicts,--when one praises,--when one
receives an insult,--when one offers one,--when one bows another
down,--when one would just precisely play the Devil. But it is well
that such a virtue of crooking has its own places of exercise, and does
not depend on chance. At court a man with straight body and spirit
would be cast out as dead, in the court sense, like a crab with a
straight tail, which only a dead one carries. If formerly hermits chose
lowly cells, in order not to stand upright, a man of the world does not
need this; lofty banquet-halls, temples of pleasure, dancing-halls,
press him down so much the lower, the higher they are themselves.--It
were bad, if this so important virtue of bending downward presupposed a
special strength of mind or body, which no one, indeed, can bestow on
himself; but exactly the reverse is the case; it will have only
weakness, which with horses is not so, for they can no longer let down
the tail when its sinews are cut. If the Pharisees carried lead in
their caps in order to make it easier for them to stoop,[148] the lead
which one brings into the world with him, and which lies in the head,
renders perhaps still greater services. Hence it is a fine arrangement,
that great souls, for which, as for tall statures, stooping is
disagreeable, fortunately (but for their punishment) never come to
anything, whereas mediocre ones, who make nothing of it, flourish and
put forth a goodly crown: thus have I often seen in the baking of
bread, that every moderate loaf in the oven rose and arched
beautifully, but the big one remained sitting there flat and
miserable.--But we should be subjects for pity, if a virtue which
constitutes the worth of the civilian, the virtue of becoming not
merely like children, but like fœtuses, which double themselves up
in the mother's body,--if this could only prosper in the highest place,
as one must almost suppose, since the courtier _after_ the fall goes
upright again on his estate,--whereas the serpent _before_ the fall and
during the temptation did not creep.--But in all civil relations
educational institutions for _crooklings_ are provided; everywhere
there stretches out in the air now a spiritual and now a secular arm,
which gives us the regular crook, and still higher are the longest of
all set, which reach over whole nations. The scholar himself bends over
his writing-desk under the birth of introductions and courtly
dedications and opinions. By the mere hoariness of old age the body as
well as the spirit ripens to a bony humpback, and the lower clergy,
because they are always looking downward into the grave, work
themselves into the crooked posture.--I conclude with the consolation
that bending does not _exclude_ inflation, but _includes_ it; just as
the circle, of which one is a section, runs innumerable times around
the swollen surface of the sphere....
I would truly have written over this "Extra-leaf" that title as a
heading,--so that the reader might have skipped it,--had I not wished
that he should read it, by way of diverting himself, and of sharing
more easily with my Victor his dismal hours. For every stroke of the
clock is a death-bell sounding out a dead march for the wreck of his
fairer hours.
The very evening he entered into Flachsenfingen, stories quite as ugly
as probable came to his ears; Mat had told the Apothecary a good deal;
but this time I give in to his reports.
That is to say, the Parson, so soon as he heard of the betrothal, had
set out for the city in order to frustrate murderous deeds and duels on
the part of his son. As during his dressing the whole of his travelling
uniform did not lie at the very instant before his eyes, he threw off
to his family light red-crayon-drawings of the bloody scenes and bloody
scaffolds, upon which, he said, he reckoned, as he probably, on account
of the detention in dressing, should arrive too late. The shrunk boot
which Appel had dried a little at the fire could not be got on to the
foot,--Eymann gasped,--pulled, "It is possible," said he, "that they
are at this very moment letting fly at each other";--at last he let his
arms fall back powerless, and sat calmly and firmly bolt upright, and
waited silently for them to fire at him and question him. When nothing
came, he said with fury: "Whatever Satan it may be that has got into my
house, and has made my boots shrink up so, (I would undertake to get my
foot into a leather queue, through a needle's eye, but not into one of
them,) he has the murder of my child upon his soul.--Is there then no
child of misery about here, that will just polish my heel for me with a
little soft soap?"--While they were forcing in his foot, he saw Appel
still busily ironing away at his shirt-bosom: "Enough, Appel! very
good!"--said he,--"I really shall not unbutton myself." She glided away
lightly on the flat, which was, as it were, the skate under her hand.
"Daughter, thy father wants his shirt. The life of thy own brother is
put in jeopardy by thee,--it is just as if thou wert giving him the
finishing stroke!" She glided nimbly only once more on her hand-skate
over the whole, and then handed it to him with pleasure.
On the way the chaplain sketched to himself a safe and sound plan of
proceeding in the business. He would in the beginning make no
disclosure of the engagement to Flamin,--then he was going to read to
him only the penitential text upon the Maienthal duel,--then to extort
from him the _Urphede_ or solemn oath to keep quiet,--and only at the
very last to come out with the report. While he was thinking over the
plan and the danger, he ran himself into a hotter and hotter sweat of
anxiety. Just as he had once, by a long drawing out of consequences,
driven himself and a patient who had a slight buzzing in the ears to
such a pitch, that they both expected the next minute apoplexy and
paralysis of half one side: so, in the present instance, by a
picturesque treatment of the details of an _imaginary_ duel he at last
removed from himself so thoroughly all doubts about one's having
already _transpired_ that he passed in through the city gate with the
firm conviction that the Regency-Councillor was lying either in chains
or on the bier. "Thank God that I see thee without wounds and without
chains," was the expression that escaped from him on his entrance; and
he had almost spoiled his whole business plan, or at least reversed it.
Flamin understood him to refer to the first duel. Eymann could so much
the more easily follow out the management of the case and phlebotomical
table of rules which he had laid down, and, so to speak, fight a duel
with the duel. The silent son had nothing to oppose to him--but light
beer. While he was getting it, the Parson had pulled at the knobs of
all the canes to see whether there were no sword-canes. A pistol-like
tinder-box at a distance was a suspicious object to him. A
double-barrelled gun on the wall near by, with its--stock aimed at him,
took away much of his courage. Flamin excused his taciturnity on the
ground of legal _plethora_ and over-freighting of the brain, and
pointed to the pile of criminal documents before him. When he was
called upon to give him an extemporaneous abstract of them, and when of
course the war-cries _prison_, _blood-guiltiness_, _avenging sword_,
whizzed like a hissing rain of bullets round Eymann's ears; then did
the agony which he aggravated by the more rapid _douche_ of the pale
ale expand itself so mightily within him that the double-barrelled gun
had to be hung up in the chamber: "I get nothing by it," said he, "if
it goes off and bursts, and the lock flies into my face, or if the
stock actually kills me." Now he began in a compound fit of emotion and
intoxication to weep and to exhort: that a man ought to think on the
fifth petition in the Lord's prayer,--that a country clergyman could
with ill-grace preach to his spiritual fold reconciliation, if he had a
son in the city, who during the sermon was fighting a duel,--and that
Flamin must never say he was his son, if he either got or gave the
fatal shot in a duel. Nothing so easily drew the storm-wind of Flamin's
anger out of its cavern, as a doleful voice and long religious edicts.
"For God's sake," cried Flamin, "let that be enough now,--God shall
punish me, I will be lost to all eternity, I swear to you, if I ever
touch _him_ even." This oath which escaped him was magnificent
marshmallow-paste and soft ice-cream for the heated court-chaplain,
who from forgetfulness of his order of business now adopted the
opinion that the betrothal was already full well known to the
Regency-Councillor. "Thinkest thou not, son," said he joyfully, "that
such an oath refreshes and comforts an anxious father like the latter
rain, especially as, since _her_ betrothal to him, I have had
absolutely nothing better to look for than murder and assassination? Am
I right or not?"--Flamin flung up by a single question the cover from
this murderous armed spectre of his heart,--and now he heard his father
no more; pale, full of convulsions, he sat there in silence,--the back
of the chair cracked under his pressure,--he twisted and tied his
watch-chain round his fingers, and tore it off and mashed the remnant
again round the bruised finger and crushed it to pieces,--in his glassy
eyes stood two heavy, rigid, cold drops,--his heart shrank up empty and
spiritless before an approaching and frightful _death-chill_, which,
when a friendship is murdered in a bosom, always precedes the burning
wrath thereby excited.--Ah, who of us does not pity the unhappy,
forsaken soul?--Eymann went away deceived, and took this calm for mere
calm, and the broken and choked voice for emotion.
And in this bloody state he was found by Matthieu, who had just come to
announce to the Regency-Councillor, as if with twenty-four blowing
postilions (from a note of the wife of the Chamberlain), Victor's
victory over the whole of them. This fellow now first transformed the
iceberg into a volcano, and made Flamin in his pent-up fury feel as if
he could shatter to pieces one quarter of the world against another.
Victor heard nothing now for some days. Flamin locked himself up.
Matthieu visited him often, but not the house of the Apothecary. The
crowned pair arrived at last at the baths of St. Luna.
Thus all remained till the morning when Victor took leave of the
Apothecary to go to Maienthal before the curtain of a heavy scene. Here
the Apothecary could not deny himself the pleasure of depriving the
Court-Physician of his, by imparting to him the (probably false)
intelligence, that the Page had challenged the Chamberlain on account
of his breach of promise with regard to Clotilda. Little or no
importance is to be attached to the report, for the reason, if for no
other, that the Apothecary wanted only to cough out his own praise and
disguise it in the shape of a commendation of Victor, that the latter
had known how, with such infinite finesse, to carry out _his_ recent
hints of undermining the Evangelist. The hints were, as will be
recollected, the two propositions of becoming the lover of the Princess
and the husband of Clotilda, in order to gain the Prince, and thus, as
a swine does a rattlesnake, to swallow Mat with impunity. One must
forgive the soul of Victor, gnawed by a worm's-nest of afflictions, for
blazing up and attacking Zeusel with an eye full of the profoundest
contempt, "I know not who would deserve to listen to such
propositions,--unless it is he who can make them."
My correspondent leaves off abruptly and sadly with the words: "Late in
the evening, Victor arrived with swollen eyes at Maienthal, to see
whether on the next day his noblest teacher and greatest friend would
wither away."----We can all conceive what must be the embrace of a
loved one a few paces from his grave. The friend who threatens us with
his death takes a painful hold of our soul, even if we doubt it. We can
all imagine the wet eye which Victor must have cast on the still
blooming scene of his withered rose-feast.--What consoles him is the
improbability of the predicted death, since Emanuel is as well as
usual, and since suicide is still more impossible with this pious
spirit, who long since compared the suicide to the lobster, who cannot
draw out the claw which he himself in his stupidity has jammed and
crushed with its mate, but snaps it off.--May the reader bring with him
to the description of the longest day,[149] which I am to make all
alone under the exalting stillness of night, a heart like that of the
East Indian, which like old temples is dumb and dark, but vast and full
of holy images!
38. DOG-POST DAY.
The Sublime Hour before Midnight.--The Blissful
After-Midnight.--The Soft Evening.
To-day I present Emanuel's last day (which now lies cooled off and
extinguished among the days of eternity) with pale outlines to the
fantasies of men. My hand trembles and my eye burns before the scenes
which in funeral veils glide around me and lift their veils so near to
me.----I shut myself up to-night,--I hear nothing but my thoughts,--I
see nothing but the night-suns which move across the heavens,--I forget
the weaknesses and the stains of my heart, that I may get the courage
to lift up my head as if I were good, as if I dwelt on the height where
around the great man like constellations lie only God, Eternity, and
Virtue. But I say to them who are better,--to the silent great heart,
which _increases_ its obligations in _fulfilling_ them, and which
satisfies itself _as its conscience grows_ only with daily increasing
merits,--to the lofty men who have warmly pressed the hand of death,
who can calmly ask him, when he walks round on morning-meadows,
"Seekest thou me to-day?"--to the panting soul which cools itself
under the _cypress-tree_,--to the men with tears, with dreams, with
wings,--to all these I say, "Kinsmen of my Emanuel, your brother
stretches out his hand after you through the shortest night; grasp it,
he would fain bid you farewell!"
THE SUBLIME HOUR BEFORE MIDNIGHT.
Victor rose sadly from his dreams, in which he had seen nothing but
graves and funeral piles for his friend; but he gathered secret hopes
at the morning-greeting, as he saw him step forth into his alleged
death-morning without fever, without oppression, without change. His
only concern was about the impression which the disappointed hope of
departure would make upon the heart of the beloved friend, already half
torn from the earthly soil and laid bare from earthly environment. The
latter, on the contrary, still held fast to his dreams, to which even
his nightly ones gave nourishment; and he looked yearningly into the
starless blue, and calculated the long road to the twelfth night-hour,
when, out of heaven should peer forth the stars, and death with that
dark, immense mantle of his, in which he bears us through his cold
realm. His heart lay in a sweet siesta, which proceeded partly from
bodily exhaustion and from the beauty of the day. His inner calm, never
so great and magical as in souls in which whirlwinds and hurricanes
have swept to and fro, overspread his whole being with a bliss of
yearning which in other eyes than his would have melted in tear-drops.
O Rest! thou soft word!--autumnal bloom of Eden! Moonlight of the
spirit! Rest of the soul, when wilt thou hold our head, that it may be
still, and our heart, that it may cease beating? Ah, ere the one grows
pale and the other stiff, thou comest often and goest often, and only
down below with sleep and with death thou abidest, whereas above, men
with the greatest wings, like birds of paradise, are whirled about most
of all by the storms!
The tranquillity with which Emanuel played out the star-part of life,
even to the last catch-word,--with which he packed up everything--set
all to rights--gave all directions--took leave of all,--stirred up
tears and tempests together in his tormented friend. His heart had
been, indeed, dragged till it was sore over a stony road, but its
inflammations were now softly cooled off by the thought of death; yet
he could not--though with the greatest incredulity about Emanuel's
death--endure to hear it, when Emanuel committed to him at a distance
the blind Julius, from whom this death was concealed, with the
low-spoken words, "Hold him dear as I do, protect, provide for the poor
child, till thou canst deliver him over to Lord Horion." His trembling
hands could hardly take from him a packet to that lord, which the
friend handed to him with tender eyes and with the words, "When these
seals are opened, then my oaths have ceased and thou wilt learn all."
For his tender conscience allowed him to conceal only the _import_, not
the _existence_ of secrets.--It will not astonish us, as Victor's veins
received one wound after another, that, in order not to increase their
bleeding by agitations, he begged the flute-player not to play to-day;
music would, on this day, have had too much power over his dissolved
heart.
The morning they spent in farewell-visits to old paths, bowers, and
heights; but Emanuel performed not here the sharp, passionate
climax-part of the fifth act; he broke not forth, upon an earth where
death grazes, into any unphilosophical outcry because he should not see
the flowers plucked and the grain cut, nor the green fruit grow yellow;
but with a higher rapture, which beyond the earthy spring promised
itself still fairer ones, he took his leave of every flower, went
through every leafy winding and shadowy night-piece, drew out of every
mirroring pond his transfigured form lying as it were in the earth, and
showed a more affectionate attentiveness to nature, now that he hoped
to-night to come nearer to Him who created it. He sought and Victor
shunned every occasion to speak of all this. "Only not for the last
time!" said the latter. "Not?" said Emanuel.--"Does not everything
happen only once and for the last time?--Do not Autumn and Time, as
well as Death, separate us from all?--Does not all part from us, even
if we do not part from it?--Time is nothing but a death with softer,
thinner sickles; every minute is the autumn of the past one, and the
second world will be the spring of a _third_.----Ah, when I one day
retire again from the flowery surface of a second, and when on the
heavenly death-day I see the twilight of the memory of two lives,----O
in the future lies a groundwork for infinite bliss as well as woe, why
does man shrink with awe only before this?"--Victor disputed the
immortality of memory. "Without memory," said Emanuel, "there is no
life, only existence, no years, only seconds,--no _I_, only
representations of it.--A being breaks up into as many million beings
as it has thoughts,--memory is merely consciousness of present
existence."[150]--Even the Poet philosophizes at least for poetry and
against philosophy.--Victor thought: "Thou good man! to myself, not to
thee, I made these objections."
It was towards noon; the sky was clear, but sultry; the flowers
announced by their shutting up the gathering of the electric fires; all
meadows were altars of incense, and fragrances went forth as prophets
of the storm-clouds. With the _physical_ stormy material there
accumulated in Victor a corresponding _moral_ element;--he reflected
that often a hot day ended the life of consumptive patients;--he
confounded at times the _bitterness_ of parting with its _probability_;
for man, deceived by the _aerial perspective_ of fear, fancies a shape
of terror so much the _nearer_, the _larger_ it is; he wept at the very
thought that he might weep; but nevertheless reason would have held the
upperhand of the feelings, had not the following occurrence benumbed
both.
In Maienthal there dwelt a madman whom they called by no other name
than that of the crazy skeleton. For three reasons he was called so:
first, because he was an anatomical preparation of leanness; secondly,
because he carried round the fixed idea, that Death was after him and
wanted to seize and abduct him by the left hand, which he therefore
concealed; thirdly, because he gave out that he could see when any one
was going to die soon by the look of the face, which in that case was
already overspread with the indentations and abscesses of corruption.
In Moritz's experimental psychology[151] a similar man is described,
who is also said to be able to detect the forerunners of death and its
triturating hand on faces which appear to others smooth and ruddy,
whereas he sees them seamed with the lunar caustic of corruption.--This
skeleton it was, which, on the night of the fourth Whitsuntide day,
when Clotilda was in the churchyard, cried out, Death! I am already
buried.[152]--Victor and Emanuel went home during the striking of the
twelfth hour, and on their way passed a hill, whereon the skeleton sat
agitated; the left hand, at which Death grasped, buried itself deep
into the opposite arm-pit: "Brrr!" it said, shaking its head at
Emanuel, "he has thee, but not me! Nothing but mould is hanging on
thee! The eyes are gone! Brr!"
The words of the insane are, to a man who listens at the gate of the
invisible world, more memorable than those of the wise man, just as he
listens more attentively to sleepers than to the waking, to the sick
than to the well. Victor's blood stiffened under the ice-cold clutch at
his warm life. The crazy skeleton ran off, shielding the left hand with
the right. Victor took his friend's left, looked up at the warm sun,
and sought to conceal and to warm himself and could say nothing. Down
near the margin of the deep-blue heaven little clouds smoked up, the
germs of an evening tempest; and in the sultry air nothing but vermin
flew abroad.
Emanuel was more quiet and almost troubled, but it was not the anxiety
of fear, but that uneasiness of expectation with which we always look
upon the folds and flutterings of the curtain of great scenes. The
stinging sun kept the couple at home. To Emanuel, oppressed by the
sultry atmosphere, the last afternoon was almost too long. But his
friend saw all the time hanging in this atmospheric vault a mouldering
countenance, which seemed to work its way into the beloved fresh one,
and he continually heard the crazy skeleton repeating in his ear, "His
eyes are out!"
In the sultry stillness, when the sun dug and charged the mining pits
of the thunder, and when the two friends ventured before the ears of
the blind Julius to speak only with looks of to-day's future, towards
four o'clock a fanning, evening-breeze came up, which refreshed all
drooping wings and heads. Emanuel let in these cool waves, which ran
lullingly and comfortingly over the bent flowers at the window, and
flowed down along the wavering folds of the curtains, and strayed and
plashed through the fragrant foliage of the room. Then came an infinite
stillness, a dissolving bliss, an inexpressible yearning into Emanuel's
heart. The joys of his childhood, the features of his mother, the
images of Indian fields, all beloved, mouldering forms, the whole
gliding reflection of his youth's morning, flowed along glimmeringly
before him;--a melancholy longing for his native land, for his dead
friends, distended his bosom with sweet, distressful emotions. That
evergreen palm-grove of youthful memory he laid as a cooling herb
around his own and Horion's brows, and brought over the whole first
circle of his existence out of the Indian Eden into this narrow housing
before the two latest objects of his affection. But as he thus
heaped up the ashes of the Phœnixes of joy on the altar of the
evening-sun,--as he thus at his exodus looked back over all the Elysian
fields of his life as they lay behind each other,--as the whole of
earth and life, overspread with morning dew and morning redness,
transformed themselves before him into the glimmering playground of
humanity;--then was he unable to master any longer his emotion and his
melted heart, and in a blissful agitation, in a trembling gratitude to
the Eternal, he begged the blind youth to take his flute and let the
_Song of Ecstasy_, which he always had played for himself on the
morning of the new year and of his birthday, sound after him as an echo
of his dying life.
Julius took the flute. Horion went out under a loud-rustling tree and
looked into the setting sun. Emanuel placed himself at the breezy
window opposite the purple stream of the evening light, and the song of
rapture began and flowed in streams into his heart and round the
sinking sun.
And as the tones of the spheres seemed to well out from the sun, which
in the evening redness, like a swan dissolved in melodies, died of
rapture before God in gold-haze and dew of joy,--and as all the flowers
wherewith the Eternal goodness covers our heart, and all the blissful
fields through which its gentle hand conducts uncertain man, flew by
before Emanuel like angels,--and as he saw the future heavens, into
which the way of life leads, drawing nearer,--and as he saw these
infinite arms cover all wounded hearts, stretch over all millenniums,
bear all worlds and yet even him too, him, puny son of earth;--O then
was it impossible for him longer to restrain his full heart; it burst
with gratitude, and from his eyes again fell the first tear-drops after
long, long years. These holy drops he wiped not away; in them the
evening-red ran to a blazing sea; the flute died away; Victor found his
eyes still glistening; Emanuel said, "O see, I weep for joy at the
thought of my Maker!"----Then were there between these exalted men, on
this holy spot, no more words,--death had lost his form,--a sublime
sorrow deadened the pangs of separation,--the sun, over which the earth
had rolled, touched with his erect beams the heavens and the night and
the bottom of the clouds,--the earth glimmered magically like a
dream-landscape, and yet it was easy to quit it, for the other
dream-landscapes covered the sky.
The earths of night (the planets) had already come out, the suns of
night (the fixed stars) had already come forth after them, the moon had
already enveloped itself in the southeast storm: when Emanuel saw that
it was time to end the scenes of the valley and go up to his Tabor, to
give Death the wing-casing of his soul. Hesitating, he begged Victor to
go forward a little, that he might not see his parting with the blind
one, and haply betray himself by sympathy; for Victor had represented:
to the blind one the journey into the other world as only one upon this
earth. He stationed himself unhappily out before the hushed sultry
fields through which once had passed the rivers of paradise of his
love, on which he had once at Clotilda's side seen fairer evenings; on
the earth was the stillness of death, as in a church by night, only a
leaden cloud, bent down toward the earth, blustered round the heavens,
and Death seemed to go from cloud to cloud and array them for battle.
At last he heard Julius weeping. Emanuel came flying out, but in his
eyes stood heavier drops than his former ones. And as the forsaken
blind one turned away his dark head from his friends in the
house-door-way, either because he knew not which way they had gone or
would listen to know, then was Victor barely able, for inward sadness,
to call back to the bowed form, which dwelt in a double night, that he
would return after twelve o'clock.
In the bald evening greeting, "Good night, a pleasant sleep," which
Emanuel gave and received, there was more stuff for tears than in whole
elegies and farewell-speeches; so true it is that words are only the
inscriptions upon our hour,[153] and the ripieno[154]-voices of the
scoring of our keynotes.
So soon as Emanuel came out before the night heavens, before the
hurricane chained thereto and before his death-mountain, angels lifted
up again his softened soul,--he saw death descend from heaven and set
up the liberty-tree on his grave,--he saw the friendly stars draw
nearer, and they were the heavenly eyes of his friends and of all
blessed beings. Victor dared not disturb his poetic hopes by any
reasons; much rather was he himself from hour to hour drawn deeper into
the belief of his death; at least he feared that to-day's storm of
rapture might rend asunder the frail dwelling of this fair heart and of
its sighs, and that death would creep about the noble soul till by its
very wings, as it rose in its ecstasy, he could pluck it away from
life, as children go round and round the butterfly till at last it
lifts its wings folded on one another into their predatory fingers.
Emanuel delayed by circuitous paths the ascent of the mountain, in
order to raise his broken friend, whose eyes were no longer dry, from
one sun to the other, so that in that high position he might look down
from the midst of lights upon this shadowy earth and hardly notice the
corpse of his friend on account of its littleness. "Yes, this is the
reason," said he, "why the earth is every day darkened, like the cages
of birds, that we may in the dark more easily catch the higher
melodies.--Thoughts which the day makes a dark smoke and vapor stand
round about us in the night as flames and lights, as the column which
floats over Vesuvius appears a pillar of cloud by day and is a pillar
of fire by night." Victor perceived the design, namely, of consoling
him, and became the more disconsolate and continued silent.
They did not go up on the side of the mountain to the weeping-birch,
but over its slowly ascending ridge. They overlooked the theatre of
night, over which the moon and the storm were coming up under a veil;
Emanuel stopped and said: "O look up and see the eternally sparkling
morning-meadows which lie around the throne of the Eternal! Had never a
star shone out of heaven, only then would man lay himself down with
anguish in his last sleep, on a dark earth built over like a burial
vault without an opening." Before eyes which were fastened on suns,
flashing glowworms trailed by, and a bat whizzed after a gray
night-butterfly,--three St. John's day fires; lighted by superstition,
brought three distant hills out of night,--all life slept under its
leaf, under its twig, nearer to its mother, and in the dreams that were
strewed about lay storms,--fishes tumbled up like corpses on the
surface of the water as forerunners of the thunder.
Suddenly Emanuel began, with an ill-fitting, not sufficiently
controlled voice: "Verily we should stand more composedly beside the
genius who lets fall the last sands of slumber on the eyes of our
loves, if they did not afterward sleep out their last sleep in church
vaults, in churchyards, but upon meadows, under the open heavens, or as
mummies in chambers.... Now then, my beloved," they heard already the
waving of the weeping-birch, "control thy fantasy; thou wilt see near
the birch-tree my resting-pit open; I have for four weeks sown and
clothed it with flowers which are now mostly in bloom,--thou wilt lay
me thus to-morrow, without any _other_ preparation, in my night-dress
among the flowers,--and cover it up to-morrow,--but do not, thou good
man, give my little flower-piece such hard names as other men
do,--to-morrow, I say; to-day go immediately home to thy Julius, when
I...." (_am dead_, he would have said, but could not find for emotion
the soft paraphrase).--
Ah! Horion with a sigh tore his agonized eyes out from the cold open
grotto of his beloved, and could not look down to its blooming flowers.
He sobbed aloud and looked out through tears faintly into Emanuel's
face, to see whether he was living or dying. Two glowworms crossed one
another in glimmering curves above the grave, they settled down beside
it, and were extinguished, for their light ceases with their motion.
The thunder now struck into Victor's wounds with its first clap,--a
dissolving lightning covered the Eastern horizon, and the flame ran
over the Alpine ridges,--the lightning-rod on the powder-house glowed,
its alarm-bells rang, the ignes-fatui played about the tower, and in
mid-air a hovering luminous point moved fearfully towards it.
In Maienthal eleven o'clock was called,--at twelve Emanuel believed he
should be gone hence. At last Emanuel, unmanned himself by another's
sorrow, fell upon his friend and said: "What hast thou further to
say to me, my beloved, my inexpressibly dear friend?--by hours are
fled,--our farewell approaches,--say thine, and then disturb not my
dying. Be still, when death climbs the mountain, and send no
lamentations after me, when he takes me up.--What hast thou more to say
to me, my eternally beloved?"--"Nothing more, thou angel of heaven! nor
can I," said Victor with bleeding and exhausted heart, and laid his
oppressed head with streams of tears on Emanuel's shoulder.
"Now then break off thy heart from mine, and farewell,--be happy, be
good, be great. I have loved thee very much, I shall love thee once
more and then forever. Good, faithful one,--mortal like me, immortal
like me!"
The storm-bells tolled more violently,--the hovering luminous point
advanced upon the powder-house,--all the covered cloud-volcanoes
bellowed side by side and flung their flames together, and the thunders
passed like alarm-bells between them,--the two friends lay in each
other's arms, close, mute, gasping, clasping, trembling before the last
word.
"O speak once more, my Horion, and take leave of thy friend,--only say
to me, Rest well! and leave the dying."
Horion said, "Rest well!" and left him. His tears ceased and his sighs
were hushed. The thunder came to a fearful pause. Nature was mutely
ordering her chaos in the tempest. Not a flash gleamed through the
funeral pile in heaven. Only the funeral tolling of the alarm-bells on
the lightning-rod continued to speak, and the luminous point to creep
onward.
Under the wide stillness lay sleep, dreams, and a friend's inconsolable
heart.
In this stillness of eternity Emanuel went up without any other hand in
his to the high gate which soars away in black darkness above time.
Silence is the speech of the world of spirits, the starry heaven its
nunnery-grating,--but behind this nunnery-grating appeared now no
spirit, not even God.
The moment was coming when man looks upon his body and then on his
individual self, and then shudders.--The _I_ stands alone beside its
shadow,--a foam-globe of being trembles, snaps, and collapses, and one
hears the bubble vanish and _is_ one himself.
Emanuel peered into Eternity, it looked like a long night.
He looked round him to see whether he cast a shadow,--a shadow casts no
shadow.
Ah! a mute lays man in the cradle, a mute stretches him out in the
grave.--When he has a joy, it looks as if a sleeper smiled,--when he
weeps and wails, it looks like weeping in one's sleep.--We all look up
to heaven and pray for solace; but overhead in the endless blue there
is no voice for our heart,--nothing appears, nothing consoles us,
nothing answers us.--
And so we die....
--O All-gracious One! we die more happily; only the poor Emanuel
wrestled in the silent darkness with fierce thoughts which for so long
a time he had not seen, and which clutched at his paling countenance.
But these masks flee away, when a friendly fraternal face appears
before thee and embraces thee.--Horion raised himself up and warmed
again his bowed friend by a mute farewell. A storm-wind precipitated
itself out of the clear west into the dumb, laboring hell, and chased
out all the lightnings and all the thunders. Lo, at that moment the
bright moon flew out from the backward-drifted mass of cloud like an
angel of peace into the unstained blue,--_then in the light Emanuel
stood distinguished from his shadow_,--then did the moon illuminate a
rainbow of pale color grains, which in the Southeast (the gate to the
East Indies) penetrated through the dark water-columns, and arched
itself over the Alps,--then Emanuel saw again, as previously, the
Jacob's ladder leaning against the earthly night,--then came rapture
without measure, and he cried with outspread arms: "Ah, yonder in the
_East_, in the East, over the road to my _native land_, there glows the
arch of triumph, there opens the gate of glory, there the dying march
through." ...
And as just then it struck twelve o'clock, he spread out his hand
ecstatically towards heaven, which was blue above the mountains, and
toward the moon, which reposed serenely beside the tempest, and cried,
breaking into blissful tears, "Thanks, Eternal One, for my first life,
for all my joys, for this fair earth."--
The flute tones of Julius floated around Maienthal, and he looked down
upon the earth.
"And be thou ever blest, thou good earth, thou good mother-land, bloom,
ye fields of Hindostan, farewell, thou glowing Maienthal, with thy
flowers and with thy people,--and ye brothers, all of you, after a long
smile, come and blissfully follow me. Now, O Eternal One, take me up,
and console the _two_ survivors."
The death angels stood on all the clouds, and drew their glittering
swords out of the nights,--one thunder clapped after another, as if one
prison-door of this earthly life after another were flung open.
The terrible luminous point had crept out of mid-air into the
powder-house.
The death-hour had already passed, and yet life had not.
Emanuel trembled with yearning and apprehension, because he felt as yet
no sign of dying,--moved his hands as if he would give them to some
one,--stared into the lightnings as if he would draw them upon him....
"Death! seize me," he cried, beside himself,--"ye dead friends! O
father! O mother! tear my heart away, take me,--I cannot--cannot live
any longer."----
At that moment a blazing, rattling globe flew up into the tempest, and
the powder-house shot itself to pieces like an undermined hell.--The
explosion threw the flaming Emanuel pale into his flowery grave; the
whole thundering east trembled; the moon and the rainbow were
darkened....
THE BLISSFUL AFTER-MIDNIGHT.
Victor, cast headlong, senseless, at last bestirred his arm and felt
therewith the cold face, on which to-day the crazy skeleton had read
this night beforehand, and which projected above the grave, turned
toward heaven. He threw himself upon it and pressed his face to the
pale one. Before his tears had forced their way through the hard grief,
the clouds carried back their fire-buckets and their funeral torches,
and transparent foam-fleeces softly overflowed the moon and settled
down at last over the whole valley and over the still couple in a
thousand warm drops, which so easily remind man of his own tears. The
blowing up of the powder-house by one of the three Englishmen had
broken up the naval engagement of the burning clouds.
The dismembered tempest had drifted about in little clouds and stood
above the midnight-red in the northeast, when the cold numbness of the
shock still held the two men fastened together; at last a hot hand
glided down from above between their faces, and a timid voice asked,
"Are you asleep?"
"O Julius," said Horion, "come down unto the grave, thy Emanuel is
dead." ...
I care not to count the dismal minutes that let two wretched beings lie
bound by the thorn-girdle of anguish to a pallid one. But brighter
moments came, which first drove every smallest cloud out of the sky and
wiped clean the tarnished moon, and then opened the hot eyes before the
cleansed and cooled silvery night.
"Ah, he has perhaps only fainted," said Victor after a long while. They
raised themselves up with a sigh. Wearily they drew their beloved out
of the grave. They would fain carry him down to his dwelling, in order
there to bring back again from its _solstice_ this fair soul, as the
St. John's sun would return from his. With the slight energies which
grief had still spared them, and with the little light which still
entered into two wet eyes, they struggled along with the crippled
angel, while two laboring shadows beside them frightfully carried a
third in the glimmer, from the mountain down into the meadows. Here
Victor went alone into the village, in order, perhaps, to provide a
more cheerful carriage than a hearse. The blind one stayed himself by a
birch-tree, Emanuel slept like the other flowers, and upon them, before
the moon.... But suddenly Julius heard the dead man speak and graze him
as he passed through the grass; and, pursued by terror, he fled....
--Genius of dreams! thou that walkest through the nebulous sleep of
mortals and bringest up before the lonely soul imprisoned in a corpse
the happy islands of childhood! O thou that therein restorest to our
mouldered friends the bloom of the cheek and showest to our poor
frenzied heart past heavens and reflections of Eden and undulating
lawns, on clouds!----Magic Genius! enter into this holy night before a
man who is not asleep, and turn thy crape-covered glass to my open eye,
that I may see therein, and paint, the Elysian world of light which
struggles with our earthly shadow, as a pale Luna, in the double
eclipse![155]----
The enraptured voice of the dead man cried: "Hail to thee, thou still
Elysium!--O thou glimmering land of rest! receive the new shade. Ah,
how softly thou glowest,--how softly thou breathest,--how softly thou
reposest!" ...
Emanuel's eyes had opened; but in his brain burned the Elysian
delirious idea that he had died and waked up in the second world. O
thou over-blest! and indeed a glittering Eden did encircle thee,--ah,
this glow, this breath, this fragrance, this repose, was too beautiful
for an earth. The moon weaved over with silver threads, as with flying
summer-gossamer, the green of night,--from leaf to leaf, from trees to
trees stretched the sparkling veil of the illuminated rain,--over all
waters floated glimmering banks of vapor,--a gentle fanning threw
jewels from the twigs into the silver streams,--the trees and the
mountains rose like giants into the night,--the everlasting sky stood
over the falling sparks, over the fleeting fragrances; over the playing
leaves, it alone unchangeable, with fixed suns, with the eternal
world-studded vault, great, cool, radiant and blue.--Never did a valley
so glimmer, so exhale, so whisper, so enchant before....
Emanuel embraced the sparkling soil and cried out from a burning
breast, subdued and stammering with rapture: "Ah, is it true, then? do
I really hold thee, my native land?--Ay, in such fields of rest wounds
are healed, tears are stilled, no sighs demanded, no sins committed,
here in sooth the little human heart dissolves for overfulness of
rapture and creates itself anew to dissolve again.... Thus have I long
since imagined thee, blessed, magical, dazzling land, that borderest on
my earth.... O dear earth! where mayest thou be?"
He lifted his intoxicated eye to the star-bedewed heaven, and saw the
low-sunken moon hanging faint and yellow in the south; this he took for
the earth, from which he supposed death had borne him into this
Elysium. Here his voice dissolved into emotion at the beloved earliest
garden of his life, and he addressed the earth flying overhead above
the stars:--
"Globe of tears! Dwelling of dreams! Land full of shadows and
spots!--Ah, on thy broad shadowy spots[156] the good children of men
will be at this moment trembling and sinking!... A ring of clouds[157]
encircles thee, and they see not Elysium.... Ah, how silently thou
bearest through the still, blessed heavens thy battle-cry--thy
storms--thy graves; thy enveloping atmosphere shuts in like a coffin
all the voices of wailing round about thee, and thou glidest with thy
bowed and enshrouded ones only as a pale, still ball away above
Elysium!...
"Ah, ye precious ones, my Horion! my Julius! Ye are still up yonder in
the tempest, ye cover up my corpse, ye look weeping towards Heaven and
cannot see Elysium.... O that you were already through the wet cloud of
life!--but perhaps ye have already been long sleeping and waking,
perhaps time goes otherwise on earth than in eternity.--Ah! that you
might come down into the still pastures!" He saw in the magically
magnifying glimmer two forms walking. "Oh, who is it?" he cried, flying
to meet them. "O father! O mother! Are you here?"--But when he came
nearer, he sank into four other arms, and stammered, "Blessed, blessed
are we now, my Horion! my Julius!"--At last he said: "Where are my
parents and my brothers and Clotilda and the three Brahmins? know they
not that their Dahore is in Elysium?"
Victor beheld disconsolately the delirious ecstasy of his beloved, and
said neither yes nor no. The latter gazed with a heavenly smile and a
stream of love into the face of Julius, and said, "Look on me, thou
couldst never see me on the earth."--"Thou knowest well that I am
blind, my Emanuel," said the blind one. Here the frenzied man, turning
away his quivering eyes suddenly and with a sigh to the moon, fled from
his friends, saying to himself in a low voice: "The two forms are only
shadowy dreams from the earth,--I will not look upon them, so that they
may melt away.--So then the shadowy and dreamy woe of earth reaches
over even into Eden. Haply I am still in a dream of death, for the
region round about me looks like the landscapes in my life-dreams,--or
is this only the fore-court of heaven, as I do not find my parents?"
... He looked toward the lofty stars: "Where do I now stand below you?
New heavens lie on new heavens.----Ah, does one yearn then even here?"
He sighed and wondered that he sighed. He leaned down on the
pearl-glistening hill of flowers, with his back to the beloved shadows
and his eyes towards the kindling dawn, and groped and dreamed,--but at
last the coolness of morning overspread the seeking, dazzled, burning
eyes, which to-day had fallen now upon shapes of terror, now into seas
of ecstasy, with gentle slumber and with corresponding dreams... "Rest
softly, thou weary man!" said his friend; but the sleeper glowed with
the horizon, and the old delusion played on within him again....
A dream and the morning laid for him the groundwork of a still higher
Elysium.
He dreamed God would descend from a throne of suns, and in the form of
an invisible, infinite zephyr's breath move over Elysium.
The first morning of summer heaped around him the bridal finery of the
earth,--it lined the fields with pearl-banks of dew, and flung over the
burrowing brooks the gold tinsel and spangles of the descending flush
of morn, and hung upon the bushes the bracelets of burning drops.--But
not until it had cloven open all the flowers,--sent out all the birds,
quivering with gladness through the radiant heavens,--hid singing
voices in all tree-tops,--not till it had sunk the faded moon behind
the earth, and set up the sun like a god's throne over wreaths of
clouds just burst into bloom, and over all gardens and around all woods
had hung intertwined rainbows of dew,--and not till the blissful one
stammered in his dreaming, "All-gracious One, All-gracious One, appear
in the Elysium!"--not till then did the slowly flowing morning wind
awaken him and usher him into the thousand-voiced jubilant choirs of
creation, and set him to reeling blindly in the ringing, blazing
Elysium.----
And lo! at this moment, a vast, boundless breath, cool, stirring,
whispering, overflowed the whole enkindled Paradise; and the little
flowers bowed themselves down silently, and the green ears soughing
undulated together, and the stately trees trembled and murmured,--but
only the great breast of man drank in in streams the infinite breath,
and Emanuel's heart dissolved, ere it could say, "This is Thyself,
All-loving One!"
--Thou, that readest me here, deny not God, when thou steppest out into
the morning or under the starry heavens, or when thou art good or when
thou art happy!--
--But, unhappy Emanuel!
Thou beheldest five sporting black butterflies, and thoughtest the fair
creatures blessed Psyches.--Thou heardest behind thy hill a hewing into
the earth, as if men were making a grave.--Thou lookedst upon thy good
blind darling, and yet saidst, "Shadow! retire.... Tremble before God,
who just passed by, and vanish!"--But thou saidst, before that,
something else which I to-day do not disclose.--
My heart trembles before the coming line!--
Howling with pain, grinning with exultant fury, the crazy skeleton
sprang forth from behind the hill into the blessed plain, bearing in
its right hand a bloody hand that had been hewed off, and shook from
the left stump, from which its madness had hacked it off, trickling
fountain-curves of blood, and pressed to itself with the right arm a
spade, designed for the burying of the hand, and screamed with a grin
of exultation and agony: "Death grabbed me by it, but I snapped it
off,--and when he sees the grave of the fist, he will be so stupid as
to think it is I lying there ... Ah, thou there! Lay thyself, prithee,
to bed in the coffin; he has bored out thy eyes and clogged thy maw
with mould.... Brr!"
"O All-gracious One, thou hast damned me!" stammered Emanuel; the
driven blood broke from his crushed lung, and the disconsolate one
staggered and sank dying on the blood-stained flowers of his lost
heaven....
Thus does one day rob another of its heaven, and ere bereaved man
enters yonder into the last paradise, he has lost too many here
below!--Ah, we bear into every spring-air of this life and into the
ether of the second a breast yawning with wounds; and it must first be
closed, before it can fill itself!...
THE SOFT EVENING.
Towards noon he opened his weary eyes, but only to let them fall into
the grave, which death had opened beside him during his sleep. However,
one madman had been the God of Medicine to the other; his dream of
Elysium was dreamed out, shortly before it seemed about to be
fulfilled, and he was rational again. Victor saw by all signs, that
toward sundown at least death with his fruit-gatherer would pluck this
white fruit from its stem; but he saw it more calmly than yesterday. As
he had already rehearsed the part of disconsolateness, the instruments
of grief sawed no fissure into his heart, but only moved bloodily to
and fro in the old one. Whoever after years deposits for the second
time in the coffin one who has been once awakened therein, scarcely
mourns with so much intensity as the first time.
With what altered eyes did Emanuel awake in the evening hour, when he
yesterday had shed the first tears for joy! His soul, like the mourning
tree of Goa,[158] let fall by day the nightly load of blossoms; to his
chilled head the earth turned no longer the meadow-side of poesy, but
the light side of cold reason. He confessed now that he had nourished
into fulness of blood the nobler parts of his inner man at the expense
of the lower,--that his hope of death had been too great as well as his
poetic wing-feathers,--that he had contemplated the earth not from the
earth, but too much from Jupiter, seen from whose observatory it must
needs dwindle to a fiery spark, and that he had therefore lost the
earth without getting Jupiter instead. Vainly did Victor oppose him
with the true proposition, that the higher man, as the painters do with
water-colors, always begins his life-piece with the _background_ and
with the _sky_, which the painters in oil and inferior men make last;
his answer was the complaint that he unfortunately had not completed
his picture so far as the foreground. At last he reproached himself
with having made too much ado about so slight a separation as death
was, at least for him who goes, since the other separations on the
earth were after all _longer_, more _bitter_ and _two-sided_.
They came in this way upon the subject of _recognitions_ on the other
side of this stage of being. Victor said, he could not decry, as many a
philosopher had done, conjectures reaching out beyond the earth; for
after all we _must_ guess about what was beyond this world, whether we
asserted or denied. "Without the continuance of memory," said he, "the
continuance of my conscious self is no more than that of my knowledge
of another's, i. e. nothing at all; so soon as I forget my present
self, then surely might any other one instead of me be immortal.
Nor does the destruction of my memory follow from its earthly
dependence on my body; for this dependence all the spiritual powers
have in common with it, and in that case the destruction of the others
would follow from this dependence; and what then would be left for
immortality?"--Emanuel said: the thought of recognition, however much
it presupposed of the sensuous, was so sweet and transporting, that, if
men could make themselves _sure_ of it, no one would be willing to
tarry here an hour, particularly if one painted out to himself the
heavenly thought of finding all great and noble men at once. "I have
often," said he, "pictured out the future recollection after the
analogy of the present, and always had to leave off for rapture when I
thought to myself how in that remembrance the earth would shrink up to
a dim morning-meadow, and our life to a far-removed day illumined with
moonlight.--Oh, if we now, dissolve at the image even of a few years of
childhood, how tenderly will the image of _all_ childish years one day
look upon us!"--Victor waived off these deathly raptures, and after
saying, by way of transition, "_one_ connection, at all events, this
world must have with the second," he came upon something else, which
had struck him so much among the incidents of this night....
* * * * *
* * * * *
I still throw a veil to-day over what Victor asked and what Emanuel
disclosed; the new perspective would draw away our eyes too long from
the great patient.
The blind one held in one steady and agonized grasp his hot hand, in
order not to lose the beloved father; and when Emanuel had for a long
time been laying soft consolation concerning his death, like cool
leaves around the inflamed temples, he still said nothing except, in a
tone of fervent supplication, "Ah, father, if I had only seen thee,
only once!"--
Emanuel seemed to be composed; but he deceived himself; his present
indifference to the earth was in fact more piercing than that in the
night, which was merely a different enjoyment of life mixed with the
magic drinks of fantasy. With his remorse for his poetic suicide there
seemed almost to mingle joy at its consequences. Hence he said, with a
look of touching certainty: "To-day towards evening he should certainly
go, and no longer torment his two last and best friends with these
delayings of his departure. The genius of the world would forgive him
his last fault, and not let their _to-day's_ separation from him, which
for him was too long, be followed by any second one yonder."
The longer he spoke, so much the more did the old blooming Eden
re-enter into his languid soul.--Now he made a singular, heart-rending
request to his friends. As, notoriously, the sense of hearing remains
longest with the dying, when all other senses have already closed to
earth, Emanuel said to Victor: "So soon as thou seest that a change is
about to come over me, then give thy Julius the flute, and thou! play
me then the _old song of rapture_, that I may die upon the tones, as I
have already often wished, and continue to play on some minutes after
the end."
He began now to reflect how beautifully tones would glide around his
last thoughts, like the song of birds around the setting sun; and in
his extinguished spirit the old sparks flew up again: "Ah, I shall go
hence blissfully,--O my soul could even to-night lay upon this earthly
soil a super-earthly adornment, and take it for Eden: ah then, at
length; when the soil is fairer and the soul is greater...."
He swooned away again, but the pulse still beat faintly.--And here, in
this brooding state, it was that he received from the earth as a last
gift the awfully-sweet dream, into which the body infused the feelings
of its sickliness, and which, after his resuscitation, he related with
a new after-dreaming. It is the last soft triad of our body with our
expiring soul, that the former, even in its dissolution (as we know by
fainting persons and those apparently dead under the water, &c.),
communicates to the latter sweet plays and dreams.--
EMANUEL'S DREAM, THAT ALL SOULS WERE ANNIHILATED BY ONE BLISS.
He reposed in a glorified form in a transparent, dark, and yet colored
tulip-cup, which rocked him to and fro, because a gentle earthquake
made the tulip-bower sway on its bowed shaft. The flower stood in a
magnetic sea, which attracted the blest one more and more strongly; at
last he was drawn so far out, that he weighed it down, and fell as a
pearl of dew out of the drooping chalice....
What a colored world! A fleecy throng of ethereal forms like his stood
hovering over a broad island, about which played a circular balustrade
of great flowers in full blow,--above, in mid-heaven, over the island,
flew evening suns behind evening suns,--farther in, beside them ran
white moons,--near the horizon, stars traced their circles--and as
often as a sun or a moon flew downward, they gazed with a heavenly look
as of angels' eyes through the great flowers along the shore. The suns
were divided from the moons by rainbows, and all the stars ran between
two rainbows, and embroidered with silver the variegated ring of the
heavenly sphere. One above another rose gay clouds, in which burned a
kernel of gold, of silver, of precious stones,--from butterflies' wings
clouds of dust were shed, which like flying colors mantled the ground,
and out of the cloud flashed rushing floods of light, which were all
intertwined in one another....
And in this din of colors a sweet voice went round, saying everywhere,
_Die more sweetly of light_.
But the souls were only dazzled, and did not yet die.
Then evening winds and morning winds and noonday winds conspiring fell
upon the meadow and wafted down the bright-blue and gold-green clouds,
which had arisen out of flower-fragrance, and unfolded the ring of
flowers on the horizon, and bore the sweet perfume to the hearts of the
blest. The cloud of blossoms swallowed them into itself, the heart was
baptized into the dark scents as into a feeling from the deepest depths
of childhood, and, overwhelmed with the hot steam of flowers, would
fain drop asunder therein.--Now the unknown voice drew nearer, and
softly whispered, _Die more sweetly of fragrance_.
But the souls only grew giddy, and did not yet die. Far in the depths
of Eternity out of the south rose and fell, as in a curve, a single
tone,--a second rose in the east,--a third in the west,--at last from
the distance the whole heaven sounded, and the tones streamed over the
island, and seized upon the softened souls.... When the tones were upon
the island, all beings wept for bliss and longing.... Then on a sudden
the suns ran still faster, then the tones flew still higher, and,
ascending spirally, lost themselves in a keen, endless height,--ah,
then all the wounds of men opened again, and warmed softly with the
trickling blood every breast, which died in its melancholy,--ah then,
indeed, all came flying before us that we had loved here, all that we
had lost here, every precious hour, every lamented pasture, every
beloved being, every tear and every wish.----And when the highest tones
were hushed and pierced again, and were still longer mute and pierced
more deeply; then harmonica-bells trembled beneath human beings who
stood upon them, so that the piercing hum agitated to pieces every
trembler.--And a lofty form, around which a little dark cloud floated,
came up in a white veil and said melodiously, _Die more sweetly of
tones_.
Ah! they would have died and died gladly of the sadness of melody, if
every heart had held the heart for which it languished on its breast;
but every one still wept on lonesomely without his beloved.
At last the form threw off the white veil, and the _Angel of the
end_ stood before men. The little cloud that floated round him was
_Time_,--so soon as he should grasp the little cloud, he would crush
it, and time and men would be annihilated.
When the Angel of the end had unveiled himself, he smiled on men with
indescribable affection, in order to dissolve their hearts with bliss
and with smiles. And a soft light fell from his eyes upon all the
shapes, and every one saw standing before him the soul he most
loved,--and when they gazed upon each other with a dying look for love
and sent a languid smile after the angel, he grasped at the little
cloud which was near him,--but he could not reach it.
Suddenly each one saw once more beside him his own self,--the second
_I_ trembled transparently beside the first, and the two smiled
consumingly on each other and exalted each other,--the heart which
trembled in man hung once more, tremblingly, in the second self, and
saw itself dying therein.--
O then was every one constrained to fly from himself to his beloved,
and, seized with dread and love, to twine his arms round other beings
who were dear to him.--And the angel of the end opened his arms wide,
and clasped the whole human race together in one embrace.--Then the
whole meadow glimmers, breathes fragrance, rings with music,--then the
suns stop, but the island itself whirls around the suns,--the two
sundered selves run into each other,--the loving souls fall on each
other like snow-flakes,--the flakes become cloud,--the cloud melts into
a dark tear.--
The great tear of bliss, made out of us all, swims more transparent and
yet more transparent in Eternity.--
At last the Angel of the end said softly, _They have died most sweetly
of their beloved_.--
And he crushed weeping the little cloud of time.--
* * * * *
The fever images of death, with which every sleep, even the last,
begins, gleamed in Emanuel's eyes. His spirit hung swaying in his loose
nerves, breathed upon by soft airs; for he was already in that
dissolving nervous ecstasy of the fainting, the child-bearing, the
exhausted by bleeding, the dying. But his emptied breast rose the more
lightly, his departing spirit drew out thinner the thread of life.
Victor would have enjoyed the comfort of the dull numbness, wherewith
pains heaped one upon another crush us down, had he not been obliged
every minute to tell these pains, i. e. all the preparations of death,
to the poor blind youth. Ah, the blind one feared perhaps that he might
call after this teacher too late with the song of rapture.
Evening came. Emanuel grew stiller and his eye more rigid, and it
seemed to see the fantasies of his busy brain in the apartment, until
the gold strip of the far-sinking sun, which a looking-glass directed
towards him, darted like a lightning-flash through his world of dream.
Softly, but with altered voice, he said, "Into the sun!"--They
understood him, and moved his bed and his head toward the evening-rain
of the setting sun, to which he had of old so often unfolded his
susceptible heart. Victor started, when he saw that his eyes stood,
undazzled and immovable, open to the sun.
There was a sublime stillness round three discomposed beings; only a
breath of evening wind fluttered among the linden-leaves of the
apartment, and a bee hovered about the linden-blossoms; but out of
doors away from the theatre of distress a blissful evening reposed on
the pastures red with sunlight, among joyous, fluttering, singing,
intoxicated creatures.
Emanuel gazed silently into the sun, which sunk lower toward the earth;
he clutched not at the bed-clothes like others, but flung his arms
aloft as if for a flight or an embrace. Victor took his beloved hands,
but they hung down into his without a pressure. And when the sun, like
a blazing world on the day of judgment, sank down in a last upshooting
glow: then the silent one still hung with cold eyes on the vacant place
of the sun, and remarked not the setting; and Victor saw suddenly
shifting flashes of the scythe of death pass yellow across the
undistorted face.--Then, deeply troubled, he handed the flute to
Julius, and said in a broken voice, "Play the song of rapture, he is
dying now."--
And Julius, with streaming, darkened eyes, compressed his sobbing
breath into the flute and raised his sighs to heavenly tones, that he
might muffle and benumb the parting soul, during the tearing away of
its earthly roots, with the after-echoes of the first world, with the
preluding echoes of the second.
And as, during the song, a blissful smile at an unknown dream glorified
the face that was growing cold,--and when only a quiver of the hand
pressed the hand of the disconsolate friend, and only a quiver winked
with the eyelid and farther down opened the pale lips and passed away,
and when the evening redness overspread the pale form,--lo, then death,
cold to the earth and our lamentations, iron, erect, and dumb, stalked
through the fair evening under the linden blossoms to the enwrapped
soul in the tranquillized corpse and transferred the veiled soul with
immeasurable arms from the earth through unknown worlds into Thy
eternal, warm, fatherly hand which has created us,--into the Elysium
for which Thou hast formed us,--among the kindred of our hearts,--into
the land of rest, of virtue, and of light....
Julius stopped for sorrow, and Victor said, "Play on the song of
rapture, he has only just died."--During the tones Victor shut to the
eyes of his beloved, and said with a heart above the earth, "Now close
yourselves,--the spirit is above the earth, to which you gave
light,--thou pale, hallowed form, thou hallowed heart, the angel within
thee is gone out and thou fallest back into the earth."--And here he
embraced once more the cold, empty wrappage, and pressed the heart,
which beat no more, knew him no longer, to his hot bosom; for the
flute-tones tore his pale wounds too widely open.--Oh, it is well that
when man in grim woe stiffens to solid ice, no tones are with him: the
tender tones would lick all the sad blood out of his transpierced
bosom, and man would die of his agonies, because he would be able to
express his agonies....
--Here let my curtain fall before all these scenes of death, before
Emanuel's grave and Horion's grief!--Thou and I, my reader, will
now go forth from another's death-chamber, to look into nearer ones
where we ourselves lie prostrate or where our dearest have lain. We
will in those chambers behold our death-bed, but let not our eye
sink;--the flame of love and of virtue blazes upward above the
corruptions,--around the death-bed we see a bier as a couch of rest on
which all burdens are laid down, and the broken heart also,--around the
deathbed we see a great, unknown form, who breaks off from the _image_
of God the earthly _frame_.--But if the heart is made great beside our
own resting-place, it becomes tender beside another's.--If thou, my
reader, and if I now, with this deeply moved soul, look into the
chambers where we received the perpetual wounds of earth, then will the
pale forms which therein raise their dead men's eyes once more to meet
us, agitate and wound us too sorely.--Ah, that may you well do, too, ye
loved mutes,--what have we then left to give you, but a tear which
pains us, a sigh which oppresses our hearts? Ah, if the mourning-crape
on our faces is torn as soon as the funeral veil on yours,--if the
marble gravestone with your name must be turned over above your
corpses, in order to cover a new one with its new name,--O, if we so
easily forget all the eternal love, the eternal remembrance, which we
promised you in your last hour,--ah, then, indeed, in these tumultuous
days of life a still hour like this is holy and beautiful, in which we
lay our ear as it were close to the sunken graves, and, from the depth
of the earth, although every day more darkly, hear the voices that we
know call up: "Forget us not,--forget me not, my son--my friend--my
beloved, forget me not!"
No, and we will not forget you! And, if it makes us ever so sad, still
let each one of us at this moment summon the most precious forms before
him out of their resting-places, and behold the wasted features, the
reopened eyes full of love, which were so long closed, and contemplate
full long the dear, uncovered face, till the old remembrances of the
fair days of their love break the heart and he can weep no more.
39. DOG-POST-DAY.
Great Disclosure.--New Separations.
I will now disclose what in the former chapter I concealed.--When
Emanuel on that Elysian morning of the delirium had said to Julius,
"Shadow! hence!" he went on: "Conjure not up with thy juggling the
blind _Son_ of my Horion [Lord Horion] who takes me still for his
father,--fear before God, who has just passed by, and vanish!"--And
turning to Victor he said: "Shadow! if thou knowest not who thou art,
and knowest not thy father Eymann, then descend to the earth again and
into the shadow which my Victor casts there."----And when Victor the
next day recalled the dying man to these words, he asked distressfully:
"Ah, did I not say it in a delusion, when I dreamed I was in the land
beyond earthly oaths?" and he turned mutely his affrighted face to the
wall....
He has, then, in the illusion of having passed through death, spoken it
out, that Julius is the son of his Lordship, and Victor the son of
Pastor Eymann.... But what a bright illumination does not this full
moon give to our whole history, on which hitherto only a moon-sickle
has shone--
I confess, in the very first chapter it struck me singularly that
Victor should be a physician; now it is explained; for the medical
doctor's hat was the best Montgolfier[159] and Fortunatus's wishing-cap
for a citizen-legate of his Lordship, in order thereby the more easily
to hover round the throne and work upon the frail January; then, too,
Victor, after his future devalvation,[160] and after the loss of the
feather-hat, could best gather into the medical one his daily bread as
a citizen,--his Lordship saw. This was _one_ reason why the latter gave
him out as his son. Another is, Victor was best fitted to play the part
with the prince by his humor, cleverness, good nature, &c., to which
was added as a further recommendation the resemblance he bore in
everything, except age, to the fifth and up to this time still lost
son, whom January so loved. As, now, a physician in ordinary was to be
the favorite, his Lordship could not take any one of the princely sons
for his purpose, because they must be jurists, in order to fit into
their future offices.--His own son Julius he could not use, because he
was blind,--by the way! his Lordship was also blind once, and thus adds
his example to the cases of blindness inherited from father to son, but
even independently of the blindness he could not possibly, by reason of
his disinterested delicacy, let his son reap the advantages of princely
favor while he withheld from them January's own sons themselves.
Thou good man without hope! when I compare now thy poetic education of
the blind youth with thy cold principles,--when I consider how thou--dead
to lyric joys, hardened to the tears of enthusiasm--nevertheless causest
the dark soul of thy Julius curtained with eyelids to be filled by his
teacher with poetic flower-pieces, with dew-clouds of sensibility, and
with the nebulous star of the second life,--then does it enhance quite
as much my sorrow as my esteem, that thou findest nothing on the earth
which thou canst press to thy starved-out heart, and that thou raisest
thine eye withered on empty tear-ducts coldly to heaven, and even there
findest nothing but a void waste of blue!--
This painful observation Victor made still sooner than myself.--But to
the story! The past portion of it sent a thousand thorns through his
heart. We no longer recognize now our once joyous Sebastian,--he has
lost four beings, as if to pay off therewith the four days of
Whitsuntide: Emanuel has vanished, Flamin has become an enemy, his
Lordship a stranger, and Clotilda--a stranger. For he said to himself:
"Now, when she is removed so far above me, I will not cost the
sufferer, from whom I have already taken so much, absolutely
everything, absolutely her father's love and her position,--I will not
insist upon the love which, in her ignorance of my connections, she has
bestowed upon me.--No, I will cheerfully tear away my soul from the
most precious one amidst a thousand wounds of my breast, and then lay
myself down and bleed to death." _Now_ this determination was easy for
him; for after the death of a friend we love to take a new load of
misery on our breast; _that_ shall crush it, for we _will_ die.
Yet destiny had still left two loved ones in his arms; his Julius and
his mother. In the former he loves so many sweet associations; even
this was one, namely, that one always loves him with whom one has been
confounded; and he would fain fulfil the place of father with him as
his Lordship had done with _him_, in order not so much to requite as to
emulate that noble man. And still more ardently did his soul embrace
the excellent wife of the Pastor, to whom his heart had already
hitherto beat responsive with the soft warmth of a son. Ah, how would
it have comforted in its longing his childlike breast, from which one
hitherto his father was thrust away, to be clasped to a maternal heart,
and to hear from a mother the words, "Good son, why comest thou to me
so unhappy and so late?" But he dared not, because in that case he
would have broken the oath to leave Flamin's extraction under the cover
of mystery.
He shut himself up four days with the blind one in the house of
death;--he saw no one,--did not visit the mourning convent, where from
all fair eyes flowed similar tears,--renounced the fragrant park and
the blue sky,--and let the flowerage of the departed one fade after
him.--He consoled the forsaken blind one, and all day long they rested
in each other's embrace, and pictured to each other weeping their
teacher and his teachings and the radiant hours of their childhood. At
last, on the fourth day, he conducted the blind one forever out of the
beautiful Maienthal,--the evening-bell sent after them from afar the
knell of a whole coffined life,--Julius wept aloud,--but Victor had
only a moist eye, and consoled not himself, but the blind one; for his
soul was now otherwise than one would guess; his soul was exalted above
this eventide-life: his departed one, like a genius, held it high up
above the clouds and above the plays of our little time. Victor stood
on the high mountain, where one stands on the burial-day of a friend;
at the foot of the mountain stretched far away the dead sea of the
abyss,[161] and drained an expanded, trembling cloud which reared
itself on the sea,--and on the cloud were painted gay cities, and
swaying landscapes hung therein, and the little tribes of people with
red cheeks ran over the landscapes of vapor,--and all, people and
cities, dropped down like tears into the absorbing sea,--only down
below along the horizon in the dusky cloud was a lighted rim like
morning glow; for a sun rises behind the twilight, and then the cloud
has passed away, and a new green continent lies stretching into the
immensity.----
He would have gone on the whole night, but something frightful in the
next village, which is called Upper-Maienthal, arrested him. He
recognized in the coachhouse of the inn, by its coat of arms, the
carriage of the Chamberlain. He set the blind one down on a stone bench
at the door, where he could listen to the rustle of unloading hay.
Victor, in answer to his question in the house, got the intelligence:
"There were two ladies overhead, one of them they did not know (he
immediately discovered, however, by the first sketch of her attire, the
wife of the Parson),--the other had often passed that way; it was the
daughter of the Chief Chamberlain, and had on full mourning, because
her father some days before had been shot dead in a duel with the
Regency-Councillor Flamin, and the two were travelling, as these people
said, to England."
He screamed in vain, half choking in blood and agony, "It is
impossible,--with the page Von Schleunes, you mean." But nevertheless
it was so,--Flamin was in prison,--Matthieu out of the country,--Le
Baut already under the ground.... But demand not now the history of
this murder!--Victor slowly drew out the watch of the happy Bee-father,
and stared rigidly at the index of joyous hours, which, for want of
winding up, had stopped some days since; something within him
counselled the wild and desperate thought to hurl it against the stone
floor and smash it to pieces. But three lute-breaths of the flute, with
which the blind youth conjured before his benumbed soul a fairer,
warmer past, dissolved his congealing heart into a wet eye, and he
lifted it up overflowing, and only said, "Forgive me for it,
All-gracious One,--ah, I will gladly do nothing but weep."--When the
pangs of grief are too heart-rending within us, then something in us
gnashes against fate, and the heart infuriate clenches itself like a
fist, as it were, for resistance,--but this strength is blasphemy. O,
it is more comely towards thee, All-gracious One, to let the crushed
and broken heart melt away and become a tear, and to love and be silent
until one dies!
The familiar tones of the flute penetrated into Clotilda's thick
rain-cloud of grief,--she staggered to the window,--she saw the blind
one,--but she went slowly back and wrapped her heart deeper in the cold
cloud,--for now she knew all; the blind one was the messenger of death,
come to tell that her great friend had left the earth and the
disconsolate ones behind him. "My teacher, too, is dead," she said to
her companion; and when Victor sent up a request for an interview, she
could only nod her head speechlessly.--Then she begged the Parson's
wife to step into another chamber, because the sight of Victor, for
many reasons, must be oppressive to her. Victor ascended the staircase
as if to a scaffold on which fate was to pluck out his heart, namely,
the good Clotilda, from whom, as well by her journey as by his purpose
of resigning her, he was to-day being separated. When he opened the
door and beheld the afflicted maiden leaning pale and weary against the
wall; and as both with hands hanging down looked into each other's eyes
red with weeping, and trembled in the sombre interval between the sight
of each other and the first word, as in the fearful pause between the
fire of a great gun and the arrival of the ball, and when at last
Clotilda asked in a low voice, "It is all true?" and he said, "All!"--
then she slowly laid her beautiful head round to the wall again, and
repeated, in one continuous utterance, but in a low, wailing tone, with
the soft, muffled funeral tones of exhausted anguish, the words, "Ah!
my good teacher; my never to be forgotten friend!--Ah, thou great
spirit! thou fair, heavenly soul, why hast thou gone so soon after my
Giulia!----O, dearest friend, be not angry, I could wish now only to
be, where my father is, in the still grave."----Victor began eagerly
the question, "Has Flamin--" but he could not add, "killed him"; for
she lifted up her head and looked upon him with a swelling, a laboring,
unspeakable sorrow, and that sorrow was her _yes_.----
Exhausted with the bleeding of tears and convulsed amidst remembrances,
which, like brain-borers, touched the soul, she was on the point, at
last, of sinking down by the wall; but Victor sustained her with
inexpressible compassion, and held her upright on his breast and
said, "Come, innocent angel, come to my heart, and weep thyself dry
thereon,--we are unhappy, but innocent.--O, take thy rest, thou
tormented head, rest softly under my tears."----But always in the
height of woe a mountain-air began to flutter around him; it seemed to
him as if an iron lever lifted up the broken-in skull, as if vital air
streamed in through the pierced, inwardly mouldering breast; the reason
why he felt so was that the life of men became little to him, death
great, and earth dust. "Sleep, harassed one,"--he said to Clotilda, who
leaned languidly upon him,--"sleep away the woe,--life is a sleep, an
oppressed, sultry sleep; vampyres sit upon it, rain and wind fall upon
us sleepers, and we vainly clutch at waking.----O, life is a long, long
sigh before the going out of the breath.--But alas that the wretched
meteor should be permitted so to torment just this good soul, just
thyself!"--"Ah," said Clotilda, "if only the so sad flute would cease!
My heart is ready to fly to pieces for agony!" But her friend cruelly
tore open again all the springs of her tears and poured his into hers,
and depicted to her the past: "Four weeks ago it was otherwise; then
the flute-tones passed over a fairer region; through the happy plaints
of the nightingale they found their way into our hearts, which were
then so joyous.--On the first Whitsuntide-day I found thee, when the
nightingale throbbed,--on the second, I sank down before thee for
rapture and reverence, when the rain glistened round about us,--on the
third, at the evening fountain a broad heaven rose, and I saw a single
angel stand sparkling and smiling therein.----Our three days were
dreams of fair flowers, for dreams of flowers signify sorrow."--He had
hitherto hardened his soft soul against this cruel picture, but when he
had actually, with oppressed voice, added, "At that time our Emanuel
was still living, and visited at evening his open grave..." then must
his heart needs burst, and all his tears gushed out over the deeply
buried sword-blade like bloody drops, and he said, straining her more
passionately to himself "O, come, we will weep without measure: we will
not console ourselves. We shall not be much longer together: O, I could
now tear myself to pieces with sorrow.--Exalted Dahore! look upon this
dying one and her tears over thee, and requite her mourning, and give
the weary soul at length repose, and thy peace, and all that is wanting
to man."
The two souls sank, entwined together, into a single tear, and the
stillness of mourning hallowed the moment,--and let me not with my
oppressed breath say any more of this.
--As if awaking, she drew her head from his heart and with an enervated
smile took his hand; for notwithstanding all unhappy events she loved
him inexpressibly, and was even now on the way to Maienthal for the
very purpose of seeing him once more,--and she said, "I am going to
England to my mother, to find his Lordship, and to beg him to come
sooner and act as intercessor, and end the sorrows of others and my
own."--Her pause, which her look filled out, disclosed to him as much
as it concealed from the unhappy wife of the Parson, who could hear a
good deal in the adjoining chamber;--what she suppressed was, that she
would urge upon his Lordship the expediting of the disclosure that
Flamin was the son of the Prince. Besides, this journey withdrew her
eyes from so many images of grief, as well as her ears from so many a
discordant tone of mockery. To be sure, the design of taking motion on
the coach-cushion and on shipboard as a tincture of iron, had only been
her pretext at court, where polite untruths are not merely forgiven,
but even required.
Victor promised her, under a dark presentiment of his strength and
disinterestedness,--for the unhappy makes sacrifices more freely
and easily than the happy,--that "he would care for him like a
_sister_."--Their eyes exchanged confessions of their secrets, and, for
that _very_ reason, of their love, and Clotilda overflowed with tearful
love, first on account of the journey (because to her sex a journey by
reason of its rarity is something of consequence); secondly, on account
of sorrow, for love makes a woman's heart in full mourning warmer than
one in half-mourning, as burning lenses heat black-colored things more
powerfully than white.
And this very day, when she looked into his eyes with so much renewed
love, he was to be torn from her! He spared her, it is true, the
revelation of his birth and his eternal separation, in order not to lay
upon her lacerated heart new loads of sorrow; but he would fain wholly
gather, in this last minute of his fair love, this gleaning and this
after-bloom of his life. Ah, he would fain look upon her as never
before,--he would press her hand intensely as he had never before
done,--he would say a farewell to her like a dying man.----For it
is all--his innermost being cried unceasingly--for the last, last
time!--Only he would not kiss her: a shrinking reverence, the thought
of having played out the part of the lover, forbade him to make a
selfish use of her ignorance. But when he was about to direct towards
her the last look of love,--then did fate thrust all the sharpened
weapons, which had hitherto been driven into his nerves, once more into
the bleeding openings, just as they replace in the wounds of murdered
men the old instruments, to see whether they are the same,----ah,
they _were_ the same,--the chamber was darkened as if by an
extinguisher,----the tones of the flute were stifled in the internal
din,--he must needs look upon her and yet could not for the water in
his eyes,--he must look upon her with a long, retentive look, because
he wanted to impress her beautiful face as a shadow-image of the
shadowy Eden forever upon his soul.--At last he succeeded; amidst a
thousand woes he seized with an intense look her tear-bedewed face,
through which virtue pulsed like a heart, and shadowed it out in his
desolate soul even to every line, to every drop.--So much of her he
took away with him,--no more; he left her everything, his heart and his
joy.--Ah, tender Clotilda! if thou hadst guessed it!--The sobbing of
_his_ mother hurried him to the adjoining chamber; he flung open the
door, cried in a crushed voice to his mother, whose face was averted:
"Dearest! by the Almighty, your _son_ is no murderer and no
reprobate,"--and compressed the hand she gave him behind her back with
a wild intensity of grasp.
Look not now, my friends, at the dismal moment when for the last time
he takes Clotilda's hand, and severs his heart from hers, and yet only
says, "A happy journey, Clotilda, a peaceful life, Clotilda, joy be
with thee, Clotilda!"
--And at a distance from the village he fell on his knees beside the
blind one, with a mute prayer for the mourning heart which he had now
lost for the last time.--
Not until four o'clock in the morning did he arrive with the blind-one,
without weariness, without tears, and without thoughts, at
Flachsenfingen.
40. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Murderous Duel.--Apology for the Duel.--Prisons regarded as
Temples.--Job's-Wails of the Parson.--Legends of my Biographical
Past.--Potato-Planting.
As I am on the point of entering upon the fortieth day with the
observation, "The history of the duel is still full of regular ciphers,
and is a true unfigured thorough-bass,"-a piece of the forty-third
comes to hand and figures the bass and puts the vowel-points to the
Hebrew consonants. To this young forerunning[162] of the forty-third
chapter one is indebted for the fact that I can relate the
shooting-history with better spirits.
It will not be guessed who boiled up the most furiously at Clotilda's
engagement,--namely, the Evangelist. He was vexed with the bold
faithlessness of the Chamberlain, whose courtliness he had hitherto
managed by coarseness, and so much the more because a human mixture of
imbecility and flattery like Le Baut exasperates us unspeakably, when
it passes over from flatteries to insults. Still more was he who set on
Flamin himself set on by the widow of the Chamberlain, who stirred into
his elementary fire soft oil and some matches; she hated Clotilda
because she was loved, and our hero because he did not, like the
Evangelist, set the step-mother above the step-daughter. A woman who
has gone to the death for a man, i. e. into a short sleep (which is
death to the good), namely, into a swoon,--as this very widow did in
the Eighth Post-Day,--must be expected of course to hate this man, if
he will not let himself be loved. The Evangelist, who had hitherto
taken the love of Victor and Clotilda only for the accidental gallantry
of a moment, and who had also looked upon the flying attachment to his
sister Joachime as nothing more serious, was devilishly mad at the
mis-shot in the first case, and at the royal shot in the second; and he
determined to avenge himself and his sister, whom he loved more than
his father, on both.
Joachime was additionally and bitterly enraged with Victor, because she
believed herself and her love to have been hitherto abused as a mere
cloak for his love to Clotilda. I have stated above that Matthieu,
after the Eymann visit, made his to Flamin. When the Councillor had
disclosed to him the interview with the Parson and his decisory oath,
Mat formed his resolution and threw much upon the Chamberlain: "This
fellow was a small sharper and a great courtier,--he had perhaps had
more to do than the lover had with Clotilda's excursion to the baths of
Maienthal,--he, and not so much Victor, sought to make out of his
daughter a lark's net for the Prince's heart and a _gradus ad
Parnassum_ of the Court." Flamin was right down glad that his vengeance
had got another object besides him with whom he had sworn to his father
not to quarrel. Meanwhile he did not conceal from the Councillor (to be
impartial) that the Apothecary proclaimed everywhere, from exasperation
against Sebastian, that the latter had gotten the plan of this marriage
as a stepping-stone to promotion entirely from him, from Zeusel.
Flamin, in such bone-fractures of the breast, always resorted at once
to the chalybeate (steel-cure) of the sword, the lead-water of bullets;
and the cautery of the sabre; and as the duel with Victor, one of noble
extraction, had spoiled him, he would also in the first heat have
proposed it to the three-buttoned[163] fellow, when Mat ridiculed
the incompetent plebeian. Flamin cursed in vain fury his defect of
ancestry, which hindered him from letting himself be shot by one
ancestrally endowed; nay, he would have been capable--as he kindled
quickly and yet cooled slowly--for a mere verbal insult from a nobleman
(as one actually did on a certain occasion)--of becoming a soldier,
then an officer and a nobleman, merely for the sake of afterward
summoning the canonical and challengeable defamer before the muzzle of
his pistol.
But the faithful Matthieu,--whose spotted soul turned a different side
to every one, like the sun, which, according to Ferguson, on account of
its spots, revolves on its axis, so as to give all the planets equal
light,--he understood the business; he said, he would in his own name
challenge the Chamberlain, and in fact to a masked duel, and then
Flamin in the disguise could take his part, while he himself stood by
under the name of the third Englishman, and the two others as seconds.
Flamin was overmastered by rapidity; but now again there was a want of
something, which is still more indispensable than nobility to a game of
fighting,--namely, of a good, legitimate offence. Matthieu, to be sure,
was ready with pleasure to offer one to the man which should adequately
justify a duel; but the man with the Chamberlain's master-key was one
who, there was every reason to fear, would forgive it,--and there would
be nobody to shoot.--Most fortunately the Evangelist remembered, that
he himself had already received one from him, which he knew how
profitably and honestly to bring to bear upon the case: "Le Baut had,
indeed, _three_ years before, as good as promised him his daughter; and
however indifferent this perjury was in itself, still, as a pretext for
the chastisement of a greater fault, it retained its full value." ...
Thus on a smutty tongue does truth take the form of a lie, provided the
lie cannot dress itself in that of truth. And Flamin did not dream that
his alleged groomsman was no other than the veritable Sabine robber of
his bride.
I am concerned lest it should be thought that Matthieu imputes to a
Chamberlain, especially one with whom making and keeping a promise
were the most distant cousins, less full-power of lying than to a
Court-Page, and that he forgets how, in general, one gets over the
stream of the court and of life as over any natural one, not in a
direct line, but in a diagonal and oblique manner. But the rascal
_despises_ the rascal still more than he _hates_ the good man. Besides,
he acted thus not merely from passion, but from calculation: if Flamin
were killed, then he must needs receive from Agnola, who now was
becoming more and more the Princess of the Prince, and for whom
naturally an after-bloom of January's and his Lordship's former sowings
was a hedge of thorns, the honest man's fee and fairing, and a higher
place on the merit-roll of the court;--furthermore, his Lordship in
that case could no longer trundle through the gate and bring word,
"Your Grace's son is to be had and is alive."--If the Chamberlain fell,
then, too, the result was not to be despised; this former boarder and
_protégé_[164] of the princely crown was, after all, gone to the Devil,
and his Lordship would have at least to be ashamed to think that by his
silence he had entangled the Regency-Councillor in a deadly relation
with a man to whom he had, at all events, publicly to pay the
veneration of a son. Matthieu could not lose,--besides, he could
disguise or disclose his knowledge of Flamin's extraction, as the case
might require.
As there was nothing to prevent the Englishmen's being seconds, Flamin
said, Yes; but Le Baut said, No, when he received Mat's manifesto
and war-articles; he was frightened to death almost at the very
death-prescription without the ingredient of the bullet. I shall never
so belittle a courtier, as to allege that he declines such a potato-war
from virtue or from faint-heartedness,--such men tremble certainly not
at death, but merely at a disgrace,--but this latter, which Le Baut
feared at the hands of the Prince and Minister, was precisely what
deterred him. He therefore, on fine paper and with fine turns of
expression, which outsparkled the black sand, represented to Mat their
former friendship, and dehortations from this glaring "ordeal,"[165]
and declared himself besides entirely willing to do everything which
his honor--would be offended at, in case he only were not obliged by
this sham-fight to violate the laws of the duel. But he was,--Matthieu
wrote back, he would pledge himself for the secrecy as well as for the
silence of the seconds, and he made the additional proposal to him,
that they should insinuate into each other dragon-[166] and pitch-balls
in the night and in masks; "for the rest he remained in future his
friend as ever, and would visit him, for only honor demanded of him
this step." ... And of the Chamberlain too;--for these men swallow only
great offences, but no little ones, just as those bitten by mad dogs
can get down solids, but no liquids,--and herewith in my eyes is a
courtier like Le Baut sufficiently excused, if he makes believe he were
an honest man, or as if he were very different from those who pawn
their honor for the whole year, and--as in the case of imperial pledges
or living pledges of love--never redeem the pawn.
All was fixed for the very evening when Victor sorrowfully entered into
Maienthal,--the theatre of war was between St. Luna and the city.
EXTRA-LEAF IN DEFENCE OF THE DUEL.
In my opinion the state favors duelling in order to set limits to the
increase of the nobility, as Titus for that very reason made the Jews
challenge each other. As in chanceries they still continue to make
nobles, but no burghers,--as, besides, a burgher must always be used
and demolished for the purpose, before the Imperial Chancery can set up
a nobleman on his building-ground,--as standing armies and coronations
increase simultaneously, and consequently the manufacture of nobles
too; the state would accordingly possess too many, certainly, rather
than too few noblemen (as is not the case, however), were not a mutual
shooting or stabbing of each other allowed them. In reference to the
petty princes who are made in the chancery-bakehouse, nothing more were
to be wished than that at the same time subjects also--say one or two
herds, with every prince--should fall off from the potter's-wheel; just
as, in fact, I know no reason, either, why the Imperial Chancery will
make poets only, when it might certainly quite as well scrape off from
its saltpetre wall historians, publicists, biographers, reviewers.--Let
it not be objected to me, that at court they seldom shoot each other;
here Nature herself has in another way set beneficial bounds to the
increase of courtiers. Somewhat as with marmots, of whose depopulation
Bechstein finds a wise design in the fact, that, though they generally
assert their own with a malicious rabidity, nevertheless they do not
reckon their brood _as_ their own, but willingly let it go. Even Dr.
Fenk may possibly be nearer right, who takes their part and says, he
grants they are of no use to the weightier members of the state, the
teaching class, the peasantry, &c., but of much, however, to the
lesser, unprofitable members, the mass-attendants of the stomach and of
luxury, the mistresses, the lackey-department, &c., and that an
impartial person must compare them with the stinging nettles, on which,
while they are of little use to men and large animals, most of the
insects get their living.
_End of this Apologetic Extra-Leaf_.
Flamin's soul worked itself off all day in images of revenge. In such a
boiling of the blood, moral skin-moles became to him bone-black,[167]
the typographical mistakes of the state appeared to him as grammatical
blunders, the _peccata splendida_ of the regency-college as black
vices. To-day, too, he saw the Prince always before his eyes, whom in
the clubs of the twins and still more in relation to Clotilda he
mortally hated. He despised the load of life, and in this heat, wherein
all materials of his inner being were melted into one flood, the inner
lava sought an outbreak in some foolhardy venture. His to-day's
exasperation was, after all, a daughter of virtue; but the daughter
grew over the mother's head. The three twins, who, although not with
the tongue, yet with the head, were as wild as he, kindled absolutely
the whole vaporous atmosphere of his full soul.
At length, when night came, the two seconds and Flamin and Matthieu
disguised as the third Englishman rode out to the shooting-ground.
Flamin contended furiously with his prancing, smoking steed. By and by
a gray nag brought along in curvets the Chamberlain. Mutely they
measure off the murdering and shooting distance, and exchange pistols.
Flamin, as insulted party, first lets fly like a storm against the
other; and, on his snorting steed, and in the trembling of rage, he
shoots his ball away over his adversary's--life. The Chamberlain fired
intentionally and openly far aside from his antagonist, because the
fall of the (supposed) Matthieu would have killed at the same time his
whole prosperity at court. Matthieu, with all his slyness, too
precipitate and too full of energy, foaming already amidst the very
preparations for the fight, and still more exasperated at the
frustration of both his alternatives, and too proud to let himself be
shamed before the Englishmen by receiving his life as a present under
another's name and from so contemptible an adversary, thrust down his
own mask and Flamin's too, and rode coldly up to the Chamberlain and
said, by way of humiliating him with the disclosure of his ignoble
opponent, "You have been under a mistake about rank,--but now let us
exchange shots." ... Le Baut stuttered, confused and offended; but
Matthieu backed his horse--stopped--screamed--shot with petrified arm,
and hit, and snuffed out the bald life of poor Le Baut.... Quick as
lightning he said to all, "To Count O.'s!" and--with the conviction of
an early and easy forgiveness on the part of the princely couple and of
the widow--trotted off over the limits towards Kussewitz.
Flamin became an iceberg,--then a volcano,--then a wild-fire,--then he
grasped the hands of the Britons, and said: "I, only I, have killed
this man. My friend would have had no quarrel with him; but, as he
has sinned for me, it is my duty to suffer for him.--I will die: I
shall give myself up to the judges as the murderer, that I may be
executed,--and you must back my asseveration."--But he disclosed to
them now a much higher motive for his bold lie; "If I die," said he,
more and more glowingly, "they will have to let me say at the place of
execution what I will. Then will I throw flames among the people, which
shall turn the throne to ashes. I will say, 'Lo! here beside the sword
of justice I am as firm and cheerful as you; and yet I have sent only
one good-for-nothing fellow out of the world. You could catch and
confine bloodsuckers, wolves, and serpents, and a lamb-vulture at
once;--you could reap a life full of freedom, or a death full of fame.
Are then the thousand staring eyes around me all blind with the
cataract, the arms all palsied, that none will see and hurl away the
long bloodsucker that crawls over you all, and whose tail is cut off,
so that the court and the boards in turn suck from it behind? Lo! I too
was once part and parcel of all that, and saw how they flay you,--and
how the messieurs of the court go about in your skins. Take one look
into the city; are yours the palaces or the dog-kennels? The long
pleasure-gardens in which they walk, or the stony fields in which you
must work yourselves--to death? You toil, indeed; but you have nothing,
you are nothing, you become nothing,--on the contrary the lazy, dead
Chamberlain there beside me'" ... No one smiled; but he came to
himself. The three twins, to whom the body and time and the throne were
a fire-proof wall, or a stove-screen against their self-devouring blaze
of freedom, vowed to him tied tongues, steadfast hearts, and active
hands; yet were they silently resolved, _after_ the flashing speech, to
rescue him with their blood, and to reveal his innocence. One
consequence of this dithyrambic of freedom was, that Cato the Elder,
the day after, blew up in the storm the powder-house at Maienthal,
which was the only powder-magazine in the country (magazines of corn
they had not so many), as he rode towards Kussewitz to join Matthieu.
Now they carried the lie into the village, that Flamin had availed
himself of Matthieu's disguise, and in a similar one had attacked the
Chamberlain, whom, for want of ancestors, he could not shoot in duel,
and blown out with a pistol his lamp of life. The Regency-Councillor
was, upon a slight, specious flight, arrested, and placed as a statue
of a god alone in that temple, which, like the old temples, was without
windows or furniture, and which the gods inhabiting them furnish, as
Diogenes did his tub, with inscriptions, and which the common man calls
merely a prison.----I will, however, first and foremost, call this and
the following words an
EXTRA-LEAF.
The chapel or vestry of such a temple is further called a dog's hole or
dungeon. The priests and fellows of this pagoda are the gaolers and
constables. In fact, the times are no more when the great folk were
indifferent to truths; now they rather seek out a man who has uttered
weighty ones, and hunt after him, and (with more justice than the
Tyrians did their god Hercules) make him fast in the aforesaid temples
with chains and iron _postillons d'amour_, that he may there on this
insulating-stool (_Isolatorio_) the better concentrate and accumulate
his electric fire and light. When once such a Mercury is so fixed; and
has for a sufficient length of time had, in common with the fixed
stars, beside light, immobility also, then they can finally, if more
has been made out of him by this process, get him even up to the
tripod,--as they call the gallows,--for a _hanging_ seal of truth,
where he can shrink up into a regular, dried, natural specimen, because
he may not otherwise be stuck as a useful example into the _herbarium
vivum_ of the philosophic martyrology. Such a hanging is a more
dignified and profitable imitation of the crucifixion of Christ, than I
have seen in ever so many Catholic Churches on Good Friday, and in fact
not a whit less forcible than that which Michael Angelo, according to
the tradition, arranged, who crucified _re verâ_ the man who sat, or
rather hung, to him for the Crucified. Hence in Catholic countries,
beside the _bloodless_ masses, there are sundry _bloody_ ones; for such
a quasi Christ, who is raised by a little hemp, not into the third
heaven, but still into the tremulous heaven[168] (_cœlum
trepidationis_), must--and for that reason they slay him--render to his
doctrines by his death the service which the higher death of the Cross
once rendered. And verily the dead still preach;--to die for the truth
is a death not for one's country, but for the world;--the truth, like
the Medicean Venus, is handed over in thirty fragments to posterity;
but posterity will fit them together again to form a goddess,--and thy
temple, eternal Truth, which now stands half under the earth,
undermined by the burials of thy martyrs, will at last rear itself
above the earth, and stand, made of iron, with every pillar in a
precious grave!
_End_.
Cato rode after Matthieu, who had fled to Kussewitz, and laid before
him, with French eloquence, Flamin's plan to die, and their own to save
him. Mat approved all, but he believed nothing of it; he still staid
over the limits. Yet he begged for himself the favor, not to take it
ill of him, if he should requite Flamin's noble sacrifice with
something which would be against their plan, but beyond their hopes.
Would he perhaps mention to the Prince that _his son_ lay in prison?
In three minutes the readers and I will go into the apothecary's shop
to our hero, when we have waited only to be first informed that, as the
riderless, bloody nag of the Chamberlain and the three twins with the
lying Job's tidings of the murder came up to the window of the
parsonage, the Court Chaplain was lathered and half shaved. He had
therefore to sit still, and only say slowly under the razor: "O sorrow
above all sorrows!--pray shave quicker, dear Mr. Surgeon,--wife, howl
for me!" He waved his hand loosely in his suppressed agony, in order
not to shake his arm and chin: "For God's sake, can't you scrape
more speedily?--You have a poor Job under the razor,--it is my last
beard,--they will march me and my household off to prison.--Thou
unnatural child, thy father may be decapitated for thy sake, you Cain,
you!" He ran to every window: "God have mercy on us! the whole parish
has by this time got wind of it.--Dost thou see, wife, what a Satan we
have together brought up and borne: it is thy fault.--What is the
fellow listening there for? Shear off to your customers, Mr. Shearer,
and don't go to blackening your spiritual shepherd anywhere, nor spread
the news about."----At this moment came the gentle Clotilda, downcast
and with her handkerchief in her hand, because she guessed what the
heart of a disconsolate mother needed; namely, two loving arms as a
band around the shattered breast, and a thousand balsam-drops of
another's tears upon the splintered and swelling heart. She went up to
the mother with open arms, and enfolded her therein with speechless
weeping. The whimsical Parson fell at her feet and cried: "Mercy,
mercy! none of us knew a word about it. I only heard of the murder just
now while in the hands of the barber. I lament only for your sainted
father and his relicts.--Who could have said ten years ago, good lady,
that I should have raised a scamp that would shoot down my master and
patron? I am a ruined man, and my wife too. I can no longer now for
shame be _Senior Consistorii_.--I can send off no christening paper and
present to his Highness, even though my wife should be taken in labor
on the spot.--And if they behead my son, it will bring down my gray
hairs with sorrow to the grave."--When Clotilda, without smiling,
assured him, on her sacred word, that there was an infallible way of
rescue,--by which she meant Flamin's princely extraction,--then the
Chaplain looked on her with sparkling eyes and dumfounded mien, and
kept calling her half aloud at intervals, "Angel of heaven!--Angel of
God!--Archangel!"--But the two female friends retired eagerly into a
cabinet; and here Clotilda poured the first vulnerary water into the
widely rent soul of the mother, by asseverating and pledging the
intervention of a redeeming mystery, and concerting with her on that
account the journey to London.--This withdrawal was partly also wrung
from her by her false position with the Chamberlain's lady, whose last
windlass-maker, together with all the levers of her sunken fortune, had
now been buried with her husband; and who, as she threw all the blame
upon Clotilda's conduct, sought still more to afflict this mourning
spirit by an intentional exaggeration of her own mourning. As Lady Le
Baut, for the rest, liked nothing so much as prayer-books and
freethinkers, she now compensated for the latter with the former.
Some of my readers will already have darted on before me, and have
peered into Victor's balcony to find his grief hidden within four
walls;--frightfully stands the solitude before him, unfolding to him a
great black picture, with two fresh graves. In one great grave lies
lost friendship; in the other, lost hope. Ah! he wishes the third, in
which he might also lose himself. He had the sublime mood of _Hamlet_.
The darkened Julius appeared to him like a galvanically quivering dead
man. He wholly avoided the court; for his self-regard was far too
considerate and proud to keep up a fleeting pomp with a stolen
nobility, and the surreptitious privileges of a lord's son. Moreover, a
slight chilblain was raised on his heart by the thought that his
Lordship, according to the degenerate way of all statesmen and
state-machinists, of managing men only as bodies, not as spirits; only
as caryatides, not as tenants of the state-edifice; in short, merely as
dancing-girls of Golconda,[169] who have their limbs yoked and tied
together as a beast of burden to a single rider,--that his Lordship, I
say, this otherwise exalted soul, had misused even his Victor too much
as the tool of his virtue. But he forgave the man for it, whom, after
all, he had nothing to reproach with, except that he had only the
kindnesses of a father, without his rights.
As Victor no longer paid court to any one, naturally the Apothecary
cared no more to pay it to him. The former smiled at that, and thought:
"So should every good courtier act, and, like a clever ferryman, always
leave that side of his boat which is _sinking_, and step over to the
other." Zeusel stepped over to the favored Watering-place-doctor,
Culpepper, to whose judgment they ascribed January's recovery, which
was the effect of summer; and he prostrated himself to lick with his
little snaky tongue the feet whose heels he had formerly stung with his
poisonous bite. But churls never forgive; Culpepper despised the
"ninety-nine per cent fellow,"[170] and the "ninety-nine per cent
fellow" again despised my court-physician, although, from fear,--as the
Prince from love of ease,--he ventured not either to browbeat him or to
turn him out of his house.
Poor Victor! the unhappy needs activity, as the happy needs repose; and
yet thou wast compelled to look, with bound limbs, into the future, as
into an approaching, distending storm.--Thou couldst neither suppress
nor guide nor hasten it, and hadst not even the comfort of forging
weapons for sorrow, and, like Samson, to express and--extinguish the
convulsion of agony by shakings down of the pillars!--He could not even
do anything for the imprisoned darling, whom he had plunged into a
still greater anguish; for Flamin's sufferings brought back again into
his bosom _friendship_ for him, though disguised in the domino of
_philanthropy_. He must wait to see; but he could not guess whether his
Lordship was coming or was living,--neither of which suppositions, in
consequence of his silence and of the non-appearance of the fifth
princely son, had much in its favor.--At last he came to be afraid of
sleep, especially the afternoon nap; for slumber lays, to be sure, its
summer night over our present as over a future. It draws two eyelids
like the first bandage over the wounds of man, and with a little dream
covers over a battle-field; but when it departs again with its mantle,
then do the _hungry_ pangs pounce so much the more fiercely upon the
naked man, amidst stings he starts up out of the more tranquil dream,
and reason must begin over again the suspended cure, the forgotten
consolation.--And yet--thou good Destiny!--thou didst still show our
Victor a streak of evening-redness in his broad night-heaven; it was
the hope of perhaps receiving from Clotilda, whom his heart no longer
dared call his own, a letter from London....
I was going to close this chapter, first with the intelligence that the
chapters come in, in ever-widening comprehensiveness of periods and
lessenings of size,--which betokens the end of the story,--and
afterward with the request that readers will not take it ill, if the
personages therein play and speculate more and more romantically;
misfortune makes romantic, not the biographer.
But I by no means conclude,--even on account of the last request,--but
rather prefer to freshen a little in the mind of the reader the image
of the old, joyous Victor, of whom he will hardly any longer be able to
conceive. It is an uncommonly fortunate incident that the dog, on the
third Dog-Post-Day, handed in one or two facts, which I at the time
entirely omitted. For that reason I can now unexpectedly state them. It
must certainly give me and the reader the greatest pleasure, when my
picture--which was even at that time quite finished--is hung up here on
this page.
The hiatus of the third chapter, wherein I paint Victor's arrival at
the parsonage from Göttingen, reads, when filled out, thus:--
"The Chaplain had the peculiarity of many people, that, in the midst of
the choir of joys and visits, he thought on his most trifling
employments; e. g., on the wedding day, of his mole-traps. To-day, in
the servants' room,--while his Lordship was communicating his secret
instruction to the Court-Physician,--he was cutting in halves
seed-potatoes. There were few to whom he could intrust the cutting up
of this fruit, because he knew how seldom a man possesses sufficient
stereometry of the eye to split a potato into two equal conic sections
or hemispheres. He would sooner have passed the seed-time than have
divided a germinal globe into unequal sections; and he said, 'All I
want is order.'--It may throw a shade over my hero, if it comes
out,--and certainly it must through the press,--and especially if it
reaches the ears of Nuremberg patricians and people in offices and
_membra_ of the supreme court, that Victor in the afternoon marched in
state behind the Chaplain and Appel over the vegetable garden, and
there executed what they call in some provinces planting potatoes. They
gave him the credit, that he incorporated the subterranean bread-fruit
in the ground at quite as symmetrical distances as the chaplain; in
fact, both looked sharply after the rectitude of the potato-row, and
their eyes were the parallel rulers of the beds. The Chaplain had
already beforehand looked after and helped on the plough behind a
dioptric rule or alidade, in order that the field about which I and the
judicial _membra_ are now standing might be cut up into equal prisms or
beds. When at evening both came home with great gravity and little
waistcoats, the whole house loved him so that they could have eaten
him; and the Parson's wife asked him what he would have done in his
waistcoat, if the Chamberlain's lady had met him; would he have made a
bow or an apology, or done nothing?
"'O thou dear Germany!' (he cried and smote his hands together,) 'shall
not then the whole country make a joke, except as the court decrees?'
(Here Victor looked at the old, deaf coachman Zeusel; for every
humorous effusion he regularly addressed to him who least understood
it. I will here, however, have it addressed to the patricians and
_membra_.) 'Is there, then, my dear man, nothing in the country but
gallowses and carpenters and officers of justice, so that, I mean, the
former cannot touch an axe, unless the latter have struck the first
blow with it? Will you, then, get all follies, like fashions, from
above downward, as a wind always roars in the upper regions of the
atmosphere before it whistles down below at our windows?--And where,
then, is there an imperial recess or a vicariate conclusion which
forbids a German of the empire to play the fool? I hope, Zeusel, a time
is yet to come when you and I and every one will have sense enough to
have his own, and his own private folly, begotten of his flesh and
blood, as Autodidact in all folly and wisdom.--O men, poor creatures!
catch, I pray, at the wing and tail feathers of joy amidst the forced
marches of your days! O ye poor creatures! will no good friend, then,
scribble an imperial folio, and prove to you that, like the Devil in
the Apocalypse, you have but a short time? Ah! enjoyment promises so
little,--hope performs so little,--the mowing and planting days of joy
stand in the Berlin Almanac so few in number,--if, now, you were
absolutely so stupid as to put away and lay up whole hours and
olympiads full of pleasure, like preserves in your cellar, in order,
the Devil knows when, to come upon them as fifty or sixty entire
pickled and salted years----I say, if you did not press out on the
cluster of every hour the berry of each moment at least with some
lemon-squeezers----what would come of it at last?... nothing but the
moral to my first and last fable, which I once made in the presence of
a Hanoverian.' ...
"I wish the reader wanted it; for it runs thus: '_The Stupid Marmot_ is
the title. The said marmot was once led by the full crop of a pigeon,
the contents of which he was eating, to the prize question, whether it
would not be better, if, instead of single grains of corn, he should
rather bring in pigeons with whole corn magazines in their throats. He
did so. On a long summer day, he arrested half a flock of pigeons with
full crops. He slit open not a single crop, however, but, though
hungry, saved all up for evening and morning: first, in order to catch
a goodly lot of pigeons; secondly, to feast on the batch of corn
thoroughly softened in the evening. At last, when evening came, he
ripped open the crops of his tithe-officers, six, nine, all,--not a
grain was any longer there; the prisoners had already digested all
themselves, and the marmot had been as stupid as a miser.'"
So far the Third and the Fortieth Dog-Post-Days.--Poor Victor!
POSTSCRIPT.--The history stops now in the month of August, and the
historian in the fore part of October,--only a month lies between the
two.
41. DOG-POST-DAY.
Letter.--Two new Incisions of Fate.--His Lordship's
Confession of Faith.
One must excuse a man, who, like horses, increases his speed as night
and home draw near, from a tenth intercalary day; at the end of a life
and of a book, man makes few digressions.
I have already said, that nothing presses the spiritual and spinal
marrow out of a man more than when his misfortune allows him no action;
fate still held our Victor fast with one hand, in order to beat him
sore with the other, when in these weeks of sorrow the water-wheel of
time filled up _two_ new lachrymatories out of the hearts of men, and
emptied them into eternity. First came the dismal tidings, like a
funeral knell, to Victor's ear, that the sometime friend of his youth,
Flamin, was about to expiate a step which, but for the falling out with
him, he never would have taken, with his death. Some days after the
canicular holidays,--precisely when, a year previous, the poor prisoner
had entered on his new office with so many philanthropic hopes,--that
rumor came forth like a pestilential cloud out of the session-chambers.
Victor flew, incredulous and yet trembling, to the Apothecary, in order
to get, by inquiry, a refutation. The latter candidly unfolded before
him--for the very reason that he despised and wanted to shame the
Court-Physician--all the _rapport_-lists of the court and the reports
of the _cercles_, and recited to him so much as this out of them: it
was not otherwise. Victor heard, what he already presupposed, that the
Prince had on now the leading-strings or curb-bit of his own wife, and
that she came nearer to him in consequence of Clotilda's withdrawal,
and, with her _ear_-[171] and _ring_-finger, moved the bridle, threaded
through the _nose_-ring, as if she were in fact nothing less than
his--mistress; which is a new and mournful example, how easily in these
times a fine married lady steals the privileges of a concubine. Zeusel
found it natural, "that she, as the friend of the Minister, who, as
well as his son Matthieu, had been the friend of the Chamberlain,
should seek to avenge the death of the latter upon Flamin, and
that the Minister, in order the better to get his hand into the
handle of the Parcæ's scissors, and cut in twain the thread of the
Regency-Councillor's life, himself ordained and maintained the
continued absence of his son, that the latter might not in any way
protect the unhappy favorite." In all this there was not a true
word,--Victor knew better; but so much the worse. O, does not
everything betray that Matthieu has drawn the Princess, by hints
respecting Flamin's birth, into his faithless interests, in order, like
magicians, to destroy at a distance, and by few characters? Would the
mere fear of the stigma of the challenge hold him so long beyond the
limits of the country?--Add to this, that the sun of princely favor
brooded more and more warmly over the ministerial frog-spawn. It is
true,--and Victor did not deny it,--one might expect of the Princess
that she would in time overturn with her foot the Matthieu's- or
Jacob's-ladder on which she climbed the princely heart, (whereas she
had previously reached only January's _hand_,) just as the marten lets
the drowsy eagle snatch him up into the air, and only up aloft begins
to hack at him, and keeps doing it till the bearer falls and dies; but
by this time, I think, her steadfast gratitude toward Schleunes is
abundantly excused with honest men by the fact, that still more remains
to be gotten of the uncompleted _gift_. An old lawgiver ordained a
punishment for every case of _ingratitude_; in my opinion, every one
falls into the same fault as he, if one censures and punishes every
instance of gratitude, since often the most selfish at court may have
his good reasons for it.[172]
Victor went sadly into his chamber, and looked on Flamin's picture, and
said: "O, may it not be the will of Heaven, poor fellow, that it should
be no longer possible to save thee." Victor could never, three days
after an offence, any longer avenge himself. "I forgive every one," he
used to say, "only not friends and maidens, because I am too fond of
both." But what helping hand, what twig, could he reach down into
prison to the sinking Flamin?--All he could do was to go to the Prince
with a naked prayer for his pardon. Thousands of generous acts remain
undone, because one is not entirely certain that they will produce
their legitimate fruits. But Victor went nevertheless; he had made for
himself the golden rule, _to act for another even when the result is
not a matter of certain hope_. For if we chose first to wait for that
certainty, sacrifices would be quite as rare as they were devoid of
merit.
He went to the Prince, for the first time after so long, an
interval,--with the disadvantage against him of terminating a long
absence with a petition,--spoke with the fire of a recluse in behalf of
his Flamin,--besought the Prince for the postponement of his fate till
his Lordship should return,--received the decision, "Your honored
father and I must simply leave it in the hands of justice,"--and was
coldly and proudly dismissed.
Now precisely it was, on the 5th of September of this year, when a
great eclipse of the sun made the soul as well as the earth sad and
gloomy, that the water-wheel of time had filled the first lachrymatory
vessel in his breast; it rolled over farther, and the second
overflowed. Clotilda's letter arrived on the 22d of September, at the
beginning of autumn.
"DEAR FRIEND:--
"Your honored father was still in London at the beginning of February,
and had much _French_ correspondence; then he went off to Germany, and
since that my mother knows nothing of his movements. May Destiny watch
over his important life! Upon three oaths,[173] which his absence makes
inviolable, hang many tears, many hearts, and, O God! a human life.--I
enclose a leaf from your honored father, which he wrote at my mother's,
and which contains a philosophy that makes my spirit and my prospects
more and more sad. Ah, although you once said, neither the fear nor the
hopes of man hit their mark, but always something else; still I have
the mournful right to believe my apprehensions and all the dreams of
anxiety, as I have hitherto been mistaken in nothing but in hope.--How
insatiable is man!--But even though all should come true, and I should
become too unhappy, still I should say, how could I now be too unhappy,
had I not once been too happy?"----
You will readily forgive me, if I am silent about London, and about the
impression which it might make on so _distrait_ a heart as mine. The
active stir of freedom, and the glitter of luxury and of commerce,
simply oppress a sorrowing soul, and do not make one more cheerful who
was not cheerful before. Be happy, beloved native city, my heart said,
be long and greatly happy, as I was in thee in my youth!--But then I
love rather to hasten with my mother to her country-seat, where once
three good children[174] so joyously bloomed, and there I am
inexpressibly softened, and then I fancy myself happier here than among
the happy. I only fancy it, I may well say: for when I contemplate
there all the playthings of those good children, their task-books and
their little clothes; when I seat myself under three cherry-trees
planted close together, which they in play had set out in the child's
garden, which was too narrow for them; and then when I think how on
this stage they exercised and built up their hearts for a happier life
than they have won, for a higher virtue than their relations allowed
them, and for better society than they have found,--then am I sorely
distressed, and then I feel as if I must weep and could say, I too was
born in England, and was educated in Maienthal by Emanuel.
"Ah, I cannot hide the feelings of my heart, when I write the name of
that great soul.--He was often on a mountain here, where lies a ruined
church, and where he climbed a column that was still standing, in order
to lift his eye to the stars, above which he now dwells.--I was just on
the point of writing to you now what my mother told me of his
departure; but it makes me too sad, and I will tell it to you orally. I
visit this mountain very often, because one can look down on the whole
plain eastward: here is the old tree, still hanging with its roots and
twigs down into the quarry, which lies full of broken temple columns.
Emanuel often at evening took thither the child whom he loved
most,[175] and who, when _he_ prayed on the column, with one arm wound
round the tree, looked out and leaned out, longing and singing, over
the broad landscape, and, without knowing it, wept in sweet distress at
his own tones, and at the distant fields, and at the pale morning-red
which gleamed back from the red of evening. Once, when the teacher
asked the child, 'Why art thou so still, and leavest off singing?'--the
answer was, 'Ah, I long for the morning-red. I should like to lie
in it and go through it, and look, over into the bright lands behind
there.'--I often seat myself under that tree, and lean my head against
it, and silently follow with my eye the stretch of distance even to the
horizon, which stands before Germany; and no one disturbs my weeping or
my still prayer.
"I was there to-day for the last time; for to-morrow we go with my
mother, without whom my orphan heart can no longer live, back to
Germany, to the best friend of
"The truest friend,
"CL."
O thou good soul!----
How hard, after this, sounds the singular leaf of his Lordship, which
seems to be no letter, but a cold apology for his future conduct. "Life
is a petty; empty game. If my many years have not refuted me, then a
refutation by my few remaining ones is neither necessary nor possible.
A single unhappy man outweighs all drunken ones. For us insignificant
things, insignificant things are good enough; for sleepers, dreams.
Therefore, neither in us nor out of us is there anything worthy of
wonder. The sun near to is a ball of earth; an earthly globe is merely
the more frequent repetition of an earthly clod.--What is not sublime
in itself and for itself can no more be made so by repetition than the
flea by the microscope; at most, smaller. Why should the tempest be
sublimer than an electric experiment, a rainbow greater than a
soap-bubble? If I resolve a great Swiss landscape into its constituent
parts, I get fir-needles, icicles, grasses, drops, and gravel.--Time
resolves itself into moments, peoples into individuals, genius into
thoughts, immensity into points; there is nothing great.--A
trigonometrical proposition, often thought over, becomes a tautological
one; an oft-read conceit, stale; an old truth, indifferent.--Again I
assert, what becomes great by steps remains little. If the poetic
power, which paints either _images_ or _passions_, is not already
admirable in the invention of the most commonplace image, then it is
nowhere so. Every one can, like the poet, put himself into the place of
another, at least in some degree.--I hate inspiration, because it is
raised as well by liquors as by fancies, and because, during and after
it, one is most inclined to _intolerance_ and _sensual pleasure_.--The
greatness of a sublime deed consists not in the execution, which
amounts to mere corporeal pitiablenesses, going and staying; not in the
simple resolve, because the opposite one, e. g., that of murdering,
requires just as much energy as that of dying; not in its rarity,
because we all are conscious in ourselves of the same capacity for the
act, but have not the motive;--not in any of these, but in our
boasting.--We hold our very last error for truth, and only the last but
one as none at all; our today as holy, and every future moment as the
crown and heaven of its predecessors. In old age, after so many labors,
after so many appeasings, the spirit has the same thirst, the same
torment. As in a higher eye everything is diminished, a spirit or a
world, in order to be great, should be so even before a so-called
Divine eye; but then the one or the other would have to be greater than
God, for one never admires his own image.--In my youth, I composed a
tragedy, and put all the above principles into the mouth of my hero,
and made him, shortly before he plunged the dagger into his own heart,
add these further words: But perhaps death is sublime; for I do not
comprehend it. And so, then, will I lead aside the columns of blood
which leap up out of the heart and so sportively keep up the human head
and the human individuality at such an elevation, as a fountain bears
the hollow ball balanced on its flickering stream,--this fountain will
I draw off with the dagger, so that the _I_ may be precipitated.--I
shuddered at this character at the time; but afterward, I reflected
upon it, and it became my own!"
* * * * *
Frightful man! Thy blood-stream and the _I_ on the top of it
have perhaps already collapsed, or will soon fall through.--And
precisely this dark presentiment is also in the hearts of Victor and
Clotilda----O that thou, thou other bowed man, whom I dare not name
here before the public, mightest guess that I mean thee, that thou,
just as well as the unhappy Lord, art eating away thy own self like
blood-sucking corpses, and that, in the _starry night_ of life, thou
still bearest a deadly _mist_ of thine own around thee! O the spectacle
of a magnanimous heart, which merely through ideas makes itself
helpless, and which lies inaccessible and benumbed in its arbor of
philosophical poison-trees, often dyes our days black!--Believe, not
that his Lordship is anywhere right! How can he find anything to be
small, without holding it over against something great? Without
reverence there could be no contempt; without the feeling of
disinterestedness, no perception of selfishness; without greatness, no
littleness. When thou canst explain the tears of the adagio by the
vibration of the strings, or by the blood-globules and threefold
skins of a beautiful face thy regard for the same; then and as well
canst thou think to justify thy rapture for the _spiritual_ in
Nature by means of its corporeal filaments, which are nothing but the
_flute-pieces_ and flat and sharp valves of the unplayed harmony. The
sublime resides only in thoughts, whether those of the Eternal One, who
expresses them by letters made of worlds, or those of man, who reads
them and spells them out!--
I postpone the refutation of his Lordship to another book, although
this, too, is a refutation.--
42. DOG-POST-DAY.
Self-Sacrifice.--Farewell Addresses to the Earth.--Memento
Mori.--Walk.--Heart of Wax.
There is a sorrow which lays itself with a great sucker-sting to the
heart and thirstily drains its tears,--the whole heart runs and gushes
and spasmodically contracts its innermost fibres, in order to become a
stream of tears, and does not feel the wrench of grief under the
deadly-sweet effusion.... Such a deadly-sweet pang our Victor felt at
Clotilda's letter.
But deadly bitter was that of his Lordship. "O this tormented and
worn-out spirit," he exclaimed, "longed, indeed, even on the Isle of
Union, for the repose of the dead;--ah! it has surely fled already from
the sweltry earth, which seemed to it so small and oppressive." If this
were so, then all the oaths, on whose remission Flamin's life hung,
were made eternal, and he was lost. If it was not so, then was there at
least no hope of his return, since Emanuel's death and confession,
Flamin's imprisonment, and all the previous occurrences, all of which
his Lordship might learn, had wiped out his whole finely delineated
plan. Now a voice cried aloud in Victor's soul, "Save the brother of
thy beloved!"--Yes, a way to do it was at hand;--but it was perjury.
If, namely he committed that crime by disclosing to the Prince who
Flamin was, then he was rescued. But his conscience said, "No!--The
downfall of a virtue is a greater evil than the downfall of a
man,--only death, but not sin, must be;--shall it cost me still more to
break my word, than it has hitherto cost me to keep it?"
It is well known that on the day of this year's equinox, when he had
received the two London leaves, there was a cold storm of snow and
rain, from which the summer afterward seemed to bloom out a second
time.--Victor went on in his, pondering. He called up before him once
more, with all its moments, that great day on the Isle of Union, and
found that he had absolutely sworn to his Lordship forever to be
silent, except an hour before his own death. We may still remember that
he had at the time reserved this very condition, because he had once
sworn to Flamin to throw himself down with him from the observatory, if
they should be obliged to part as enemies; and because now, when
Clotilda's sisterly relation was announced to him, he feared beforehand
it might come to that separation and suicide. In that case, he would at
least reserve to himself the liberty, only an hour before his death, of
saying to his friend that he was innocent, and that Flamin's beloved
was only a--sister.
"So then, an hour before my death, I may disclose
all?--O God!--Yes!----Yes!--I will die, that so I may speak!" he cried,
enkindled, throbbing, fluttering, exalted above life.--The tempest
hurled the torrents of heaven and the powdered glaciers against the
windows, and the day sank gloomily in the whelming flood.... "O,"
said our friend, "how I long to escape out of this black storm of
life,--into the still, bright ether,--to the steadfast, immovable
breast of death, which does not disturb sleep...."
If he disclosed to the Prince that Flamin was his own son, then was the
latter delivered, and he needed only an hour after that to--destroy
himself.
And that would he gladly do; for what had he left on earth
except--recollections? O, too many recollections, too few hopes--Who
would be grieved at his fall?--the loved one, who, after all, resigns
him,--or her brother, whom he saves and flies from,--or his good lord,
who perhaps rests already in the earth,--or his Emanuel, whose loving
arms are already crumbling to dust?--"Yes, him only will my dying
affect," said he, "for he will long for his faithful scholar, he will
on some sun open his arms and look down along the way to the earth, and
I shall come up with a great wound on my breast, and my streaming heart
will lie naked on the wound.--O Emanuel, despise me not, I shall cry; I
was truly unhappy, after thou hadst died; receive me and heal the
wound!"
--"Seest thou my father?" said the blind Julius, and his face
approached a smile of rapture. Victor started and said, "I talk with
him, but I do not see him."--But this checked his exaltation. He had
been hitherto the paraclete and nurse of the poor blind charge; he
could not leave him, he must needs put off the _retreating-shot_ of
life till the arrival of Clotilda, that she might protect the helpless
one. Ah, the good night-walker and night-sitter (in the proper sense)
had at first every day prayed Victor to operate upon his eye, and give
him back the light, before his dear father should crumble to pieces,
that he might see once more, only once more, the fair countenance not
yet undermined by worms; yes, he would at least touch blindly the cold
mask,--this he had in the beginning implored; but in a few weeks he had
drawn his arms away from under the dead man, and folded them entirely
(like a true child) with all his caressing love around Victor, who
_always_ stayed at home with him. And in the night they reached out to
each other their warm hands out of their adjoining beds, and thus
linked together went into the evening-lands of dreams. To the childlike
blind one, even the continuous din of the city turmoil, which his
village had wanted, had been a comfort....
Victor, therefore, waited first for the arrival of Clotilda;--ah! he
would have done it even without reference to the blind youth.--Must he
not see once more his good mother, hear once more the voice of his
never-to-be-forgotten beloved?--For the rest, I cannot disguise the
fact, that not merely the salvation of Flamin, but a real disgust
at life, guided his hand in his death-sentence. The verdict of
murderous disgust had, for its grounds of decision, the sunset
of Emanuel,--Victor's oft-recurring night-thoughts upon this
our lucubration of life,--his entire revolution of his social
relations,--the corresponding past or future example of his
Lordship,--his panting for a deed full of energy,--and, most of all,
the death-chill about his forlorn and naked bosom, which once was
covered by so many warm hearts. One can do without love and friendship
only so long as one has not yet enjoyed them;--but to lose them, and
that without hope, _this_ one cannot do without dying. Upon his
conscience he played off the optical deception and stage-trick of
asking it whether he might not draw his friend out of the water at the
hazard of his life; whether he might not leap from the plank, which
could hold only one, into the waves, in order to make his death the
purchase-money of another's life.--Two singular ideas sweetened for him
his deadly purpose more than all.
The first was, that on his death-day (after the disclosure to the
Prince) he could repair to Flamin's prison, and grasp his hand, and
boldly say: "Come out,--to-day I die for thee, that I may prove to thee
that Clotilda was thy sister, and I thy friend.--I quench the black
word, which can only be forgiven on the death-day, with my innocent
blood, and death folds me again to thy arms.---O, I do it gladly, so
that I may only love thee once more right heartily, and say to thee, My
good, precious, never-to-be-forgotten youthful friend!"--Then would he
fall upon his neck with a thousand tears, and forgive him all; for _in
the neighborhood of death, and after a great deed_, man can and may
forgive man everything, everything.
Every tenderer soul will easily divine the second thought that
sweetened that of death.--It was this, that he could go once more to
his beloved and think, though not say, before her, "I fall for thee."
For he now felt, after all, that the resolve of a parting for life was
too hard, and only that of doing so by death was easy.--O right easy
and sweet it is, he felt, to close the wet eye in the presence of the
loved one, then to see nothing more on the earth; but with the high
flames of the heart, and with the dear image pressed to the bosom, like
the encoffined mother with the dead darling, to step blindfold to the
brink of this world, and throw one's self headlong into the still,
deep, dark, cold sea of the dead.... "Thou art," he often said,
"painted on my conscious being, and nothing can sever thy image from my
heart; both must, as in Italy the wall and the picture upon it, be
transported together."--And as now there was no longer any need to care
for his body, he could call forth, of his own accord, the tears which
agitated him. He wanted really to offer something of his life to
Clotilda: therefore he rehearsed, for some days in succession, the part
of the bloodiest farewell scene, even to exhaustion, and made
pen-and-ink sketches of his sorrow, and said to himself, when thereby
headaches and heart-beatings came upon him, "I can thus at least suffer
something for _her_, though _she_ knows nothing of it."
Here is one such mournful leaf.
"O thou angel! Were it not that it would affect thee too sadly, I would
go to thee, and before thy eyes fill my heart with tears, with images
of the fairer time, with the bitterest sorrows, until it broke and
sank,--or I would slay myself in thy presence. Ah! it were sweet to
pierce my heart with lead, as it leaned on thy bosom, and to let my
blood and life flow out on thy breast.--But, O God! no, no! Smiling
will I go to thee, good soul, when thou comest back again, as if it
were merely for joy at thy return,--only the pink with the red drop
will I beg of thee, that my heart, adorned with it, may moulder under
the last flower of life. I will, indeed, bleed so near thee, heavenly
murderess, as the corpse does before its murderess, but yet only
inwardly; and every drop of blood will fall merely from one thought to
another.--Then, at last, will I be silent for a long time, and go, and
that forever, only saying this and no more: 'Think of me, beloved, but
be happier than heretofore.'----Whither then will I go, after an hour?
I shall take the dumb, dreary road to the poisonous Buo-upas-tree,[176]
to where death stands solitary, and there die all alone, all
alone.----The dead are mutes, they have bells, and in the blue a mute
will hover, and toll the death-bell.... Clotilda, Clotilda! then our
love on earth is over!"
Dost thou, reader, still recognize the voice which, in his inner being,
always, amidst the weeping of music, rang in the cadence of verse? Here
it rings again.--But his hurricane of resolve soon gave place to
gentler deeds and hours, just as the equinoctial storm of autumn
dissolved into still after-summer days. The thought, "In a few weeks
thou wilt fly to the land beyond the grave," made him a _free-born_
creature and an angel. He forgave everybody, even the Evangelist. He
filled his little sphere with virtues as with an after-bloom of life,
and devoted his short hours, not to sweet fantasies, but to needy
patients. He denied himself every expenditure, in order to leave to
Julius his paternal property unimpaired. He was neither vain nor proud.
He spoke frankly about and against the state;--for what is there to
fear so near to the storm- and weather-shed of the coffin-lid?--But for
the very reason that he felt only love for what is good, and no
passions and no cowardice in his inner man, therefore he resisted
_gently_ and _quietly_; for when once man is convinced for himself that
he has laid up courage for a day of need, he no longer seeks to make a
show of it before others. The thought of death used to incline him to
humorous follies, but now only to good actions. He was so happy,
men and scenes around him appeared to him in the mild, soothing
evening-light, wherein he always beheld both in the _sicknesses_ of his
childhood. It seemed as if he wanted (and he succeeded in it) to bribe
his conscience by this piety to a legible indorsement of his
autographic sentence of death. To him, as to the departed Emanuel, men
appeared as children, the light of earth as evening-light, everything
seemed softer, everything a little smaller; he had no anxiety or
hankering; the earth was his moon; now for the first time he understood
the soul of his Dahore....
--And thou, my reader, dost thou not feel that thou, too, so near to
the cloister-gate of death, wouldst improve just so? But thou and I are
in fact already standing before it. Is not our death as certain as
Victor's, although the certainty ranges through a longer interval? O,
if every one only had a fixed belief that after fifty years, on an
appointed day, Nature would lead him to her place of execution, he
would be a different man; but we all banish the image of death out of
our souls, as the Silesians on Lætare-Sunday cast it out of the cities.
The thought and the expectation of death improve us as much as the
certainty and the choice of it.
And now the fair, blue after-summer days of this year's October floated
on tender butterfly-wings of spider-webs across the heavens. Victor
said to himself, "Fair earthly heaven, I will take one more walk
beneath thee! Good mother-land, I will look out upon thee once more,
with thy woods and mountains, and fix thy image in the immortal soul,
ere thy yellow green grows over my heart, and strikes its roots
therein. I will see thee, St. Luna of my childhood, and you, my fair
Whitsuntide paths, and thee, thou blessed Maienthal, and thee, thou
good old Bee-father,[177] and will give back to thee thy watch that
counts the hours of joy----and then I shall have lived long enough."
He asked himself, "Am I, then, ripe for the granary of the
churchyard?--But then is any man ripe? Is he not in his ninetieth year
still incomplete as in his twentieth?"--Yes, indeed! Death takes off
children and Patagonians; man is summer fruit, which Heaven must pluck
before it matures. The other world is no uniform alley and orangery,
but the tree-nursery of our present seed-nursery.
Before Victor left the blind one, with tears and kisses, he sent for
poor Marie the evening previous to come to the cabinet, and commended
to her (as well as to the Italian servant) the care of the dependent
youth. But his design was to give and announce beforehand to the
crushed and powerless soul the hope of some hundred florins; for so
much he could already expect as inheritance from his well-circumstanced
father, Eymann. The selfishness of this humiliated creature, which
would have made others cold, was precisely what moved his innermost
being. Long since he had said, "One should not have compassion on any
man who thought philosophically or loftily, least of all on a learned
man,--with such a one the wasp-stings of fate hardly went through
the stocking,--on the contrary, with the poor vulgar soul he suffered
and wept infinitely, which knew nothing greater than the goods of
earth, and which, without principles, without consolation, pale,
helpless, convulsed, and rigid, sank at the sight of the ruin of its
goods."--It therefore only redoubled his pity when this Marie in wild
gratitude passed in his presence from abrupt utterances of thanks,
ejaculations, gushes of joy, to kissing of the coat, silly laughing,
and kneeling.
When he went the next morning,--first to St. Luna,--and passed along
before the convent of Mary, where once the adopted daughter of the
Italian Tostato would have offered a sixth finger, Marie was just
coming out of a limb-shop,[178] where she had bought two wax hearts.
Victor drew out from her by long and ingenious questioning that she was
going to hang one of them, which represented hers, on the holy Mary,
because hers no longer pained her so much nor was so much oppressed as
it had been the week before.--As to the second, she would not for a
long time let anything out; at last she confessed: it was Victor's own,
which she was going to offer to the Holy Mother of God, because she
thought it must pain him also right sorely, as he looked so pale and
sighed so often.----"Give it to me, love," he said, too deeply moved,
"_I will offer my heart myself_."
"Ay," he repeated out under the still heaven, "the heart behind the
wall of the breast will I offer,--that, too, is of wax,--and to mother
Earth will I give it, that it may heal,--heal." ...
Let him weep freely, my friends, now that he beholds smiling the still,
pale earth, even up to its hazy mountains.--For softness of
sensibility loves to ally itself with petrifying processes and the
art[179] of Passau against the calamities of fate. Let him weep freely,
as he looks upon this flowerless earth, spinning itself, as it were,
into the silk of the fugitive summer, and feels as if he must fall down
and kiss the cold meadow as a mother, and say, "Bloom again sooner than
I; thou hast given me enough of joys and flowers!"--The silent
dissolution of nature, on whose corpse the full-blooming daisy stood as
if it were a death-garland, softly unnerved his powers by this
loosening friction,--he was exhausted and stilled,--nature reposed
around him and he in it,--the exhaustion overflowed almost into a
sweet, tickling faintness,--the tear-gland swelled and pressed no more
before it ran over; but its water trickled down like dew out of
flowers, easily and without stopping, as the blood flowed through his
breast.
He saw now St. Luna lying before him, but, as it were, withdrawn from
him in a moonlight. He passed not through, in order not to see the wax
statue, whose funeral sermon he had delivered, and for which he also
possessed a heart of wax; but he went round along the outskirts. "Grow
ever broader and more bustling, fair spot: never may an enemy beleaguer
thee around!" He said no more. For as he passed by the church-yard he
thought, "Have not all these, then, also taken leave of the place; and
am I the only one who does it?"--The mere backward glance at the slated
roof of the parsonage kindled one more lightning flash of pain at the
thought of a _mother's_ tears for his death; but he soon whispered to
himself the consolation, that the maternal heart of the parson's wife,
never weaned from Flamin, would cure its sorrow for the victim by its
joy over the rescued favorite.
He went now towards Maienthal, and carefully kept away his dreaming
thoughts from its exalted places, in order (at evening on the arrival)
to enjoy so much the more--sorrow. But now his conscious soul spun
itself into a new ideal web. He thought over the pleasure of sinking
without any sick nights into the earth, bright and erect, not
prostrate, but upright like the giant Cænæus,[180]--he felt himself
shielded against all disasters of life, and purged from the fear
perpetually gnawing on in every heart,--all this, and the joy of having
fulfilled his duties and controlled his impulses, and the lights
of the blue day standing as if in flower-dust, so cleared his turbid
life-stream, that at last he could have wished (had not his
determination forbidden it) to play longer in the bright stream.... So
great does contempt of death render the beauty of life,--so sure is
every one, who in _cold blood_ renounces life, of being able to endure
it,--so sound is the advice of Rousseau, before death to undertake a
good deed, because one can then do without dying.... --As Victor
thought thus, Fate stepped before him and asked him sternly, "Wilt thou
die?"--He answered, "Yes!"--as, just before sundown, he beheld again in
Upper Maienthal Clotilda's carriage, which he had seen there at its
starting upon the journey. Now the death-cloud fell upon the landscape.
He hurried by,--at the window he saw his mother and the lady, the
mother of Flamin,--his inner being was in a tumult,--his eyes glowed,
but remained dry,--for he was choosing among the instruments of
death.---Why did he go, so late, in the dark, with a stormy soul, which
obscured all sweet dreams, to Maienthal?--He would go to Emanuel's
grave; not to mourn there, not to dream there, but to seek for himself
a hollow there, namely, the last. His impetuous grief had sketched a
picture of his dying, and he had approved the sketch; namely, so soon
as fate had decided the necessity of his death by the disappearance of
his father and by the peril of Flamin, he meant to scoop out his grave
near the weeping birch, lay himself down in it, kill himself therein,
and then let the blind Julius, who could not know nor see anything of
it, fling the earth over him, and so, veiled, unknown, nameless, flee
out of life to the side of his mouldering Emanuel....
Black funeral processions of ravens flew slowly like a cloud through
the sunless heavens, and settled down like a cloud into the woods,--the
half-moon hung above the earth,--a strange, little shadow, as big as a
heart, ran fearfully beside him. He looked up: it was the shadow of a
slowly hovering hawk; he rushed through Maienthal; he saw not the
leafless garden nor Dahore's closed house, but ran through the chestnut
alley toward the weeping birch.--
But under the chestnuts, at the place where Flamin would have killed
him, he saw Clotilda's withered pink, with the bloody drop in its
chalice, lying on the ground.... And as a lark, the last songstress of
Nature, still quivered over the garden, and called with too ardent
tones after all the spring-times of life, and pierced the heart with an
infinite, deathly yearning, then did my Victor look up and weep aloud;
and when, up on the grave, he had wiped away the great, dark tears,
there stood--Clotilda before him.
One thrill ran through him, and he was dumb.... She hardly recognized
the paled form, and asked, trembling, "Is it you? Do we see each other
again?"--His soul was torn asunder, and he said, but in another sense,
"We see each other again." She was in the bloom of health, having been
restored by the journey. But there was blood on her handkerchief;--it
was the blood which Emanuel's bosom had shed during the duel in the
alley. He stared inquiringly at the blood. She pointed to the grave,
and veiled her weeping eyes.--With the question, "Has your honored
father come?" the good soul sought gently to lead him aside; but she
led him to his grave,--his eye sought wildly the place for the last
cool grotto of life,--she had never seen her gentle lover thus, and
would fain soothe his soul by quiet remembrances of Emanuel,--she
filled out the chasm in her letter, and related how quietly and
composedly the dead man went from England, and previously at his
departure lowered down into an extraordinarily deep hollow of the
fallen temple all his East-Indian flowers, three pictures, written
palm-leaves, and collections of loved ashes....
Victor was beside himself,--he supported himself by his hand on the
dew-cold, wet, yellow grave,--he wept in one steady stream, and could
no longer see his beloved,--he threw himself upon her quivering lips,
and gave her the farewell-kiss of death. He could venture to kiss her;
for there is no rank among the dead. He felt her streaming tears, and a
cruel longing seized him to provoke these tears forth; but he could
only not speak. He choked her words with kisses and his own with grief.
At last he was able to say, "Farewell!" She extricated herself with
terror, and looked on him with greater tears, and said, "What is it
with _you_? You break my heart!"--He said, "Only mine must break!" and
hurriedly drew out the heart of wax, and crushed it to pieces on the
grave, and said, "I offer my heart to thee, Emanuel; I offer thee my
heart." And when Clotilda had fled with alarm, he could only call after
her, with exhausted tones, "Farewell! farewell!"
43. DOG-POST-DAY.
Matthieu's Four Whitsuntide Days and Jubilee.
It is a stroke of art in me to write down true scenes of villany in the
higher classes in French first, and then interpret them into the
vernacular, as Boileau composed his insipid verses originally in
prose.--As I attach great importance to the Forty-Third
Dog-Post-Day,--because therein the noble Mat seeks to save his Flamin
even at the sacrifice of his virtue and of Lord Horion,--accordingly I
meditate to translate it so faithfully into German out of the French,
in which I have written it, that my French author himself shall bestow
on me his approbation.
Hardly had Matthieu heard that Clotilda's and Flamin's mother had come
from London, when this Reineke marched out of his fox-kennel to
Flachsenfingen, because he would not let any one take from him the
honor of releasing Flamin. He seldom, despite his fieriness,
anticipated opportunity; but he watched and only helped things on here
or there; as in a romance, so in life, a thousand light trivialities,
brought together at last, hook into each other firmly, and a good
Mat twists at last out of scattered cobweb-meshes of accident a
regular--silk noose for his fellow-man.--He boldly contrived to get
himself a secret audience with the Prince, "because he would rather go
to meet his punishment (on account of the challenge to the duel) than
let certain weighty things remain in silence any longer." _Weighty_ and
_dangerous_ had long since been kindred terms with January, but now
were absolutely identical, because the Princess entertained him every
morning with a few strophes out of the penitential psalm and owl's song
about sedition, Ankerstrœms,[181] and propagandists. She and
Schleunes blew upon _one_ horn,--at least, they blew one melody from
it.
Matthieu entered and produced the great weighty matter,--the bold
petition for Flamin's life. January pronounced an equally bold "No!"
for man is quite as indignant at him who drives him into a groundless
fear, as at him who drives him into a well-grounded one. Matthieu
coldly repeated his request: "I simply beg your Highness not to suppose
that I should ever hold mere friendship as an adequate apology for such
a bold petition,--the duty of a subject is my excuse."--January, who
was annoyed at the uncourteous retraction, broke it off: "The guilty
cannot petition for the guilty."--"Most gracious sir," said the
Evangelist, who sought to drive him into fear and fury at once, "in any
other times than ours it would be quite as punishable to guess or to
predict certain things as to decree them; but in ours, these three
things are easier. Against the day when the Regency-Councillor should
lose his life, a plan is arranged, which certain persons have formed
for the salvation of his life at the expense of their own."--The
Prince--enraged at a boldness which ordinarily resides not within the
_snow-line_[182] of courts, but only at the democratic equator--said,
with the death-sentence which Mat had long since wanted to get into his
face: "I shall have you required to tell tomorrow the names of the
wretches who propose to sacrifice their lives for the sake of turning
the course of justice." ... Here the page fell down before him, and
said quickly: "My name is the first; it is now my duty to be unhappy.
My friend has killed no one, but I did it; he is not the son of a
priest, but the first-born son of the murdered Mr. Le Baut." ...
Since pier-mirrors first existed, never was such a dumfounded,
distracted visage seen in them as to-day. January dismissed him, in
order to collect himself.
We will now in the antechamber say three words about the absent one. A
shrewd thinker once said to me, that he had once said to a great
connoisseur of the world, "The fault of the great was never to trust
themselves in anything, and hence they were led by every one"; and that
the connoisseur answered, he had hit it.--January had a grudge against
Mat, and that merely on account of his satirical and sensual face,--but
not anywise on account of his vices. I take for granted that the reader
will certainly have seen courts enough--on the stage, where the higher
classes get their notions of country people, and we ours of them--to
know what one hates there----not vicious persons, not even virtuous
ones, but both of these one really loves there (precisely as they do
violinists, mechanics, Wetzlar attorneys, intendants) whenever they
have need of them.----
The page appeared again. January had allayed the sweet paternal
ebullition at the news, since he had heretofore given up all his
children for lost. He desired now the proof that Flamin was the
(nominal) son of the Chamberlain. About the duel he gave himself not
the least concern. The proof was easy for the upright soul to produce.
The soul appealed directly to the mother, who had this very moment
arrived from London, having come to save her son, and to the sister
herself. The soul had again the antecedent proposition to prove that
both had knowledge of the matter:--Matthieu appealed to the letter of
the mother which he had some years before read to the blind lord with
the borrowed voice of Clotilda, and to the sister's exclamation during
the duel in Maienthal Park, "It is my brother,"--and finally he adduced
one more domestic witness in the case, the after-summer, which would
now soon appear, and would retouch the maternal mark of the apple,
which Le Baut's son bore on his shoulder.
Matthieu had too much veneration for his Prince and master to call the
sovereign of the son the son's father. He now closed by saying, "He
knew not for what reasons Lord Horion had hitherto concealed Flamin's
extraction; but whatever they might have been, all excuses his Lordship
had were also his own excuses for having himself kept silence so
long,--and so much the more, as the proof of this descent must be more
difficult for him than for his Lordship.--Only now, by the arrival of
the mother, the _facility_ of the proof was made as great as the
_necessity_ of it. All that he could do as a family friend of the
Chamberlain had been to become Flamin's confidant in order to be his
protector."
Thereby the Prince was necessarily brought back to the subject of the
duel, which he in the beginning, after a few hints, had let drop. It
was his way of business to break off soon from an affair of importance
to him, to talk quite as long about other things, then to bring that
matter forward again, and so pack the important matter away under quite
as big layers of unimportant matters, as the booksellers slip
contraband books in sheets under white or other paper. Then, too,
Flamin's innocence of the murder was now of more consequence to
January; he therefore naturally inquired why he had exposed his friend
as a victim even to the show of a duel.
Matthieu said it would be a long story, and it was a bold step to
entreat so much attention on the part of his Highness. He began with
reporting what--the Dog-Post-Days have hitherto reported. He lied very
little. He intimated that, in order to _break off_ Flamin's love for
his unknown sister Clotilda,--at least he wanted to _increase_ it,--he
had tried to make him jealous, but had not been able to set him at
variance with any one except the lover; nay, it had not even helped
matters at all that he had let him be himself an ear-witness of the
very pardonable infidelity of Clotilda, but that his friend had at the
very last manifested a rage at his sister's betrothal, which he had
been able to appease in no other way than by the illusion of a
disguised duel with the father. For in order to prevent a second fight
between father and son; he had himself undertaken it, but unhappily
with too disastrous an effect.
So far the noble Mat. The true circumstances, which are familiar to us,
I suppress. January, who was now favorably inclined toward the
Evangelist for the removal of a fear into which he himself had thrown
him, put to him the natural question, why Flamin took upon himself the
murder.--Matthieu: "I fled at once, and it was not in my power to
prevent his untruth, which I could not have looked for; but it was in
my power to refute it."--January: "Go on in your frankness; it is your
vindication; do not evade!"--Matthieu, with a freer mien: "What I had
to say I have already said in the beginning, for the sake of saving
him; and now he is saved." January went back in thought, could not
comprehend, and begged, "Make yourself a little more clear."--Matthieu,
with the designed look of a man who prepares silverings-over of his
story: "From magnanimity he would have died for him (Mat) who had
sinned for him, did not his friends come to the rescue." January shook
his head incredulously. "For," the other continued, "as he knows not
his high rank, he more readily adopted certain French principles, which
would have _alleviated_ for him his death quite as much as certain
Englishmen would have made use of them with the people to prevent it."
As a proof, by the way, he adduced the blowing-up of the powder-house.
January saw with astonishment a light glide into a dark cavern, and saw
far into the cavern.
One wrongs the excellent Evangelist, if one thinks it satisfies him
merely to have saved his friend. His good heart was also bent upon
setting up for his Lordship a monumental column, and of laying him
under the column as its corner-stone. He gladly (as in "Hamlet")
quartered in the play another play, and raised two theatre-curtains. We
will seat ourselves in the first box. His previous conduct toward the
Regency-Councillor shows plainly enough how far he was capable of
carrying a true friendship without offending other friends, e. g. the
Princess; for to the latter the finding again of the lost son of the
Prince was no remarkable disadvantage, since the son was presented at
once as master of a Jacobin lodge and rebel against his step-father and
father both, and since his Lordship was so terrible a loser in the
matter besides. But inasmuch as Matthieu had nothing to reproach
himself with in the case, except his excess of philanthropy, he sought
to counteract this extreme by an opposite one, of malice, because Bacon
writes: "Exaggerations are best cured by their opposites." Neither,
according to his too ardent notions of friendship, could he be a
genuine friend of his Lordship's, since, according to Montaigne, one
can have only _one_ true friend, as well as only one lover; and his
Lordship already exhibited one such in the person of January.
Allow me in three words to be short and agreeable. If the Arabs have
two hundred names for the snake, they should certainly add the two
hundred and first,--that of Courtier. Indulge me further in saying,
that a man of influence and tone, by a capital crime,--a so-called
_debt of blood_,[183]--flourishes full as well as a whole state does
upon more pitiful ones in the matter of money.--
January was now prepared to believe anything that explained the
foregoing singular things. A lie which unties a knot is more credible
to us than one which ties one. Matthieu went on: "He had attended all
the republican _concerts spirituels_, in order to take measures against
Flamin's catching the contagion; and he did not carry to an extreme
friendship for the three Englishmen and the Lord's son (Victor), if he
looked upon them and him more as tools of some other concealed hand,
than as themselves workers on a plan.--This was confirmed by the misuse
hitherto made of the innocent Flamin."--By way of excusing Victor, he
said,--in doing which, he all along named him the Court-Physician, so
that January, in his present mood, was more likely to think of a
court-poisoner than anything else,--by way, then, of setting him in a
favorable light, he said that individual was a mere lover of pleasure,
and only carried out obediently what his father had sketched out for
him,--that Victor had disguised himself as an Italian to watch the
Princess, and afterward to report to the Lord, at whose behest he
probably did it, in a secret interview on an island.--As Italian, he
had handed the Princess a watch, in which he had covertly pasted a slip
of paper, wherein he had forgotten the higher rank to flatter his own.
The Prince, who loved his spouse with greater jealousy than his
betrothed, swept the floor with heavy strokes of the turkey-cock's
wing, and pulled out the point of his nose to an unusual length, and
proudly inquired how he knew that.--Matthieu replied calmly, "From
Victor himself; for the Princess herself knew nothing of it." ...
The reader owes it to me, that he knows better about a thousand
things.--Agnola certainly knew the contents of the watch very well;
nay, I even imagine, that, when the enraged Joachime informed her of
Victor's direct confession of his _concepit_, she had allowed Mat or
Joachime to trace the present recipe, according to which the bridegroom
here has to swallow Sebastian's _billet-doux_.
--"On the contrary," he continued, "she had long after presented his
sister the watch, together with the billet.--Joachime had taken it out
in Victor's presence, and he had thought fit to confess to her freely
that very thing, which neither she nor he himself had, out of respect,
yet disclosed to the Princess.--Meanwhile his sister had _thereupon_
given him the slip,--_whereupon_ he had made advances to Clotilda,
perhaps according to a paternal instruction to bring the brother into
nearer relations.--But in every instance he mixed up with the paternal
schemes of ambition his own of pleasure, and was well disposed, just as
the Englishmen were, whom he held to be Frenchmen in disguise."
The Prince, during the whole exhibition of these pretty snake-preparations,
concealed his fear behind anger; Matthieu, who saw both _mask_ and _face_,
had hitherto cut all according to the former, and made the apparent want
of fear the cloak of his boldness in exciting it.--And so he went from
the Prince into a sort of indefinite, mock arrest for the murder; but
January began to examine _persons_ and _papers_.
Before reporting the result, let me gladly confess that Mat, the noble,
knows how to lie well enough, and all the more, that he puts in truth
as lath-work to his mortar of falsehood. As in the Polish rock-salt
mines, the good liar always, in the undermining, leaves so many truths
standing for pillars as may be necessary to prevent the breaking-in of
the arch. In fact, every lie is a happy sign that there is still truth
in the world; for, without this, no lie would be believed, and
therefore none attempted. Bankruptcies give pleasure to the honest man,
as new evidences of the unexhausted religious fund of other men's
honesty, which must be extant, if it is to be deceived. So long as
treaties of war and peace are disgracefully broken, so long is there
still hope enough left, and so long courts will not want for genuine
honesty; for every breach of a contract presupposes that one has been
made,--and that is what no one could be any longer, if not one were any
longer observed. It is with lies as with false teeth, which the gold
thread cannot fasten, except to a couple of genuine ones still
remaining.
January began the mint-probation days of Matthew's Gospel.
1. The Parson was summoned to confess, in the presence of the supreme
authority of the state, what meetings he had suffered in the priestly
house. The poor man turned over the leaves of Œmler's Pastoral
Theology, to find out how a parson has to behave who is going to be
hanged, Without a murmur he now laid his neck upon the block and under
the axe for lesser and moderate mishaps, for the Rat-King, who went
like a whirlwind through his dwelling, for the garter which, while he
walked, gradually slipped down over his knee-pan, and exchanged the
_anxiety_ of the happy for the _agony_ of the unhappy. At the audience
he said, he had, at church and elsewhere, inveighed against the clubs
as much as any one, and had bought Girtanner[184] for the purpose. To
the question, whether Flamin was his son, he replied sadly, he hoped
his wife had never violated his and her marriage vows.--When he got
back to his house, in order not to be in agony for fear of arrest, he
took a bundle of old manuscript sermons with him into a quarry, and
learned them there by heart for three or four Sundays to come.
2. On the same day the Minister Von Schleunes (out of complacency to
the Princess) paid a visit at Le Baut's house, and communicated to the
lady and Clotilda the current rumors about Flamin's birth. Both ladies
had to believe that Victor must have disclosed the secret to the
Prince, in order to save his unhappy friend. How could they have helped
imitating him, when the iron pear[185] of the oath was taken from the
tongue and out of the mouth, and since one may violate a vow of secrecy
when one would otherwise have to violate truth, and the tender souls
rejoiced now so heartily at the opening of the door of the year of
Jubilee into the prison of their darling?--In one word, the Minister
brought back nothing but confirmations of the hypotheses of his son.
3. On the same day, the merchant Tostato was examined by Count O.
respecting his shop-partner, and Victor by the confessor respecting the
author of the pastoral or bucolic letter in the watch, and then heard.
Here, too, Matthieu, as was to be expected, had the truth entirely on
his side. Victor was now too proud, too good, too resigned, to conceal
anything.
4. All the tallies of sins in Kussewitz and everywhere fitted into each
other; even from Victor's former mediatorial office, which he once
discharged with the Prince for Agnola, from his little indiscretions,
from his satires, from his dressing up the juvenile soldiery in
breeches, from his journey with the Prince, there was now spelled out
nothing but draughts and ground-strokes of a sketched plan of battle
against the throne. In fact it was necessary, January was obliged, the
more spy-glasses he directed at this meteorological phenomenon of lies,
to behold it only so much the greater.
I have forgotten the Princess, who made believe that she was very
much offended and wholly ignorant in the matter of the billet, and
could hardly be contented with the punishment, that the hero of the
Dog-Post-Days should be forbidden the court. The court! _thee_, good
Victor! thee,--who wilt soon forbid thyself the _earth_!
January easily overlooked past offences, but he strictly punished
_future_ ones. And since, moreover, Mat, like a rattlesnake, rattled so
terribly, not to give warning, but, as more recent naturalists have
found in the case of the real rattlesnake, for the sake of making the
victim stiff and fearful: accordingly his Lordship was tumbled down so
out of January's heart over all the steps of the throne, that it could
not have helped him at all, even if he had immediately stept forth out
of the air. Flamin was found without his help.--To the house of the
three Englishmen permission was sent to take passage for their island,
when they pleased. They sent back word, they needed only _one_ day to
reach their island, and waited only for their travelling companion. By
the island, however, they meant the _Isle of Union_,--and by the
travelling companion the fettered Flamin, whom they wanted to persuade
to go along with them.
I am pleased that my Victor was forbidden the court. Dismissal from
court is generally a favor,--(now a deliverance from court-services may
well deserve that name,)--which is not always bestowed on the
worthiest, but often on a devil like Louvois,[186] as well as on an
apostle like Tessin.[187] But does it not amount to taking away from an
eminent favor, an order _pour le mérite_, all its value, when one
tosses it to knaves, whereas it ought to be laid up as the greatest and
last reward, as a premium and pike-bearer's reward,[188] as an ovation,
for the most honest, candid, and oldest man at court?
In the next chapter one may hold himself prepared for an uproar, the
like of which is heard in few German chapters; the alarm-cannons of the
court-party, the knocking down of scaffoldings and upsetting of chairs,
in getting from the criminal court, I shall be able to hear even over
on my island. The black-haired and black-hearted court-page, when he is
discharged from arrest, with his ironical mien and his peculiar _low_
voice,--the ripieno-voice of his most malicious scorn, as it is with
others that of the most exalted enthusiasm,--will stalk round
everywhere and say, he wishes his Lordship would appear, he has
hitherto labored in his matters to the best of his ability. At court
one sometimes becomes sublime by an eminent wickedness,[189] as,
according to Burke, no smell is sublime except the most stinking of
all, and no taste except the bitterest. And just so every one easily
conceals there his compassionate interest in the falling favorite, like
the wise father, who, at the _fall_ of a child, disguises his
compassionate face under a comic one.
On the 21st of October, Matthieu is set at large, and is at liberty to
go to Flamin,--he has begged the favor for himself--to announce to him
his freedom and promotion at once.... In a few days the incidents, and
my protocol of them, might run out of the hour-glass of one and the
same time, if the dog should come regularly; but he comes when he will.
44. DOG-POST-DAY.
Brotherly Love.--Friendly Love.--Maternal Love.--Love.
The Dog is here, but not his Lordship,--the noise is small, but not the
joy,--all is prepared for, and yet unexpected,--vice maintains the
battle-field, but virtue the Elysian fields.--In short, it is very
foolish, but very fine.
I think this is the last chapter of the book. I look upon the
Post-Dog--my Pomeranian messenger,[190] whose tail is his official
pike--with real emotion, and it vexes me to think that he, too, has
fallen in Adam, and has eaten a bone under the forbidden tree; for in
Paradise the first canine parents shone like diamonds, and one could
see through them, as Böhme asserts.--For this very reason, as the
Mining Superintendent will soon have written himself out, let it be
forgiven him that, in this chapter of love, he is more ardent and
agreeable than ever, and in fact writes now as if he were possessed.
In the beginning, the heavenly chariot is still drawn by mourning
steeds.... It was very early, on the 21st of October, 1793, when the
court-page ran into Flamin's block-house out of his own, and announced
to that brother, doing penance there, the whole budget,--his
release,--his relation to Clotilda as brother and sister,--his
affiliation into the princely house,--his ascending career, and at the
same time the amnesty of the murderer and messenger, namely, his own. O
how did joy kindle his stagnant veins at Matthieu's acquittal and
intercession, and at his elevation of rank! For Flamin mounted the
higher station as an eminence whence he might send out farther his
benefits and plans; Victor, on the contrary, had rejoiced at his
bankruptcy of rank, because he craved stillness, as Flamin did tumult.
The former was more desirous to amend himself; the latter, to improve
others. Flamin thrust the live crew overboard, and nailed the Bucentaur
of state full of galley-slaves, in order to propel it more swiftly
against the winds. But Victor allowed himself to make only _one_ corpse
by way of lightening the privateer,--namely, his own. He said to
himself, "If I can only always sacredly maintain the courage _to
sacrifice myself, then I need no greater_; for a greater sacrifices
after all stolen goods.--Fate can sacrifice centuries and islands to
benefit millennia and continents;[191] but man, nothing but himself."
Exultingly Flamin hastened with his savior to St. Luna, to embrace
gratefully and apologetically the true sister in the untrue
mistress.--Ah! as the high observatory rose upon his sight, with pain
and bleeding did the covering fall from them like scales, which had
hitherto obscured the innocence of his best friend, Victor! "Ah, how
will he hate me! O that I had trusted him more!" he sighed, and nothing
any longer gladdened him; for the grief of a good man who has been
unjust, even under the notion of the fullest justice, nothing can
console, nothing but many, many sacrifices. He stole, sighing, not to
his new mother, but sank softly on the unoffended heart of the three
true twins. The honest souls all welcomed the Evangelist as a friend in
need; and this gayly-colored spider crawled round with his unclean
spider-warts over all these noble growths of an open love. The spider
heard everything, even the agreement that the Englishmen should take
the injunction to go off to their island literally, and seclude
themselves in the English island of his Lordship, until such time as
Flamin and her Ladyship were ready to embark with them all for their
greater island,--the workshop of freedom, the classic soil of erect
men.
The same morning the Chaplain betook himself to his quarry, and lay at
anchor there, because he knew as yet nothing of the latest news. There
in the open air, all day long, he sat away his agony, and at night he
came home again. He conversed there with no one but his own body,--as
many commune with their souls, so do others with their bodies,--and
looked from time to time, not at Nature, but at his water, in order--as
its want of color, according to physiology, betokens sorrow--to
ascertain from it whether he was pining away very much or not with
grief; although his _protomedicus_ will answer for him, that he shall
not have mistaken _urinam chyli_ or _sanguinis_ for _urinam potûs_. As
the physicians assert that sighs are beneficial, to quicken the pulse
and lighten the lungs,--accordingly a prince can benefit whole
countries at once, by compelling them to sigh,--Eymann, therefore,
prescribed to himself a definite number of sighs, which he had daily to
draw for the benefit of his lungs.
The same morning went my Lady to the wife of the Parson to tell her
that Flamin was an innocent man, but not her son; and Clotilda went
with her to take the hands of the two daughters and say to them, "You
have another brother"; for Victor had still concealed his extraction.
"O God!" said the Parson's wife, now becoming impoverished, and clasped
Flamin's mother and sister to her pining maternal bosom, which, with
hot sighs, yearned for a son,--"where, then, is my child?--Bring me my
true son!--Ah, I had a presentiment that the duel would certainly cost
me a child! He regains all, but I lose all.--O you are a mother, and I
am a mother, help me!" Clotilda looked upon her, weeping with a desire
to give consolation; but the Lady said, "Your son lives, and is happy
too; but more I cannot say!"
And the same morning, this son, our Victor, was _not_ happy. It seemed
to him, at the report of Flamin's discharge and of Matthieu's
officiousness, as if he heard the hissing and the bullet-like whistle
of the swooping hawk, that hitherto in motionless poise, as if with
nailed pinion, had hung high in the blue above his prey.--Think not too
hardly of the Doctor, that he mourned the lost opportunity of freeing
his friend out of the narrow prison, and himself out of the wide one of
life. For he has lost too much and is too lonely; men appear to him as
people in the Polish rock-salt mines, who grope round with a light
bound to their heads, which they call "I," encircled with the
unenjoyable glitter of the salt, clad in white and with red
fillets,[192] as if they were bandages.--The speech of his
acquaintances, like that of the Chinese, is monosyllabic.--He must live
to see the mortifying day when January and the city will set down
against him the lowliness of his rank as a fraud.--Before every eye he
stands in a different light, or shade rather. Matthieu regards him as
coarse; January, as intriguing; the women, as trifling,--just as
Emanuel regarded him as pious, and Clotilda as too ardent; for every
one hears in a full-toned, harmonious man only his own echo. What heart
could henceforth induce him--his own could not--to hold an oar any
longer in the slave-ship of life? O, one could do it, a warm and mighty
one,--his mother's! "Only once plunge out of this world," said his
conscience, "then will thy mother, in the fulness of love, die after
thee, and appear before thee in the next world with so many tears, with
all her hot wounds, and say, 'Son, this sorrow is thy work!'"--He
obeyed, and perceived that, if it is noble to die for a mistress, it is
still nobler to live for a mother.
He therefore determined this very evening--in the evening, so that
night might place its screen before certain weather-wasting ruins of
better times, before certain gliding _night-corpses_ of memory--to go
to St. Luna, to call to his mother, and to refresh her sick and weary
heart with at least _one_ flower of joy, and say to her,--as no oath
any longer bound him,--"Now for the second time thou givest me life!"
How sweet was the thought to him!--A single good purpose makes up and
airs the sharp sick-bed of a shattered life.
But at evening, you good, oppressed souls, in the evening--not of life,
but--of the 21st of October, all will be lighter and fresher to you,
and the ball of your fortune will revolve from the stormy to the sunny
side.
At evening, Victor arrived at St. Luna, and ensconced himself in the
arbor of the parsonage garden, where he had given Clotilda the first
tears of love.--The parsonage, the hall, the observatory, the two
gardens, lay around him like dilapidated knightly castles, from which
all joys and inmates have long since departed!--All so autumnally
still, so stationary around him,--the bees sat mute on the sill of the
hive beside the executed drones,--even the moon and a little cloud
stood fast beside each other,--the wax mummy stood with rigid face
turned round toward the still chamber!--At last the Parson's wife came
through the garden, on her way to the hall. He knew how exceedingly she
must needs love him again, now that his fidelity to the jealous Flamin
had come to light. O, she looked so weary and sickly, so red with
weeping, and exhausted with bleeding, and prematurely old! It grieved
him, that he must say first an indifferent word, in order to call her
into the arbor. When she entered, he raised himself up, and bowed low,
and laid himself, as if he would expire, on the dear bosom, within
which was a world full of sighs and a heart full of love, and said: "O
mother, I am thy son!--accept me; thy son has nothing, loves nothing
more on the whole wide earth, nothing more but thee.--O dear mother, I
have lost much before finding thee.--Why dost thou look on me thus?--If
thou despisest me, then give me thy blessing, and let me flee.... Oh!
and besides it was only for thy sake that I chose to live any
longer."--She looked upon him, bending backward, with a moist eye, full
of inexpressible tenderness and sorrow, and said: "Is it true, then? O
God! if you were my son!--Ah, good child!--I have long loved thee as a
mother.--But deceive me not, my heart is so sore!"--The son gave his
oath.... and here let the curtain slowly sink on the maternal embrace,
and when it has wholly covered son and mother, then let a good child
look back into his own soul, and say, here dwells everything that thou
canst not describe!
And now, at evening, the Chaplain was stealing home from the field and
through the garden, and cried out, as he came to meet his new son: "Ah!
Herr Hofmedicus, I am falling away abominably. I look really and
manifestly like an _Ecce Homo_ and feverish patient. I am doomed.--I am
destined to make a _soiffre-douleur_, a _persona miserabilis_, a
Patripassian."[193]--When Victor had reported to him, "It is all over,
the Regency-Councillor is liberated and innocent," Eymann looked
steadfastly up at the observatory, and said, "Verily there sits the
Councillor up there, peeping over," and was on the point of going up to
him; but Victor gently held him back, and said tenderly, "I am your
son," and disclosed to him all.--"What?--you?--thou?--the son of such
an eminent Lord, my son?--I to have begotten my Herr Godfather?--That
is unheard of, one brother to be another's godson.--I have two
Sebastians in my house at once."--He got sight of the Parsoness, and
began a quarrel,--which was always with him a sign of joy.--"So, wife!
thou hast known this all day, and let me sit out there in the quarry,
on the anxious seat, in the midst of grief, tolling away till night at
the poor-sinners'-bell? Couldst thou not have let the bellows-blower
come out to notify me? That was very ill done,--the wife sits at home
and drinks bitters, into which are thrown whole casks of sugar and
dishes of comfits,--and the man keeps himself in stone-quarries, and
swills down steadily his bitter extracts out of an emetic-cup."--She
never answered a word.
Now, for the first time, Victor learned from his mother that it was
only for his friend (Matthieu), and for his country, Flamin had meant
to die; that he repented his unjust jealousy, and bewailed the
friendship he had trifled away; and that she had sent for him for the
very reason that she might conduct him to the arms of his true mother,
and before the face of an afflicted sister. It had been this morning a
human weakness, that the frozen limb of friendship, his heart, had been
a little more cold and unfeeling towards Flamin, when he heard of his
deliverance from imprisonment,--but it was now, at evening, the part of
human kindness, that Flamin's great resolve to die restored, like a
chilblain ointment, to his stiff heart warmth and motion. His inner
being stirred itself mightily, welled up, overflowed his crushed
resentment, and the image of the youthful friend rose up and said:
"Victor, give thy hand again to thy school-friend,--O, he has suffered
so much, and acted so nobly!" Tears shot from his quivering eyes, as he
resolved to ascend the observatory, and say to his old favorite, "Let
it be forgotten,--come, we will go together to thy sister." He went
alone up to the tower,--intending to present him to the lady afterward.
The Parson's wife flew off some minutes before Victor started, to
inform and bring his two sisters, and send for the blind Julius to be
conducted from the city, that no link might be missing in the golden
necklace of love.
What a Jacob's ladder, on which every minute is a higher round, is set
up this night on the swinging earth, whereon good beings climb up one
after another!--
Down on the lowest step of the throne of reconciliation was Victor's
heart laboring mightily in the hot blood through which it struggled.
Flamin saw him slowly coming up, but he came not to meet him; because
he was uncertain whether Victor came angry or forgiving. When the
latter at last reached the top, Flamin, ashamed, supported his averted
face in the branches; for he could not look his so sorely abused
darling in the eye, till he knew that he had forgiven him. They
maintained an awful silence beside each other, under the rippling
linden-top,--they could not wholly guess each other's feelings, and
that made the silence more gloomy, and the reconciliation doubtful. At
last, Flamin, breathing intensely, and with his face buried in the
foliage, reached out to him a trembling hand. When Victor saw the
trembling of this dumb hand imploring reconciliation, boiling tears
dropped through his heart and dissolved it asunder, and only from
sadness and loving forbearance he delayed taking the lowly hand; but at
this moment Flamin turned round (under the influence of a false
suspicion), proud, blushing, full of tears and full of love, and said:
"I beg thy forgiveness with all my heart for having been a devil to
thee, an angel; but then if thou dost not grant it to me, I hurl myself
down, that only the devil may get me!"--Singular! this extortion of
forgiveness contracted a little Victor's open soul; but still he
embraced the friendly wildling, and said with the mild voice of
tranquil love: "From the bottom of my soul have I to-day forgiven thee;
but loved thee I ever and always have, and in a few weeks would have
died for thee, to save thy life."--Now their souls approached each
other without reserve, and disclosed their lives,----and when both had
told all, and Victor had unfolded to him, that he had been substituted
in his place, and was the son of the bereaved mother, then would Flamin
have died for remorse, and only pressed his face more closely for shame
into Victor's bosom,--and their newly wedded souls celebrated their
silver wedding on the nuptial altar of the watchtower, under the bridal
torch of the moon; and their bliss was equalled by nothing but their
friendship.
They wandered in the tender intoxication slowly into Le Baut's garden,
and the stream of rapture grew deeper and deeper; but suddenly ice-cold
waves, as from the river Styx, terrified the softly warmed Victor, when
he came to the mournful bower, where, exactly a year ago to-day, on the
21st of October,--to-day then is Clotilda's birth-day,--he had torn her
image out of his distracted heart, and where he now arrived again,
perhaps again to tear it out from the old scars. For the lowering of
his rank had made him a little--prouder, and his love for Clotilda more
shy. To tell the truth, he could not himself fully believe that his
inferior extraction had been unknown to her; he rather inferred the
opposite, from the interest which his Lordship had let her take in his
letters, and all secrets,--from her struggle in the beginning against
her germinating love, and from the slight haughtiness towards him on
the first day,--from her praise of misalliances,--from her favoring of
Giulia's love for Julius, whom she knew to be his Lordship's son,--from
her ready assent to the betrothal, which certainly otherwise her
father, after the recognition, would no longer have granted,--and from
other signs which one will more easily gather up for himself on the
second reading of this work. As was said, this hope, that she had all
along known who he was, refuted certain objections of his delicacy and
of his spirit of renunciation, and bloomed out still higher to-day,
among so many joys and pleasant incidents.--Ah! if he had been devoid
of all hope, then he would certainly, in the midst of the circle of so
many blessed ones, have been obliged to fall as the last victim!--But
that something in man, which always prefigures to him a great loss as
so probable, and a great gain as so improbable, united with melancholy
remembrances, now tormented his soul.
He therefore begged Flamin to leave him alone for a while in the bower,
and to hasten alone (as the Parson's wife was already in the garden) to
the friendly arms of the newly-found sister and mother, and added that
he would presently follow him. When Flamin was gone, Victor began to
tremble more and more at the thought of the agitation of Clotilda,
which would perhaps get the mastery of her at the intelligence of his
pedigree; and it oppressed him sorely when he thought that for all in
the garden sorrow had been removed from the black-hung mourning-chamber
of earth, only for him haply not.--
But at that moment came his mother, beaming with the reflection of new
raptures, and before questioning him first wiped his eyes. Her new
raptures proceeded from this, that Clotilda, when she had related his
descent, had fallen on her neck and begged her forgiveness for so long
a concealment of the so long continued robbery of a child,--and that
she had reminded the mother of a promise which had been given during
the walk after the betrothal and was now redeemed. Much had escaped the
mother,--and, I fear, the reader,--and Clotilda only glided hastily and
blushingly over the matter; but had she not there said to her, "We
change not our _relation_"? namely, that of a sister by marriage.--The
Parson's wife concluded her report with the entreaty of her Ladyship,
that she would bring her new son to her as speedily as possible. Victor
could say nothing, for tearful rapture, except, "Have not then my good
Agatha and the blind one yet arrived?"--And both stood--behind him; and
he concealed the overmeasure of his bliss under the caressings of the
sister and the friend; his capacious cup of sorrow was truly poured
full of tears of joy.
As, in the accompanying circle of three loving souls, he entered upon
the fair road to the dear united ones, they all came to meet him with
radiant features,--with swimming glances,--with remembrances from which
the sting had been extracted, or rather which had been turned into
joys; for from the crushed flowers of gladness on the road of life a
sweet perfume is wafted over to the present hour, as marching armies
often send out from heaths the fragrance of trampled plants. Her
Ladyship was conducted by her two children, and said, with an obliging
smile: "I present to you here my beloved children; continue towards
them the friendship which you have hitherto shown them."--Her son
Flamin, heedless of decorum, flew to him and flung himself upon his
neck. Clotilda bowed lower than she would have done before a Prince,
and in her eye swam the question of melancholy love, "Art thou still
unhappy? Have I still thy heart? Why is thy eye moistened? why is thy
voice broken?"--Victor replied with quite as much tenderness as
dignity, as he turned to the Lady, "You could not on a fairer day find
again your son than on the birthday of your daughter." ...
Of _that_, in the previous whirlwinds, no one had thought. What a chaos
of gladness! What a hearty, loving confusion of tongues on the part of
congratulating improvisators! What affecting eye-thanks from Clotilda
for such an obliging remembrance!
They went in ecstasy through the cool garden to the hall. O, when
sisterly love, filial love, maternal love, love of lovers, and
friendship burn side by side on the altars, then does it make a good
man feel glad that the human heart is so noble, and preserves the
material for so many flames, and that we feel love and warmth only when
we dispense them out of ourselves, just as our blood never appears to
us warm, until it flows, outside of our veins, in the open air.--O
love! how happy are we that thou, when contemplated by a second soul,
regeneratest and redoublest thyself,--that warm hearts attract and
create warm ones, as suns do planets, the greater the lesser, and God,
all,--and that even the dark planet is only a lesser, veiled,
monœcian[194] sun!... All these souls stood today high on their Alp,
and saw--as on a natural one--the _rainbow_ of human fortune hanging as
a great completed _magic circle_ between the earth and the sun.--In the
hall the Lady begged her daughter to go alone into the dark Jew's-harp
chamber; she wanted to give her her birthday present. Clotilda's eye
bade her friend, as she left him, with a second expression of thanks
for his soul, a tender farewell.
After her departure, the Lady gave him a sign to stay with her behind
the rest,--then he gladly fell on his knee before Clotilda's mother,
who had not yet been asked her consent to his love, with the words, "If
you do not guess my prayer, I have not the courage to begin it." She
raised him up and said, "Prayers that are made so silently are quite as
silently fulfilled; but rather come now and see what present I make to
my daughter."--He must first, however, for a long time, moisten and
kiss the hand which is about to offer him the lime-blossom honey of a
whole life.
The two proceeded now, in this evening sent over out of the millennial
kingdom, to the dark chamber of the daughter. Why did tears flow from
Clotilda's eyes for rapture, even before her mother spoke?--Because she
could already guess everything. The mother conducted the lover to his
beloved, and said to the bride: "Take here thy birthday present. Few
mothers are rich enough to give such a one; but then few daughters good
enough to receive such a one."--The bridal pair were brought to their
knees before her by the weight of overwhelming bliss and great, dumb
gratitude, and took respectively the two beneficent hands of the
mother; but she gently drew them out of theirs, and laid those of the
loving ones in each other, and slipped away with the whisper, "I will
bring our guests hither!"----
--O ye two good souls, kneeling beside each, blest at last! how unhappy
must a man be who, without a tear of joy, or how happy one who, without
a tear of longing, can see you now fall speechless and weeping into
each other's arms,--after so many painful partings, at last linked
together,--after so many exhaustive bleedings, at last healed,--after
thousands and thousands of sighs, yet at last blest,--and inexpressibly
blest by innocence of heart and peace of soul and God!--No, I cannot
to-day take my wet eyes away from you,--I cannot to-day behold and
sketch the other good souls,--but I lay my eyes, with the _two_ tears
which belong to the happy and the unhappy man, softly and steadfastly
on my two still lovers in the dusky chamber, where once the breath of
the harmonica tones wafted their two souls together like gold- and
silver-leaves.--O, as my book now ends, and my beloved vanish from
me,--withdraw thyself, dim Holy of Holies, with thy two angels,--send
back a long echo, when thou fliest upward with thy melodious souls, as
swans in the night glide with flute-tones through the heavens.----But,
alas! does not the Holy of Holies already stand far away and high above
me, and hang as a little silver cloud on the horizon of dream?--O these
good souls, this good Victor, this good Emanuel, this good Clotilda,
all these vernal dreams have gone up, and my heart looks up sorrowfully
and calls after them without hope, "Dreams of spring, when will ye
return?"
O why should I do it, were it not that the friends whom we firmly grasp
by the hand are also dreams that soar upward? But the convulsive,
prostrate, moaning heart on the gravestone does not call after these,
"Dreams of spring-time, when will ye return?"----
SUPPLEMENT TO THE 44TH DOG-POST-DAY.
Nothing.
As this supplement to a little Post-Day was too small, I kept waiting
for the dog and for new biographical pipe-clay and dough.--Since,
however, the _post-aux-chiens_ still delays, I will just score down the
few cat-tones which I left out of the concert of love in the former
chapter. It is nothing but vexatious stuff that I have still to supply
here, and just these creaking tones may topple down again a new
avalanche and institute new mischief. It is simply stupid that in this
way the book is done, and yet not done, since the dog of a--dog is
quite unexpectedly out of the way, like snuff.
The step-mother, the Chamberlain's lady, who has been long since
banished the country by the biographical conjurer of spirits and bodies
out of these leaves, had, on the advent of her Ladyship, from a very
natural antipathy, marched off to a little country-seat. Speed on;
besides, thou art not my Amancebada![195]--Matthieu had, in the former
chapter, conformably to his old audacity, stayed awhile among none but
antagonists of his dark nature, and was sitting in the hall as the
happy procession marched in from the garden. He knew not yet that the
courtier Victor was in reality nothing but a mere, flat parson's son.
At first he continued to carry on the antique joke of his declaration
of love to Agatha, and set the Parson up to compliments and addresses
of thanks for the services which he had rendered all to-day. But when
he found there was too much indifference to his cold malice, he took
away from his contempt its ambiguity. In fact, his heart was sincere,
and rather made itself out more malicious, than more virtuous, than it
was; he hated a dissimulation, whereby many a courtling easily gives
himself that look of the virtuous man, which is best to be explained by
Lavater's observation, that the angry person transfers to his own face
the looks of the one whom he hates.
At last, Matthieu guessed the secrets, and the Parson ratified his
guess. Such a water for his saw-mill, on which he cut men straight for
his throne-scaffolding, had never before flowed in upon him.--If he
represents to the Prince this falsehood, this new, terrible, abominable
fraud, which his Lordship has played upon him, then--he concludes--must
January go beside himself with amazement at Lord Horion's lies and at
Matthieu's truths.--Now, he held it for his duty to smile, indeed, but
no more with malicious pleasure, like Mat, but with a regular
contemptuousness, as a court-vassal should; he felt, too, how much
beneath his dignity it was to let himself any longer be twisted into
this citizenly quodlibet, without at least making a fool of it. He went
accordingly,--for the sake of throwing out the news from his seed-apron
into good ground,--after a short but sincere congratulation upon the
marriage, the very same night back to the court,----and the Devil,
following him as attendant blackamoor, decorously brought up the rear.
I wish the villain would never step into my biographical
writing-chamber and _casa santa_ again; he is conscious of so many
immoral resources, that, in the feeling of strength they impart to him,
he actually plays with sins, and always ventures upon several more than
he needs; just as, e. g., in the Maienthal alley, out of mere
wantonness, he enticed Victor and Clotilda into his neighborhood with
the voice of the nightingale, although Flamin might have overheard both
without that Philomelic machinery. In this view, I could absolutely
almost wish that the Post-Dog would not come again; I have too much
reason to fear that Matthieu may bring new frog-spawn and new
mother-of-vinegar to January's warmth, that it may hatch out new,
sharp, poisonous misery; for he will certainly report in the highest
quarters, that the three Englishmen are hiding themselves in the island
as in a catacomb,--that Flamin is associated with them,--that Victor
has hitherto deceived a Prince, whose subject he is,--to say nothing of
still other things, which the ministerial spy and Chamberlainess von Le
Baut communicates, and his father, who is so much of an anti-clubbist,
paints black,--which the former draws and the latter colors. And when I
consider that in this biography a little misfortune has always been the
egg-shell and the white-of-the-egg of a great one,--I am very much
inclined to believe that the expression of the Parson on the 21st of
October contained more wit than truth: "That they were all at present,
instead of the bread of tears, cutting into the bride's cake of joy."
... Ye good people! in which may now, at this moment, your bosoms be
rising and falling,--in the soft, thin ether of gladness, or in the
stormy vapor of agony?
SUPPLEMENT TO THE SUPPLEMENT.
While the first edition has been getting out of print, I have learned
some very interesting additional circumstances for the second. Julius
hugged his Victor in the garden right heartily, and said: "I am very
glad to be here again,--I have been so alone all day, and not heard a
human being,--thy Italian domestic has absolutely run away." In
Victor's bosom, this unaccountable absconding of a faithful and
contented servant raised, if not a storm-cloud, yet a dark mist. The
quiet Marie had diligently discharged toward the blind one the duties
of the fugitive. "I would gladly have given the Italian his letter
first," Julius continued, "but here I have it still." Victor looked at
it, and found, to his amazement, the address in the handwriting of--his
Lordship. The letter was handed to the _blind one_ a few minutes after
the man's flight, with the request that he would give it to no one but
the Italian. Although Flamin and her Ladyship promised to be answerable
for the breaking of the seal, still Victor addressed himself
reluctantly to this solution of a new charade of his life; for Clotilda
was silent in the matter. Here is an authentic copy:--
"You are right. Do not, however, start till to-morrow, but go
immediately to Mr. * * *. The place remains 5. But VI are necessary."
_Mr_. might mean _Monsieur_ (the fifth son). Further than that there
was nothing to be guessed from this flight of clouds of the coming
weather by the best weather-prophets. The reader, however, may imagine,
merely from his own eager desire to know the significance of these
celestial signs, how great must have been that of our hero.
45. OR LAST CHAPTER.
Knef.--The Town of Hof.--Sorrel Horse.--Robbers.
--Sleep.--Oath.--Night Journey.--Bushes.--End.
I say only this much beforehand: in all the time that ink--like
currant-wine--has been drawn from quill-tubes,--in all the time that
quills have been cut to make instruments of peace, or carbonized to
make instruments of war (for the coal used in manufacturing gunpowder
is prepared from feathers[196]),--and still further back, in all that
time the singular occurrence has never till now happened which I am now
to report to the world. As I said, this is all I say beforehand; the
incident is a tolerable one.
Inasmuch as the Post-Dog has, since the forty-fourth chapter, withdrawn
his hand, or paw, from this learned work, my plan was to make it out
alone, and only append one more and last chapter,--but not this
one,--as capstone and swan-song, so that the _opus_ might be given at
once to the post, the press, and the world. Good reviewers (thought I)
I can let wrangle with the Post-Dog and biographical bell-wether as
long as they please over the want of a final cadence.... It was already
getting toward the end of October, and of my Robinsonade on the island
of St. John's, when the good old Friday of this Robinson, my Dr. Fenk,
returned from his long botanical Alpine tour home to Scheerau, but
immediately put out to sea again, and landed on my St. John's domain.
We sat down to two or three courses with minced-meat (or ragout) of
travelling-anecdotes. At last, I drew his attention--as all literati
do--to what I had written, to my latest _opusculum_, what stood before
us in a cursed pile as high as a conical orrery: "It has dropped from
me," said I, "in an entirely cursory manner, often in the night, just
as Voltaire or the pea-hens let fall their eggs on the straw in their
sleep. I have taken pleasure in endowing the world with this legacy of
four volumes; but the legacy still waits for its last chapter,--without
which the labor of the dog (in the noble sense) will be in the bad
sense a dog's-work." He read the whole bequest through before my
eyes,--which gives an author a foolish, oppressive sensation,--and
flung his two arms up and down often during the perusal, and would fain
make the author red with extravagant praise. But it did not take; for
an author has already bestowed every compliment upon himself beforehand
a thousand times, and is at the same time his own flesh-scales, his own
flesh-weight, and his own flesh, because, like a virtuous man, he is
satisfied with his own approbation.
"The hero of thy Post-Days," said he, "is modelled somewhat after
thyself."--"That," I replied, "is for the world and the hero to decide,
when they both become acquainted with me; but all authors do so,--their
personality is either pictured opposite the title-page, or farther on
in the midst of the work, as the painter Rubens and the designer
Ramberg in almost all their works bring on a dog."
But now let one imagine with what astonishment I clapped my hands when
the Doctor named to me the little country where the whole story
transpired: * * * is the little country's real name. "I had only to go
thither," he said, "and I could draw the forty-fifth (tail-) chapter
from the fountain-head. As he passed through Flachsenfingen, they had
only just got to the Fortieth Dog-Post-Day. If I would take my own
horses," ("That I will," said I, "I will buy me some this very day,")
"I might, perhaps, come up with a distinguished passenger, who, unless
all signs deceived him, was his Lordship incarnate." For the sake of a
few ounces of asafœtida which Fenk needed on the road, he had even
been with Zeusel in his apothecary's shop, upon whom, he said, the
number ninety-nine was as legibly imprinted as the number ninety-eight
was on the butterfly[197] (the Catalanta).
No one certainly can blame an author who was crabbing and fishing for
his forty-fifth, tail- or train-chapter, for running away as if
distracted,--packing up,--tackling up,--jumping in,--starting off, and
driving so furiously, as he shot by hotels, country-houses,
processions, stars, and nights, that not in * * days, but in * * * days
(many a one will actually think I am drawing a long bow[198]), I
sprang, bedusted but unpowdered, into the inn of the _Golden Lion_. The
said inn is situated in the town of Hof, which again on its part is
situated in something greater; namely, in Voigtland. I am careful not
to name either the days of my journey or the gate through which I shot
into Hof, in order that I may not reveal to curious knaves and
_mouchards_[199] by my route of march the real name of Flachsenfingen.
Hof I could name right out without harm, because from there--the moment
one is past the gates--one can travel to all points of the compass; and
so, too (which is a very good thing), one can arrive there from all
places,--from Mönchberg, Kotzan, Gattendorf, Sachsen, Bamberg, Böheim,
and from America, and from the Rascally Islands, and from any part of
Büsching and Fabri.[200]
Not far from the Golden Lion (properly in Oat Lane) stood a
distinguished Englishman, looking on while his four smoking horses took
a medicine of two thirds common saltpetre and one third horse-brimstone
against foundering. The stranger--who might have been about as many
years old as this book is days was dressed in black; tall, respectable,
rich (to judge by his equipage), and of a manly build. His bright and
fixed eye lay kindling like a focus on men,--his face was fine and
cold,--on his forehead stood the perpendicular secant as the time-_bar_
denoting business, as sign of exclamation at the toil and trouble of
life,--faint, horizontal lines were ruled across this time-bar like
staves; both sorts of lines were cut into the too high forehead, as if
for signs how high the tear-water of affliction had already risen on
this brow, on this soul. "I would," thought I, "have painted Lord
Horion differently, if this face had appeared to me sooner." Perhaps
the reader thinks this was his Lordship himself.
When the Englishman had seen my tiercet of sorrels, he came straight up
to me and introduced a project of exchange, and wanted to take my
sorrel for a black. He had the fancy of Russians in the higher ranks,
of travelling with a regular cento[201] of differently-colored
horses,--as he also had the finer custom of the Neapolitans, to let a
free, loose horse prance along beside the carriage. Accordingly, for
the sake of the equine quodlibet, he wanted to bid in my miserable
sorrel, who, to tell the truth, wore nowhere any hair of his own,
except behind on the bob. I told him frankly,--to leave him no
suspicion of selfishness or design,--"My three sorrels looked like the
three Furies, and represented tolerably well the three cavities of
anatomy; only the dark sorrel which he wanted was magnificently built,
particularly about the head, and I should be sorry to lose him now,
when the head was just going to be of use to me."--"So?" said the
Briton.--"Of course," said I; "for a horse's head is the best remedy
against bed-bugs, and this one must now very soon fall off from the
nag, like a ripe plum,--the head I can then put into my bed-straw." The
Englishman did not even smile; during the whole bargain he stirred not
a finger, not a feature, not a muscle. Not until I myself had said, "If
the three Fates only keep on their legs till I have fetched away the
forty-fifth chapter on wheels," did it strike me that he had been in a
distant manner studying and sounding me more than the sorrel,--and I
fell upon the hypothesis, whether he had not misused the whole
horse-exchange as a mere cloak and blinder of his suspicious, pumping
questions.
Let the reader only just read on--The Englishman started off with my
sorrel muscle-preparation; and I followed some time after with my
black, who was as strong, black, and glossy as the old Adam in man.
But I must first tell what I was going to do in Hof,--I was going to
dedicate. At first each of these volumes was to be inscribed to a
female friend; but I had reason to fear I should rue it, because my
wont is to quarrel with a different one--never with all at once--every
month. I should like to know in what parallel of latitude the man were
to be found who does not fall out with his lady friend a thousand times
oftener than with his male one. The biographer must, therefore, of
necessity, because he is too changeable, cross the street from the
Golden Lion with his four volumes, and enter the house of the only man
towards whom he never alters, and who never does himself either, and
say to him, "Here, my dear good Christian Otto, I dedicate something to
thee again,--four volumes at once.--It were handsome, if thou again
wouldst dedicate each to one of thy family,--three are just enough, and
thou hast thine own left for thee, too.--I am riding now after the
forty-fifth chapter, and thou--cut and clear away meanwhile at the
forty-four other beds as much as thou wilt."
And here, my faithful one, must thou absolutely have the last chapter
also; and I only add further, "This _Hesperus_, which stands as
_morning-star_ over my life's fresh morning, thou mayest still look
upon when my earthly day is over; then is it a quiet _evening-star_ for
quiet men, till it also sets behind its hill."
Inasmuch as all letters to me are notoriously delivered in the busy and
somewhat surly city of Hof, and as in fact many travellers pass this
way, one will readily indulge me with the small space for two
observations, which the town itself makes upon the town. The Hofites,
namely, all remark and complain that they cannot exactly become
accustomed to each other. "We ought all to be able," they say, "to bear
with each other very well, and, if only thereby, refute the observation
of the great Montesquieu, that trade knits together nations and sunders
individuals." Secondly, they all reproach each other, that from year to
year they barter for in quantity, and accumulate and store away in
green-houses, great cornucopias full of balsam, rose, clover, and
lily-seed, and tall boxes full of splendid apple-seeds (particularly of
princes' apples, violet apples, Adam's- and virgin-apples, and Dutch
ketterlings),----but that they sow or set out of this seed little or
nothing. "In old age," they say, "good fruits and flowers will come
apropos to us, if we save a good quantity of seed out of the present
ones, and then plant it."--A certain candidate (an academical chum of
mine) took occasion from these two observations to make two very good
points in an afternoon sermon. In the first part, he showed his Hofites
out of the Epistle that they should not torment, but heartily love,
each other in this fleeting vapor of life, without reference to the
numbers of their houses; and in the second _pars_, he made it plain
that they ought in this brief, waning light of life to make from time
to time one and another joke....
I had hardly travelled a few hours--days--weeks (for I do not state the
truth), and had gone to sleep towards midnight in my carriage as I
mounted a hill in a thick forest, when suddenly two hands, which had
worked their way in behind through the back window, jammed down a
bee-cap[202] over my head, fastened it hastily round my neck with a
padlock, covered and blinded my eyes, and ten or twelve other hands
seized, held, and bound my body. The worst thing in such a case is,
that one expects to be killed and robbed of his jewel-caskets; but
nothing can vex and annoy more an author who has not yet finished his
book than to take away his life. No man wishes to die in the midst of a
plan; and yet every one at every hour of the day bears about with him
at once budding, green, half-ripe, and wholly ripe plans. I sought,
therefore, to defend my life with such valor--since the forty-fifth
chapter and its critics weighed upon my mind--that I--although I say
it--could easily have mastered four or five prince-stealers, had
there not been half a dozen. I laid down my arms, but occupied the
battle-field (namely, the coach-cushion),--and observed, in fact, that
they did not want so much to kill the Mining-Superintendent as to blind
him. The adventure grew still more romantic,--my own fellow was not
tumbled from the throne of his box,--my carriage continued on the road
to Flachsenfingen,--two gentlemen seated themselves in beside me, who,
to judge by their feminine hands, were persons of rank,--and, strangest
of all, a dog began to bark, who, by his barking, must have labored as
mass-assistant and fellow-master on this learned work.
We supped and lunched in the open air. Here a surgical order-ribbon was
drawn around my naked body, because I had unfortunately, during
the quarter-wheelings and manual evolutions of my defence, run my
shoulder-blade upon the point of a sword. I could eat very well,
inasmuch as the tin canary-cage door of my bee-cap was turned wide
open. Good heavens! if the public had seen the author of the
Dog-Post-Days shove in his eatables through the open leaves of the
leaden gate, he would have died with shame!--During the meal, I called
the dog to me by the name, Hofmann! He actually came; I felt all over
him, if haply any forty-fifth chapter might be hanging on his neck,--it
was bare.
After a long alternation of journeying,--eating,--saying
nothing,--sleeping,--days,--nights,--I was at last set down in a sea,
and there carried about (or did it come from a narcotic?) till I slept
like a rat. What followed--strange as it is--I shall not make known
till I have first written out the observation, that, to be sure, great
_joy_ and great _sorrow_ enliven and gratify the nobler propensities
within us; but that _hope_, and far more _anxiety_, hatch the whole
worm's nest of miserable hankerings, the infusorial spawn of petty
ideas, and unravel them and set them to gnawing,--so that in this way
the _Devil_ and the _Angel_ within us contrive to maintain a worse
_parity_ of their two religions than holds even in Augsburg with two
others,[203] and that each of the two religious parties in man has in
pay its own night-watch, censor, innkeeper, gazetteer, just as much as
the aforesaid ones in Augsburg....
--I had my eyes still closed, when a whispering, swelled and multiplied
into a great murmur by a thousand tree-tops, floated round me; the
rushing aerial sea swept through narrow Æolian harps, and raised waves
thereon, and the waves rippled over me with melodies,--a high mountain
air, flung down from a cloud shooting by overhead, fell like a cooling
stream of water on my breast.--I opened my eyes, and thought I was
dreaming, because I was without the iron mask.--I was leaning against
the fifth column on the upper step of a Grecian temple, whose white
floor was encircled by the _summits_ of tossing poplars,--and the tops
of oaks and chestnuts ran waving only as fruit-hedges and espaliers
round the lofty temple, and reached only up to the heart of a man
standing within.
"I must surely be acquainted with this luxuriant harvest of tree-tops,"
said I.--"Lo, weeping birches hang their arms yonder,--out there stems
kneel before the thunder which blasted them,--do not nine crape veils
and sprayey fountains, in many-colored twigs, flutter through each
other?--and the tempests have planted here their conductors as five
iron sceptres in the earth.---This is most certainly a dream of the
_Island of Reunion_, which has hitherto so often darted rays across the
mist of sleep, and with heavenly and winning radiance beamed upon my
soul."----
But it was no dream. I rose from the step, and was about to enter the
illuminated Grecian temple, which consisted only of a Grecian roof, of
five columns, and the whole earth encamped around it, when eight arms
embraced me, and four voices accosted me: "Brother!--we are thy
brothers." Before looking upon them, before addressing them, I fell
gladly with outspread arms into the midst of three hearts which I knew
not, and shed tears upon a fourth, which I knew not, and at last lifted
my eyes, not inquiringly, but blissfully, from the unknown hearts to
their faces; and while I looked upon them, I heard behind me my beloved
Dr. Fenk say: "Thou art the brother of Flamin, and these three
Englishmen are thy incarnate brothers." ... Joy darted through me
convulsively like a pang.--I pressed my lips mutely to those of the
four embraced and embracing ones,--but I fell then upon my elder
friend, and stammered, "Dear, good Fenk! tell me all! I am distracted
and enchanted with things which I still do not comprehend."
Fenk went back with me smiling to the four brothers, and said to them:
"See, this is the _monsieur_, your fifth and lost brother of the seven
islands,-and your biographer into the bargain.--Now at last he has
caught his forty-fifth chapter."--Then turning to me: "Thou seest, of
course," said he, "that this is the Isle of Union,--that the three
twins here are the sons of the Prince, whom our Lord wanted to bring
back.--For thy sake, because thou hast this long time been absent from
the seven islands, he has travelled through all market towns, and
around all islands of Europe. At last I wrote to him." ...
"Thou hast certainly, also," I interrupted him, "been my correspondent
through the dog."--
"Just go on," said he.
"And _Knef_ is _Fenk_ spelt backward,--and thou gavest thyself out with
Victor for an Italian, who could speak no German,--copiedst off all day
his own list of rules for deportment, for his Lordship, and for me too,
in fact, in order to be his and my spy."--
"It is so,--and therefore I also wrote to his Lordship," said he, "that
thy French name, _Jean Paul_, brought thee under suspicion; and as
thou, besides, didst not thyself know thy origin, and, in addition to
that, thy foolish bit of life-road, which, as in an English garden,
would not reach a mile in a straight direction"----
"The biographer," said I, "should, in fact, be his own."[204]--
"It is incomprehensible to me now how it was that I did not happen upon
this in the first instance; for thy resemblance to Sebastian, which the
fifth son of the Prince should also have, thou hast thyself long since
remarked,--and thy Stettin box-picture on the shoulder-blade, which
these gentlemen here all have about them, and which his Lordship
himself beheld day before yesterday, during the bandaging."
"So! so!" said I, "it was for this, then, that your biographer got the
falcon's hood, the wound in the back, the fine black steed, and the
stranger in Hof was his Lordship?"--
In short, by all this his Lordship had fully convinced himself that I
was the one whom he had so long sought; for he had previously long
since received Fenk's communication through fifteen hands, inasmuch as
it travelled from Hamburg, or rather from the land of the Hadeln, to
Ziegenhain in Lower Hesse, then into the Principality of Schwabeck,
then into the Duchy of Holzapfel, to Schweinfurt, to Scheer-Scheer, and
still back again to * * and to * * *, and finally to Flachsenfingen,
where he at last received it; there, in the Isle of Union, he had been
concealed a long time, until the communication, the ending of October,
which as it were underscored the maternal marls with red ink, and, most
of all, the banishing from St. Luna of the three brothers who landed
on the island, constrained him to travel off to Scheerau, or rather to
Hof in Voigtland. Here, naturally, I was obliged to meet him, according
to a concert with the Italian servant (i. e. with Dr. Fenk), on account
of which he sent me from my island after the forty-fifth chapter, and
whose repetition came to hand in the billet intercepted by the blind
one, and now deciphered; and my old face, which he forthwith compared
with a younger engraving of the fifth princely son, threw at once in
the "Oat-lane" the most ample light upon everything.
So soon as he knew this, he left me to travel on alone, under my tin
bee-cap and Moses's veil, and hurried forward to the Prince just one
minute before it was too late. For Matthieu had betrayed all; and they
were just on the point of sending to arrest the three twins, on the
island where they had taken refuge, and our Victor at his mother's
house, wherein he had already forgotten court and nobility for patients
and sciences and bride, when his Lordship sent in his name to the
Prince. The Prince was afraid of being persuaded by him, as Cæsar was
of Cicero. His Lordship--whose soul, indeed, was a _petrographic_[205]
chart of sublime ideas--confounded the measures of the Prince by a more
daring and defiant boldness than these measures had reckoned on. He
began with the intelligence, that he brought not merely _one_ son to
the Prince, but all; which last thing he had not promised, for the
reason that he could not know how far fate would perhaps leave or lead
him.--He forced the Prince to listen to a long and cold discourse,
wherein he laid before him the plan of study for the five sons, and
their development, history, and destiny; while he seemed to presuppose
the proofs of their extraction, he however wove them elaborately into
the inferences he drew from it. Thus, e. g., he said, no one had known
about the important secret but her Ladyship and Clotilda and Emanuel,
whose sacred documents, sealing all with death, he here presented him,
together with others for the children; only a certain court-page had,
during his blindness, stolen and abused one of five secrets. His
Lordship did not pluck to pieces this snare of a soul, because, as he
said, it was too insignificant for satisfaction, too black-dyed for
punishment, and because he himself besides would soon depart out of
these regions forever. In short, with his omnipotence he took such a
hold of the Prince, and drew all veils so clean off from the past, that
he almost compelled him, instead of condemning or acquitting, merely to
deprecate and to exchange accusation and mistrust for gratitude. The
single good thing, Lord Horion said in conclusion, which the Page had
done, was, that, by his weed-sowing-machines, he had ripened and
expedited the great and fair recognition precisely for a monthly
period, when the festoon of the five shoulders (the maternal moles)
were in full bloom. The Prince, in spite of the other party's iciness,
was melted, for his paternal love was enriched with new treasures.
Nevertheless, he mixed in with his thanks this delicate reproach
against Victor's pretended nobility: "I am full of gratitude for you,
although you deprive me too soon of the opportunity of showing it.
Hitherto I have rejoiced that I could at least prove to the son how
very much indebted, if not grateful, I was to the father. But you know
my error." His Lordship--now made more pliant by victory--replied: "I
know not whether good intentions and bad circumstances excuse me; but I
could regard him only as worthy to be your body physician, whom I--
acknowledged worthy to be my son."--The Prince embraced him cordially;
his Lordship reciprocated it quite as warmly, and said: "On the 31st of
October," (that is to-day, and he said it yesterday,) "he would seal
his honest sentiments toward the Prince in a manner more decisive than
words."----
Noble man! Thou consumest nothing on the earth beyond thyself, and art
a storm-bird, through whose fat a wick of the lamp is threaded, and
which is now burned out and carbonized by its own light,--I have a
presentiment, as if thy fair soul would soon be on another, _higher
Isle of Reunion_ than this earthly one!
I write this on the' forenoon of the 31st of October, at ten o'clock,
on the island.
* * * * *
EVENING, AT SIX O'CLOCK, IN MAIENTHAL.
Wherewith will this book end at last?--with a tear or with an
exultation?--
Dr. Fenk, until two o'clock (for not till then would his Lordship
arrive), threw the brown or lump-sugar of humor upon our minutes and
sorrows; his whimsical red face was the violet sugar-loaf paper of
sweetness. My good Victor was with Clotilda in Maienthal. Fenk kept up
one continued laugh at me as a dauphin. He makes many similes, he says:
"I should not, until the end of a book and of the whole play, get my
true title, as they do not print the general title-page of the journals
till the last number,--or," he says, "like a pawn at chess, I should
not be promoted until the last row to be an officer." It is, however,
very well known to me from history, that in France, even under Louis
XIV., the present system of equality already existed, though first with
reference to princes, whom the king made equal, whether they entered
upon life as Mestizoes[206] or Creoles, or Quatroons[207] or Quintoons,
or as born to the throne. As now one can produce new laws and
novellæ[208] of imperial statute quite as well in Germany as beyond its
limits, it might well happen in my lifetime that legitimated princes
should be declared competent to the throne,--whereby I of course should
come to be ruler. It were well for Flachsenfingen if that should
happen, because I will buy me beforehand the best French and Latin
works on government, and study the subject in them so well that I
cannot fail. I think I may venture to take it upon me to set the poor
human race, which is forever living in the _first of April_, and which
never gets out of its standing-stool or go-cart,--the only change being
the addition of more wheels to the cart,--on its legs again a little by
my sceptre. Time was when a nobleman and the horse of an English
riding-master were capable of doffing the hat, of firing a pistol, of
smoking tobacco, of telling whether there was a damsel in the company,
&c.; but now-a-days horse and nobleman have come to be so distinguished
from each other by culture, that it is a true honor to be the latter,
and that it does not harm my nobility (though I feared it in the
beginning) that I have more than common learning. In our days the
head-horses of the nobility are no longer harnessed on so far ahead of
the citizenly wheel-horses to the chariot of state as they were a
hundred years since; hence duty, or at least prudence, dictates (even
for a new nobleman like me) that he (or I) should let himself down,
and hide the consciousness of his rank (why should not I succeed in
that as well as another?) under the grace of an easy and complaisant
good-breeding, and in fact take no airs upon himself about any
ancestors, except for the _future_ ones, of whose collective merits I
cannot think greatly enough, because the earth is still mighty
young,[209] and just in petticoats, and, like the Poles, in Polish
frock.
To return: at two o'clock, his Lordship came with his blind son, like
Philosophy with Poesy. Beautiful, beautiful youth! innocence has
sketched thy cheeks, love thy lips, enthusiasm thy forehead. His
Lordship, with his Laudon's[210] forehead, and with a face more
obscured and shaded to-day than in Hof, on which the honeymoon of youth
and the passion-weeks of later age threw a confused chiaroscuro,--he
came to us to-day almost warmer than usual, although with features
expressive of nothing but the feeling that life is an intercalary day,
and that he loves only philanthropy, not men. He said, we must do him
and the Hof-medicus the pleasure of visiting the latter this very day
in Maienthal, and bringing him hither, because he had still to complete
here without eyewitnesses all sorts of arrangements for the arrival of
the Prince; we must, however, come back again with Victor in the night,
because our distinguished father would arrive very early in the
morning. The blind one, as blind, could stay where he was. It did not
occur to me, that he concealed from the good, darkened Julius, that he
was his father, for he said, with double and treble meaning: "As the
good creature has once already had to endure the pain of losing a
father, we must not a second time expose him to this sorrow." But
_this_ did strike me, that he begged us to requite him for what he had
hitherto sought to do in behalf of Flachsenfingen, by doing _this_
ourselves, and assuring him with an oath, that in the public offices
which we should get, we would fulfil his cosmopolitan wishes, which he
delivered to us in writing, at least until such time _as he should see
us again_. The Prince had been obliged to give him the same solemn
assurance. We looked up at him as at a beclouded comet, and took the
oath with sorrow.
We entered on the road to Maienthal. An Englishman related to us that
he had seen behind the mourning-thicket--the sleeping chamber of the
blind one's mother, his Lordship's beloved, who rests beneath a black
marble slab--a second marble set up, which the crape-veils sweeping
over it were meant to cover, but could not. O then did each of us look
round him with a heavy heart toward the island, as towards an
undermined city, ere it is blown to pieces and hurled into the
air.--But my longing to behold Victor and Maienthal, that labyrinthine
flower-garden of my warmest dreams, drowned the anxious apprehension.
At last we climbed the southern mountain, and the variegated Eden, with
its fulness of foliage and with the multitude of its pulsating twigs,
grew with a murmur down into the valley.--Up yonder among the boughs
lay, like a nightingale's nest, Emanuel's peaceful cottage, in which
was now my Victor,--nearer to us rustled the chestnut avenue, and
without, overhead, reposed the mowed churchyard.--To me, who had seen
all this hitherto only in the dream of fancy, it seemed now again as if
dreams were coming on; and the opaque ground became a transparent one,
full of shapes created out of vapor,--and I sank full of sadness on the
hill.... I went down at last as into a promised land, but my whole soul
was swathed in a soft funeral veil.
--And my Victor tore away the veil, and pressed his warm soul to mine,
and we melted together into one glowing point.--But I will, by and by,
when he comes back from the abbey, once more and still more warmly fall
on his breast, and then at length truly tell him my love.... O Victor,
how gentle thou art, and how harmonious, how ennobled, how beautiful in
the tear of joy, how great in thy inspiration!--Ah, love of man, thou
that givest to the inner man the Grecian profile, and to his motions
lines of beauty, and to his charms bridal ornaments, redouble thy
wondrous and healing powers in my hectic breast, when I see fools, or
sinners, or uncongenial men, or enemies, or strangers!
Victor, who never made the anxiety of a man still greater, gave us some
satisfaction about his Lordship. He went to the convent to Clotilda, to
announce our visit to her and the Abbess,--the lateness of the visit he
excuses by the necessity of a nightly return. Till he comes back, I
suspend my story. My eyes followed him on his way to the betrothed; and
his hand, his eye, and his mouth were full of greetings for every one,
especially for despised people, for old men, for old widows. The joy of
my hero becomes mine. Time is working at the beautiful day, when his
heart shall forever melt into one with the betrothed, when, without a
remaining link of the sundered flea- and ape-chain of the court, he
shall walk freely through nature, be nothing but a man, make nothing
but curves, instead of _cour_, love nothing but the whole world, and be
too happy to be envied. Then will I, for once, my Bastian, eat with
thee at evening in the moonlight, under the steam and the hum of the
linden, and seat myself on the bales of freshly unpacked and printed
Dog-Post-Days. For the rest,--although I did let my own inner man sit
to paint his by,--I am but a wretched, dissolved, wiped-out slate-copy
of him, only a very freely paraphrased interpretation of this soul; and
I find that a cultivated parson's son is, at bottom, better than an
uncultivated prince, and that princes are not, like poets, born, but
made.
I hope I have material enough to keep me writing till he comes back. I
have, in fact, in this biography, as supernumerary copyist of Nature,
all along borrowed from reality,--e. g. for Flamin's character I had in
my head a captain of dragoons,--in the case of Emanuel, I thought of a
great man dead, a celebrated writer, who, the very day when I with
sweet, shuddering entrancement wrote Emanuel's dream of annihilation,
went from the earth and half under it,--the goddess Clotilda I
compounded of two female angels, and I shall see for myself, in a few
minutes, whether I hit them. It is provoking, that in conversations,
from the force of habit, I give to the people of this book the names
they bear in the Dog-Post-Days; whereas Flamin is properly called * *,
and Victor * *, and Clotilda actually * *. It were to be wished--I have
not sworn not to do it--that I could, after the death of some moral
_blasés_ and plague-infected personages of these volumes, or after my
own, make known to the world the true names. If I do it, then will
learned Europe be initiated into all the reasons, which the political
world already knows, that have kept the Mining-Superintendent from
letting fall upon some parts of his history (especially upon the court)
so much light as he might actually have given; and I am curious to see
whether, after the _exposé_ of these reasons, the newspaper
correspondent A. and the secretary of legation Z.--the two greatest
enemies of the Flachlsenfingen court, and of me personally--will still
assert that I am stupid. Nay, I am bold enough to appeal publicly here
to the * * agent in * * to say whether I have not wholly left out many
persons in the history, who had acted a part in it, and who had entered
into the actual machinery of my biographical sugar-mill as undershot
wheels; nay, more, I even give my pair of adversaries permission to
name to the world the personages I have left out,--who have some power
to do injury,--if this two-head vulture has the heart to do it....
The good Spitzius Hofmann is now wagging his tail, and leaping up
before me. Good, industrious Post-Dog! Jean Paul's biographical Egeria!
I will, as an encouraging example, so soon as I have time, flay thee
and stuff thee neatly, and fill thee as with a sausage-filling of hay,
in order to set thee up in a public library as thine own bust beside
other distinguished scholars!--Meusel is a reasonable man, to whom I
will apply, in a private and autographic communication, for a seat in
his Learned Germany for Spitz. This scholar will not be able, any
better than I, to see why such a diligent hod-carrier and compiler and
forwarder of learning as my dog is should suffer a more pitiful and
colder fate than other learned hod-carriers, merely because he bears a
tail, which represents his posterior-toupee. That is all which gives
the poor beast an inferior place in the scale of literati.
--I now see Victor escorted with lights through the bowers of the
garden. I will only throw out, as hastily as possible, the further
statement, that I am sitting in the sacristy of Emanuel, which is
latticed with leafless shrubbery. Hurry not so, Sebastian, thou that,
in respect to thy previous transformations, resemblest the three or
four pseudo-Sebastians in Portugal; hurry not, that I may still simply
say to my sister, "Thou beloved ex-sister, thy crazy brother writes
himself _von_, but thou hast lost only his breast, not his heart. When
I come to Scheerau, I will care for nothing, but weep on thee during
the embrace, and finally say, It is no matter. My spirit is thy
brother, thy soul is my sister; and so, change not, sisterly heart."
--The good Victor walks hastily, Ah, men whom sorrow has often chilled
have neither in their bodily nor moral motions the slow symmetry of
prosperous fortune, just as people who wade in the water take great
broad strides.--Poor Victor! why dost thou now weep so, that thou
absolutely canst not dry thy tears?...
* * * * *
FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, IN THE ISLAND OF REUNION.
Ah, it is long ago that I asked, "Will this book close with a
tear?"--Victor came back at eight o'clock last night with two great
immovable tears on the brink of his eyelid, and said: "We will just
hasten back somewhat rapidly to the island. Clotilda herself begs us to
do so, and to take another time for seeing her."--"A misfortune," I have
dreamed, "is just now rearing itself large and high like a sea-serpent,
and flinging itself upon human hearts, as that does upon ships, and
crushing them under." She had grown every minute more anxious and
oppressed, as one becomes in a damp spot over which the lightning darts
and hisses. What else did this imply, than that his Lordship had
disclosed to his faithful friend things which we feared this night to
experience? And we could none of us any longer conceal from ourselves
the fear that his weary spirit meant perhaps, like Lycurgus, to stamp
the seal of his corpse upon his assurance that we were January's sons,
and, moreover, on our oath to be good, and on that of the Prince to
obey my brothers, till he should return.
"Weep not so sorely, Victor," said I; "it is not, after all, yet
certain." He quietly dried his eyes, and merely said: "We will, then,
now go to the island,--it is already nine o'clock."
We went along, far, far aside from the spotted weeping-birch, which
threw its torn-off leaves toward the wasted remains of the great man.
Victor could not look that way for sorrow; but I looked with a chill
trembling where it swayed in the serene night-heavens. Not until after
some days, when Victor had become happier; had the dust of Emanuel
contracted itself again, as it were, into a pale form, and erected
itself out on the burial-green, and opened wide its arms for its old
darling,--and Victor moaned and pined, and sought vainly to press the
white shadow to his dying breast.
He smiled sadly, as he sought to divert us and himself by the words,
"Foolish man ducks like a bird, if calamity only approaches him from
afar off." His tears made him a blind man, and Flamin and I were his
guides; nevertheless he greeted in his pain a night-express.
I have said nothing (for I cannot) of the _garden of termination_, of
the withered scene of faded, leafless days of joy.
Over the stubble and over the chrysalides of night-butterflies (the
jugglers of future spring-nights), and over the steadfast, subterranean
winter sleep, swept the solitary night-winds.--Ah, man might well
think, "Breezes, come ye not hither over graves, over precious,
precious graves?--"
I said, "How slender is the pale-green interval of earth between human
bodies and human skeletons!"--Victor said, "Ah, Nature has so much
repose, and why has our heart so little?"
It was near midnight. The heavens glittered nearer to the earth; the
_Swan_, the _Lyre_, _Hercules_,[211] beamed from where they had gone
down through another blue of heaven. Great heaven,--said every
heart,--dost thou belong to the human spirit, dost thou one day receive
it, or art thou only like the ceiling-picture of a minster, which hides
the limiting walls, and opens out with colors the prospect of a heaven
which does not exist?--Ah, every Present makes our soul so small, and
only a Future makes it so great.
Victor was beside himself, and said again: "Repose! neither joy nor
sorrow can give thee, but only hope. Why is not all at rest within us,
as around us?"
At that moment the knell of a shot, repeated by all the echoing woods,
rang through the silent night,--and the Isle of Union swam up in the
night-blue, and its white temple hung over it,--and beside the
mourning-thicket, which grew up over the mouldering remains of a
youthful heart, nine slender flames, which ran up on the nine
crape-veils, shot up toward heaven, as if they were _feux de joie_ to a
festival of _peace_.
Pale, hurrying, sighing, and silent, we touched the first shore of the
island. The water was sucked up dry by the ground. The black Eastern
gate had flung itself wide open, and leaned and hid its white painted
sun against the trees. Many funeral torches, on white lustres, attached
themselves to the Eastern gate, went in through the long green avenue,
flickered over ruins, sphinxes, and marble torsos, and ended darkly in
the mourning-thicket.
Fluttering music of Æolian harps was permeated at the entrance by long
tones. Under the Eastern gateway the blind one rested quietly and
played joyously on his flute,--just as a dove flies into the thunder.
He fell joyfully on the neck of his Victor, and said: "It is good that
thou comest; a tall, still man has lain a quarter of an hour on my
heart, and wept into my hand, and given me a leaf for thee."
Victor snatched the leaf; it read: "You have all sworn to fulfil my
requests until such time as you hear my voice again; but uncover not
the black marble."--His Lordship had given it to the blind son.
Victor cried: "O father! O father! I could not then make thee any
requital!" and sank upon the breast of the son. He was about to tear
himself away again, but the blind youth hung around him, and smiled
with glad unconsciousness into the night.--We hastened into the
mourning-thicket,--and, by the dim light of the two funeral torches
that were burning down therein, we saw that a second grave had been
scooped out there, the fresh earth of which lay near by,--that a black
marble covered the hollow, and that the black dress of his Lordship
peeped out a little way from the opening, and that in there he had
killed himself.--And on his black marble stood, as upon the marble of
his beloved, an ashy-pale heart, and below the heart stood in white
letters the words:
"IT IS AT REST."
THE END.
APPENDIX.
ADDITIONAL NOTES TO "TITAN."
ADDITIONAL NOTES TO "TITAN."
Reluctant to encumber the pages of a romance with more Notes than
seemed absolutely necessary, the present translator, in giving to the
public his version of Titan, was (he has had reason to think) too chary
of helps to the reader. Having, moreover, gained new light himself on
some points since that translation was made and printed, he ventures to
insert here (having a little spare space) a few explanatory or
illustrative (occasionally corrective) Notes, principally to the first
volume of Titan, which has generally proved more difficult than the
second.
[The translator's reason for giving such Notes here, rather than in a
(possible) third edition of Titan, is that a great many more of the
buyers of the first editions of that work will also (may it not be
presumed?) buy Hesperus than would be likely to see a third edition of
Titan; and therefore the present way of furnishing the additional
matter seemed to be the fairest to all parties.]
INTRODUCTORY AND GENERAL NOTE.
In a note to Vol. II. p. 174, occurs an allusion to certain _Comic
Appendices_ to Titan. There is a special good reason for recalling the
reader's attention to that subject, inasmuch as that appended matter
contains, slyly hid away by the waggish J. P., what is generally
regarded as an important part of a work. These Comic Appendages contain
apparently nothing essentially connected with the story of Titan, but
only satirical hits at men and things in connection with the names of
persons and places that occur in the work. For the sake, however, of
one interesting thing found there (beside the aforesaid Preface), we
will simply state that the "COMIC APPENDIX TO TITAN" consists of two
(so-called) little volumes, the first of which ends with a "Preface to
Titan," and after the second follows, as an "Appendix to the First
Comic Appendix of Titan," a "CLAVIS FICHTIANA, SEU LEIBGEBERIANA" (_Key
to Fichte, or Leibgeber_,--Leibgeber, alias Siebenkäs, alias Schoppe,
being so much a quiz of the philosopher Fichte in the Titan itself).
The "Preface" is as follows:--
"PREFACE TO TITAN.
"I write it last, in order that it may not be read first. I will here
leave the world free again, after I have had it in my service barely 2
hours 33 minutes and 36 seconds longer,[212] seeing that I have been in
_its_ service just so many years and months. Let it not begrudge me
three words more; that is to say, seven last ones.
"The _first_ is my joy in the fact that the readers, like children,
have been obliged to eat the bread, which they would not bite at the
table, afterward. With a similar stroke of art I shall drive them into
my future flogging-cellars. For from this time forth no book of mine
will appear without such an Appendix,--unless I send it out _first_ and
the work itself afterward.--Has not everything on this Anglicized
comet-ball its appendix [or -_dage_],--the Universal German Library the
dearest, the Almanac the cheapest?--has not Robespierre his queue,--the
comet of 1769, a tail of forty million miles,--the Predicaments,[213]
four Postpredicaments,--and Kant, his Fichte?
"The _second_ last word is to beg the reader that he will not quite
yet--as I have hardly made a feeble beginning in my deliveries of
Titan--draw two or three hundred conclusions therefrom, but wait for
the twentieth volume. The _opus_ desires to be judged like the moon,
which rises bay-colored and swollen and cloudy, and which one needs
to allow half a night's time before expecting to find her on her
high-climbed pathway pure, white, and radiant. Modern romances easily
get themselves into the greatest repute on the appearance of their very
first volume, because they take no thought for the next morning (i. e.
for the next volume), but enjoy the present; because they have not so
much a plan--and thereby, too, the pauses in the same, the episodes,
are avoided--as ten thousand plans, which they carry out one after the
other; so that the work, when one gets it at length from the
bookbinder, then and not till then, produces a good effect and
represents a whole; just as the army-worm appears to the vulgar to roll
itself along magnificently in a length of twelve ells, although it
amounts only to an inch-deep procession of mere gnat-larvæ (_Larvæ
tipulæ_). _My_ infusorial, on the contrary, is entire, and yet is fed
till it grows to a giant-snake,--but that is quite as wonderful.
"_Third_ word. In every epic history there lie whole volumes full of
morals, more than in a fable; but not otherwise than in actual history,
which is not the daughter of moral philosophy, but the mother, of whom
every one can beget such a daughter as he pleases. I find in the
biographies which the Infinite One writes more poetry, more poetic
justice and justification by motives, than in those which the heroes of
the former, like poor fools, send to the press. A divine biography is,
besides, not only a little work of art, but also a part of an
infinitely great one; and we are all so bound to our paths that one
must be able, from the diurnal arc of his life's epicycloid of the
988th power, to calculate the ellipse which humanity describes around
the immovable Infinite; in other words, one can (bold as it may sound)
from the incidents of his forenoon infer much with regard to the next
that will appear in the newspaper.
"_Fourth_ last word. They still continue in Jena, Wenigen-Jena,
Jena-Priesnitz, and the surrounding localities, to moot the
proposition, that a poet must, like a fly, travel along on transparent
gauze-wings, and not on any heavily bedizened pinions of the bird of
paradise. The reader, they continue without metaphor, cannot at once
fly and carry; Pegasus cannot be a packhorse; still less may a poetic
pinion like that of the angel alluded to have _eyes_, which at most can
belong to the peacock's tail.----Thereto I lately, while attending
Mozart's _Zauberflöte_, came out with the striking answer, namely, the
question: 'But the opera, good people?--Must not here, 1st, the genial
interworking of all the instruments, as well as, what is quite as
great, of all the actors; 2dly, the optical, and, 3dly, the acoustic
imitation; then, 4thly, the poetic composition itself; and finally and
5thly, the splendor of the decoration,--be all comprehended and enjoyed
at once? A building in the _five_ orders of architecture is easier for
you than _one_ with gorgeous foliaceous ornamentation? The five wise
virgins at once leave you wiser than one foolish one?--Say, Jenaite!
But no; write on, and a happy journey home to you in this infernal
cold!'
"Since one word begets another, and accordingly the _fifth_ begets the
_sixth_, I give my word with both, that to-day, on which I say my last
word and this next, is to me no day of finding a cross, but of taking
down from one. Is not to-day Virgil's day, and are not the first volume
of this work and the first and last winter months over?--For to-morrow
there blooms for me the morn of spring; namely, the first of February,
the Sunday eve (_Sonnabend_) of Candlemas. Already must many a freezing
German have with me found in February the aurora of spring, at least in
the rapid lengthening of the days. Hovers not already in the cold ether
out there the first vernal song, the first fluttering lark? Does not
the wren climb and glide up along a black bough, dripping in the
sunshine, and chirp, warmly gilded with bright rays, his winter-solo?
Does not the returning sun re-bind my manuscript books with gilt edges?
and has not my neighbor shoved up the slides of his beehives, that the
merry bee-tribe may joyously fling themselves forth from the narrow,
sultry prisons upon the fresh green, variegated, not with flowers, but
with sunbeams, and creep about over it with vigor?--Virgil, whose
anniversary is to-day celebrated, on _thy_ grave they break now only
fictitious laurel-twigs; but on the graves of the seasons ever fresh
ones bloom after.--
"To-day shall, after a long satirical ice-month of quarrelling,
reconcile me again to the times. Let my last and _seventh_ word be,
Peace! as He also said it who spake the seven words on a more painful
wood than my writing-table is.
"Peace be with the age!--one should often exclaim to himself.[214] As
an annoying day does not put us out in the hopes of our life, so
neither should a suffering century deprive us of that hope wherewith we
paint the far future. The pyramid of the age seems, like an Egyptian
one, to lift itself up, either to a narrow and sharp apex, or into
completeness; but when one climbs it, the summit proves to be a roomy
level.
"Where a _goal_ appears to us divine, there must _the road_ also have
been so; because _this_ was once _that_, and that will become this.
Well may we all be nearer to Thee, O Infinite One, than we know:--for
Thou only canst know how near we are; and we live _in_ Thee, not merely
_from_ Thee, just as our earth moves in the midst of the atmosphere of
the sun's globe,[215] while it seems only to revolve far off around his
light."
EXPLANATION OF TITLE.--As regards the title of TITAN, the translator
has been strongly tempted to fall back upon his first idea, that Jean
Paul hardly meant, after all, anything more definite by it than to
express the magnitude of his aspiration in undertaking the work; and
that, as Mr. Longfellow's "Hyperion" hints at a book of the beautiful,
so _Titan_, like _Hesperus_, has a corresponding, more moral than
mythological reference, and signifies that this was to be the author's
Titanic work.
NOTES TO VOL. I.
Page xi.--By some slip or confusion of memory, the first and second
editions were made to say, in the note, that Louisa, one of the four
reigning sisters to whom Titan is dedicated, lived in the _Liberation_
War. This mistake probably arose from mixing up the French Revolution
with Körner's august apostrophes to Louisa as guardian genius of her
people in the later war for freedom.
Page 2, line 8. "Wolf's tooth."--The tooth of a wolf or boar, or some
other animal, was once used just as we use an ivory handle, or
(sometimes) the thumb-nail, to rub down smooth the paper from which
ink-marks had been erased.--Line 15. "Burning-glass" means here
properly a _concave-mirror_ (Brenn-_spiegel_ in German,--there being
another word, Brenn-_glas_, corresponding to our common burning and
magnifying glass).--Line 18. "Cutting _hollow_"; _concave grinding_
would seem a more scientific phrase, but the word _hollow_ seemed
necessary in carrying out the _moral_ allusion.
Page 5, line 27.--The reference is probably to _Wilcke_, who broached a
new theory about magnetism, that of two fluids. (See art. in Encyc.
Britan.)
Page 5, line 31. "When it struck 23 o'clock."--The Italian clocks,
though they indicate on the face up to 24, strike only to 12.
[Illustration]
The above is a comparative table of German and Italian ways of
reckoning time, adapted to the latter half of September. It is taken
from Goethe's Italian Tour. He says: "The inner circle denotes our 24
hours, from midnight to midnight, divided into twice 12, as we reckon,
and our clocks indicate. The middle circle shows how the Italian clocks
strike at the present season (namely, up to 12 twice in 24 hours), but
in such a way that it strikes 1 when it strikes 8 with us, and so
on.... Finally, the outer circle shows how the 24 hours are reckoned in
actual life. For example, I hear 7 o'clock striking in the night, and
know that midnight is at 5 o'clock; I therefore deduct the latter
number from the former and thus have 2 hours after midnight. If I hear
7 in the daytime, as I know that noon is at 5, I have 2 P. M. But if I
wish to express the hour according to the fashion of this country, I
must know that noon is 17 o'clock; I add the 2, and get 19 o'clock." It
must have been, it would seem, then, _in his mind_ that Albano would
have "counted up the tedious strokes."
Page 6, line 16. "Juno Ludovici."--The fine colossal head known as the
_Lodovisi_ Juno (so Murray spells it) in the Villa Lodovisi.
Page 9, line 24.--"Kremnitz" is a town in Moravia. The ducats coined
there were of the very finest gold.--Line 24. "More _lightly_ on her
left arm,"--_and therefore the old man was not actuated purely by the
pious motives which Albano gave him credit for, but by more mercenary
ones_,--is the connecting link to be supplied before the next clause.
Page 11, line 12.--"Micromegas,"--_little giant_.
Page 19, line 13.--Bouverot, here called the German Gentleman (in
German, the _Deutsche Herr_), was in reality a _Teutscher Ordensherr_,
or Teutonic Knight. The translator has throughout simply called him the
_Gentleman_, merely, however, by a sort of general, parliamentary
etiquette, and not, of course, as if the word defined his technical
standing. The reader will please bear this in mind.
Page 19, note.--He was also nicknamed _Peter de Mulieribus_. He was a
fine painter, Put a coarse-grained scapegrace. Was born at Haerlem in
1637. Went to Italy, and from Calvinist became Papist. Was famous for
his animals and landscapes. In Italy he fell in love with a woman, and,
as he already had a wife, he sent for her to come to him, and then
caused her to be murdered on the road. He was arrested and sentenced to
be hung, but, in the confusion consequent on the breaking out of some
war, escaped, and died in 1701.
Page 20.--The translator confesses himself in the dark (with a
scholarly German friend also) as to the process which may have been
pursued by Don Gaspard with that German debauchee. It may simply be
that Gaspard operated on the man by holding out worldly inducements to
make him play the saint, and then, by disappointing them, left him to
sink back again to his real character.
Page 21, line 7.--The Pasquino was a mutilated statue, so called from a
cobbler who had his shop near it, and was always quizzing and
caricaturing passers-by. After his death, the statue, which had come to
be nearly buried in the ground, was dug up, and people said, "Here is
old Pasquin come to life again!" When any one wanted to satirize a
public or private enemy, he would affix his lampoon secretly to the
Pasquin statue. The statue of Marforio, supposed to be that of a
river-god, which, about the end of the sixteenth century, was placed
near the Capitol, was made the vehicle of replying to the attacks of
Pasquin.
Page 22, line 10.--If any one would see how queerly Jean Paul used his
queer knowledge, what
"A sea-change
Into something rare and strange,"
the driest material "suffered" in passing over the ocean of his
fantasy,--let him read the article in Bayle's Dictionary on Gaspar
Scioppius. Scioppius, a German critic, philologist, and
controversialist, equally remarkable for acumen and acrimony, was born
in 1576; had a precocious youth; changed from a Protestant to a
Catholic, and wrote bitterly against his old friends, and even against
the King of England; then became equally bitter against the Jesuits;
and, after a life of constant quarrelling with living and dead scholars
(for he charged even Cicero with barbarous Latin), "he died," says a
biographer, "universally hated and hating," in 1649. One of his
opponents called him the "Grammarian Cur."--As Jean Paul makes _his_
Schoppe call himself _Titular Librarian_, &c., it may be worth
mentioning that the historical Scioppius had the following titles:
"Patrician of Rome, Knight of St. Peter, Counsellor to the Emperor,
Counsellor to the King of Spain, Counsellor to the Archduke, Count
Palatine, and Count de Clara Valle" (Clairvaux).
Page 25, line 21.--_Trembley_ led the way in the actual study from life
of the Polype tribe, particularly the _hydra_. "Sometimes two polypes
will seize on the same worm; and most amusing is it then to witness the
struggle that ensues, sometimes resulting in the swallowing of the
weaker polype by the stronger, which, however, is soon disgorged with
no other loss than his dinner." "If the body be halved in any
direction, each half grows into a perfect hydra." "When a polype is
introduced by the tail into another body, the two unite and form one
individual; and when a head is lopped off, it may safely be engrafted
on the body of any other which may chance to want one." "A polype, cut
transversely in three parts, requires four or five days in summer, and
longer in cold weather, for the middle piece to produce a head and
tail, and the tail part to get a body and head."--_English Cyclop_.
Page 26, line 23.--The pigeons spoken of are the common house-pigeons.
(In German, _Flug_-taube: pigeons that go in _flocks_,--which misled
the translator in the first edition to call them _wild_ pigeons.) I am
told that Jean Paul is here really picturing his own traits too. For
instance, it is said he would not look in at a shop-door in passing,
lest he should hold out promises which he was not going to perform.
Page 27, line 22.--"Snow-_ball_." (In German, _Kugel_: globe,--_ball_
being the word used where the snow-ball of the schoolboys is meant.)
Page 31, line 10.--Gold wedges,--"the _golden wedge_ of Ophir." In the
first edition the word _Stufen_ was rendered _steps_. But it has also a
technical meaning of _ore_ in masses or strata.
Page 35, line 32.--Otto Guerike, who was born at Magdeburg in
1602, and died in 1686, invented the air-pump and the barometer. The
Wetter-männchen was a little man on the top of the clock, for instance,
who came out in fair weather and went in in foul; or one in a bottle
with a skin cover, who rose and sunk according to the pressure of the
atmosphere. (See the _Bubbles of Nassau_.)
Page 38, line 13.--If Gaspard was simply a Knight of the Fleece, Jean
Paul would seem to have taken a liberty in decorating him. "The
decoration of the _Grand Master_ is a chain composed of alternate
flints and rays of steel, with the golden fleece fastened in the
middle. The _Knights_ wear a golden fleece on a red ribbon."--Line 17.
Dragons and basilisks are both _amphibia_ in the strict sense, only the
two dwelling-places of the former are _air_ and land, and of the latter
_water_ and land. The basilisk has a membranous bag on the back of his
head which can be filled with air at pleasure, and also a spinal fin
along his back, which adapt him to swimming.
Page 43, line 16.--The _flower_ on behind the stag is the hunter's name
for _tail_.
Page 44, line 11.---"Bed-tail" does not mean here, as an English
reader might imagine, the foot-board, but the cord hanging down like a
bell-rope before the nose of the sleeper, by which old or feeble
persons (in Germany) used to raise themselves out of bed. In the Eighth
Dog-Post-Day of _Hesperus_, Victor is represented as raising himself
slowly by the bed-tassel out of bed, which he usually left with a
spring. One would think it would need mechanical aid to hoist the
fevered frame from _under_ a German feather-bed.
Page 47, line 25.--The _piping_ of Schoppe was simply with his
_windpipe_; the _whistle_ one is said to _wet_ when he drinks.
Page 48, line 14.--"Dissolving" is not quite strong enough. The idea
is, that, as ships have their bolts drawn out by the _lodestone_ and
fall apart, so the senses fall apart as man sinks to slumber.
Page 52, line 24.--_After_-Stimme means, strictly, _mock_-voice.
Page 59, line 10.--"Cellini's History"; i. e. probably Goethe's
translation of Benvenuto's Autobiography.
Page 60, line 18.--"Dog-Post-Day" is the title of the chapters of
_Hesperus_, a former work of Jean Paul's, which he pretends to have
composed on an island in some Indian Ocean, the materials being brought
to him by a dog who swam over from the mainland with the basket
containing them in his teeth; and the days of the dog's arriving with
fresh material were called _Dog-Post-Days_.
Page 61, line 19.--The "_chiffre banal_" is the common cipher.
Page 62, line 15.--"Veimers,"--so Jean Paul spells it. "Vehmic (or
Fehmic) courts were secret tribunals, established in Germany in the
Middle Ages, terrible from the secrecy with which they carried on their
proceedings, as well as from their organization and the extent of their
authority. The members, who at one time are said to have amounted to
not less than one hundred thousand, were bound by a horrible oath to
secrecy, and to obey and carry out the laws of the order. These
tribunals are said to have originated with Charlemagne; but it was not
till the thirteenth century that they reached their greatest
prominence. The lawlessness and anarchy which prevailed at that time
gave them work to do, and they gathered strength in the performance of
it. They were professedly established to support virtue and honor; but
there is no doubt they were often perverted to the gratification of
private malice and tyranny. Westphalia was the great centre of their
jurisdiction, and was hence termed the Red Land." See Wigand's
_Fehmgerichte Westphalens_, 1827. A very good popular account of this
court may also be found in Markham's History of Germany, Chap. XXI.
(Supplement).--Line 17. "Pointeurs." See note to p. 221.
Page 63, line 12.--The author refers here to a process of slipping off
the outer coating of the quill by soaking it in boiling water.
Page 64, line 12. "Wooden legs."--_Spindle-shanks_ would better express
the author's slur.--Line 26. The _cul de Paris_ is what is technically
called the _bishop_ or _bustle_.
Page 76, line 26.--"Flying [i. e. transient] teachers" (_journeymen_).
Page 80, line 32. "Ah, what bliss," &c.--Compare a passage in Faust (p.
58 in Brooks's translation), beginning, "O for a wing," &c.
Page 82, line 17. "Fatal."--This German word is hard to translate here.
Perhaps _plaguy_ or _confounded_ would help give the idea.
Page 84, line 14.--"The _lost_ son" means of course the _Prodigal Son_.
Page 86, line 5. "Diabolically possessed,"--"des Teufels auf Bänder."
Literally, "the Devil on ribbons"; or, as we should say, _death on
ribbons_.
Page 87, line 2.--Jean Paul may well have recalled his own sore
experience on the subject of queues. See his biography, as referred to
in Carlyle's article on Richter.--In the next paragraph, "the
everlasting rogue" is, in German, the _persistent Mæcenas_,--alluding
to Albano's lavishing of his patronage on the blind girl.--In the next
paragraph, the translator is responsible for the play on the word
_monkey_; Jean Paul having simply _Capuchinades_.
Page 92, line 7.--A music-pen is an instrument for ruling five parallel
lines at once.
Page 93, line 28.--"Real territion" (or terrification) is explained in
a note to Vol. II. p. 1.
Page 95, line 1.--The special kind of _floor_ which Jean Paul's fancy
calls up is the _threshing-floor_.--Line 7. In regard to the "leather
aprons," it may be proper to mention that _miners_, to whom the
musicians had been compared on the previous page, wear them _behind_.
Page 98, line 30.--"The new commission"; i. e. the newly appointed
tutor, Falterle.
Page 100, line 15.--"Pump-chambers" is a figurative expression here for
_top-boots_.--Line 21. The word rendered "chub" may mean _tadpole_.
Page 101, line 23.--A "pike _au four_" (_four_ meaning _oven_) is
simply a _baked pike_.
Page 102, line 6.--"Shop-keeper" here does not mean the _man_ who keeps
shop, but an article that _keeps the shop_; i. e. remains on the shelf
as unsalable lumber. "Keep" is used in the same sense as when we say
one _keeps his bed_ or _keeps house_ when sick.--"Paste-eels" are
minute creatures found on scraping away the paste from under the
binding of an old book.
Page 103, line 13. "St. John."--See Mrs. Jameson's Poetry of Legendary
Art, Vol. I. p. 168. "St. John had a tame partridge, which he cherished
much; and he amused himself with feeding and tending it. A certain
huntsman, passing by with his bow and arrows, was astonished to see the
great Apostle, so venerable for his age and sanctity, engaged in such
an amusement. The Apostle asked him if he always kept his bow bent. He
answered, that would be the way to render it useless. 'If,' replied St.
John, 'you unbend your bow to prevent its being useless, so do I thus
unbend my mind for the same reason.'"
Page 107, line 18. "Wehmeier's."--Jean Paul uses here the old-fashioned
double genitive. _Wehmeier's seiner_ (Wehmeier's's) like our antiquated
_hissen_, which we still sometimes hear from the lips of old people.
Page 111, line 26.--"The history of countries"; i. e. of individual
countries,--the beginning, e. g., with that of one's own country as a
centre, and going backward.
Page 112, line 25.--_Kanstein_ was the founder of a Bible-establishment
for the printing and diffusion of the Scriptures.
Page 113, line 9.--_Foundery_, or perhaps a _gallery_ of casts.
Page 114, line 12.--His thoughts fell upon the Middle-mark. This
was one of the three Marches (hence the words Marquis and
Marchioness),--Alt-Mark, Neu-Mark, and Mittel-Mark,--in which last
Berlin was, and Frederick lived.
Page 114, line 16.--Christoph Scheiner, a German mathematician and
astronomer, eminent for being one of the first who discovered spots on
the sun (in 1611, a few months after Galileo), was born at Wald, near
Mundelheim, in Swabia, in 1575, and died in 1660.
Page 115, line 9. "Partner."--In the German, _Moitistinn_, a somewhat
hard word, apparently of Jean Paul's own coining, from the French
_moitié_.
Page 123, line 25.--Aldert van Everdingen, a celebrated Dutch painter
of wild and rugged landscapes, was born at Alkmaar in 1621, and
died in 1675. "Some of his fine _forests_ are extremely true and
picturesque."--John van Huysum, born at Amsterdam in 1682, "was the
most eminent painter of _flowers_ and fruits in the eighteenth century.
Every term of panegyric that language can furnish has been lavished,
and with justice, on his productions. He seems to have dived into the
mysteries of Nature, to represent the loveliest and most brilliant of
her creations with all the magic of her own pencil. His _flowers_,
however, are more beautiful and true to nature than his fruits."
Page 124, line 33. "Leaves of her heart."--Literally, however,
_heart-leaves_, a technical term in botany.
Page 134, line 17.--That is, by this course which he had now adopted,
he put himself beyond the reach of those severe censors.
Page 135, line 11.--"Murmuring" is hardly strong enough here to give
the force of the _many-meaning_ German word _brausend_. "Roaring" would
come nearer to it.
Page 136, line 17:--
"'T is better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all."
TENNYSON.
"'O, in this chilly world, too fast
The doubting fiend pursues our youth!
Better be cheated to the last
Than lose the glorious hope of truth!"
FANNY KEMBLE.
Page 141, 2d note.--The meaning seems to be, that strips of gold-foil
were hung up to flutter round and frighten the birds, just as our
farmers hang up strips of tin for scarecrows.
Page 146, line 3. "She kept," &c.--There is something very obscure
here. For the German reads that the old Princess made this comparison
"im Wahne der Verschwisterung" (under the illusion or in a fancy of
relationship). Now Eleonore knew that this was her son Albano; because,
in the letter she wrote to him that day and laid up (see Vol. II. p.
493), she says, "To-day I have seen thee again," &c. May the meaning
be, then, that Eleonore tried to imagine by looking at the children
that Albano might be a relative of hers? Or had Richter forgotten that
Eleonore knew who Albano was, and does the _bonus Homerus dormitat_
here?
Page 157, line 33.--The _cane_; more exactly, the _pike_.
Page 159, line 20.--"Adopt" is rather too strong a word. "Take an
interest in them" is all the original requires.
Page 164, line 4.--We use the phrase "within four walls" as synonymous
with "in a room"; and in this case there would be _three_ rooms or
_twelve_ walls (one of J. P.'s trivial niceties).
Page 168, line 21.--The _fat-eye_ (_exophthalmy_ it was wrongly
rendered in the first editions) means such little _globules_ of fat as
show themselves, for instance, on the surface of _bouilli_, or marrow
boiled down.
Page 169, line 7.--As army-cloth shrinks when wet, so Malt grows thin
and falls away under the soaking of his tears.
Page 176, line 2. "It is a sin," &c.--There is a degree of obscurity in
this sentence arising from the elliptical and allusive style Jean Paul
employs; but the "innocent conditions" seems to mean the extent to
which one may safely go in certain pleasures. Surgeons attend at the
rack to tell how far torture may be carried without producing
death;[216] but no physician is at hand to tell the poor prince how
much he may enjoy without killing himself.
Page 177, line 11.--"Scholar-like"; more properly, _tyro-like_. The
Germans hardly have a word corresponding to our _scholar_ as meaning a
scholarly man. Their _Schüler_ means a _learner_, not one who is
_learned_.
Page 178, line 7.--"Sprinkled him with rose-vinegar"; i. e. gently
rebuked his moral indifference.
Page 178, line 9.--Luigi's father was lying on the coffin-board (or
bier); and L. himself was in that state of stupidity, thick-headedness,
and brazen-facedness which the proverb describes: "Er hat ein Bret vor
dem Kopf."
Page 181, line 28.--"Fire-mounds," or, more exactly, _fire-moles_;
described in the German works as _feuer-rothe Muttermäler_ (fiery-red
marks inherited from a mother).
Page 184, line 7.--"Leading-hounds,"--or pointers, which gives rather
more effect to the surprise produced by saying, after the dash, instead
of _noses_,--_ears_.--The allusion to _le Cain_ of course has a double
meaning, referring not only to the actor, but to the wicked and
murderous brother.
Page 188, line 12.--"Chap-sager," sap-sago,--derived from two words,
meaning _scraped cheese_.
Page 188, line 21.--When children in Germany are set at a little
side-table, they are said to "sitzen am Katz-tische." These expressions
come from the custom of giving the cat a side-bit while the dinner is
going on.--Line 31. The Ephraimite was a coin named after one Ephraim,
a Jew, who alloyed the legal coin of the Empire. The counterfeit was
readily to be detected by suspending the piece in wine, the acid of
which acted upon the spurious element, and turned the metal black.
Page 197, line 2. "TEN PERSECUTIONS."--In allusion, of course, to the
number the Christians are estimated to have suffered under the Roman
Emperor.
Page 203, line 25. "The gossiping letter."--_Gevatter's-brief_
(godfather's letter), a request to her to stand as godmother.
Page 211, line 1.--A _Spanish wall_ means a temporary partition put up
to make two rooms of one.
Page 213, line 27.--"Sun-path," used here in the astronomical sense and
figuratively. "Sweet moon, I thank thee for thy _sunny_ beams!" says
Pyramus.--In line 12 occurs again that peculiar word _fatal_, which
does not bear exactly our sense, but means ugly, disagreeable, &c.
Page 215, line 15.--"He can't count more than five," is a proverb
expressing dulness or stupidity.
Page 217, line 17.--"Conditions"; i. e. apprentices, hires.
Page 218, line 3,--"A box of letters" i. e. a case of type.
Page 219, line 3. The time of the Indiction among the Romans was that
wherein the people were summoned (_indicted_) to pay a certain
tribute.--The Romish or Papal Indiction, which is that used in the
Pope's bull, begins on the first of January.
Page 221, bottom. (_Faro_ is said to derive its name from _Pharaoh_,
whose image was formerly on one of the cards.)--"The banker turns up
the cards from a complete pack, one by one, laying them first to his
right for the bank, and then to his left for the _punter_ (or player,
so called from the Italian _puntare_), till all the cards are dealt
out. The banker wins when the card equal in points to that on which the
stake is set turns up on his right hand, but loses when it is dealt to
the left."
Page 224, line 13. "A round pearl."--_Zahl-perle_ means strictly a
pearl that is counted, not weighed.
Page 225, line 31.--The translator was not sure whether the
abbreviative H. prefixed to these names meant _Heilige_ or _Herrn_; and
he chose the former, merely because the author calls them _disciples_.
Page 242, line 11.--_Hirschfeld_ (erroneously translated _deer-field_)
is a proper name, of a writer quite obsolete now, who lived from 1742
to 1792, and wrote a work on country life. Richter says that Lilar is
not like a page out of Hirschfeld (made to order).
Page 243, line 23.--Of the "wild Germander," old Thomas Johnson says in
his Historie of Plants, 1633, "The floures be of a gallant blew colour,
standing orderlie on the tops of the tender, spriggy spraies."
Page 246, line 3.--Castor and Pollux were brothers of Helen; and,
according to one tradition, _all_ were born at once, being children of
Zeus and Leda. Horace calls them
"Fratres Helenæ, lucida sidera."
Carm. 1. 3.
Page 248, "43^_a_ cycle."--It was apparently an oversight of Jean
Paul's, making _two_ 43d cycles, and it was left so in all the
editions.
Page 252, line 19. "Sad-cloak."--A butterfly called the _Trauermantel_,
or _mourning mantle_.
Page 262, line 26.--_Blazing sea_ is a bold figure. Perhaps _boiling_
would be more appropriate to the outer element, though not to Albano's
inner emotion.
Page 267, line 4.--"Voice" means here _vote_.
Page 272, line 22.--There is a trick of language here, which cannot be
given in translation, but only in explanation. The idea is that Schoppe
was _turning_ (or rather twisting) something similar to what the
children were making; namely, an imaginary nose. Now in English we have
no concise expression for that symbolic art of pressing the thumb to
the nose and stretching the fingers into the air with a whirling
motion, to convey the idea of having outwitted the person pointed at.
The gesture is described very elaborately in one of Marryatt's
novels; and Bon Gualtier, in his parody of Locksley Hall, speaks of
"coffee-milling care and sorrow, with a nose-adapted thumb."
Page 284, line 7.--"Shut up," literally _crooks up_, as a prisoner is
doubled up by fetters.
Page 285, line 9.--The "Charles" referred to is _Charlemagne_.
"Sacramentarian" is strictly the English of _Sacramentierer_; but the
word Schoppe uses is _Sacramenter_, which may mean one who says
_Sacrament_! (a vulgar oath). Or it might be translated here "a poor
curse."
Page 286, second note.--Subscription is called in German
_prænumeration_, because the subscribers are numbered, or the money
counted out, beforehand.
Page 291, line 6.--This does not fully express the ceremony, which
consisted in breaking the helmet in pieces, and flinging them in upon
the coffin.
Page 298, line 17.--"Awaiting his sword," which he had been obliged to
leave behind on entering.
Page 299, line 11. "Paper dragon."--The German name for a child's kite.
Page 301, line 31. Properly rendered, "What will he--you?"--The
mechanic, thinking at first he was addressing one of his own class,
used the familiar "he," then, recognizing his mistake, he changed it to
the more respectful "you."
Page 306, line 9.--"Whipped" is too strong an expression. The meaning
is, that, the punishment having been commuted to a mere grazing of the
neck with a rod (twig), the penitent had died under the stroke by the
effect of imagination;--as is said to have actually occurred in the
case of a beadle at a German university, whom the students, after a
mock-trial, pretended they were going to execute, and, having laid his
head on the block, simply struck it with a sausage, when to their
horror he died of pure fright.
Page 312, line 4.--It was not a chocolate _mill_, but a twirling stick
to stir chocolate.--Line 8. "Support"; i. e. to lay paper on for
writing.
Page 312, line 33.--Richter has, not "Russia," but _Saanen_.
Page 327, line 7.--"Bleeds" _to death_, is the force of the original.
Page 329, line 32. "Just then," &c. Compare a passage in Richter's "New
Year's Night of an Unhappy Man."
Page 335, line 10.--Jordan- or paper-almonds are those of which the
shell is scraped to the thinness of paper.
Page 387, line 15.--The "touching ambiguity" spoken of cannot be
expressed in the English translation. It lies in the fact that Albano's
last three words, _es seines wird_, may mean either "When it becomes
his," or "When his is so"; i. e. my heart will be happy when his is so.
Page 390, line 2.--The "English horsetails" are the _Bobtails_.
Page 391, line 2. "Overstrained image."--Rather the _stretched
pictures_ (as pictures are stretched in framing).
Page 392, line 5.--"Thickness" is a proper name; but the translator has
not been able to learn anything of him, or of the fact here adduced on
his authority.
Page 393, line 18. "To dream and _enjoy_."--Instead of _geniessen_,
some editions have _genesen_, to _get well_.
Page 405, line 12.--The _Schneider's skin_ is the _Schneiderian
membrane_, so called from its discoverer, Conrad Victor Schneider, who
was born in 1610, was Professor of Medicine and Physician to the
Elector, and in 1660 wrote a treatise, "De Catarrhis," in six books,
devoted chiefly to an anatomical description of the cavities of the
nose.
Page 429, line 14.--The literal meaning of this bold figure is, "It
struck epileptically, till they bled, the limbs of the inner man."
Page 436, line 22.--The _time-keeper_ means the _metronome_.
Page 465, line 18.--The "seven pleasure-stations" allude to the
stations in the Catholic Church, which are a series of pictured scenes
in the life of Christ, before which the devotee successively pauses.
They correspond here to the "Point of View, No. 1," "Point of View, No.
2," and so on, which one meets in the neighborhood of certain great
wonders of Nature, such as Niagara Falls.
Page 469, line 7. "The wain."--Query, _Charles's Wain_.
Page 475, line 24. "The golden splendor of the strings of joy."--One
edition has _Der goldene Seiten_- [instead of _Saiten_-] _glanz der
Freude_,--"The golden side-glance of joy."
Page 479, line 16. "The fiery rain," &c.--One edition has _Wagen_
instead of _Regen_,--the fiery _chariot_.
NOTES TO VOL. II.
Page 74, line 25. "The laughter-plant."--"The _Illyrium Crow-foot_,"
says Thomas Johnson, in his "History of Plants," p. 953, "in Greek, may
be that kind of crow-foot called _Apium risus_, and [Greek: gelotophuê]
[laughter-producing]; and this is thought to be that _Gelotophyllis_ of
which Pliny maketh mention in his 24th Booke, 17th chapter, which being
drunke, saith he, with wine and myrrhe, causeth a man to see divers
strange sights, and not to cease laughing till he hath drunk Pineapple
kernels with pepper in wine of the Date-tree (I think he would have
said untill he be dead), because the nature of laughing Crow-foot is to
kill laughing, but without doubt the thing is clean contrary; for it
causeth such convulsions, cramps, and wringings of the mouth and jaws,
that it hath seemed to some that the parties died laughing, whereas in
truth they have died in great torment."
Page 487, line 20.--Hemsterhuis, a Dutch critic and philologist, of
remarkable precocity, was born in Groningen in 1685, entered the
University at fourteen, and at nineteen became Professor of Mathematics
and Philosophy at Amsterdam. He died at Leyden in 1766.
Page 499, line 29.--Saint Alban is said to have been the first martyr
for Christianity in Britain. He renounced Paganism in Rome, and
suffered martyrdom during the persecutions under Dioclesian. A
monastery was built in his memory, and around it grew up the town of
St. Alban's.
Page 500, line 1.--Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, founded the order
of _el toysón de oro_, on occasion of his marriage with the Princess
Isabella of Portugal, January 10, 1430.
Page 508, line 4.--Nicholas Jerome Gundling, a learned and in his day
noted professor of law and eloquence, was born near Nuremberg, and died
in 1729 at Halle, where he had been Rector of the University. He left
many works, among them "Otia, or a Collection of Discourses on
Physical, Moral, Political, and Historical Topics," in 3 vols., 8vo.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: See Titan, Vol. I p. 38.--Tr.]
[Footnote 2: The Greek Polus (in Aulus Gellius, Book VII. Chap. V.),
who, having to enact Electra with the bones of Orestes, took instead
the ashes of his own son, who had just died, and uttered _real_
sorrow.--Tr.]
[Footnote 3: Julius did not become blind till his twelfth year, and had
therefore conceptions of the face.]
[Footnote 4: See the blind girl's song in Bulwer's "Last Days of
Pompeii."--Tr.]
[Footnote 5: Planets with their moons.]
[Footnote 6: Literally, He only thinks us, when we think Him.--Tr.]
[Footnote 7: Here ended Jean Paul's second volume.--Tr.]
[Footnote 8: Professor Hofmann as a throne-stormer, and his magazine,
wherein at the beginning of the Revolution he took every free-thinker
captive, are to be sure long since forgotten; but one may substitute
for him any the nearest and newest German ultra.]
[Footnote 9: Literally, "What time o' day it was."--Tr.]
[Footnote 10: I. e. a poltroon.--Tr.]
[Footnote 11: Hence in Athens it was allowed to ridicule the gods, but
not to deny them.]
[Footnote 12: Literally, was _handselled_ or _overhauled_ (as young
sailors on first crossing the line).--Tr.]
[Footnote 13: Literally, "knocked him into April."--Tr.]
[Footnote 14: _Satyr_ means a satyr, and _satyre_, satire.--Tr.]
[Footnote 15: _Emprosthotonos_ is the cramp which bends men forward.
_Opisthotonos_ bends them backward.]
[Footnote 16: "Sed magis amica veritas!"--Tr.]
[Footnote 17: See the weekly, called "The Jew," page 380, e. g.
according to the Book _Lebusch Atteret Sahaph_, a man with a beast's
head is a human first-birth, but not so an insect, an entire beast.]
[Footnote 18: Anatomical term for a passage connecting with the uterus.
Tr.]
[Footnote 19: That is, as an army is put on a movable footing or in
marching order for battle.--Tr.]
[Footnote 20: So the spinners call the decayed part of the
cotton-wool.]
[Footnote 21: The bellows' _treader_ or blower.--Tr.]
[Footnote 22: Bristles.--Tr.]
[Footnote 23: One of the seven stars in the tail of the Lion, named for
the wife of Ptolemy III., whose hair was stolen from the Temple of
Venus, where she had placed it in fulfilment of a vow.--Tr.]
[Footnote 24: From the connection, these books would seem to have been
certain antidotes to melancholy, or _Cheerful Companions_, well known
at that day.--Tr.]
[Footnote 25: Servants dressed in the costume of Hungarian
soldiers.--Tr.]
[Footnote 26: Pier-glasses.--Tr.]
[Footnote 27: Household plate.--Tr.]
[Footnote 28: Probably a ward or school of the city.--Tr.]
[Footnote 29: The hands of the Medicean Venus are new and restored.]
[Footnote 30: Chief-Physician.--Tr.]
[Footnote 31: For Vandyk's Sebastian is said to resemble the painter
himself.]
[Footnote 32: A furnace for destroying galleries of mines, invented by
Belidor, a French military mathematician, born in 1697.--Tr.]
[Footnote 33: "But it is myself I forget in pardoning you."]
[Footnote 34: According to the common opinion; for I am inclined to the
other, which calls them Ator, Sator, Peratoras. These names distinguish
the kings wholly from the shepherds, who were called Milati, Acheel,
Cyriacus, and Stephanus, and who also preceded them, all which I copy
here out of _Casaub. Exercit. ad Ann. Baron_., II. 10, because I am not
at all ashamed to know anything useless, provided a Casaubon is not,
and provided it is something learned too.]
[Footnote 35: The reference is all along to the years 1792-93.]
[Footnote 36: Who would take a hand at nine-pins on coming out of a
battle won or lost.--Tr.]
[Footnote 37: See Titan, Vol. II. p. 1, note.--Tr.]
[Footnote 38: A liquor made of sulphuric acid, alcohol, sorrel-juice,
and water, once much used for gun-shot wounds.--Tr.]
[Footnote 39: Voetii Select. Disputat. Theol., P. I. p. 918.]
[Footnote 40: Papin was a physicist and machinist, who invented a
machine for softening bones to make a digestible food.--Tr.]
[Footnote 41: Writers on natural history deny that serpents _do_ drink.
But this may allude to some legend.--Tr.]
[Footnote 42: He calls Death, and the state, a pavior, though in
different senses.]
[Footnote 43: The name given to a high rocky pyramid beside Mont Blanc,
containing a hole through which one sees the heavens. It is to me a
tender fancy to represent to myself beside the highest mountain, which
takes in as much of heaven as of earth, a smaller one, which opens into
a narrow prospect offering to our eye a blue telescope, out of which
our hope builds the arch of heaven.]
[Footnote 44: After the death of the Emperor, a wax image of him was
kept for seven days in the palace, where it received as his
representative ceremonious visits, and, among the rest, of course from
the physicians.--Tr.]
[Footnote 45: Meaning her body. See p. 78.--Tr.]
[Footnote 46: Or neck (of a violin, for instance).--Tr.]
[Footnote 47: _Vorrede_ being the German for Preface.--Tr.]
[Footnote 48: _To turn over the strong-box_ means _to count the
cash_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 49: Outlawry of debts after five years.--Tr.]
[Footnote 50: Hell-stone, or lunar caustic.--Tr.]
[Footnote 51: The district in which Voltaire's Ferney lay.--Tr.]
[Footnote 52: Probably some _vade-mecum_ of Jean Paul's time.--Tr.]
[Footnote 53: Contribution levied on subjects when the sovereign's
daughter is to be portioned.--Tr.]
[Footnote 54: Knave.--Tr.]
[Footnote 55: Ballet-dancer.--"The brisk locomotion of _Columbine_."
(Johnson's ghost in "Rejected Addresses.")--Tr.]
[Footnote 56: 1700-1763. A famous, extravagant German statesman
attached to Augustus III. of Saxony.--Tr.]
[Footnote 57: Heads of short, frizzled hair, modelled after the busts
or portraits of Titus.--Tr.]
[Footnote 58: A small Cologne coin, so named from the image of a little
fat man or monk (some thinking _fettmännchen_ a corruption for
_fettmönchchen_) stamped on it.--Tr.]
[Footnote 59, 60, 61: The one word _butterfly_ is expressed by three
different words here in German: _Schmetterling_, _Phaläne_, and
_Zweifalter_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 62: The crape hat.]
[Footnote 63: Because courtiers herein also resemble the first
Christians, who destroyed only such statues as had received adoration
in the place of _God_.]
[Footnote 64: Doctrine of kissing.--Tr.]
[Footnote 65: Carl Gottlob Cramer, who died in 1817, was a very
prolific, and in his day popular, romance-writer.]
[Footnote 66: In miners' language the _men of the quill_ are the
superintendents, clerks, &c., in the Mining-office; those of _leather_
are those who wear the hind aprons of that stuff for sliding down into
the mines; those of _fire_ are the men that smelt the metal.]
[Footnote 67: That is to say, in the years of _Lucinda_, the
anti-Herders, &c.]
[Footnote 68: Jean Paul reminds us in the Preface to "Quintus Fixlein"
that "Flying Dogs" is a name for _Vampyres_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 69: John David Michaelis (knighted by the King of Sweden)
planned, in 1756, a journey to the East, in the cause of biblical
and philological science, for which he prepared a series of
questions.--Tr.]
[Footnote 70: From the iron-forges and colliers' huts.]
[Footnote 71: See Apocrypha: Tobit viii. 8.]
[Footnote 72: It was when he spoke with his father in the arbor in
behalf of Clotilda's union with Flamin,--and when he proposed to
himself, before the event, to renounce even her friendship.]
[Footnote 73: Frascati was a summer residence of the Roman Emperors in
the Campagna, on the Tusculan Mount, eight miles from Rome.--Tr.]
[Footnote 74: Architectural term.--Tr.]
[Footnote 75: _Real-schule_: practical school, for the learning of
things. "Res, non verba, quæso," was Spurzheim's motto.--Tr.]
[Footnote 76: This Institute is of course out of Jean Paul's brain; the
others are historical. The one at Schnepfenthal (in Thüringen) was
founded by Salzman, who died in 1811.--Tr.]
[Footnote 77: Septleva (Sept-le-va) is an old French term applied to
the case in the game of faro where the player gains seven times the
number he laid down.--Tr.]
[Footnote 78: In German, Muck! like the snapping noise of the dog when
flies torment his sleep.--Tr.]
[Footnote 79: Most women are not gallows-_paters_ [confessors]
properly, gallows-maters and female barrack-preachers, until they are
full of the Devil, as Sterne had the most conceits when he was not
well.]
[Footnote 80: Sixth and fifth months of the French Republican
calendar.--Tr.]
[Footnote 81: February changed to August.--Tr.]
[Footnote 82: A grated Place in Paris, where they expose the dead found
during the night, that every one may find his relative.]
[Footnote 83: Great is the soul which, like him, with none but enemies
around him, renounces all power,--greater is the people, before which
one could venture to do it. Another people would have anticipated
Sulla's lice. [Alluding to a loathsome disease which beset him late in
life, called the _morbus pediculosus_.--Tr.]]
[Footnote 84: Victor took for his union ten persons, perhaps because
exactly that number is required to make a riot. Hommel, _Rhapsod.
observat_. CCXXV.]
[Footnote 85: The 4th of August, 1789, was the memorable night in which
all the represented upper estates formally renounced their old
privileges.--Tr.]
[Footnote 86: Literally _brain-borer_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 87: Job xxxvi. 21: "Take heed, regard not iniquity; for this
hast thou chosen rather than affliction."--Tr.]
[Footnote 88: For there is no great event from a little cause, but only
great events from a million little causes, of which one always assigns
the last as the mother of the great result. Is then the priming the
charge of the cannon?]
[Footnote 89: Thistle-knobs.--Tr.]
[Footnote 90: That is to say, no sculptor could make a second nose to
fit this statue,--for the first had been broken off. At last, after
four hundred years, a child found in a great fish the marble one which
belonged to it. Labat's Travels, Fifth Part.]
[Footnote 91: Old designation of a Russian or Polish Prince.--Tr.]
[Footnote 92: Dionysius the Little, a Roman abbot, invented the
Christian era.--Tr.]
[Footnote 93: Working-man's holiday.--Tr.]
[Footnote 94: _Mummies_,--one of the titles of the "Invisible Lodge,"
given in allusion to mixing up of serious and jocose scenes and ideas,
as the Egyptians introduced a skeleton at their merry--makings.--Tr.]
[Footnote 95: Financial speculators.--Tr.]
[Footnote 96: According to Scheuchzer, Alps are the best remedy for
constipation.]
[Footnote 97: _Horæ_ are the matins in the Catholic convents.--Tr.]
[Footnote 98: Papin, the inventor of the machine for dissolving bones
to make them digestible.--Tr.]
[Footnote 99: Galley in which the Doge of Venice wedded the
waves.--Tr.]
[Footnote 100: Richter's Idyl, "The Life and Death of the contented
Schoolmaster Wutz."--Tr.]
[Footnote 101: "The very sense of being would then be a continued
pleasure, such as we now feel it in some few and favored moments of our
youth."--Shelley's Notes to Queen Mab.]
[Footnote 102: Such was the name given to the park in the Abbey which
Lord Horion in his romantic taste had begun but not finished, because
he hit upon the Island of Union. I weave this description of it only
fragmentarily in with the incidents.]
[Footnote 103: Trio.--Tr.]
[Footnote 104: In the "Invisible Lodge."--Tr.]
[Footnote 105: Worm-shaped clots of foam.--Tr.]
[Footnote 106: Originally those who bore a ticket from the Emperor
recommending them to receive bread (_panis_) from a monastery.--Tr.]
[Footnote 107: "Proper mandates of the sacred imperial majesty."--Tr.]
[Footnote 108: _Befehlhaberisch_ is the German word.--Tr.]
[Footnote 109: Defined by Grimm, "a medical warm-bath prepared over
ants and ant-hills."--Tr.]
[Footnote 110: Readiness at turns, repartee, &c.--Tr.]
[Footnote 111: A prim, affected person.--Tr.]
[Footnote 112: I. e. light girls. Jean Paul uses _Dingen_ for the
dative in the first instance, and _Dingern_ in the second.--Tr.]
[Footnote 113: For not until he came back from Kussewitz did he learn
on the island, from his father, Clotilda's relationship.]
[Footnote 114: Complementary or completing, a musical term.--Tr.]
[Footnote 115: Four points in Lotto, next to the highest.--Tr.]
[Footnote 116: The Roman who wrote much on husbandry and natural
history in a gossiping style.--Tr.]
[Footnote 117: The spot in Mecca to which every good Mussulman turns in
prayer.--Tr.]
[Footnote 118: One took the silver thread rising and falling in arcs
for one continuous rill trickling downward; but the arcs of several
diagonally leaping fountains were set at such distances, that one
became a continuation of the other.]
[Footnote 119: A term for the ear-flaps.--Tr.]
[Footnote 120: In the moonlight, plants secrete oxygen gas or vital
air.]
[Footnote 121: _Third_ in German,--the musical division of time, not
however used in our common arithmetical tables.--Tr.]
[Footnote 122: Remember the Author's "Recollections of Life's fairest
Hours against the last."--Tr.]
[Footnote 123: "_Sea_-wonders" is the German expression.--Tr.]
[Footnote 124: The translator feels how much he has sacrificed of the
simplicity of the language in this song, in endeavoring to keep the
rhyme and the silvery rhythm.]
[Footnote 125: "_Nerve_-worm," literally.--Tr.]
[Footnote 126: Pascal.]
[Footnote 127:
"Man's littleness is grandeur in disguise
And discontent is immortality."
YOUNG.]
[Footnote 128: Here ended Richter's third volume.--Tr.]
[Footnote 129: Last-First, or _the cart before the horse_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 130: The name given to a harpsichord which notes down
everything that it plays.]
[Footnote 131: The term applied to the abridged title of a book
recurring at the bottom of every sheet.]
[Footnote 132: The gradual sapping of logical strictness by moral
freedom.--Tr.]
[Footnote 133: The getting of its Eastings through the Practical
Reason.]
[Footnote 134: Opposition of laws. And yet _antinomian_ is an opponent
of law.--Tr.]
[Footnote 135: Named after its discoverer.--Tr.]
[Footnote 136: The _Zwinger_ is originally the narrow interval between
the town-wall and the town itself.--Tr.]
[Footnote 137: The sensuous images of the ancient Greek
philosophers.--Tr.]
[Footnote 138: Flamin.--Tr.]
[Footnote 139: D'Israeli, in his "Curiosities of Literature" (Art.
_Literary Follies_), ascribes this to one Gregorio Leti, who, he says,
presented a discourse to the Academy of the Humorists at Rome,
throughout which he had purposely omitted the letter R, and he entitled
it, "_The exiled R_."--Tr.]
[Footnote 140: The R disbanded.--Tr.]
[Footnote 141: A name given by the Romans to the slave who carried the
children's school-books after them.--Tr.]
[Footnote 142: "Decency adds to the pleasures of indecency; virtue is
the salt of love; but don't take too much of it.--I love in woman
bursts of anger, of grief, of joy, of fear; there is always in their
boiling blood something which is favorable to men.--It is where
_finesse_ falls short, that enthusiasm is needed.--Women are rarely
astonished at being thought weak; it is at the contrary that they are
somewhat astonished.--Love always pardons love, rarely reason."--Tr.]
[Footnote 143: Such was the title Stevens gave his satirical
college-lectures on pasteboard heads, which half London ran after.]
[Footnote 144: Lacon says: "As to time without an end and space without
a limit, these are two things that finite beings cannot clearly
comprehend. But ... there are two things much more incomprehensible,
... time that _has_ an end and space that _has_ a limit. For whatever
limits these two things must be itself unlimited, and I am at a loss to
conceive where it can exist except in space and time."--Tr.]
[Footnote 145: Peristaltic.--Tr.]
[Footnote 146: That part of the nose happens also to be called its root
in German.--Tr.]
[Footnote 147: The rough breathing (in Greek) which has a crooked
shape, thus: (').-Tr.]
[Footnote 148: The Pharisees did it,--like certain Jews, who also
always walked bent, and so were called _crooklings_,--in order to leave
a little room for God who fills the whole earth.--_Ancient and Modern
Judaism_, Vol. II. p. 47.]
[Footnote 149: Thus did Emanuel always name St. John's day, though not
with perfect astronomical accuracy.]
[Footnote 150: See Dr. Thomas Brown's Mental Philosophy on the subject
of consciousness.--Tr.]
[Footnote 151: In the second part of the second volume.]
[Footnote 152: Page 266.--Tr.]
[Footnote 153: I. e. On the dial-plate of our inner life.--Tr.]
[Footnote 154: Complementary parts in music.--Tr.]
[Footnote 155: The sun when eclipsed by the moon is beheld by us in a
crape-covered [or smoked] glass.]
[Footnote 156: The seas of our earth look in the distance like the
spots of the moon.]
[Footnote 157: The halo round the moon.]
[Footnote 158: The Upas-tree.--Tr.]
[Footnote 159: _Balloon_ (inventor of the).--Tr.]
[Footnote 160: Depreciation (of money).--Tr.]
[Footnote 161: Allusions to cloud filled with pictured lands and
islands which one sees at morning on looking down from Mount Ætna.]
[Footnote 162: A term taken from wine-making, meaning the unpressed
wine, the first runnings.--Tr.]
[Footnote 163: Chamberlains wear, as a decoration, three gold buttons
over the right pocket-lappet.--Tr.]
[Footnote 164: _Preciste_ in the original: one nominated to a benefice
in virtue of the right of first petition.--Tr.]
[Footnote 165: Original: "Gotzsurthel,"--properly
_Gottesurtheil_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 166: The dragon was an old-fashioned war-machine.--Tr.]
[Footnote 167: Color of burnt bones.--Tr.]
[Footnote 168: The old astronomers inserted between the fixed stars and
the planets a tremulous heaven, in order to have something on which to
charge the slight anomalies of the latter bodies.]
[Footnote 169: Nine dancing-women are strung together to make an
elephant for the king. One makes the trunk; four, the legs; four, the
body. History of all Travels, Vol. X.]
[Footnote 170: An old German name affixed to apothecaries, in allusion
to the alleged profits on their drugs.--Tr.]
[Footnote 171: The little finger. The German name is kept for the sake
of the allusion.--Tr.]
[Footnote 172: All this is neatly summed up in the witty Frenchman's
saying, "Gratitude is a keen sense of favors _to come_."--Tr.]
[Footnote 173: These oaths of silence, as is well known, his Lordship
had required of Victor, Clotilda, and her mother, with all that tragic
circumstance which takes so strong a hold especially on female hearts.]
[Footnote 174: Victor, Julius, Flamin.]
[Footnote 175: She well knows that it was Victor.]
[Footnote 176: This poison-tree stands in a bald waste, because it
kills everything around it; and the malefactor journeys alone to its
poison, but he seldom returns. [This has been ascertained to be
fabulous. There is a poisonous valley encircled by banks emitting a
fatal carbonic-acid gas, but no tree grows there, and the upas grows in
the woods among other trees without harming them.--Tr.]]
[Footnote 177: Lind in Kussewitz.]
[Footnote 178: Around numbers of chapels (see Schlötzer's
Correspondence, Part III. Vol. XVIII. 45) stand warehouses of wax limbs
and animals, which they buy as ear-rings and bracelets for the saints,
in order that the originals may be healed.]
[Footnote 179: Of making one's self invulnerable.--Tr.]
[Footnote 180: The Centaurs could not prostrate him with trees, but had
to press him, as he stood erect, into the earth. Orph. Argonaut. 168.]
[Footnote 181: Ankerstrœm was a Swedish regicide, born 1759, and
executed, for killing Gustavus III., in 1792.--Tr.]
[Footnote 182: The name given to a certain elevation above the sea,
determined by Bouger, at which the mountains in all zones are covered
with snow.]
[Footnote 183: _Blutschuld_,--forfeiture of life (_Schuld_ meaning both
_debt_ and _guilt_).--Tr.]
[Footnote 184: Died in 1800. He was a famous and forcible writer
against the French Revolution and the Jacobin clubs, from which latter
he drew on himself extreme odium. He wrote "Historical Sketches and
Political Observations on the French Revolution," in seventeen
volumes.--Tr.]
[Footnote 185: A piece of iron that made speaking impossible.--Tr.]
[Footnote 186: Prime Minister to Louis XIV. in the most brilliant part
of his reign;--arrogant, cruel, inflexible;--had the chief hand in
revoking the Edict of Nantes.--Madame de Maintenon overthrew him.--Tr.]
[Footnote 187: Tessin was an excellent Swedish count, born in
1695.--Tr.]
[Footnote 188: Lit. "Spiessfolgedank." So, too, citizens who act as a
military guard are called "Spiessbürger."--Tr.]
[Footnote 189: "By merit raised to that bad eminence."--Tr.]
[Footnote 190: At the University of Paris they still keep up the
_messenger from Pomerania_, who annually set out for Pomerania, &c. to
fetch the Paris students letters from their parents.]
[Footnote 191: And even there only with reference to immortality
and compensation. We feel no injustice when one being becomes a
plantation-negro, another an angel of the sun; but their creation begins
their claims, and the Eternal cannot, without injustice, purchase even
with the sufferings of the minutest creature the joys of all better ones,
if it is not made good again to the sufferer.]
[Footnote 192: The white flesh of the human body and the red veins of
blood.--Tr.]
[Footnote 193: Name given to the believers in the dogma of the
_Father's_ suffering on the cross.--Tr.]
[Footnote 194: A botanical term, meaning literally _in one house_, and
designating Linnæus's twenty-first class of plants, of which the male
and female (or barren and bearing) grow on one stock.--Tr.]
[Footnote 195: A Spanish word, equivalent to _Inamorata_ (or
sweetheart).--Tr.]
[Footnote 196: _Feder_ means, in German, both _feather_ and _pen_, as
_plume_ and _penna_, in French and Latin, mean both _feather_ and
_quill_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 197: In the original, _Nummern-vogel_ (numbered bird). As to
the 99 [i. e. per cent.] on Zeusel, see page 368.--Tr.]
[Footnote 198: Literally: _Ich mache Wind_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 199: Spies.--Tr.]
[Footnote 200: Geographical writers.--Tr.]
[Footnote 201: Patchwork,--a term applied also to poems plagiarized
from all quarters.--Tr.]
[Footnote 202: A cap worn by those who take up hives, to defend them
against stings.--Tr.]
[Footnote 203: The Lutheran and Reformed:--at the Diet of Augsburg, in
1555.--Tr.]
[Footnote 204: And I here with pleasure hold out to the public hope of
my own biography, wherewith, when I shall have lived out a few more
indispensable chapters of it, I propose to present it under the title,
Jean Paul's Acts of the Apostles, or his Actions, Experiences, and
Opinions.]
[Footnote 205: Or _lith_ographic, only _petro_ is used designedly with
a _moral_ reference.--Tr.]
[Footnote 206: Children of a European and an American Indian.--Tr.]
[Footnote 207: Children of Terceroons, who again are children of
Mulattoes and whites.]
[Footnote 208: Alluding to Justinian's new statutes.--Tr.]
[Footnote 209: _Blutjung_ is the German; a vulgarism, corresponding,
perhaps, to the English _bloody_-young,--Tr.]
[Footnote 210: Gideon Ernest Laudon (Baron) was a great soldier and
captain, born in 1716. The Emperor of Austria, under whom he chiefly
served, had the following epitaph written for him: "Gideonis Laudoni
summi castrorum præfecti, semper strenui, fortis, felicis militis et
civis optimi exemplum quod duces militesque imitentur Josephus 11 Aug.
in ejus effigie proponi voluit, anno 1783."--Tr.]
[Footnote 211: The Swan is Giulia; the Lyre of Apollo, Emanuel;
Hercules reminded one of his Lordship.]
[Footnote 212: It is estimated that one can read 60 letters in a
second, consequently a moderate octavo page in 16 seconds, therefore an
alphabet (Printer's term for 23 sheets--Tr.) in an hour 42 minutes 24
seconds. My book I assume to be one alphabet and a half strong.]
[Footnote 213: The Ten Predicaments are the various aspects or
relations under which things may be considered.--Tr.]
[Footnote 214: _Cry into himself_, is the German.]
[Footnote 215: The zodiacal light manifests the dipping of the earth
into the sun's atmosphere.]
[Footnote 216: See Vol. II. p. 74.]
* * * * *
Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.
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