Part 20

In the morning Emanuel, as cicerone of Nature, led his guest through the ruins and antiques of the earth: for every tree is an eternal antique. How different is a walk with a religious[165] man from one with a vulgar, worldly soul! The earth appeared to him holy, just fallen from the hands of the Creator; it was to him as if he were walking in a planet hanging over us and clothed with flowers. Emanuel showed him God and love everywhere mirrored, but everywhere transformed,--in the light, in--colors, in the scale of living creatures, in the blossom and in human beauty, in the pleasures of animals, in the thoughts of men and in the circles of worlds; for either everything or nothing is his shadow. So the sun paints its image on all creatures,--great in the ocean, many-colored in the dew-drop, small on the human retina, as mock-sun on the cloud, red on the apple, silvery on the stream, seven-colored in the falling rain, and gleaming over the whole moon and over all its other worlds.

Victor felt to-day, for the first time, the enlargement and transfiguration of his conscious being before a spirit which, _like_ his, but _excelling_ his, like a spherical concave mirror reflected all the features of his nobler part in colossal size. The whole vulgar portion of his nature crept away when the higher, painted by Dahore on a large scale, erected itself above the low impulses. A man whom the perihelion of a great man does not set on fire and beside himself is nothing worth. He was hardly willing to speak, so that he might only hear _him_ all the time, although he had it in mind to stay here a good many days. As before a higher being and before the woman of his love, in whose presence one will neither show his head nor his tongue, so had he, renouncing self, sunk into pure truth and love. All the varnish of the little relations of place and citizenly respectability had cracked so clean off, and they all stood before him there so moss-grown, that he would not so much as name the names of Göttingen, of Flachsenfingen, or empty incidents of life, or strange personalities. In fact, Victor had a slight contempt for men who care more for the directions to the bookbinder than for the book, and more for the review of an author than for his system, and to whom the earth is no deciphering chancery of the book of nature, but a parlor (a talking-room), a news-office of wretched personalities, which they care neither to profit by, nor to retain, nor to estimate, but merely to tell; and he was disgusted with the German societies, in which there is so little philosophizing.--Oh, how blest he was, for once to think a whole day in company with another, and, what is still finer, to be permitted to poetize with him!

His doubts upon the greatest matters which can weigh down our minds and lift up our hearts grew to-day to questions; the questions, to hopes; the hopes, to presentiments. There are truths of which one hopes that great men will be more strongly convinced than one can be one's self; and one will therefore by their conviction confirm and complete his own. Dahore held the two great truths (God and immortality) which, like two pillars, bear up the universe, firmly to his heart; but, like the rarer men to whom the truth is not merely the _shew-bread_ of vanity and the dessert of the head, but a _holy supper_ and _love-feast_ full of the _spirit of life_ for their weary heart, he cared little, if he could make no proselytes. Victor felt that _he_ understood handling the artillery-train and the electric pistols and batteries of the art of disputation better than Emanuel; he would have abhorred his own tongue if he had directed its readiness against this fair soul. He was silent for two reasons. "Undertake," said he, "to give a molten image, an altar-piece, of a great, shining truth that embraces thy whole being,--to do this on the flying second-hand whereon one stands in transient conversation, with the few dry paints wherewith human ideas are to be colored, and with the clumsy human tongue wherewith you must daub on these grains of color,--I tell you, a _silhouette_, a transparent asterism, will be all you can produce." The light heaven of certain simple-hearted men of deep feeling veils, like the outer one, all its suns, except the warmest, under the sheen of a void blue; but the unclean heaven of others full of wit and logic is bedizened with _mock-suns_, bows, northern lights, clouds, and redness.

The second, better reason why he scorned the honor of opposition was his heart, which contained in itself more than the head could throw light upon. Certain views cannot be detached so easily as wall-pictures in Italy, and transferred from one head into another. The _light_ which another can give thee _shows_, but _constructs_ not, the house-furniture of thy interior, and what the light really _creates_ with some is meteorological appearance, optical illusion, but no substance.[166]--Hence all turns not upon the showing and seeing of a truth, i. e. of an object, but upon the effects which it works through thy whole inner being. For how is it that there are men who, as Socrates did Aristides, make us better merely by our being with them?--How do great authors bring it about, that their invisible spirit in their works seizes and holds us fast, without our being able to quote the words and passages whereby they do it, as a thickly leaved forest always murmurs, though not a single branch stirs?--Why did Emanuel overmaster his beloved Horion--more than by broad thesis-formulas, _rationes decidendi_ and _sententiæ magistrales_--merely by the transfiguration in his countenance, by the low echo-tone of his voice, by the radiance of his look, and by the devotion in his breast, when he spoke solemnly truths which were old to speech and new to the heart, like the following?--

Man goes, like the earth, from _west_ to _east_; but it seems to him as if he went, with it, from east to west, from life to the grave.

What is highest and noblest in man conceals itself, and is without use for the practical world, (as the highest mountains bear no herbage,) and out of the chain of fine _thoughts_ only some members can be detached as actions.[167]

Our aimless activity, our clutchings at the air, must appear to higher beings like the clutching of dying men at the bed-clothes.

The spirit awakes and will awake when the light of the senses goes out, just as sleepers awake when the night-light is extinguished.

* * * * *

Why did these thoughts linger like things of awe in the soul?--Because Horion felt something higher than language, which is invented only for every-day sensations, can ever represent; because, even in his childhood, he hated systems which thrust out of sight all that is inexplicable; and because the human spirit feels itself as much oppressed in the explicable and finite as it is in a mine, or in the thought of the heavenly space overhead being somewhere or other boarded up.

How should he have had the heart or the occasion on such a day to ask Emanuel about his dying-day, or about Clotilda? Victor had that poetry of fellow-feeling which easily puts itself into the place of the most unlike persons, of women and philosophers. In the evening Dahore went to the abbey to teach astronomy, his most beloved science. During the astronomical school-hour the open face of Julius became an open heaven; he told his Victor everything, as if he were a second father. Now he related to him frankly that the year before an angel had again and again come to him, who grasped his hand, gave him flowers, spoke to him kindly, and at last vanished from him into heaven, but had left him a letter, which he was permitted to have read to him a year after, at Whitsuntide, by Clotilda,--yes, and that this good angel had yesterday flown by him with a kiss. Victor smiled with delight, but concealed his conjecture that _he_ looked upon the angel to be a shy, loving maiden from the boarding-school.--"But yesterday," said Victor, "I only was the angel that kissed thee _thus_!" and repeated it. Julius knew no fairer gift to make to those he loved than the picture of his father,--the portraiture of his exalted love, which forgot no human being, because it was based, not upon the superiorities, but upon the necessities, of men,--further, of his indulgence, of his disinterestedness, since a long virtue spared him the battle against his heart, and now he did nothing but what he wished to, and since the next world, hanging low down before him, preached a peculiar independence upon necessities. Five hundred thousand fixed stars of the first magnitude, according to Lambert, hardly give a light equal to that of the nearer full moon,--and so the present always outshines our inner world; but soar nearer to the fixed star of the next world, then does it grow to a sun, which transforms the moon of time and of the present into a petty nebula.--As to this Emanuel, all Maienthalers loved him (even the Parson, although he was a non-Catholic, non-Lutheran, and non-Calvinist); and he loved to be dependent on something, on others' love.[168]--During this description Victor yearned for him again with as much emotion as if they had been separated a year; accordingly, in the flush of evening he laid himself down under the birch-leaves opposite the school, in order immediately, with ardent arms, to take him prisoner.

And as Victor lifted his soul on the tall, white columns of the park planned by his Lordship, on the sublime sculpture which wrote out a great thought that looked like a tempest, and just as he had carried a bee that had dropped down, his wings being glued up with honey, to the beehive sill,--just then Dahore, with a friendly manner, came up. The latter entered, himself,--for Victor would have held the covert starting of a subject as a sin,--on that of Clotilda, and said this used to be her favorite spot, and the resting-bench of her quiet soul. The place was not grand, but, what is more, it was opposite to something grand (even physical greatness, e. g. a mountain, needs distance as a pedestal); it lay in the deepest part of the dell, encircled with Emanuel's flower-chains, which he often laid out without enclosure, because all Maienthalers respected his little joys,--breathed upon by great clover-fields,--overspread by the moon, which in spring, only after reaching the mountain-top, beamed down this deep valley with a mournful medley of birch-shadows, water-glistenings, and bright spots,--and, finally, adorned with a grassy bench, which I should not have mentioned had it not been planted at both ends with great, drooping flowers, which, with a tender feeling, no one crushed who sat down between them. How was Victor surprised or enraptured when Emanuel asked about this Clotilda! Like jewels of dew, like tears of joy, all the words of his teacher fell into his languishing heart, because they were eulogies upon her tender soul, which leads its own tears only into those of _others_, and hides them before dry hearts; upon her fine ambition, which men's criticism misconstrues into _coldness_ and women's into _pride_; and on her warmth of love, which one would not have looked for in a heart like hers, fast closed as a bud, which now confounds inanimate with animated nature, in order by the former to learn to love the latter. It touched Victor even to tears when Emanuel so warmly praised his pupil, now withdrawn from this Eden; and when he actually went on to beg, in all simplicity, that he would be the friend of _his_ friend, and now especially because he was going to die, and because she would never come back again,--for she had been here the last time merely for the purpose--on Whitsuntide, where her parents could not smile at it--of publicly taking the sacrament with the boarding-school girls,--that he would now take _his_ place towards this starward-soaring eye, this heart aspiring to eternity,--then could he have fallen at the feet of his friend and _his_ maiden friend for emotion and love.... From such lips praise bestowed upon its object always gives to love an extraordinary growth, because that sentiment always seems a pretext,[169] and ripens at once, so soon as it has found it.

If thy heart, my friend, does not beat quickly and intensely enough for another's,--although, in my opinion, it already pulsates at the fever-point, namely, a hundred and eleven times in a minute,--then just go, in order to transform thy cold fever into a warm one, thy quartan ague into a quotidian, to other particularly respected people, and let them praise her, the good soul, or only name her often before thee,--mortally sick, and provided with thy good hundred and forty pulsations to the minute, thou wilt go thy way, and have the desired fever.

The innocent Emanuel, who did not guess Victor's warmth, thought he must do still more by way of giving him the sevenfold consecration as priest of friendship for Clotilda, and gave him a--letter from her. _Thou_ couldst do it, East Indian, since thou art here a child that has been made into an angel in the _limbus infantum_ (the children's heaven), since thou hast no mysteries, excepting the mystery of the three children (hence his Lordship did not make thee the reader of his letters), and since thou dost not at all dream that the giving away of another's letter is anything wrong. Still thy scholar should not have read it.

But he did read it. He cannot defend himself by anything except by my reader, who here holds in his hand this very same letter of another who never wrote it for him, and nevertheless reads it through word for word in his chair. I, for my part, read nothing, but only copy off what the dog brings me.--It is a beautiful coincidence that this letter should have been written by her on that very same raining, melodious night of the garden-feast when he wrote his first to Emanuel.

"St. Luna, May 4, 179*.

"You will not, perhaps, expect any excuse from me, revered teacher, that, when I have hardly left Maienthal, I come back in the form of a letter. In fact, I meant to write it even while on the road, then the second day, and finally yesterday. This Maienthal will spoil for me many other valleys; all music will sound to me like an Alpine horn, making me sad, and bringing to my heart the remembrance of the Alpine life under the weeping-birch tree.

"In this mood I should not have been able to deny my heart the pleasure of opening itself and pouring itself out before yours in the warmest thanks for the most beautiful and instructive days of my life, had I not formed the resolve after some days to be in Maienthal again; after my second return home, my heart must have its will, and way.

"In our house I found nothing changed,[170] nor anything in our neighbor's; and I found in all souls the same old love with which we had parted from each other,--only my Agatha, to be sure, is merry, but yet less so than she used to be. The only change in Herr Eymann's house is a guest whom every one calls by a different name,--Victor, Horion, Sebastian, young Lord, Doctor. This last name he fully deserves by his first action and first joy in St. Luna, which was the healing of the blind Lord Horion. What a piece of happiness for the saved and for his saviour!--May this youth one day only pass through your Eden, and meet with your good Julius, so as to repeat upon him the beautiful art--Oh! as often as I think upon it, that the male sex is blest with the means of the greatest, godlike benefactions,--that they, like a god, can distribute eyes, life, justice, science,--whereas my sex must confine its heart, so yearning to do good, to lesser services,--to the drying away of a tear for another, to the concealing of its own, to the exercise of a secret patience with happy and unhappy;--then the wish rises, O that that sex which has the highest benefits in its hands would vouchsafe to us the greatest,--that of imitating itself, and getting into our hands good things which should bless us by our distribution of them!---At present, a woman can have nothing in her soul to make her great, except only wishes.

"I have just come in out of the open air from a little garden-feast at my Agatha's; and never is any fair bit of deep-blue sky exactly right to me, if it does not stand over your weeping-birch, where your eye counts up all its treasures and suns, and shows my heart all the tokens of Infinite Power and Love. To-day, in the garden, I thought with almost too sad a longing on your Maienthal; Herr Sebastian reminded me of it still oftener, because he seems to have had a teacher who resembled mine.[171] He talked very well to-day, and seemed to be made up of two halves,--a British and a French. Some of his fine observations have not gone from me,--e. g., 'Sorrows are like thunder-clouds: in the distance they look black, over our heads hardly gray.--As sad dreams betoken a glad future, so may it be with the so-often-tormenting dream of life when it is over.--All our strong feelings, like ghosts, hold sway only up to a certain hour; and if a man would always say to himself, This passion, this grief, this rapture, will in three days certainly be gone from this soul,--then would he become more and more tranquil and composed.' I report all this to you so exactly, in order, as it were, to punish myself for a too hasty judgment which I passed some days since (though within myself) on his propensity to satire.--Satire, also, seems to be merely for the stronger sex; I have never yet found one of my own who had found in the works of Swift or Cervantes or Tristram anything to her taste.--

"_Two days later_.--I and my letter are still here; but to-day it starts four days in advance of me. I cannot help thinking, This last time every flower in Maienthal, and every word my best teacher says to me, will give me still greater and deeper joy than ever, because I journey thither right from the turmoil of visiting, and with such a melancholy heart. The morning after that lovely night of the church-going festival I sat alone in an arbor near the great pond, and made myself sadder with all that I saw and thought; for during that whole morning, by reason of a dream I had had, my faded friend[172] stood before my soul,--her grave lay transparent above her, and I looked down through it, and saw that lily of heaven lying within there pale and still,--I reflected, indeed, as the gardener buried flowers with their pots in the earth, that the body in which we are planted must, in like manner, go down into the earth for future blooming, but, nevertheless, I could no longer control my tears.--In vain did I look upon the sparkling spring, which draws every day new colors, new insects, new flowers out of the earth,--I only grew sadder, since it rejuvenates everything, but not man.[173]--And when I saw Herr von Schleunes with a frog-bow approaching the pond, I was obliged, as he could see my eyes at a great distance as he passed by, to make believe asleep, in order not to betray them.... But before my dearest teacher I would have opened them as now, because he forgives me my weaknesses.

"CLOTILDA v. L. B."

Victor had kept his left hand, with which he held the letter, too near to his heart, and his arm and letter began to tremble with the thumping heart, and he could hardly read and comprehend it for emotion. "Such a teacher! such a pupil!"--beyond that his looks could say nothing more.

There was a struggle within him whether he should tell his friend his love for Clotilda. In _favor_ of the confession was Emanuel's request to seek her society,--that eye of his beholding, as if out of fixed stars, all trifles of earth,--Victor's grateful desire to repay one secret with another, and, most of all, oh! this love for his teacher, this love of his teacher for him.... And this, too, conquered, however much there was otherwise to be said _per contra_. For if Victor's whole nature glowed in the fire of friendship, so did his heart mount higher and higher, and burn to lay itself open,--he still wrestled with it, and still it was silent,--it loved boundlessly,--it lifted itself up as if by an invisible power,--at last it burst asunder,--his bosom opened wide as before God,--and now, beloved, look in, but forgive him all!

He was still in this inward conflict, when the moon, which had gone up behind their backs, projected their two shadowy knee-pieces before them.--He was reminded, by Emanuel's outstretched shadow, of a passage in his letter,[174] and of his sickly life and early passing away.... This clove open his inner being; he gently turned his Emanuel round toward the moon, now pouring down its radiance, and told him and showed him everything,--not merely his love, however, but his whole history, his whole soul, all his faults, all his follies,--everything; he was, at this moment, as eloquent as an angel, and full as great; his heart undulated in the melting glow of love; and the more he said, the more he wanted to have to say.

No sublimer and more blessed hour strikes on this earth than that in which a man erects himself, exalted by virtue, softened by love, and despises all dangers, and shows a friend how it is with his heart. This trembling, this dissolving, this exaltation, is more precious than the itching of vanity to disguise itself in idle refinings. But perfect sincerity comports only with virtue. Let the man in whom suspicion and darkness dwell by all means apply to his bosom night-screws and night-bolts,--let the bad man spare us his opening of coffins,--and whoso has no heaven's door about him to open, let him keep the hell-gate shut!

Emanuel felt the divine or motherly joy which a friend experiences at the virtue and improvement of a friend, and forgot in his joy the different occasions of it.

Reluctantly do I tear myself away for a night from this virtuous pair. May I get many more days of Maienthal to paint, and may Victor spend there many days more!

15. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Parting.

Ah, he goes this very day! The emotions and conversations which we have described had shattered too severely the tender casing which enclosed, as a tulip does the bee, Emanuel's fair spirit; he rose pale and languid; and the blind one was the happiest, who saw neither this paleness nor the white handkerchief which he, during the night, instead of staining with tears, had stained with blood. He himself had still the pale evening red of yesterday's joy on his face; but this very indifference to the gradual extinguishing of his days, this growing feebleness and faintness of tone in his conversation, caused Victor to turn away his eyes from him whenever they had for some time rested upon him. Emanuel looked down calm as an eternal sun on the autumn of his bodily life; nay, the more the sand fell from his life's hourglass, so much the more clearly did he look through the empty glass. And yet the earth was to him a beloved place, a fair meadow for our earliest plays of childhood; and he still hung upon this mother of our first life with the love wherewith the bride spends the evening full of childish remembrances on the bosom of her beloved mother, before on the morrow she goes to meet the bridegroom of her heart.