Part 37

Man regards his century or his half-century as the culmination of light, as a festal-day, to which all other centuries lead only as week-days. He knows only two golden ages,--the one at the beginning of the world, and the one at the end of it,--by which he understands only his own; he finds history to be like great woods, in the middle of which are silence, night-birds, and birds of prey, and whose borders only are filled with light and song.--Certainly all things serve me; but I too serve all. As Nature, who in her eternity knows no loss of time, in her inexhaustibleness no loss of power, has no other law of frugality assigned her than that of prodigality,--as she, with _eggs_ and _seed-corns_, ministers equally well to _nourishment_ and to _propagation_,[290] and with an undeveloped germ-world sustains half a developed one,--as her way leads over no smooth bowling-alley, but over alps and seas;--our little heart must needs misunderstand her, whether in its hopes or in its fears; it must, as it becomes enlightened, reciprocally interchange _morning_ and _evening red_; it must, in its contentment, now regard after-summer as _spring_, and now _after-winter_ as _autumn_. _Moral_ revolutions mislead us more than _physical_, because the former according to their nature occupy a _greater_ play-room and space of time than the latter,--and yet the Dark Ages are nothing but a dipping into the shadow of _Saturn_, or an eclipse of the sun of short duration. A man who should be six thousand years old, would say to the six creation-days of the world's history, They are very good.

But one should never set _moral_ and _physical_ revolutions and developments too near to each other. All Nature has no other motions than _former_ ones; the circle is her path, she has no other years than Platonic,--but man alone is _changeable_, and the straight line or the zigzag describes his course. A sun has its eclipses as well as the moon, has its bloom and decay like a flower, but also its _palingenesia_ and renovation. But there lies in the human race the necessity of an everlasting mutation; yet here there are only _ascending_ and _descending_ signs, no culmination; they do not necessarily draw one another after them, as in physics, and have no extreme limit. No people, no period returns; in physics, all must come back again. It is only accidental, not necessary, that nations, at a certain age and stage of progress, and on a certain rotten round of the ladder, fall again,--one only confounds the _last_ step, from which nations fall, with the _highest_; the Romans, with whom not single rounds, but the whole ladder broke, were not necessitated to sink by a culture which does not equal even our own.[291] Nations have no age, or old age with them often precedes youth. Even with individuals the crab's-walk of the mind in old age is only accidental; still less has virtue in them a summer-solstice. Humanity has then the capacity of an endless improvement; but has it the hope also?--

The disturbance of the _equipoise_ of his own faculties makes the individual man miserable; the _inequality_ of citizens, the _inequality_ of nations, makes the earth miserable; just as lightnings arise from the neighborhood of the ebb and flow of the ether, and all storms from unequal distributions of air. But fortunately it lies in the nature of mountains to fill the valleys.

Not inequality of goods,--for the majority of voices and fists on the part of the poor balances in the scale the power of the rich,--but inequality of culture, does most to create and distribute the political fly-presses and forcing-pumps. The _Lex agraria_ in the fields of science passes over at last into the physical fields. Since the tree of knowledge has thrust out its branches from the school windows of philosophy and the church windows of the priesthood into the common garden, all nations have become stronger.--Unequal cultivation chains the West Indies to the feet of Europe, Helots to Spartans, and the iron hollow-head[292] with the trigger on the negro's tongue presupposes a hollow-head of another kind.

With such a frightful disparity among nations in power, wealth, culture, only a universal rush of storms from all points of the compass can terminate in a lasting calm. A perpetual balance of Europe presuppose a balance of the four remaining parts of the world, which one may, deducting small librations, promise our globe. In future men will quite as little discover a salvage as an island. One people must draw another out of pits blundering years. A more equal culture will conclude commercial treaties with more equal advantages. The longest rainy months of humanity--which always fell upon the time of national transplantations, just as one always sets out flowers on cloudy days--have spent themselves.

One spectre still remains from the midnight, which reaches far into the hours of light,--War. But the claws and bill of the armorial eagle grow on, till, like the boar's tusks, they crook up and make themselves useless. As it was calculated in regard to Vesuvius, that it contained material for only forty-three eruptions more,--so might one also reckon the number of future wars. This long tempest, which already for six thousand years has been standing over our planet, will continue to storm till clouds and earth have charged each other full with an _equal_ measure of electric matter.

_All_ nations become illuminated only in joint fermentation; and the precipitate is blood and dead men's bones. Were the earth narrowed to one half of its size, then would the time of its moral--and physical--development be shortened one half.

With wars the strongest drag-chains of the sciences are cut off. Once war-machines were the sowing-machines of new knowledges, while they crushed old harvests; now it is the press which scatters the pollen more widely and gently. Instead of an Alexander, Greece would need now to send to Asia nothing but a--compositor; the conqueror grafts, the author sows.

It is a characteristic of enlightenment that, although it still leaves to individuals the possibility of the illusion and weakening of vice, nevertheless it releases nations from company-vices and national deceptions,--e. g. from wrecking, piracy. The best and worst deeds we do in company; war is an example. The slave-trade must in our days, unless indeed the trade in subjects begins, come to an end.[293]

The highest and steepest thrones stand, like the highest mountains, in the warmest lands. The political mountains, like the physical, daily grow lower (especially when they spout fire), and must at last be with the valleys in a common plain.

From all this follows:--

There comes one day a golden age, which every wise and virtuous man even now enjoys, and when men will find it easier to live well because they will find it easier to live indeed,--when men will have, not more pleasure (for this honey they draw from every flower and leaf-louse), but more virtue,--when the people Will take part in thinking, and the thinker--in working,[294] in order that he may save himself the need of Helots,--when military and judicial murder shall be condemned, and only occasionally cannon-balls shall be turned up with the plough. When that time comes, then will a preponderance of good no more stop the machine by frictions. When it comes, then will the necessity no longer lie in human nature of degenerating again and again breeding tempests (for heretofore the noble element has merely kept up a flying fight with the overpowering evil), just as, according to Forster, even on the hot island of St. Helena[295] there are no storms.

When this festal day comes, then will our children's children be--no more. We stand now in the evening and see at the close of our dark day the sun go down with a red-hot glory, and promise us behind the last cloud the still, serene sabbath-day of humanity; but our posterity have yet to travel through a night full of wind, and through a cloud full of poison, till at last over a happier earth an eternal morning-wind full of blossom-spirits, moving on before the sun, expelling all clouds, shall breathe on men without a sigh. Astronomy promises the earth an eternal vernal equinox;[296] and history promises it a higher one; perhaps the two eternal springs may coincide.--

Since man disappears among men, we downcast ones must erect ourselves before humanity. When I think of the Greeks, I see that our hopes move faster than fate.--As one travels by night with lights over the icy Alps, in order not to be terrified at the abysses and at the long road, so does fate spread night around us, and hands us only torches for the way immediately before us, that we may not worry ourselves about the chasms of the future, and the distance of the goal.--There were centuries when humanity was led with bandaged eyes--from one prison to another;--there were other centuries when spectres rattled and overturned all night long, and in the morning nothing was disturbed; there can be no other centuries except those in which individuals die, but nations rise, and in which nations decay, but mankind rises: when mankind itself sinks and falls to ruins, and ends with the scattering of the globe in a dust-cloud ... what shall console us?--

A veiled eye behind the bounds of time, an infinite heart beyond the world. There is a higher order of things than we can demonstrate,--there is a Providence in the world's history and in every one's life which reason has the boldness to deny, and which the heart has the boldness to believe;--there must be a Providence, which, according to other rules than we have hitherto assumed, links this confused earth as daughter-land to a higher city of God,--there must be a God, a Virtue, and an Eternity.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: His collected works, Vol. III. p. 68.]

[Footnote 2: In Faust,--Scene of the Easter Holidays.--Tr.]

[Footnote 3: A Jew once separated from his wife when she appeared with bare arms; but it is difficult to ascribe the present frequent divorces in Paris to that cause.]

[Footnote 4: It is amusing to hear Jean Paul call it so, but the German diminutive, "Werk_lein_," also expresses attachment to the thing in question. Thus children say _Väter-chen_, "Little Papa; Daddy."--Tr.]

[Footnote 5: Descriptive of Venus, or written under her influence.--Tr.]

[Footnote 6: The stick on which a painter rests his arm.--Tr.]

[Footnote 7: Similarity of the parts to the whole.--Tr.]

[Footnote 8: _Fliegende Blätter_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 9: Of course, "Forgive us our debts."--Tr.]

[Footnote 10: A city of the Tauric Chersonesus, the modern Crimea.--Tr.]

[Footnote 11: A Jesuit astronomer, A. D. 1598-1671, who named the moon's spots Tycho, Plato, Hercules, St. Catharine, &c.--Tr.]

[Footnote 12: He alludes to the chimney-sweeper of his perukes.]

[Footnote 13: The name the Germans give to Death. _Hein_ would seem to mean Hal.--Tr.]

[Footnote 14: Probably peas, which the children, as now, blew through long tubes with great force.--Tr.]

[Footnote 15: In Upper Alsace, where every three years only the best youth receives the crown and medal, and the jurisdiction of the pastures.]

[Footnote 16: A sort of fire-ball, which, as it goes, emits smoke to blind the enemy.--Tr.]

[Footnote 17: Small balls invented by him to put into a horse's ear, and act as a spur.--Tr.]

[Footnote 18: An island of the Malay Archipelago, wooded, volcanic, and spicy.--Tr.]

[Footnote 19: It is notorious how little I know of mining operations; I therefore thought I had reason to apply to my superiors for a spur which might stimulate me to do something in such a weighty science,--and such a spur is certainly the office of mining-superintendent.]

[Footnote 20: Except the two emperors Silluck and Athnac, and the four kings Sgolta, Sakeph-Katon, etc., I never had intercourse with any; and that only as upper-class scholar, because we jurists, with the Devil's help, had to learn Hebrew, wherein just the above-mentioned six potentates appear as the names of the accents on words. Perhaps, however, my correspondent means the great, acute, crowned accents of nations. [_Sakeph-Katon_ is the only one the translator has not been able to verify of these interesting names. _Kauton_ is given among the Hebrew accents, but not Sakeph.--Tr.]]

[Footnote 21: Justus Möser, author of the "Patriotic Fantasies," one of Germany's dearest memories, in many respects a Franklin.--Tr.]

[Footnote 22: Lane of the mine.--Tr.]

[Footnote 23: Ass's Post.--Tr.]

[Footnote 24: Instrument for taking the distance of a star north or south from the equator.--Tr.]

[Footnote 25: Instrument for reckoning the deviation of the hour-circle from the meridian.--Tr.]

[Footnote 26: Jean Paul seems to indulge here in an hexameter himself: "Welches sie auch mehr bedarf, als der harmonische Gessner."--Tr.]

[Footnote 27: _Bewähren_ and _bewahren_ are the two German words.--Tr.]

[Footnote 28: E. g. their honor suffers, if their carriage does not pass ahead of another carriage of rank.]

[Footnote 29: Such letters as David sent by Uriah to Joab. (See 2 Samuel xi. 14, 15.)--Tr.]

[Footnote 30: _Kleeblatt_ (_trefoil_) in the German.--Tr.]

[Footnote 31: After an operation for the cataract, the sensitive retina represents everything magnified.]

[Footnote 32: A piece of charred bone or horn used by natives of the East to absorb the blood from wounds made by the bite of a snake. See Tennent's Natural History of Ceylon, p. 312.--Tr.]

[Footnote 33: The _Psalter_ in the ox's stomach is the _Blättermagen_ (lit. _leaf-stomach_), the third stomach of ruminant animals, the tripe. So we speak of the _leaves_ of fat.--Tr.]

[Footnote 34: "My spirit flew in feathers then, That is so heavy now."--Hood.]

[Footnote 35: Joint-reporter.--Tr.]

[Footnote 36: A kind that heads in the form of a capuchin's hood.--Tr.]

[Footnote 37: When one's five numbers are all drawn in their order, it is a quinterne.--Tr.]

[Footnote 38: _Aufgebunden_ may mean either tied up or untied.--Tr.]

[Footnote 39: Burlesque and serious operas.--Tr.]

[Footnote 40: Or, figure in history.--Tr.]

[Footnote 41: The ideal of the beautiful.]

[Footnote 42: As the Rabbins believe, according to Eisenmenger's Judaism, Part II. 7.]

[Footnote 43: _Usance_ means the month's grace allowed for the payment of a bill of exchange; double usance, of course, allows two months.--Tr.]

[Footnote 44: Petrarch, like German reviewers, avoided nightingales, and sought frogs.]

[Footnote 45: "Schatten_riss_ oder Schatten_schnitt_" is the German.--Tr.]

[Footnote 46: The literal rendering would be "_cut out of the eyes_, or, rather, out of the face." The phrase in Italics is a German idiom for expressing an exact likeness.--Tr.]

[Footnote 47: The readers of Boswell's Johnson will remember that interesting native of the South-Sea Islands.--Tr.]

[Footnote 48: Matthieu being the French for _Matthew_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 49: _Zeusel_ was a court-apothecary, mentioned on page 7, of whom we shall hear more.--Tr.]

[Footnote 50: An Italian word, meaning literally gallant, applied to those Platonic lovers who, with the connivance of the husbands, attended married ladies, and were everywhere seen in confidential chat with them.--Tr.]

[Footnote 51: La Mettrie was a noted medical man and materialist in his day, b. 1709.--Tr.]

[Footnote 52: Remember the beautiful passage in Bede's History, where the Northumbrian prince compares man's life to the flight of the swallow through the lighted hall out of darkness into darkness.--Tr.]

[Footnote 53: An allusion, perhaps, to the legend, so lovely to the fancy, that a crucifix in Naples, when Alphonso was besieged there, in 1439, bowed its head before a cannon-ball, which consequently took off only the crown of thorns!--_Voyage d'un François_, Tom. VI. p. 303.]

[Footnote 54: This clover insures him who accidentally finds it against future deception. Hitherto it has been found only by--princes and philosophers.]

[Footnote 55: _Matz_, in German, means also both a starling and a blockhead.--Tr.]

[Footnote 56: Elegant paper for the upper classes.--Tr.]

[Footnote 57: In the original, "hang hares' tails on us," i. e. "make fools of us."--Tr.]

[Footnote 58: Literally, spit-devils,--a sort of firework.--Tr.]

[Footnote 59: I. e. Birthday-festival.--Tr.]

[Footnote 60: Not one of the commonplace souls that jog steadily on like the hexameter.--Tr.]

[Footnote 61: This was a common practice of our old New England Puritan parsons.--Tr.]

[Footnote 62: Disciples of Kennicott, the well-known English verifier of the general accuracy of the Sacred Text.--Tr.]

[Footnote 63: A trap extemporized by setting up a heavy book obliquely, with one end resting on a stick, and the cheese attached.--Tr.]

[Footnote 64: Christina, daughter of Charles XII., abdicated in May, 1654, at the age of twenty-eight.--Tr.]

[Footnote 65: A famous and popular old volume delineating the world of nature and life in pictures, with numbers referring to the different parts of each picture.--Tr.]

[Footnote 66: That is, threw into them, as into scrap-baskets, the bits of paper on which he had written his thoughts.--Tr.]

[Footnote 67: Allusion to Ezekiel.--Tr.]

[Footnote 68: Literally, _God's-box_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 69: _Gesprungen_ seems to mean both _vibrated_ and _snapped_.]

[Footnote 70: _Haupt_- und _Staat-actionen_, the phrase used by Faust in his first dialogue with Wagner. Schlegel says the title was affixed to dramas designed for marionettes when they treated heroic and historical subjects.--Tr.]

[Footnote 71: Epiglottis.--Tr.]

[Footnote 72: What has come into the world feet foremost.--Tr.]

[Footnote 73: Basselisse (French).--Tr.]

[Footnote 74: _Ladenhüter_ (shop-keeper) is the German word, meaning goods that keep the store as a sick man keeps his bed,--_shop-ridden_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 75: A court that decided matters in dispute among the sovereigns of the German Confederation.--Tr.]

[Footnote 76: A selection of choice learning.--Tr.]

[Footnote 77: Midsummer-day.--Tr.]

[Footnote 78: A name given by the Greeks to the Hebrew word Jehovah, which consists, in the original, of _four letters_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 79: The thumb of a hanged thief was considered as a lucky-bone.--Tr.]

[Footnote 80: Full.--Tr.]

[Footnote 81: Or it _went a begging_, as we say.--Tr.]

[Footnote 82: "Rara avis."--Tr.]

[Footnote 83: See page 67.--Tr.]

[Footnote 84: It is precisely the possession of _heterogeneous_ faculties in _similar_ degree that makes one inconsequent and inconsistent; men with one predominant faculty act by it with more equableness. In despotisms there is more quiet than in republics; at the hot equator there is a more even rate of the barometer than in the zones of four seasons.]

[Footnote 85: One of Burns's words.--Tr.]

[Footnote 86: The bust of the Vatican Apollo, by which he would learn to model no other figure than his own.]

[Footnote 87: There is something in the use and application of the word _Wissenschaft_ which requires for its appreciation an understanding of the peculiar genius of the German mind.--Tr.]

[Footnote 88: Bacon's remark will recur to the reader.--Tr.]

[Footnote 89: A solar system is only a dotted profile of the genius of the world, but a human eye is his miniature. The _mechanics_ of the bodies of the universe the mathematical masters of reckoning may calculate, but the _dioptrics_ of the eye, growing bright amidst nothing but dull moistures, transcends our algebraic audit-offices, which therefore cannot reckon away from the imitated eyes (the glasses) the space of diffusion and the narrow field.]

[Footnote 90: Jean Paul would probably have said Rubicon if he had not been going to say it elsewhere,--e. g. p. 199.]

[Footnote 91: Hieronym. cont. Jov. L 2.]

[Footnote 92: _Hof_ means in German _both_ court--and yard.--Tr.]

[Footnote 93: Bayle's Dictionary, Art. _François d'Assise_, Note C.]

[Footnote 94: A half-way house.--Tr.]

[Footnote 95: Jean Paul probably means, that such noble hearts as Victor's Le Baut might shut up into silence, but could not with his Chamberlain's master-key open and find out their secrets.--Tr.]

[Footnote 96: In a later edition Jean Paul substitutes for _Schein-tod_ (sham death) a half French word, _Postiche-tod_ (supposititious death).--Tr.]

[Footnote 97: "On whose board he had a _stone_," literally,--a proverb for being in one's good graces.--Tr.]

[Footnote 98: There is an inconsistency in date of month here with p. 135.--Tr.]

[Footnote 99: The dog as well as myself know what island that is, but no more.]

[Footnote 100: "Burning-chambers," a name originally given to the place for judging criminals of state belonging to illustrious families. The room was lined with black, and lighted with flambeaux. Originated with Francis I. in 1535, in his persecution of heretics.--Tr.]

[Footnote 101: Plebeian.--Tr.]

[Footnote 102: One at hearing from Emanuel, the other at seeing Clotilda.--Tr.]

[Footnote 103: Red drops fall from butterflies in their last transformation, which they used to call bloody rain.]

[Footnote 104: When one looks a long time into the blue of heaven, it begins to undulate, and these waves in the air one imagines in childhood to be angels at play.]

[Footnote 105: This monologue is a fragment from an earlier dark hour, such as every heart of sensibility once suffers.]

[Footnote 106: _Noth-münzen_ means originally coin containing alloy, struck off in hard times.--Tr.]

[Footnote 107: The Hebrew language has but three vowels ("vowel-points") which, from the assistance they gave in enunciating a vast variety of words, were called _matres lectionis_, or mothers of the reading.--Tr.]

[Footnote 108: I. e. bowing so low.--Tr.]

[Footnote 109: Herkommen, as a common noun, means _tradition_ or _custom_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 110: An infusorial or minute animal, called in natural history _rotifera_ (wheel-bearer).--Tr.]

[Footnote 111: _Famulus_ is the Latin name in the German. Wagner was one in Faust.--Tr.]

[Footnote 112: So called in allusion to the _shaking_ they were giving it.--Tr.]

[Footnote 113: _Kopfstück_ (lit. _head-piece_), a coin bearing the head of the regent.--Tr.]

[Footnote 114: The billiard-pockets (like the contribution-bags) used to have bells to them.--Tr.]

[Footnote 115: Who felt himself to be "a child picking up pebbles on the shore of the great ocean of truth."--Tr.]

[Footnote 116: A conventual term,--a six.--Tr.]

[Footnote 117: God bless you!--Tr.]

[Footnote 118: Many thanks!--Tr.]

[Footnote 119: Of course a parody on "Verbum sat _sapienti_,"--"A word for the _fool_," &c.--Tr.]

[Footnote 120: Or reading-_easel_ (the latter word seeming to be an English corruption of the German _Esel_, ass),--any book-rest. _Maler-esel_ means a painter's easel.--Tr.]

[Footnote 121: When they occur in actual life.--Tr.]

[Footnote 122: Eclectic or miscellaneous science, not confined to one department.--Tr.]

[Footnote 123: A King of France once sent a vassal _illum baculum, quo se sustentabat, in symbolum traditionis_. (Du Fresne's Glossary.) So far as I know, there has never been made a good and serviceable--abridgment of this _glossarium_ for ladies.]

[Footnote 124: Just as there are _listening sisters_ (_les Tourières_ or _S[oe]urs écoutés_) who go with the nuns into the conversing room, to overhear their talk.]

[Footnote 125: Or absentee-curates.--Tr.]

[Footnote 126: Literally _looker-on_,--one admitted to behold the secret ceremonies in the Eleusinian mysteries.--Tr.]

[Footnote 127: To know how to obey is a glory equal to that of commanding.--Tr.]

[Footnote 128: "Slaves are accounted nobodies."--Tr.]

[Footnote 129: In real life.--Tr.]

[Footnote 130: _To make one a queue_ is a proverb for imposing on him (like pinning a rag to one's coat-tail?).--Tr.]