Part 17

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.