Part 18

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."--