Part 33

So soon as he knew this, he left me to travel on alone, under my tin bee-cap and Moses's veil, and hurried forward to the Prince just one minute before it was too late. For Matthieu had betrayed all; and they were just on the point of sending to arrest the three twins, on the island where they had taken refuge, and our Victor at his mother's house, wherein he had already forgotten court and nobility for patients and sciences and bride, when his Lordship sent in his name to the Prince. The Prince was afraid of being persuaded by him, as Cæsar was of Cicero. His Lordship--whose soul, indeed, was a _petrographic_[205] chart of sublime ideas--confounded the measures of the Prince by a more daring and defiant boldness than these measures had reckoned on. He began with the intelligence, that he brought not merely _one_ son to the Prince, but all; which last thing he had not promised, for the reason that he could not know how far fate would perhaps leave or lead him.--He forced the Prince to listen to a long and cold discourse, wherein he laid before him the plan of study for the five sons, and their development, history, and destiny; while he seemed to presuppose the proofs of their extraction, he however wove them elaborately into the inferences he drew from it. Thus, e. g., he said, no one had known about the important secret but her Ladyship and Clotilda and Emanuel, whose sacred documents, sealing all with death, he here presented him, together with others for the children; only a certain court-page had, during his blindness, stolen and abused one of five secrets. His Lordship did not pluck to pieces this snare of a soul, because, as he said, it was too insignificant for satisfaction, too black-dyed for punishment, and because he himself besides would soon depart out of these regions forever. In short, with his omnipotence he took such a hold of the Prince, and drew all veils so clean off from the past, that he almost compelled him, instead of condemning or acquitting, merely to deprecate and to exchange accusation and mistrust for gratitude. The single good thing, Lord Horion said in conclusion, which the Page had done, was, that, by his weed-sowing-machines, he had ripened and expedited the great and fair recognition precisely for a monthly period, when the festoon of the five shoulders (the maternal moles) were in full bloom. The Prince, in spite of the other party's iciness, was melted, for his paternal love was enriched with new treasures. Nevertheless, he mixed in with his thanks this delicate reproach against Victor's pretended nobility: "I am full of gratitude for you, although you deprive me too soon of the opportunity of showing it. Hitherto I have rejoiced that I could at least prove to the son how very much indebted, if not grateful, I was to the father. But you know my error." His Lordship--now made more pliant by victory--replied: "I know not whether good intentions and bad circumstances excuse me; but I could regard him only as worthy to be your body physician, whom I-- acknowledged worthy to be my son."--The Prince embraced him cordially; his Lordship reciprocated it quite as warmly, and said: "On the 31st of October," (that is to-day, and he said it yesterday,) "he would seal his honest sentiments toward the Prince in a manner more decisive than words."----

Noble man! Thou consumest nothing on the earth beyond thyself, and art a storm-bird, through whose fat a wick of the lamp is threaded, and which is now burned out and carbonized by its own light,--I have a presentiment, as if thy fair soul would soon be on another, _higher Isle of Reunion_ than this earthly one!

I write this on the' forenoon of the 31st of October, at ten o'clock, on the island.

* * * * *

EVENING, AT SIX O'CLOCK, IN MAIENTHAL.

Wherewith will this book end at last?--with a tear or with an exultation?--

Dr. Fenk, until two o'clock (for not till then would his Lordship arrive), threw the brown or lump-sugar of humor upon our minutes and sorrows; his whimsical red face was the violet sugar-loaf paper of sweetness. My good Victor was with Clotilda in Maienthal. Fenk kept up one continued laugh at me as a dauphin. He makes many similes, he says: "I should not, until the end of a book and of the whole play, get my true title, as they do not print the general title-page of the journals till the last number,--or," he says, "like a pawn at chess, I should not be promoted until the last row to be an officer." It is, however, very well known to me from history, that in France, even under Louis XIV., the present system of equality already existed, though first with reference to princes, whom the king made equal, whether they entered upon life as Mestizoes[206] or Creoles, or Quatroons[207] or Quintoons, or as born to the throne. As now one can produce new laws and novellæ[208] of imperial statute quite as well in Germany as beyond its limits, it might well happen in my lifetime that legitimated princes should be declared competent to the throne,--whereby I of course should come to be ruler. It were well for Flachsenfingen if that should happen, because I will buy me beforehand the best French and Latin works on government, and study the subject in them so well that I cannot fail. I think I may venture to take it upon me to set the poor human race, which is forever living in the _first of April_, and which never gets out of its standing-stool or go-cart,--the only change being the addition of more wheels to the cart,--on its legs again a little by my sceptre. Time was when a nobleman and the horse of an English riding-master were capable of doffing the hat, of firing a pistol, of smoking tobacco, of telling whether there was a damsel in the company, &c.; but now-a-days horse and nobleman have come to be so distinguished from each other by culture, that it is a true honor to be the latter, and that it does not harm my nobility (though I feared it in the beginning) that I have more than common learning. In our days the head-horses of the nobility are no longer harnessed on so far ahead of the citizenly wheel-horses to the chariot of state as they were a hundred years since; hence duty, or at least prudence, dictates (even for a new nobleman like me) that he (or I) should let himself down, and hide the consciousness of his rank (why should not I succeed in that as well as another?) under the grace of an easy and complaisant good-breeding, and in fact take no airs upon himself about any ancestors, except for the _future_ ones, of whose collective merits I cannot think greatly enough, because the earth is still mighty young,[209] and just in petticoats, and, like the Poles, in Polish frock.

To return: at two o'clock, his Lordship came with his blind son, like Philosophy with Poesy. Beautiful, beautiful youth! innocence has sketched thy cheeks, love thy lips, enthusiasm thy forehead. His Lordship, with his Laudon's[210] forehead, and with a face more obscured and shaded to-day than in Hof, on which the honeymoon of youth and the passion-weeks of later age threw a confused chiaroscuro,--he came to us to-day almost warmer than usual, although with features expressive of nothing but the feeling that life is an intercalary day, and that he loves only philanthropy, not men. He said, we must do him and the Hof-medicus the pleasure of visiting the latter this very day in Maienthal, and bringing him hither, because he had still to complete here without eyewitnesses all sorts of arrangements for the arrival of the Prince; we must, however, come back again with Victor in the night, because our distinguished father would arrive very early in the morning. The blind one, as blind, could stay where he was. It did not occur to me, that he concealed from the good, darkened Julius, that he was his father, for he said, with double and treble meaning: "As the good creature has once already had to endure the pain of losing a father, we must not a second time expose him to this sorrow." But _this_ did strike me, that he begged us to requite him for what he had hitherto sought to do in behalf of Flachsenfingen, by doing _this_ ourselves, and assuring him with an oath, that in the public offices which we should get, we would fulfil his cosmopolitan wishes, which he delivered to us in writing, at least until such time _as he should see us again_. The Prince had been obliged to give him the same solemn assurance. We looked up at him as at a beclouded comet, and took the oath with sorrow.

We entered on the road to Maienthal. An Englishman related to us that he had seen behind the mourning-thicket--the sleeping chamber of the blind one's mother, his Lordship's beloved, who rests beneath a black marble slab--a second marble set up, which the crape-veils sweeping over it were meant to cover, but could not. O then did each of us look round him with a heavy heart toward the island, as towards an undermined city, ere it is blown to pieces and hurled into the air.--But my longing to behold Victor and Maienthal, that labyrinthine flower-garden of my warmest dreams, drowned the anxious apprehension.

At last we climbed the southern mountain, and the variegated Eden, with its fulness of foliage and with the multitude of its pulsating twigs, grew with a murmur down into the valley.--Up yonder among the boughs lay, like a nightingale's nest, Emanuel's peaceful cottage, in which was now my Victor,--nearer to us rustled the chestnut avenue, and without, overhead, reposed the mowed churchyard.--To me, who had seen all this hitherto only in the dream of fancy, it seemed now again as if dreams were coming on; and the opaque ground became a transparent one, full of shapes created out of vapor,--and I sank full of sadness on the hill.... I went down at last as into a promised land, but my whole soul was swathed in a soft funeral veil.

--And my Victor tore away the veil, and pressed his warm soul to mine, and we melted together into one glowing point.--But I will, by and by, when he comes back from the abbey, once more and still more warmly fall on his breast, and then at length truly tell him my love.... O Victor, how gentle thou art, and how harmonious, how ennobled, how beautiful in the tear of joy, how great in thy inspiration!--Ah, love of man, thou that givest to the inner man the Grecian profile, and to his motions lines of beauty, and to his charms bridal ornaments, redouble thy wondrous and healing powers in my hectic breast, when I see fools, or sinners, or uncongenial men, or enemies, or strangers!

Victor, who never made the anxiety of a man still greater, gave us some satisfaction about his Lordship. He went to the convent to Clotilda, to announce our visit to her and the Abbess,--the lateness of the visit he excuses by the necessity of a nightly return. Till he comes back, I suspend my story. My eyes followed him on his way to the betrothed; and his hand, his eye, and his mouth were full of greetings for every one, especially for despised people, for old men, for old widows. The joy of my hero becomes mine. Time is working at the beautiful day, when his heart shall forever melt into one with the betrothed, when, without a remaining link of the sundered flea- and ape-chain of the court, he shall walk freely through nature, be nothing but a man, make nothing but curves, instead of _cour_, love nothing but the whole world, and be too happy to be envied. Then will I, for once, my Bastian, eat with thee at evening in the moonlight, under the steam and the hum of the linden, and seat myself on the bales of freshly unpacked and printed Dog-Post-Days. For the rest,--although I did let my own inner man sit to paint his by,--I am but a wretched, dissolved, wiped-out slate-copy of him, only a very freely paraphrased interpretation of this soul; and I find that a cultivated parson's son is, at bottom, better than an uncultivated prince, and that princes are not, like poets, born, but made.

I hope I have material enough to keep me writing till he comes back. I have, in fact, in this biography, as supernumerary copyist of Nature, all along borrowed from reality,--e. g. for Flamin's character I had in my head a captain of dragoons,--in the case of Emanuel, I thought of a great man dead, a celebrated writer, who, the very day when I with sweet, shuddering entrancement wrote Emanuel's dream of annihilation, went from the earth and half under it,--the goddess Clotilda I compounded of two female angels, and I shall see for myself, in a few minutes, whether I hit them. It is provoking, that in conversations, from the force of habit, I give to the people of this book the names they bear in the Dog-Post-Days; whereas Flamin is properly called * *, and Victor * *, and Clotilda actually * *. It were to be wished--I have not sworn not to do it--that I could, after the death of some moral _blasés_ and plague-infected personages of these volumes, or after my own, make known to the world the true names. If I do it, then will learned Europe be initiated into all the reasons, which the political world already knows, that have kept the Mining-Superintendent from letting fall upon some parts of his history (especially upon the court) so much light as he might actually have given; and I am curious to see whether, after the _exposé_ of these reasons, the newspaper correspondent A. and the secretary of legation Z.--the two greatest enemies of the Flachlsenfingen court, and of me personally--will still assert that I am stupid. Nay, I am bold enough to appeal publicly here to the * * agent in * * to say whether I have not wholly left out many persons in the history, who had acted a part in it, and who had entered into the actual machinery of my biographical sugar-mill as undershot wheels; nay, more, I even give my pair of adversaries permission to name to the world the personages I have left out,--who have some power to do injury,--if this two-head vulture has the heart to do it....

The good Spitzius Hofmann is now wagging his tail, and leaping up before me. Good, industrious Post-Dog! Jean Paul's biographical Egeria! I will, as an encouraging example, so soon as I have time, flay thee and stuff thee neatly, and fill thee as with a sausage-filling of hay, in order to set thee up in a public library as thine own bust beside other distinguished scholars!--Meusel is a reasonable man, to whom I will apply, in a private and autographic communication, for a seat in his Learned Germany for Spitz. This scholar will not be able, any better than I, to see why such a diligent hod-carrier and compiler and forwarder of learning as my dog is should suffer a more pitiful and colder fate than other learned hod-carriers, merely because he bears a tail, which represents his posterior-toupee. That is all which gives the poor beast an inferior place in the scale of literati.

--I now see Victor escorted with lights through the bowers of the garden. I will only throw out, as hastily as possible, the further statement, that I am sitting in the sacristy of Emanuel, which is latticed with leafless shrubbery. Hurry not so, Sebastian, thou that, in respect to thy previous transformations, resemblest the three or four pseudo-Sebastians in Portugal; hurry not, that I may still simply say to my sister, "Thou beloved ex-sister, thy crazy brother writes himself _von_, but thou hast lost only his breast, not his heart. When I come to Scheerau, I will care for nothing, but weep on thee during the embrace, and finally say, It is no matter. My spirit is thy brother, thy soul is my sister; and so, change not, sisterly heart."

--The good Victor walks hastily, Ah, men whom sorrow has often chilled have neither in their bodily nor moral motions the slow symmetry of prosperous fortune, just as people who wade in the water take great broad strides.--Poor Victor! why dost thou now weep so, that thou absolutely canst not dry thy tears?...

* * * * *

FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, IN THE ISLAND OF REUNION.

Ah, it is long ago that I asked, "Will this book close with a tear?"--Victor came back at eight o'clock last night with two great immovable tears on the brink of his eyelid, and said: "We will just hasten back somewhat rapidly to the island. Clotilda herself begs us to do so, and to take another time for seeing her."--"A misfortune," I have dreamed, "is just now rearing itself large and high like a sea-serpent, and flinging itself upon human hearts, as that does upon ships, and crushing them under." She had grown every minute more anxious and oppressed, as one becomes in a damp spot over which the lightning darts and hisses. What else did this imply, than that his Lordship had disclosed to his faithful friend things which we feared this night to experience? And we could none of us any longer conceal from ourselves the fear that his weary spirit meant perhaps, like Lycurgus, to stamp the seal of his corpse upon his assurance that we were January's sons, and, moreover, on our oath to be good, and on that of the Prince to obey my brothers, till he should return.

"Weep not so sorely, Victor," said I; "it is not, after all, yet certain." He quietly dried his eyes, and merely said: "We will, then, now go to the island,--it is already nine o'clock."

We went along, far, far aside from the spotted weeping-birch, which threw its torn-off leaves toward the wasted remains of the great man. Victor could not look that way for sorrow; but I looked with a chill trembling where it swayed in the serene night-heavens. Not until after some days, when Victor had become happier; had the dust of Emanuel contracted itself again, as it were, into a pale form, and erected itself out on the burial-green, and opened wide its arms for its old darling,--and Victor moaned and pined, and sought vainly to press the white shadow to his dying breast.

He smiled sadly, as he sought to divert us and himself by the words, "Foolish man ducks like a bird, if calamity only approaches him from afar off." His tears made him a blind man, and Flamin and I were his guides; nevertheless he greeted in his pain a night-express.

I have said nothing (for I cannot) of the _garden of termination_, of the withered scene of faded, leafless days of joy.

Over the stubble and over the chrysalides of night-butterflies (the jugglers of future spring-nights), and over the steadfast, subterranean winter sleep, swept the solitary night-winds.--Ah, man might well think, "Breezes, come ye not hither over graves, over precious, precious graves?--"

I said, "How slender is the pale-green interval of earth between human bodies and human skeletons!"--Victor said, "Ah, Nature has so much repose, and why has our heart so little?"

It was near midnight. The heavens glittered nearer to the earth; the _Swan_, the _Lyre_, _Hercules_,[211] beamed from where they had gone down through another blue of heaven. Great heaven,--said every heart,--dost thou belong to the human spirit, dost thou one day receive it, or art thou only like the ceiling-picture of a minster, which hides the limiting walls, and opens out with colors the prospect of a heaven which does not exist?--Ah, every Present makes our soul so small, and only a Future makes it so great.

Victor was beside himself, and said again: "Repose! neither joy nor sorrow can give thee, but only hope. Why is not all at rest within us, as around us?"

At that moment the knell of a shot, repeated by all the echoing woods, rang through the silent night,--and the Isle of Union swam up in the night-blue, and its white temple hung over it,--and beside the mourning-thicket, which grew up over the mouldering remains of a youthful heart, nine slender flames, which ran up on the nine crape-veils, shot up toward heaven, as if they were _feux de joie_ to a festival of _peace_.

Pale, hurrying, sighing, and silent, we touched the first shore of the island. The water was sucked up dry by the ground. The black Eastern gate had flung itself wide open, and leaned and hid its white painted sun against the trees. Many funeral torches, on white lustres, attached themselves to the Eastern gate, went in through the long green avenue, flickered over ruins, sphinxes, and marble torsos, and ended darkly in the mourning-thicket.

Fluttering music of Æolian harps was permeated at the entrance by long tones. Under the Eastern gateway the blind one rested quietly and played joyously on his flute,--just as a dove flies into the thunder.

He fell joyfully on the neck of his Victor, and said: "It is good that thou comest; a tall, still man has lain a quarter of an hour on my heart, and wept into my hand, and given me a leaf for thee."

Victor snatched the leaf; it read: "You have all sworn to fulfil my requests until such time as you hear my voice again; but uncover not the black marble."--His Lordship had given it to the blind son. Victor cried: "O father! O father! I could not then make thee any requital!" and sank upon the breast of the son. He was about to tear himself away again, but the blind youth hung around him, and smiled with glad unconsciousness into the night.--We hastened into the mourning-thicket,--and, by the dim light of the two funeral torches that were burning down therein, we saw that a second grave had been scooped out there, the fresh earth of which lay near by,--that a black marble covered the hollow, and that the black dress of his Lordship peeped out a little way from the opening, and that in there he had killed himself.--And on his black marble stood, as upon the marble of his beloved, an ashy-pale heart, and below the heart stood in white letters the words:

"IT IS AT REST."

THE END.

APPENDIX.

ADDITIONAL NOTES TO "TITAN."

ADDITIONAL NOTES TO "TITAN."

Reluctant to encumber the pages of a romance with more Notes than seemed absolutely necessary, the present translator, in giving to the public his version of Titan, was (he has had reason to think) too chary of helps to the reader. Having, moreover, gained new light himself on some points since that translation was made and printed, he ventures to insert here (having a little spare space) a few explanatory or illustrative (occasionally corrective) Notes, principally to the first volume of Titan, which has generally proved more difficult than the second.

[The translator's reason for giving such Notes here, rather than in a (possible) third edition of Titan, is that a great many more of the buyers of the first editions of that work will also (may it not be presumed?) buy Hesperus than would be likely to see a third edition of Titan; and therefore the present way of furnishing the additional matter seemed to be the fairest to all parties.]

INTRODUCTORY AND GENERAL NOTE.

In a note to Vol. II. p. 174, occurs an allusion to certain _Comic Appendices_ to Titan. There is a special good reason for recalling the reader's attention to that subject, inasmuch as that appended matter contains, slyly hid away by the waggish J. P., what is generally regarded as an important part of a work. These Comic Appendages contain apparently nothing essentially connected with the story of Titan, but only satirical hits at men and things in connection with the names of persons and places that occur in the work. For the sake, however, of one interesting thing found there (beside the aforesaid Preface), we will simply state that the "COMIC APPENDIX TO TITAN" consists of two (so-called) little volumes, the first of which ends with a "Preface to Titan," and after the second follows, as an "Appendix to the First Comic Appendix of Titan," a "CLAVIS FICHTIANA, SEU LEIBGEBERIANA" (_Key to Fichte, or Leibgeber_,--Leibgeber, alias Siebenkäs, alias Schoppe, being so much a quiz of the philosopher Fichte in the Titan itself).

The "Preface" is as follows:--

"PREFACE TO TITAN.