Part 3

The Ephemera.--Relative Conclusions.--Doubts of the Length of the Chain of Living Beings.--The Wart-Eaters.--The Cure.

The sun and the valley surrounded us with their burning-glasses, and it was pleasant to sit down in a shady spot, and eat; and as just opposite to us was a marble-quarry, and close to the iron rock-wall a sap-green meadow, and beside us a group of elms and a little shining solitary white house, we asked at it for as much food as a roaming, contented quintet requires. The mistress of the house was alone, the husband was at work (as most Campanians are, in Spain), four children waited on us; our ice-cellar was opened, and with its contents the soul was warmed and the body cooled. The white glowing keystone of the heaven arch awoke with its flames the noonday wind, which slept on the cold summit of the Pyrenees.

Little or nothing would taste well to poor Phylax, to whom it was more important to prove that he would be eternal. Fortunately, the French wine armed him more with French customs, and he asked the Baron politely: "I believe I owe M. Karlson some proofs of our immortality. Might I be allowed to give them?" Wilhelmi sent him to Gione, saying, "Ask there." Gione willingly granted his request, and said, "Why should not recollections of immortality ornament our joys as much as monuments do English gardens?" Nadine threw in the question, "But if men quarrel about the hopes of humanity, what remains for women?" "Her heart and its hopes, Nadine," said Gione. Wilhelmi said, smiling: "The owl of Minerva, as all other owls, is said to forebode destruction to a household, by settling on its roof. But I hope it is not so." I added, "The lives of all our beloved ones are tied to the obelisk of immortality, as to that of Rameses,[14] that the danger may double our strength; for they will be destroyed if it rebound."

In the mean time, Karlson had taken an ephemeral fly from a neighboring elm, to which it had clung, in order to cast off its super body before death. The ephemera should not be an embodiment of our immortality,[15] but of our unfolding; for, unlike other insects, after all its transformations, and when already furnished with wings, it changes its shape once more before death. He held it before us, and said: "In my opinion, a philosophical ephemera would argue thus. What! I should have uselessly accomplished all my various changes, and the Creator had no other intention in calling me from the egg to the grub, then to a chrysalis, and at last to a flying being, whose wings must burst another covering before death, with this long range of spiritual and corporeal developments, he should have had no other aim than a six hours' existence, and the grave must be the only goal of so long a long a course?" The Chaplain opportunely answered, "Your argument proves against yourself, for it is _petitio principii_ to presuppose mortality amongst ephemera."

I confess I am an enemy to these relative conclusions, because they take as much from truth as they give to eloquence, for contrary opinions can be proved by them. To one whose eyes are hurt by a grain of sand, I can prove that he is comparatively happy, as there are many in the world who suffer from sand-blisters and gravel; and also that he is unfortunate, as Sultanic eyes are never pressed by anything harder than Circassian eyelids--or two rosy lips. Thus I can make the world immense in comparison to bullets, grains of poison, or round puddings, or minute, if placed beside Jupiter, the sun, or the milky-way. If the ephemera on the ladder of existence would turn its back on the brilliant development of the beings above it, and only count the important ones on the steps beneath it, it would increase in its own importance. In short, our oratorical fantasy continually mistakes the distinction between more and less for that of something or nothing; but every relative conclusion must be based on something positive, which only eternal eyes, which can measure the whole range of innumerable degrees, can truly weigh. Indeed, there must be some bodily substance, and were it even the earth; for every comparison, every measurement, presupposes a fixed, unchanging standard. Therefore, the ephemeral development is a true one, and the conclusions on it are the same as on a seraphic one. The difference in the degrees can only bring forth _relative_, not _opposite_ conclusions. And here, in this letter--for in print I would not dare to do it--I will acknowledge a doubt. No one has ever _seen_ the steps of the ladder of beings above us,--no one has _counted_ those beneath us. What if the former were less, the latter greater, than we have hitherto imagined. The eternal promotion of souls from angels to archangels, in short, the nine philosophical hierarchies have only been asserted, but not proved. The common opinion, that the immense difference between man and the Eternal must be filled up by a chain of spiritual giants, is false; as no chain can shorten the distance, much less fill it, for it will ever retain the same width; and the seraph, i. e. the highest finite being according to human thoughts, must imagine just as many, if not more, beings above him, as I do beneath me. Astronomy, this sawing machine of suns, this ship's wharf and laboratory of earths, would persuade us that the _enlargement_ of worlds and beings is a sign of their improvement. But over the whole sky there hang only earth and fire-balls, and all things on them, from milk-way to milk-way, are less than the wishes and longings of our hearts. Then why should our earth alone, why not every other also, be progressing? why should they, rather than we, have the start in this inaugural eternity? In short, it may be disputed if in the whole universe there are other angels and archangels than Victor and Jean Paul. It seems scarcely credible to me. But truly the _melodious_ progression to sublime beings has hitherto been merely taken for granted. I believe in a _harmonious_ one, in an eternal ascension, but in no created culmination.

I presume Karlson intended to answer my argument, not on the seraphs, but on ephemera, when Nadine, who had borrowed the fly in order to examine it, held it too near her eyes, and thereby disturbed and extinguished our Mendelssohn-Platonic conversation. For Madame Berlier (such was the noble name of our temporary hostess) stepped up to Nadine, and said: "It is a pity for the pain. You must take the wart-locust, I have proofs," do you understand? It is this. The so-called wart-eater, a locust with light brown spots, takes away a wart in a very short time by a single bite. Dame Berlier, over whom, as over most Southrons, beauty had greater power than self-love and sex, had falsely imagined that Nadine wished to annihilate the only fault in her charming form with the fly. The Chaplain had scarcely heard the wart-eater mentioned, when he vanished among the green, and commenced a hunt for wart-locusts. I was vexed that I had known the remedy as well as Dame Berlier, and never thought of it. For a shabby simile I should have easily recollected it, but not for a useful cure. Fortune permitted him soon to return with the winged wart-operator; this excited my envy. When he gave it to Nadine, the officious Phylax had squeezed, with the letter and paper press of his hands, like in a good calendar-press, the brown spotted vegetable-eater to--death. The animal could bite no more; I immediately darted off in search of another, and soon returned, holding one by the tips of its wings, and said, I would myself hold it over the wart until he would operate on it. While performing the action I praised it. Every great deed, I said, is only accomplished in the soul, at the moment of determination; when it comes outward and is repeated by the body,--which holds the locust,--it disperses into insignificant movements and thirds; but when it is done, as now the operation, it becomes great again, and, ever increasing, flows onward through all time. Thus the Rhine rushes like a giant from its summit, disperses in the fog, falls as rain upon the plain, then it forms itself into clouds, and roams over the sands, and carries suns instead of rainbows.

It need not be concealed from you that it affected me to look into the retina of two such bright and warm, upturned eyes, without mentioning the whole warlike array of curls and lips, and forehead, and the Waterloo landscapes of the cheeks. Nadine's terror at the teeth of the brown little doctor made her more charming, and the danger of my situation greater. After holding it for some time, when I thought the operation was finished, she told me the locust had not yet touched her, as I held it two or three Parisian feet too far from the wart. It is true, I had lost myself in her net skin; but I remarked that the cure could not be accomplished, if I did not rest the ball of my right hand slightly on her cheek, in order to hold the wart-eater more firmly over the wart. Now he bit the required wound, and propelled into it as much of his corrosive fluid as he carried with him. I artfully diverted Nadine's pain, which resembled that of a pin pricking, by philosophizing. Man, I said, finds the stoic theory true and forcible for all pain, only not for the present. And when he bleeds from cut wounds, he imagines bruises heal more easily. He therefore defers his practice of the stoic-school until his own schooling is over. O, but then he stands by a running stream, waiting until the waters shall have passed. True firmness bears the bite of a locust, and rejoices at the trial!

Now the operation was happily accomplished, which could easily excite an illness in me. It is true that her countenance had inflicted a deeper wound on me than the wart-eater upon it,--I should fear and examine whether mine, which was just as near to hers, had done as much damage; but Nadine is exceedingly--young. The hearts of young girls, like new waterbutts, at first let everything drop through, until in time, the vessels swell and thus retain their contents.

506th STATION.

Objections To Immortality.--The Second Childhood of the Outer and Inner Man.

We broke up and proceeded. On high, light feathers floated through the sky, like the loose-flowing hair of the sun, which could not veil it. The day became hotter and stiller. But our path lay beneath a green roof, and each branch spread over us a parasol of broad fresh leaves.

Gione asked, "Can we not continue our conversation in walking?" O, your Clotilde should know her; she has, excepting her charms, half her soul. No discord exists between her outer and inner harmony; her earnest, generous soul resembles the palm-tree, which has neither bark nor branches, but which bears broad foliage and buds on its summit. "Gione," said Nadine, "these arguments unsettle our minds, instead of removing our doubts." "No one," she replied, "has yet given his opinion; if we even have the firmest convictions, still by their beautiful conformity with another's convictions our own become more beautiful and firm." "Just as water-plants, surrounded by their water, are yet as much refreshed by rain as land plants are," said Myrtil (I am Myrtil).

Wilhelmi said, just as we were passing through the Midsummer's-day night of a grotto cooled by oakshade and cascades: "Our conversation would better suit a total eclipse of the sun. I would that I could see one, when the moon hangs beauteously before the midday sun, when the noisy day is suddenly hushed, when the nightingales sing, the flowers fade, and when nightly mists and shuddering cold and dew fall." Phylax had now let slip his sofa-cushion into a murmuring spring; Nadine saw it, and, not to confuse him in the act of drawing it out, she, with charming zeal, drove us back to our conversation. Her intercourse with the world had given her a playful, light, ever-joyous exterior. But Gione's style, like the highest Grecian, is, artistically speaking, somewhat meagre and spare,--and the ball-rooms had made her, as mahogany presses make dresses, more agreeable. But her exterior charms did not contradict or injure her interior beauty.

I said to Karlson, "Pray, prove to us the spiritual mortality, this soul's death." "M. Karlson needs not do that," answered the stupid Phylax, vexed at the wet cushion, "only the assertor must prove."

"Very well," I said, "I call proofs objections, but I shall certainly give you only two;--firstly, the proof or objection: the simultaneous decay and destruction of the body and of the soul; secondly, the absolute impossibility of ascertaining the mode of life of a future existence, or as the Chaplain would say, to see into the spiritual world from the sensuous one. Now, M. Karlson, throw your two bombs into the greatest possible angles, which, according to Hennert, is 40 degrees, but according to Bezout, 43 degrees."

He aimed well. He showed how the spiritual Dryad flowered, burst and dispersed with the corporeal bark, how the noblest impulses are chained to the lead--earth, revolving wheel of the body; how memory, imagination, and madness only feed on the egg-yolk of the brain,--how bravery and mildness stand in as opposite degree to blood as leeches and Jews;[16] how, in age, the inner and outer man together bend towards the grave, together petrify, together, like metal compositions, _slowly_ cool, and at last together die!

He then asked why, with the continual experience that every bodily down-bending digs a spiritual wound, and with this unceasing parallel of body and soul, we give to the latter, after death, everything which we have seen annihilated in the former. He said, and I believe it, that neither Bonnet's underbody, nor the incorporated soul corsets of Plattner (the "second soul organ") can diminish the difficulty of the question, for as both soul's under-garments or night-gowns and pinafores, always share, in life, the good and bad fate of the coarse, corporeal coat and martyr-cloak, and as in us double-cased English watches, the works, and the first and second cases (Bonnet's and Plattner's) always suffered and gained together, it would be absurd to seek the Iliad of the future world in the narrow hazel-nut shell of the _revived_ little body which has first stood and fallen with the coarse outward one.

I then asked him to aim his second ball in the angle of forty degrees also. I added, that "I would have begged leave to give a long parliamentary speech on it, but that long speeches have a life and reproducing power, as, according to Reaumuer, long animals more easily re-form themselves, when cut, than short ones." Though certainly it occurs to me, that Unzer says, tall persons do not live as long as short ones. But Karlson needed little time or power to prove the uncertainty of the next world. The Sun-land behind the hillocks of the God's acre, behind the pest-cloud of Death, is covered by a complete, an impenetrable darkness of twelve inches, or of as many holy nights. He showed, and not badly, what an immense leap beyond all terrestrial analogies and experiences it is, to hope for, i. e. to create, a world, a transcendent Arcadia, a world of which we know neither copy nor original, which wants no less than a form and a name, map and globe, another Vespucius Americus, of which neither chemistry nor astronomy can give us the compounds or the quarters; a universe of air, on which, from the leaf-stripped, faded soul, a new body will bud forth, i. e. a nothing on which nothing is to embody itself.

O, my good Karlson! how could your noble soul omit a second world which is already contained in this physical first one, like bright crystals in dark earth, namely, the sun-world of _Virtue_, _Truth_, and _Beauty_,[17] glowing in our souls, whose golden vein inexplicably extends its ramification through the dark, dirty clump of the sensuous world.

It was now my turn to answer: "I will lessen your two difficulties, and then I will give my innumerable proofs. You are no materialist,[18] you therefore take for granted that bodily and mental activity only accompany and mutually excite each other. Yes, the body represents the keys of the inner Harmonica through all its scales. Hitherto only the corporeal outward signs have been called feelings, as the swelling heart and the slowly-beating pulse--longing; the outpouring of gall, anger, and so on. But the net-like texture, the anastomy between the inner and outer man, is so life-full, so warm, that to every _picture_, every _thought_,--a nerve, a fibre must move. We should also observe, and put into the notes of speech all the bodily after sounds of poetic, algebraic, artistic, numismatic, and anatomic ideas. But the sounding-board of the body is neither the soul's scale nor its harmony. Grief has no resemblance to a tear,--shame, none to the cheek-imprisoned blood,--wit, none to champagne,--the idea of this valley, none to its portrait on the retina. The inner man, this God, hidden in the statue, is not of marble as it is, but in the stony limbs, the living ones grow and ripen in an unknown life. We do not sufficiently mark how the inner man even tames and forms the outer one; how, for example, the passionate body which, according to physiology, should ever increase in heat, is gradually cooled and extinguished by principles,--how terror, anger, holds the dividing texture of the body in a spiritual grasp. When the whole brain is paralyzed, every nerve rusty and exhausted, and the soul carrying leaden weights, man needs but to _will_ (which he can do every moment), he needs only a letter, a striking idea, and the fibre-work of the soul's mechanism proceeds again without help from the body."

Wilhelmi said, "Then the soul is but a watch which winds itself." "There must always be some _perpetuum mobile_," I said, "for all things have moved for an eternity already. The question is, either the soul never winds off, or it is its own watchmaker. I return to the subject. If a ruptured life-vein in the fourth brain-chamber of a Socrates place the whole land of his ideas and moral tendencies in a blood-bath, these ideas and moral tendencies will surely be covered with blood-water, but not spoilt by it; because not the drowned brains were virtuous and wise, but his _self_ was, and because the dependence of a watch on its case for protection from dust, &c. does not prove the identity of the two, or that the watch consists only of cases. As spiritual exertions are not bodily ones, but only _precede_ or _follow_ them; and as every spiritual activity leaves traces, not only in the soul, but also in the body; must, then, if apoplexy or age destroy corporeal activity,--must the soul's fire be therefore quenched? Is there no difference between the soul of a _childish_ old man, and that of a _child_? Must the soul of Socrates, imprisoned in Borgia's body as in a mud-bath, lose its moral powers, and does it suddenly change its virtuous qualities for vicious ones? Or shall in left-handed wedlock (which has no common property of body and soul) the one conjugal half only share the gains, not also the losses of the other? Shall the ablactated soul feel only the blooming, not also the faded body? And if it does, the earth surrounding it must, as our earth does to the superior planets, give it the reflection of our advancing and retrograding. If we shall ever be disembodied, the slow hand of time, that is, ever encroaching age, must do it. If our course is not to be concluded in one world, the gulf between it and the second must always appear to us a grave. The _short_ interruption to our progress by age, and the _longer_ one by death, destroy this progress as little as the _shortest_ interruption by sleep. We anxiously suppose--as the first man did--the _total_ sun-eclipse of sleep to be the _night_ of death, and this again the _doomsday_ of the world."

"That must yet be proved, although I believe it," replied Phylax.

New beauties prevented my answering, and closed the 506th Station.

(P. S.--I have been told the Chaplain has declared that he had purposely not replied to several of my arguments, but he hoped he could see them in print, and then he would publish his opinions. But he will scarcely live until this letter is printed, and he will answer it.)

507th STATION.

The Theft of the Souvenir.--Answers to Previous Stations.--On the Emigration of the Dead to the Planets.--The Threefold World in Man.--Grief without Hope.--The Seal of Immortality.--The Country-seat.--The Balloons.--Ecstasy.

When it is three o'clock, and a wandering Arcadian council is very well but somewhat warm, when the narrowing Adour, which has its source at the end of the Valley, flows round a projecting tongue of land, and draws its silver gauze cover over the pale moon reposing on its breast,[19] when round this slip of earth, this flowery anchoring place, half water scene, half bowling green, a broadleaved oak arcade grows, beneath which trembles a sun-gilt shadow, gliding from between the branches of the trees, on to the grass, embroidered by the restless, roving, gay-colored sand, on the book of nature--its insects, when the hammering in the shining marble blocks, the living Alp-horns, the bleating pasture-sheep, and the murmuring of waves fill the heart to its topmost branches and up to the brim with life-balsam, and the head with life-spirit; and when so many beauties are heard and seen,--living beauties who walk are inclined to sit down on the slip of earth, after the cushion-carriers have placed their burdens as resting-places for their arms.

My dear Victor! all this came to pass.

While sitting, long speeches were not as practicable as while walking. Even before, when we, from some distance, were choosing this spot for a resting-place, they had suffered considerably. I remained on the shore near Nadine, whose cheeks, reflected in the shadow-painted waves, appeared a charming pale red, as though a cochineal had bled to death on them. The walk and her red parasol had been too great colorists.

My dear brother, I am preparing to fall in love. The operation on the wart was unimportant as a corner-piece of vexation, as negative electricity; but warts have their good points.

Nadine plucked roses and other flowers. I drew an empty jewel-box from my pocket,--it was empty, like the 9th Kurstuhl, the Elias chair,[20] or the _limbus patrum_,--and held it under them, begging her to shake the flowers, that I might catch the millipeds,[21] which, like tallow candles, are more suitable for the eye than the nose. I caught a whole germanic diet of these creatures from the fragrant flower-cups, and imprisoned them in the box.

During the flower-toying, which brought us nearer to each other, a small cockchafer fell on my skin. I looked round for the flowers and could find nothing till I saw, protruding from Nadine's left pocket, a souvenir, filled with sweet-smelling herbs. To steal from a beautiful woman is often nothing else than to give to her. I thought it fit, secretly to take the scented pocket-book in order to make a scent-bottle, and a joke of it in future. I so arranged the theft, that the Baron perceived my hand, holding the book, retreating from the pocket.

The souvenir, thought I, may occasion some scene; meanwhile I can smell at it. I indemnified her for the loss of the scent-bag by the millipeds, whose prison I immediately insinuated into her pocket. The Baron was witness.

Wilhelmi said, when we rose: "In the evening we shall be separated and deafened by the carriages. If something has yet to be decided--"