Part 4

"Something?" replied Phylax,--"everything has to be decided. M. Jean Paul, you have yet to raise M. Karlson's second difficulty." "Raise?" I asked, "I am to raise the cover of the whole future world? I am but going _towards_ it, not coming _from_ it. But this dissimilarity between the present and the future world, its inconceivable magnitude, has made many apostates. Not the bursting of our bodily doll-skin in death, but the wide disparity between the present autumn and the future spring, raises such overwhelming doubts in our poor, timid breasts. This is shown by the savages, who consider the future life merely as the second volume, the new testament of the first, and make no greater distinction between the first and second life than between youth and age: they easily believe in all their hopes; your _first_ difficulty, the bursting and fading of the bodily polish, does not deprive the savage of the hope to bud anew in another flower-vase. But your second difficulty daily increases itself, and its advocates, for by the increasing proofs and apparatus of chemistry and physiology, the future world is daily more effectually annihilated and dispersed, as it cannot be brought within play of a sun-microscope or of a chemical furnace. In fact, not only the reality, but also the theory of the body, not only the practised measurement of its longings, but also the pure moral philosophy of its spirit-world, must darken and make difficult the prospect on the inner world from the outer one. Only the moralist, the physiologist, the poet, and the artist more readily comprehend our inner world; but the chemist, the physician, and the mathematician want both seeing and hearing faculties for it, and in time, even eyes and ears.

"On the whole, I find fewer men than one would imagine who decidedly believe in, or deny, the existence of a future world. Few dare to deny it, as for them this life would then lose all unity, form, peace, and hope;--few dare to believe it, for they are startled at their own purification and at the destruction of the lessened earth. The majority, according to the promptness of alternating feelings, waver poetically between both beliefs.

"As we paint Devils more easily than Gods, Furies than Venus Urania, Hell than Heaven, we can more easily believe in the former than in the latter,--in the greatest misfortune than in the greatest happiness. Must not our spirit, used to misgivings and earth chains, be startled at a Utopia against which earth will be shipwrecked, that the lilies of it, like the Guernsey lilies,[22] may find the shore to bloom on, which saves and satisfies, elevates and makes blessed, our much tormented humanity.

"I now come to your difficulty. I imagine, if even we were to take the grave to be merely the moat of communication between allied globes, our ignorance concerning the second world should not terrify us, and we need not take for granted that the mountain ridge of humanity does not continue under the Dead Sea, merely because we cannot see through its waters, for do not all mountain ridges continue on the bottom of the ocean? What! man will guess at _worlds_, when he cannot even guess _world-quarters_! Would the Greenlander paint a Negro, a Dane, a Greek, in his mind's eye, without ever having seen one? Can the political genius divine the inner versifications of the poetic one, without experience? Can the Abderite imagine the architecture of the sage? Would we have guessed the existence of but one of the animal creations of Anthropomorphism which copy the human figure in all animals, and yet change it? Or could a bodiless self, placed in a vacuum, with all existing logic and metaphysic, ever have conceived but a single vein of its present embodification and humanification?"

"But what are you asserting or denying?" asked Wilhelmi.

"I only assert that a second life on another planet cannot be denied, merely because we are unable to map out the planet, and portray its inhabitants. But we need no other planet."

The Baron said: "O, I have often dreamed delicious dreams of this '_grande tour_' through the stars! It seemed the progression of a student from one class to another,--the classes being worlds."

"But," replied Karlson, "to all these worlds, as upon our own, you will be refused admittance if you arrive without a body. By what miracle will you obtain one?"

"_By a repeated one_," I answered. "For by a miracle we have our present body. But we can say in favor of this planet wandering, that our eyes too widely separate the worlds of which each one is but an _element_ of the infinite _integral whole_. The different worlds and their satellites above and around us, are only far removed world-quarters. The moon is but a smaller, more distant America, and space is the ocean."

Nadine said: "One day I so pictured the inhabitants of a lemon-tree to myself. The worm on the leaf may think it is on the green earth, the second worm on the white bud is on the moon, and the one on the lemon believes itself to be upon the sun."

"And yet this," said I, "is but a tree of immeasurable life. As around the earth-kernel cling wider and finer covers,--the earth, the seas, the air and space,--so the giant of one world is surrounded by increasingly large ones, with ever larger arms. The longest shell is the finest one, as light and the attractive power. The beauteous covering elongates and rarefies itself from iron bands to pearl ties, from flower-chains to rainbows and milky-ways."

"Will we not now descend from the milky-way," said Karlson, "for we cannot ascend it. It is precisely this uniformity of the universe which forbids the rambling of emigrants from the earth. Every planet already has its own crew; more dense ones, as for instance Mercury, may be peopled with real sailors."

"Precisely as Kant supposes!" said Phylax.

"Finer, less solid ones, as e. g. Uranus, only with the most tender beings, perhaps only with women and nuns who love not the sun. He who intends to rectify the so-called soul or spirit by distilling it from one planet to the other, may with as much justice assert, that the spirits of the slacked Mercury receive their dephlegmation in a distilling process through our earth,--in short, that the earth is the second world for Mercury and Venus. The dead of the arctic zones could even pass into the temperate ones (it would be _distillatio per latus_), for on all planets there can be no other than coarser or finer _human beings_[23] like ourselves."

Karlson waited for an answer and a contradiction, but I said his opinion was also mine. "I have still a stronger reason," I continued, "against emigration to, and voyage picturesque through, the planets, because we carry and lock up a heaven of starry light in our own breasts, for which no dirty earth-ball is clean or large enough. But on this subject I must have permission to speak uninterruptedly, at least until we have passed all these cornfields."

Our pleasure-trip now was an alley of magic gardens, our passage through a golden sea of corn-blades, was accompanied and surrounded on all sides by a promised land, in which solitary houses reposed beneath picturesquely grouped leaf groves, as in Italy sleepers take their siestas on shaded meads. I was permitted to speak.

"There is an inner, heart-contained spirit-world, which breaks through the dark clouds of the body-world as a warm sun. I mean the inner universe of _virtue_, _beauty_, and _truth_; three soul-worlds and heavens, which are neither parts, nor shoots, nor cuttings, nor copies of the outer one. We are less astonished at the inexplicable existence of these three transcendent heavens, because they are ever floating before us, and because we foolishly imagine we _create_ them, while we merely _recognize_ them. After which copy, with what plastic material, and of what, could we create and insert in ourselves[24] this same spirit-world? Let the atheist ask himself how he conceived the giant ideal of a God, which he either denies or embodies? An idea which has not been built upon comparative greatness and degrees, for it is the contrary of every measure and of every created greatness. In short, the atheist denies the great _original_ of the _copy_.[25]

"As there are idealists of the outer world who believe that perception makes objects, instead of that objects cause perception, so there are idealists of the inner world, who deduct the _being_ from the _seeming_, the _sound_ from the _echo_, the _fact_ from its _appearance_; instead of, on the contrary, the seeming from the being, our consciousness from the objects of it. We mistake our power of analyzing our inner world, for its preformation, i. e. the genealogist thinks himself both originator and founder.

"This inner universe, which is still more glorious and admirable than the outer one, needs another heaven than the one above us, and a higher world than one a sun now shines upon. Therefore we rightly say, not a second earth or globe, but a second _world_,--another beyond the universe."

Gione already interrupted me: "And every virtuous and wise being is in himself a proof of immortality." "And every one," added Nadine, quickly, "who suffers innocently."

"Yes, it is that," said I, with emotion, "which extends our line of life through countless ages. The chord of _Virtue_, _Truth_, and _Beauty_, taken from the music of the spheres, calls us from this dark oppressive earth, and announces to us the nearness of a more melodious existence. _Why_, and _from whence_ were these _super-earthly_ wants and longings created in us, if only, like swallowed diamonds, slowly to cut through our earthy shell. Why was a being endowed with wings of light chained to this dirty clump of earth, if it were to rot in its birth-clod, without ever being freed from it by means of its ethereal wings?"

Wilhelmi said, "I also like to dream the dream of a second life in the sleep of this first one. But may not our beautiful spiritual powers have been given to us for the _enjoyment_ and _preservation_ of the present life?"

"For its preservation?" I said. "Then an angel has been locked in the body to be the mute servant and fire-lighter, butler, cook, and porter of the stomach? Would not brutish souls have sufficed to drive man-bodies to the fruit-tree and the spring? Shall the pure ethereal flame only dry and bake the bodily patent stove with life-warmth, while it now slakes and dissolves it? For every tree of knowledge is the poison-tree of the body, and every mental refinement a slow-poison chalice. But, on the contrary, want is the iron key of freedom, the stomach is the manure-filled hot-house or manufactory of human blood, and the various animal instincts are but the earthy, soiled steps to the Grecian temple of our spiritual elevation.

"For _enjoyment_ you said also. That means, we received the palate and appetite of a god, with the food for an animal. That portion of us which is of earth, and creeps on worm-folds, may and can, like the earthworm, be fed and fattened on earth. Exertion, bodily pain, the burning hunger of necessity, and the tumult of our senses exclude and choke the spiritual autumn bloom of humanity in nations and classes. All these conditions of terrestrial existence must be fulfilled ere the soul may claim its due. To the unhappy, therefore, who must be the business men and carriers of their bodily wants, the whole inner world seems but as an imaginary gilt cobweb, like the man who, breathing only the electrical _atmosphere_, instead of feeling the spark, thinks to grasp an invisible web. But when our necessary _animal servitude_ is over, when the barking inner dog-kennel is fed, and the dog-fight finished, then the inner man demands his nectar and ambrosia, and if he is turned off with earth-food only, he changes to an angel of Death, and a Hellfiend, driving himself to suicide, or makes of him a poison-mixer who destroys all joy.[26] The eternal hunger _in_ man, the insatiability of his heart, wants not a _richer_, but a _different_ food, fruit, not grass. If our wants referred but to the degree, not to the quality, then the imagination, at least, might paint a _degree of satiety_. But imagination cannot make us happy, by showing us innumerable heaps of treasures, if they be other than _Virtue_, _Truth_, and _Beauty_."

"But the more beautiful soul?" asked Nadine. I answered, "This discrepancy between our wishes and our circumstances, the heart and the earth, will remain, an _enigma_, if we are immortal, and would be a blasphemy if we decay. Ah! how could the beautiful soul be happy? Strangers, born on mountains and living in lowland places, pine in an incurable homesickness. We belong to a higher place, and therefore an eternal longing consumes us, and every music is our soul's Swiss _ranz des vaches_. In the morning of life, the joys which hearken to the anxious wishes of our hearts are seen blooming for us in later years. When we have attained these years, we turn on the deceitful spot, and see behind us, pleasure blooming in the strong hopeful youth, and we enjoy instead of our _hopes_, the _recollections of our hopes_. Joy in this also resembles the rainbow, which in the morning shines over evening, and in the evening arches over the east. The _eye_ may reach the _light_, but the arm is short, and holds but the fruit of the soil."

"And this proves?" asked the Chaplain.

"Not that we are unhappy, but that we are immortal, and that the second world in us demands, and proves a second world beyond us. O, how much might not be said of this second life whose commencement is so clearly shown in the first one, and which so strangely doubles us! Why is Virtue too exalted to make us, and, what is more, others (sensually) happy? Why does the incapability of being useful on earth (as the expression is) increase with a certain higher purity of character, as, according to Herschel, there are suns which have no earth? Why is our heart tortured, dried, consumed, and at last broken by a slow burning fever of ceaseless love for an unattainable object, only alleviated by the hope that this _consumption_, like a physical one, must one day be sheltered and raised by the _ice cover_ of death?"

"No," said Gione, with more emotion in her eye than in her voice, "it is not ice, but lightning. When our heart lies a sacrifice on the altar, fire from heaven consumes it as a proof that the offering is accepted."

I know not why her calm voice so painfully disturbed my whole soul (not only my argument). Even Nadine's eyes, which triumphed over her own sorrows, were suffused with tears by her sister's, and, although she is generally more timid and fastidious than Gione, in passing a little garden, she raised from a projecting hairy potato-stalk, a large moth, and showed it to us with a firm mouth, which should have been softened by a smile.

It was the so-called Death's-head. I stroked the flat, drooping wings, and said, "It come? from Egypt, the land of mummies and graves; it bears a _memento mori_ on its back, and a _miserere_ in its plaintive voice." "In the mean time it is a butterfly, and visits the nectaries, which we day-birds will do also," appropriately observed Wilhelmi; but he took the words out of my mouth.

Gione's countenance again expressed thoughtful calmness, and to me she became immeasurably beautiful and grand by the stillness of her grief. You once said that the female soul, though it be pierced with burning shafts, must never beat its wings convulsively together, else, like other butterflies, it would destroy their beauty. How true is this!

Nadine's eyes seldom shone without at last overflowing, and every sorrowful emotion remained long in her heart, because she tried to guard against it. She resembled those springs which take a temperature opposed to the time of day, and which are warmest in the cool evening. She turned to me and said, putting her hand in her left pocket, "I will show you some poetry which will prove your prose." While she was seeking it, she stood still with her companion Wilhelmi. He guessed before I did, that she intended to give me something from the Souvenir, and when, in its stead, she took the milliped's prison from her pocket, he obligingly said, "If not with my hands yet with my eyes I assisted at the theft, and as accomplice I beg for mercy." The serious apology for this foolishness scarcely suited our earnest tone of mind. I said, "I wished to cause a more useless, than pardonable joke, but I--" She did not allow me to conclude, but mildly and unchanged (except by a reproving and a forgiving smile) she showed me in the aromatic book the noble Karlson's requiem on the death of the exalted Gione. I willingly give you the prosaic echo of it, from my prosaic memory.

GRIEF WITHOUT HOPE.

What cloud is that, which like the clouds of the tropics, passes from morn to eve, and then sets? It is humanity. Is that the magnet-mountain covered with the nails of wrecked ships? No, it is the great Earth, strewed with the bones of fallen men.

Ah! why did I love? I had not then lost so much!

Nadine, give me thy grief, for it contains hope. Thou standest by thy crushed sister, who dissolves even beneath the winding-sheet, and lookest upwards to the trembling stars, and thinkest: Above, O dearest one, thou dost reside, and on the suns we find again our hearts, and the small tears of life will be over.

But mine remain, and burn in the dim eye. My cypress alley is not open, and discloses no heaven. Human blood paints the fluid figure called man on the monument, as oil on marble forms forests; Death wipes away the man, and leaves the stone. O Gione! I would have some consolation, if thou wert but far away from us all, on a clouded forest, in a cave of the Earth, or on the most distant world in space. But thou art gone, thy soul is dead, not only thy life and thy body.

See, Nadine, on the judgment-seat of Time lies the crushed angel, with the death color of the spirit-world. Gione has lost all her virtues, her love, her patience, her strength, her all-embracing heart, and her rich mind: the thunderbolt of Death has destroyed the diamond, and now the wax statue of the body slowly melts beneath the soil.

Serpent of Eternity, quickly take away the beautiful form, as the larger serpent first poisons and then devours man. But I, Gione, stand beside your ruins with unalleviated pain, with undestroyed soul; and grieving, think of you until I also dissolve. And my grief is noble and deep, for I have no hope! May thy invisible shadow-picture, like the new moon with the sun,[27] arise to heaven in my soul! And may the creative wheel of Time, which raises innumerable hearts, and fills them with blood, only to pour them again into the grave, and let them die, pour out my life slowly, for long time would I mourn for thee, thou lost one!

I cannot tell you, dearest Victor, how horrible and fearful the eternal snow of annihilating death seemed to me, placed beside the noble form it should have covered; how frightful the thought: if Karlson is right, the last day has torn this never happy, innocent soul from the prisons upon the earth to the closer ones beneath it: man too often carries his errors as his truths only as word arguments, not as feelings. But let the disbeliever of immortality imagine a life of sixty minutes instead of sixty years, and let him try if he can bear to see loved, noble, or wise men only aimless, hour-long air-phantoms, hollow thin shadows which fly towards the light and are consumed by it, and who, without path, trace, or aim, after a short flight, dissolve into their former night. No; even over him steals a supposition of immortality. Else a black cloud would forever hang over his soul, and the earth would quake beneath him when he trod on it, as if he were a Cain.

I continued, but all arguments were poetized into feelings. "Yes, if all forests of this earth were pleasure grottoes, all valleys Campan, all islands holy, all fields Elysian, and all eyes sparkling, yes, then--no, even then the Eternal One would have given to our souls the promise of a future life, even in the blessedness of the present one. But now, O God! when so many houses are mourning ones, so many fields battle-fields, so many cheeks pale, and when we pass so many sunken, red, torn, closed eyes,--O, can death be but the last destroying whirlwind? And when at last, after thousand, thousand years, our earth is dried up by the sun's heat, and every living sound on its surface silenced, will an immortal spirit look down on the silent globe, and, gazing on the empty hearse moving slowly on, say: 'There the churchyard of humanity flies into the crater of the sun; on that burning heap many shadows, and dreamers, and wax-figures, have wept and bled, but now they are all melted and consumed: Fly into the sun, which will also dissolve thee, thou silent desert with thy swallowed tears, with thy dried-up blood!' No, the crushed worm dares raise himself to his Creator, and say: 'Thou canst not have made me only to suffer.'"

"And who gives the worm the right to this demand?" asked Karlson.

Gione answered, gently, "The Eternal One himself, who gives us charity and who speaks in all our souls to calm us, and who alone has created in us our demands to Him and our hope in Him."

This good sweet word could still not calm all the waves of my excited soul. From a distant house, turtle-doves sent after us trembling, soul-felt plaints. About my tear-filled inward eye assembled all those forms whose hearts were without guilt and without joy,[28] who attained no single wish here below, and who, sinking under the frost and snow-storm of fate, only longed, like persons freezing to death, to sleep; and all those forms who have loved too deeply, and lost too much, and whose wounds were never cured until death had widened them, like a cracked bell which retains its hollow sound until the crevice is made larger, and the beings nearest me, and many other female ones, whose exquisitely tender souls fate most consecrates to torture, as Narcissus is consecrated to the God of Hell. I also remembered your true remark, that you had never pronounced the words _pain_ and _the past_ before a woman, without hearing an almost inaudible sigh at the union of the two words, from the suffering heart; for woman on the narrower stage of her plans, with idealized wishes and desires built on others' worth, rather than on her own, has a thousand times more disappointments to suffer than we men.