The still angel at Victor"s side could no longer veil them, and Victor heard Clotilda"s first sigh.
Ay, then he took her hand as if he would sustain her, hovering over an open grave.
She gave up her hand to him, and her pulse throbbed trembling in unison with his.
Finally only the last lingering tone of the song still flung out its melodious circles in the ether, and its wake undulated away over a whole past,--then a distant echo wrapped it up in a fluttering breath of air, and wafted it away through deeper echoes, and finally over to the last which lay round about heaven,--then the tone expired and flew as a soul into one of Clotilda"s sighs.
Then the first tear escaped from her, and fell like a hot heart on Victor"s hand.
Her friend was overpowered,--she was carried away,--he pressed the soft hand,--she drew it out of his,--and went slowly out of the chamber, in order to come again to the help of the too tender heart, over whose sweet signs night hung her veil....
The light which was brought in took away these dream-worlds. Matthieu and the Chamberlain"s lady appeared also. We will not, however, in this soft mood, when one is precisely the severest against evil natures, say or think anything about the new couple which cannot help its contrast to our tenderness. Victor said this to himself, too, but more than once; because the Apothecary"s lyingly alleged engagement of Clotilda to Matthieu impressed itself upon him in the liveliest colors, as resembling that platonic union, in which the pure spirit, driven out of its ether and with crooked-up wings, is immured in an unclean body.
Clotilda came back. She was in a state of embarra.s.sment towards Victor, merely because he was in one, or was to be still more so by her side in the sleigh,--the swollen ball of her eye she withdrew from the light.
As condensation of tears, like insp.i.s.sation of milk, oppresses and destroys; his sadness, repressed and drawn back into his innermost being, sought an outlet through the voice, which was vehement and abrupt; through the motions of the body, which were quick; even through vivacity of expression;--in short, it was well that they started.
He thought the opposite again, when he stood behind her on the sleigh.
The night seemed to have withdrawn behind the clouds, whose wide arch occupied the heavens. He could not hunt up any subject of conversation, let him think as much as he would,--he ran through Clotilda"s, Victor"s, all his acquaintances" lives,--nothing occurred to him. The reason was, that his thoughts, which he sent out on this errand, returned every minute without his knowledge, and hung like bees on Clotilda"s n.o.ble profile, or on her soft eye, or buried themselves in that tear of hers which had fallen on his hand, and in the whole ethereal sea of to-day"s tones. The dark heaven above him finally put into his head Emanuel"s last communication, and he could relate to her out of that the blind youth"s initiation into the highest thought of man. Clotilda listened to him with delight, and at last said: "No one is more fortunate than a pupil of such a teacher: but he must never go into the world,--there he will be so no longer. His teacher has given him too soft a heart; and a soft heart, as you yourself say, hangs, like soft, fruit, so low down, that every one can reach and wound it; the hard fruits hang higher."
They had arrived now at the hard fruits of the capital, and her remark was her own history. But the new scenes,--the rattling carriages and rustling dresses,--the much ado about little or nothing,--the hall-lights like systems of fixed stars,--the double mouth-_un_harmonicas,--the masculine court-fauna,--the feminine court-flora,--the whole mobilized pleasure camp,--this din of a fair drowned the m.u.f.fled echo which pa.s.sed to and fro between two harmonious souls.
Our hero was received by the Princess in a more friendly manner than even by the Prince. Joachime, Clotilda"s lieutenant in office, had, in addition to her cold angry friendliness, a _montre a regulateur_ rich in jewels. In a public place it costs less than in a cabinet to cover the inner man with the outer as with a theatrical mask. Victor, on whom, besides, every _sorrow_ produced the witty effect of _intoxication_, betrayed the former at most by the exuberance of his vivacity.
A woman betrays herself by the opposite,--Clotilda by nothing. He expressed to her in the singular stunned state into which outer tones of joy and inner fantasies put one, when they come together like two streams meeting, the following ideas: "Were I the G.o.ddess of delight (if there is one), I would have it strike three; round the chandeliers I would draw prismatic colors, or in fact would hang them up in the cabinets and diffuse through the dancing-hall with incense a magic twilight,--then I should have to set back the tones of the orchestra through so many apartments, that nothing of the music should find its way hither but a soft echo,--and then if in the glimmering maze, breathing throughout with melodies, the people did not, after some silent movements, feel like sinking away with ecstasy, I greatly mistake." ... "Add further," said she, "in order that we too may have one, that we stay here and observe the dissolving."
But his composure hardly ever at any ball survived the minuet. After the first din was over, at least about the witching hour, his whole soul was always dissolved into a poetic melancholy which hardly left him the mastery of his eyes. Besides the tones, I can further adduce the _motion_ as an explanation of this phenomenon: all motion, in the first place, is sublime,--that is to say, of great ma.s.ses; or rather every quick motion imparts to the object the greatness of the s.p.a.ce hurried through: hence, in contrast with the end in view, objects in motion are more comic than those at rest. Secondly, the movement of men imaged to him their fluttering by, their fleeing into graves; often at night he would stop in sad musing under the windows of houses, where they were dancing in the second story, and look up, and the gliding by of heads in their movement was to him the mad dance of _ignes fatui_ in the churchyard.
To-night with his melted, overflowing soul, he felt this sooner than ever. The Anglaise, in which one couple after another disappears from the column, was the very image of our shadowy life, into which we all march out with drums, and encircled with thousands of playmates, and in which we grow poorer and poorer every year as we move onward, every hour more solitary, and in which we hurry to the end forsaken by all except a hired man, who buries us behind the goal. But death spreads out, as it were, our arms, and folds them around our beloved brothers and sisters; a human being feels for the first time on the brink of the tomb, when he comes upon the realm of unknown beings, how much he loves the known ones who love him, who suffer like him, and like him die.
As a woman in no way discloses to us more touchingly the whole blessed past, than when she lifts her eyelids and shows us her beaming eyes, accordingly he could not well help, during the dance, at least, looking into an eye, which pictured to him nothing but heavens that had set,--and to-night all was to set for him, even the eye itself. And as Clotilda usually grew pale with dancing, he entered through her eyes into her innermost being, and counted there the tear-drops that hung undisturbed on the still soul,--the many incisions made by the grafting-knife of fate for new virtues,--the clipped roots which fate shortens in this flower as we do in lowlier plants, before transplanting into another soil,--and the thousand honey-vessels of sweet thoughts. And as he thought on all her hidden virtues at once, on the supremacy of her womanly reason over her sensibility, on her easy consent in regard to the ball which the Prince now imposed upon her, as well as in regard to the rouging on which the Princess had before insisted, and on her ready compliance, whenever she had to sacrifice nothing but herself;--and as he held the thought before his mind how she, not like the women of court and city, who, like shrubs at the window of the greenhouse, spread themselves out after the light, but like spring flowers, loved to bloom in the shade, and yet made as little show of her fondness for country life as of her modesty;--he had to turn away his eye from the delicate, upright flower, on which death threw down the gravestone; from that loveliest soul who never yet saw her worth in the gla.s.s of an equal; from the dying heart, which nevertheless was not happy.
And then, to be sure, the thought before which he shrank into himself sprang up like a storm: "I will tell her to-day how good she is,--O, I shall certainly never see her again, and she will die, otherwise unknown to herself! I will fall at her feet and confess my inexpressible love. She cannot be angry; G.o.d knows I crave not her holy heart, which no man deserves; I will only say, Mine shall never forget thee, but it desires not thine, only it will break more gently when it has trembled and bled and wept and spoken before thee." ...
Close behind this thought came to him Clotilda herself, hand in hand with her step-mother, and, the face robbed of its color by the warmth as roses are by the sun, the tired and more sick-looking features put forth the silent prayer to come out into the fresh air and go home.
She went; her step-mother followed her at a distance. What a change of scene! Under the eastern gate of heaven stood the moon, who had taken off the funeral veil of cloud from the milky-way and the whole blue abyss. She gradually laid out a ground of silver, and sketched upon it with gleams and shadows a growing night-piece. The frost seemed to condense her light into body, into white meadows, into tumbling streams, into floating flakes; it hung glistering as white blossoming foliage on the bushes, it glimmered up the eastern mountains, which the sun had cast into ice-mirrors. And all above man and around man was sublimely still,--sleep played with death,--every heart rested in its own night.
And here, at this entrance, as it were, out of the turmoil of earth into the still twilight-shrouded underworld, cold thrills and after them glowing thrills ran over Victor"s nerves. This happens when the soul of man is too full and too sorely agitated, and all the threads of the trembling web of the fleshly organism sway with it. His sleigh became now a flying gondola. The night-air blowing against him kindled all his flames. O the stream full of ice-points, if it had only swept over him! the cool coverlet of snow, if it were only laid upon him! A voice was continually crying within him: "Thou art bearing the still, the patient one with her black veil to death; it is her hea.r.s.e: the n.o.ble pearl-diver has given heaven her sign that she has collected here below enough sorrows and virtues, that it may draw her up again to itself." The procession of mountains gliding by, the trees that whirled past, the fields that fled away, this flight of nature seemed to form together one great cataract that carried all before it, and man first of all, and left nothing behind it but time. And as he rolled down into the valley, where the city disappears, as did a year ago his female escort, and the moon behind the trees began seemingly to scud through the heavens, then he lifted his eyes toward the stars, and, bent backward in a rigid gaze, spoke aloud as out of a shattered heart to the heavens: "Deep blue grave over men, thou hidest thy broad nights behind crowded suns! Thou drawest us and our tears upward like vapors.
Ah, cast not poor short-sighted mortals so far asunder, so infinitely far! And why cannot man look up to thee without thinking: who knows what loved heart I may not a year hence have to seek up yonder!"
His darkened eyes fell painfully from heaven--upon Clotilda"s, which were lifted over against his. The tear which had just fallen from her eye down to her cheek she could neither conceal through the veil, nor make believe to be a snow-flake which had melted on her face, since the veil kept off the flakes; but such a tear needed no veil. Clotilda had thought lie meant merely Emanuel, and therefore she was touched and softened.... Like two parting angels, the two now beheld each other with tearful eyes. But Clotilda withdrew hers, and her sinking head bent. Nevertheless, she turned round again, and with her heavenly face and heavenly voice presented to him the sweet prayer: "Bestow this warm friendship upon my brother also; and forgive his sister today this prayer, as I may not for a long time have an opportunity to renew it."
He bowed himself down low, and could not answer.
But when now her place of residence and her castle, from which the silver rain of the moon ran down, gleamed before their eyes,--as the moment came on, darker and darker, in which the parting (perhaps the mask of death) was to take this still angel from his side,--as every indifferent formula of leave-taking which he could imagine to himself lacerated his sick heart,--as he saw how she leaned her head on her hand and on the veil, in order, un.o.bserved, to remove or check the first signs of her farewell,--then did the whole cloud which had so long been letting fall single drops into his eyes, rent asunder, rush down upon him and flood his heart.... Suddenly he stopped.... He looked with still gushing eyes toward St. Luna.... Clotilda turned round, and beheld a colorless face, a brow full of sorrows, and a quivering lip, and said bashfully, "Your soul is too good and too tender." Ay, then his over-full heart burst in twain. Then gushed up all the depths of his soul in which old tears had been so long acc.u.mulating, and lifted up from the roots his swimming heart, and he sank down before Clotilda, radiant with heavenly love and streaming sorrow,--mantled with the flame of virtue,--transfigured by the moonlight,--with his true, helpless breast, with his veiled eyes,--and the dissolving voice could only utter the words: "Angel of heaven! the heart breaks at last which loves thee inexpressibly. O, long indeed have I been silent. No, thou n.o.ble form, never canst thou pa.s.s out of my soul.--O soul from heaven, why have thy sufferings and thy goodness, and all that thou art, inspired me with an eternal love, and with no hope, but with an eternal sorrow?" Her agitated face lay bent aside from him in her right hand, and the left covered only her eyes, but not her tears. A dying sound implored him to rise. They heard the second sleigh far off.
"Never-to-be-forgotten one! I torment thee, but I will remain where I am till thou hast granted me a token of forgiveness." She extended to him her left hand, and the gesture disclosed a holy countenance full of emotion. He pressed the warm hand to his flaming face, into his hot streams of tears. Trembling, he again asked: "O, my fault grows greater every moment! Will you, then, wholly forgive it?" ...
Then did the blushing face bury itself in the folded veil, and, turning away, stammered: "Ah, then I must share it, n.o.ble friend of my teacher."
Blessed, blessed man! After this word, the whole of earthly life has no greater heaven to offer thee! Rest now in silent rapture with thy overpowered face upon the angelic hand, into which the n.o.blest of hearts pours the blood that kindles for virtue! Shed all thy tears of joy upon the dear hand which has given them to thee! And then,--if thou canst for rapture or for reverence,--then lift up thy pure, glistening eye, and show her therein the look of sublime love, the look of the love which is eternal and speechless and blissful and unspeakable!
Ah! he, who had ever been loved by a Clotilda, could now read no farther,--write no farther,--for ecstasy ... or else for pain!
Silent and sanctified he now sped along the fair road; the moon hung down from heaven like a dewy morning overlaid with white blossoms; spring stirred its meadows and its flowers under the veil of snow; rapture throbbed in Victor"s heart, swelled in his breast, shone in his eye; but speechless reverence controlled his rapture.... They arrived.
And when, in the harmonica-chamber, where in the evening he had grasped her hand for anguish, they now stood alone face to face, so changed, so blest for the first time, two such hearts,--she like an angel who had descended from heaven, he like a mortal who had risen from the earth, to fill on the heart of the timid angel, and, speechless, to go back with her to heaven.... What an hour! O, only for you, ye fair souls, who have never experienced such an hour, and yet have deserved it, do I go on picturing this one!... Like two risen ones before G.o.d, they look into each other"s eyes and souls,--like a zephyr, which two swaying roses prolong, breathes between the trembling lips the speechless sigh of bliss, drunk in by the bosom in quick inspirations, and issuing with a tremulous thrill of glad awe in long expirations,--they continue silent, to look at each other, they lift their eyes, to see through the drop of joy, and cast them down again to dry it away with the eyelid.... No, it is enough: O, there is another tear that now lies heavily on the fair heart, which is silent and would say, I was never happy, nor ever shall be!
Victor had so much to say to her, and had so few minutes more left for it; and yet not so much joy as reverence made him dumb,--for sacred to the loving heart is the form that has said to it, I am thine. But think not he would make any such rude request to her, as that she would stay here on his account; only the _question_ whether he might visit her in _Maienthal_, only the _prayer_ that she would take thought of her recovery, can he venture upon. Clotilda had only one to make to him, which she could not sufficiently veil over, namely, that, for the sake of her jealous brother, he would not see her in Maienthal.
During the lingerings of rapture, they hear the bells of the second sleigh. Haste necessitated courage. Victor transformed his _prayer_ into the _wish_ that spring might favor the design of her journey (restoration to health), and the _question_ into the _joyful thought_ how happy she would be in Maienthal by the side of Dah.o.r.e, how blest he had once been there, and how little he had once dreamed that one could ever be still more so there. Clotilda answered (probably to his wish of following her thither): "I leave behind quite as much to you,--my _brother_ and your _friend_; forget not my former prayer."
Not until the approaching parents reminded Clotilda to throw back her veil, and admonished her beloved to take his first leave of the heart which he had won,--not till then did they both look far into the great Eden which had opened around their life,--and the bright moment which now darted by in the stream of time projected into eternity the images of two heavenly forms,--one unveiled, pale-red, transfigured with tears, and one glorified by love, radiant with the reflection of hope.
And now let no longer the hand sketch souls, which not even the great, glowing eye of love can portray....
When the parents came, he felt, but he forgave, all possible contrasts.
He soon took his leave, that he might at home, in the silence of night, throw the first prayerful glance over the stream of his future life, which now glided on toward the grave in lines of beauty, and in which gay minutes played like goldfishes.
In the stillness of night, not far from his wax-mummy, the happy one thought to fall down before the Infinite Genius and thank him, with new tears, for this night, for this friend, of whom he is the first love.
But the thought of doing it is the deed, and O, how could our touched heart, which even before men is dumb, find ally other words before the Infinite than tears and thoughts?
And in this resigned frame, full of deep tranquillity, wherein I lay down the pen, mayst thou, dear reader, lay aside this book, and say with me, There may well be more sad days that will conclude like the Twenty-eighth Dog-Post-Day.
PREFACE TO PART III.
(_Which in the first edition came on a dozen sheets earlier_.)
As the Intercalary Day this time falls in with the Preface, and as it begins, too, with the letter V,[47] both indeed can, with uncommon felicity, be despatched together.
SEVENTH INTERCALARY DAY.
End of the Register of Extra-Shoots.
U. V.
Unfeelingness of Readers.--Vol. III. (Preface to.)
There were once happy times, when one had nothing to suffer from his fellow-savage and neighbor, except being struck dead,--when the hail was the only knout-master of the skin, whereas now the trade-wind of the visiting-fan is to us a whirlwind, and the cool breath over the teacup a sea-breeze,--when one took less interest in another"s trouble than in his fodder,--when the ladies never wounded the gentlemen in bear-skins in any way (least of all with glances, charms, tresses), except with clubs, and when, to be sure, they possessed themselves, as well as to-day and to-morrow, of the heart of an honest man, but only in this way, by first stretching out the proprietor of it on an altar and regularly slaughtering him, before they cut out the heavenly globe from his chest.
These times we have now all forfeited; in those which are upon us, things look badly. By heaven! one really needs not much less than everything to make him happy, and little more than nothing to make him unhappy,--for the former he requires a sun, for the latter a particle of sun-dust! We should be well off, and have the key to large apartments in all pleasure-castles, if fate had provided for us that we should endure, say as many degrees of torture as the Jurists have, namely, three,--no more plagues than the Egyptians underwent, namely, seven,--no more persecutions than the first Christians stood out, namely, ten. But for such drawings of fortune a man of sense does not look; at least, no one promises himself such prizes, who like me sits down and considers our humming-bird stomachs,--our soft caterpillar skins,--our ears tingling of themselves,--our eyes which are their own tinder,--and our _culs de Paris_, which can be pierced, not by a crumpled rose-leaf, but by the very shadow of a thorn,--and our fine complexion, which without a moon-umbrella would blacken in the moonlight.... And yet in this account of our troubles,--because I am diligently intent upon lessening them,--I have not included other quite different, most accursed items, but have left out riches, e. g., entirely, that smart-money for so many thousand gashes and fractures of the breast, and in fact millions of wounds which would make our riddled self absolutely transparent, were it not fortunately clothed from head to foot in English court-plaster.... But I left out all such stuff, because I knew it would after all amount to nothing, if I should set it off against a quite different purgatory and tempest into which we male-kind particularly are thrown, if we are so unfortunate as to keelhaul ourselves, that is to say, fall in love, which in my poor opinion is a slight foretaste of h.e.l.l, as well as of heaven. Let the best peeress in this department write to me, and enclose it post-paid to the publishing office in Berlin, and give me her name, if she was capable of not flaying and impaling her poor _pastor fido_, nor persecuting him with backbitings, nor filling his heart full of bruises with the compression-machines of her hands, his head full of fissures with the bastinado of the fan, his breast full of blisters with her eyes, nor of giving him, as they do to tobacco, a mellowing with her tears.... At least I myself at this present moment come straight from such a house of correction and baiting-house, and my skin looks as pitiably as if I had a scalped one over my limbs.
We will say no more of this. My intention in all this is to brace up the reader, because a wholly new rainy-constellation (Pleiad) which I have not at all named is rising in his horizon, to snow upon him.
This will rage worse than all that has gone before. What I mean is this: An imperial citizen may be just giving the finishing touch to everything,--his coffers[48] and his enemies may have been already overturned, and his labors right well received by the public or the board,--his pleas for delay have been allowed, and the quinquenniats[49]
of his debtors refused,--his youngest daughter, who, like the eldest of the French king"s brother, is called Mademoiselle, may already have got through with the measles and her betrothal afterward; it avails him nothing, the worst of all, a whole Gehenna still awaits him on his book-shelves; for there may the fair spirits (let him have swallowed as he may all bitter salt of fate) have sliced for him, under the name of romance-manna, a hard tear-bread, which I, for my part, should be glad neither to bake nor to chew,--truly they may (to use another metaphor) have composed and placed in readiness for him dead-marches and funeral cantatas, which shall utterly upset him and make him so warm that his eyes shall run over.
And unfortunately warm-blooded and soft-skinned excellent men are just the ones least remarkable for steadiness and moderation in bearing the poetical sorrows which authors send them. I cannot, therefore, possibly leave this third part, which will too easily affect people, wholly without a preface in the way of counterpoise, unless I am willing to be myself the cause of innocent persons weeping over the best scenes of this part, and suffering from sympathy. Such too sensitive persons, to whom Nature has denied aesthetic apathy to cases of great distress in tragedies and romances, should,--unless they are fat, for sorrow is good for fatness as a fasting-cure and _lapis infernalis_,[50]--these should make themselves cold, and arm themselves against the tragic poet with philosophy; they should console themselves during the reading of a great affliction and say: "How long does such a printed misery last?
How soon a book and a life are over! To-morrow thou wilt think very differently. The unhappy condition into which I am here brought by Shakespeare exists, in truth, only in my own imagination, and my sorrow over it is indeed, according to the stoic, only illusion. One must not, says Epictetus in his handbook, bewail that which lies not in our will, and the sad scene of Klopstock here is, in fact, an external thing, which thou canst not alter. Wilt thou let thyself be shamed by a North American, by a saltwork-man of Halle, by the rabble, by the Cretin from Gex,[51] who bore that whole scene from Goethe"s Ta.s.so quietly and composedly, without the moistening of an eye?"