And I thank thee, kind Destiny, that Thou hast given me health for the joy of sketching such a fleeting golden age, since my weak, unequally beating heart deserves not to paint such raptures.--And for thee, my dear reader, may the Whitsuntide feast have sweetened some ash-Sunday or pa.s.sion-week of thy life![128]--
FOURTH PREFACE,
OR, EXTORTED ANTICRITIQUE AGAINST ONE OR ANOTHER REVIEW, WITH WHICH I MIGHT POSSIBLY BE DISPLEASED.
Clever Romance-writers create out of writing-ink and printer"s-ink a new and terrible tyrant, give him a throne either in Italy or the Orient,--and then (unlike children who run away from the figure they have drawn) they step up courageously before the painted, crowned tyrant, and tell him the grandest, but boldest truths to his face, which betray the free man, and which no crooked courtling could well repeat before his sovereign. Such dare-devils remind me so often of two abecedarians, when I pa.s.s a gate in Oat Lane in Hof, on which a painted lion rears himself and his mane, and curls and sways his tail and his tongue. For one of the aforesaid abecedarians said to the other as I was hurrying by: "Hear me, I tell you I"ll seize him by the tail, I"m not a bit afraid." But the other tyro, who had a much bolder thought, coolly mounted a corner-stone and said: "I first, Sir, I thrust my fist right into his jaws,--so!"--
It is the same boldness with which an author often attacks on paper, not only the aforementioned grim king of beasts, but also the critical _feline race_,--which Linnaeus reckons in the royal line of lions,--while he shakes judicial chairs as coldly and boldly as if they were painted thrones, and so in general scolds and a.s.sails Journals in his Prefaces. A writer of power can do this. I, for my part, am perhaps as audacious in this as any one, and paint out for myself expressly the following review-cat, in order to grapple with her freely and fearlessly, and to show by her what courage can do.
In the first place, the Reviewer who charges me with being indebted to the amount of two whole Intercalary Days,--the one after the Fortieth and the one after the Forty-fourth Dog-Post-Days,--cannot have seen this Second Edition at all; the two Prefaces with which I have enriched it, the first and this, will answer with all sensible men for true Intercalary Days.
Secondly, my Reviewer will find fault (in future) with my indulging my _manner_. But let him hear now the Philosopher (namely, myself): Manner is of itself nothing but what follows: the aesthetic ideal and integral, like every other, is reached only by an infinite power, but we with our finite strength are incessantly coming _nearer_ to it, never so much as _near_; Manner is, therefore, as the Philosopher takes it, a finite mirror of infinity, or the expression of the relation in which every _temperament_ and number of strings of any given aeolian harp stands to the score of the infinite music of the Spheres, which it has to echo.
Every combination of human powers gives only a manner; and higher spirits would find in Homer and Goethe the _human_ manner at least; nay, the higher angelic hierarchy would find the lower manneristic, the seraph the angel of the churches. But as I am not even an ordinary angel,--not to say a seraph,--another Reviewer than he who will criticise me would have presumed beforehand that I should have a manner.--And such I manifestly have.--But yet more: as the _degree_ and the _relation_ of our powers change from year to year,--and consequently the product and proceeds of the same also, the manner--: accordingly and unfortunately the manner of the fiftieth year generally sets itself as the corrector of that of the twenty-fifth; or rather there ensues a heterogeneous adoption of children of two marriages, in which both are losers. Such a simultaneous Hysteron-Proteron[129] is still worse than if one should undertake to clip and grind down the Grecian statues of one of Winkelmann"s ages of art according to the statues of another. Pour rather a pure, flowing work into thy present mould, and do not wait to force it in when it is cast and hardened!--Even granting I should become hereafter another and a wiser man, I would never graft the old man upon the youth.
Man regards himself in the concert-hall of the universe, if not as the solo-player, yet as one of the instruments,--instead of a single _tone_,--as in fact the Prince looks upon himself as an Oberon"s or at least hunter"s horn,--the poet as an oaten pipe,--the author as a composing-instrument,[130]--the Pope as the organ-works,--the belle as Bestelmeier"s hand-steel-harmonica, or as a quail-whistle,--my reviewer as a pitch-pipe,--and I on myself as Maelzel"s great Panharmonicon. But we are all only _tones_, as in Potemkin"s orchestra every one of the sixty metallic flutes gave only _one_ tone. Therefore I am glad of every individuality, of every manner, as of a new semitone in the church music of natures.
Thirdly, I know nothing by which I can see more clearly my future reviewer"s perplexity for want of _materia peccans_ to censure, than this, that he sticks to such pitiful trifles--in future--as the following evidently are, that I, e. g., have appended this Preface, that I have bound the work in four separate Parts, and by this fourth part have made, for an earlier possessor and bookworm, the sheet-worm[131] of the old edition wholly useless. From the like specimens and sayings, wherewith such a Spartan Ephor Emerepes will rob me of the fourth and highest string, which I stretch on my fiddle full of rising fifths, let the indulgent reader form an idea how the whole of the Review must look. I am ashamed to go on.
Fourthly, I find universally, that, if an author in his Preface charges himself with a slight fault, which, however, he himself hardly believes, then the critics forthwith adopt and double this charge, as, among the Romans, a suicide who failed to accomplish the act was afterward regularly executed. If the author, having his eyes thus opened, strikes into another line, and bestows upon himself, beforehand, some praise,--and that not apparent,--_this_ is not even accepted, not to say doubled. In that case the Devil may be speaker of the prologue!--
Meanwhile he seems also to be only Reviewer, and less a sly than a coa.r.s.e customer. Many and really glaring incivilities, however, I willingly forgive my future reviewer, whereas I pardon nothing to a Gallic or British one, because he knows how one should treat people.--I play with him myself in this anticritique in no specially polite manner, nor do I, as the peasant doffs his hat before higher lightnings, doff mine before his. Besides, the judges after the Special Recension address the defendant as "thou." A mild (critical) winter is unwholesome to him upon whom it comes. For the rest, I simply wait and watch for the hour when I shall be celebrated and have on laurel-leaves: then I shall not, any more than other contemporaries who have now set up laurel-trees, suffer any one to find fault with me; and few will undertake it, just as on pictures which have been smeared with _laurel oil_ no flies alight.
Fifthly and finally. It is well known that the deceased auth.o.r.ess, Ehrmann, when the advocate Ehrmann had accepted and noticed with much approbation one of her works in the Stra.s.sburg Gazette, married him on account of the review. If the editor of some journal play his cards so adroitly that a female coadjutor in the magazine shall welcome and announce my Second Edition of Hesperus (or Star Venus) with the admiration which the First Edition universally receives on account of its charms; and if he will only tip me a wink as to the s.e.x of my reviewer,--in which connection, however, _this_ must be looked to, that the critical person shall be, on the whole, still in the best blooming period of a reviewer"s life, wherein one can still readily feel and impart and favorably review the fire of the Evening Star or Venus, and so much the more, as even in physics only green wood is a conductor of the electrical flame, but dry a nonconductor,--if the editor will see to and execute all this, then the author of this anticritique pledges himself with his signature to wait upon the coadjutress immediately after the receipt of the review, and with the usual ceremonies to marry her.
JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.
Hof in Voigtland, June 8, 1797.
NINTH INTERCALARY DAY.
VICTOR"S ESSAY ON THE RELATION OF THE SOUL TO THE ORGANS.
Victor was an enemy to the exclusive taste in philosophy quite as much as in poetry. On all systems--even of the heretics of Epiphanius and of Walch--the form of truth is imprinted, as the human form is in the b.e.s.t.i.a.l kingdom, although in bolder and bolder lines. No man can believe in nonsense proper, although he may speak it. Singular it is, that precisely the _consequent_ or consistent systems, without the atomic _Clinamen_[132] of feeling, deviate from each other the most widely. Systems, like the pa.s.sions, only at the focal distance throw the brightest point of light upon the object;--how pitifully, e. g., does the great theory of self-subjugation run out of _Christianity_ over into _Stoicism_,--then into _Mysticism_,--then into _Monachism_, till the stream spreads out and oozes away into _Fohism_, as the Rhine loses itself in the sand!--The theory of Kant, with all logical systems, has this tendency to run into sand, and has that deflection[133] of feeling in common with the inconsequent ones, which brings together the wasting arms again to a renewing fountain-head. The two hands of the Pure Reason, which in the antinomy[134] scratched and beat each other, the Practical Reason peacefully joins together, and presses them, folded, to the heart, and says, here is a G.o.d, a Conscious Person, and an Immortality!----
Victor first fructified his soul with great Nature or with poets, and then, and not till then, awaited the dawn of a system. He discovered (not invented) the truth by soaring and surveying, not by penetration, microscopic inspection, and syllogistic groping from one syllable of the book of nature to another, _whereby one gets its words indeed, but not their sense_. That creeping and touching belongs, he said, not to the _finding_, but to the _proving_ and confirming of truth; for which he always took lessons of Bayle: for no one is a poorer teacher in the discovery of truth, or a better one for the proof of it, than acuteness or Bayle, who is its mint-a.s.sayer, but not its miner.
THE ESSAY.
If I wrote it in Gottingen, I might make it in paragraphs and more thoroughly, because the Flachsenfingen folks would not disturb me.
Meanwhile it must still be written here, in order that I may have a patron and advocate in my own person against the court-gentlemen, who want to transform my soul into my body.
The Brain and Nerves are the true body of the "I"; the rest of the environment is only the body of that body, the nourishing and protecting bark of that tender pith.--And as all the changes of the world appear to us only as changes of that pith or marrow, accordingly the pith- and pulp-ball with its streaks is the proper world-globe of the soul. The inverted nervous tree springs from the swollen brain of the f[oe]tus as from a kernel, which it also resembles in appearance, and ascends with--sensitive branches as spinal marrow, even to the anatomical summit of the horse-tail. This marrowy growth is grafted upon the venous tree as a consuming parasitic plant. And as every twig is a tree in miniature, accordingly--for all this is not a correspondence of wit, but of nature--the nervous ganglia are fourth cerebral chambers in small. The terminations of the nerves, in their development, open out on the retina, on the Schneiderian[135]
membrane, in the gustative knot, &c., into leaf and flower. Hence, e. g., we see not with the continuation of the optic nerve, but with the delicate unravelling of its stamina; for the great dissolving picture-gallery on the retina cannot possibly, by a movement of the nervous spirit, (or whatever one will a.s.sume--for after all it comes back to motion,) be slid back to the brain; in which case, besides, the two galleries of the two eyes would have to pa.s.s through the two p.r.o.ngs of the visual nerve and coincide at its handle to one picture.
Consequently the image in the eye, ear, &c., if it is to serve any purpose, must be felt forward on the point of the nerve,--in one word, it is even more absurd to shut up the soul in the locker[136] of the fourth ventricle of the brain, i. e. in a pore of this tubercular plant, than it would be if one who, like me, ascribes an animating soul to the flower, should imprison the same in the ground-story of the dull kernel. Rather would I, surely, locate the soul in the finest honey-vessels of the senses, the eyes, than in the insensible brain, if I did not, in fact, believe that, like a Hamadryad, it inhabits and warms and stirs every nervous bough of this animal plant. The under-tied or severed nerve conveys, it is true, no further sensation, not however on account of the interruption of the connection with the soul and residence chamber in the brain, but because the nutritious spirit of life is cut off from it; for the nerves, like all finer organizations, need so much a continuous supply of food, that the arrested beating of heart and artery suspends in one minute all their powers.
I go further and say outright, beforehand,--by way of contradicting two errors: these organs do not feel, but are felt; secondly, the organs are not the condition of all feeling in general, but only of a certain kind.
The last first: as the organ (i. e. its changes), which is as much a body as any gross object, whose own changes it brings in contact with the soul, is nevertheless felt by the spiritual nature immediately and without a _second_ organ: accordingly all corporeal substances give the spiritual essence sensations as well as the nerves do, and an unembodied soul is not possible, for the simple and sole reason, that in case of the dissolution of the body it would then wear the whole material universe as a heavier one.
My first a.s.sertion was, one should not say the _perceptive_, but the _perceived_ organization. The nerves do not feel the object, but only change the place where it is felt, and their changes and those of the brain are only _objects_ of sensation, not _instruments_ thereof, nor in fact sensation itself. But wherefore?--
I have more than one Therefore. A body is capable only of motion, although, to be sure, that motion is only the show of the aforementioned combination and the result of the powers concealed in simple parts. The string, the air, the auditory ossicles, the auricular nerves, vibrate; but the vibration of the latter no more explains the sensation of a tone than the vibration of the string could, if the soul were chained to that. Thus, despite all images in the eye and brain, the _discernment_ of them is still not yet made out or explained; or will you say, perhaps, that for some such reason as this, because the senses are _mirrors_ full of images, therefore the spiritual _eye_ is dispensed with or made good? And does not the change of the nerve presuppose a second in a second essence, if it is to be perceived? Or does another motion in this essence represent the first motion?
This brings me to the brain. That greatest and grossest nerve--the sounding-board of all the others--shows up to the soul the delineations of those images which are introduced by the rest. Upon the whole, I am of opinion that the brain serves more the nerves of the muscles, the veins of the limbs, which meet in the hand of the soul, and all, in fact, more as nourishing root, than it serves as a case of instruments to the pictorial soul. As most of our ideas are served up on visual images, and take from them their ground color, it is probable we think more with the optic nerve than with the brain. Why is it, as Bonnet has observed, that deep-thinking wearies the eyes and sharp-seeing the brain? Why do certain excesses blunt at the same time the memory and the eyes? The fever-images playing their antics outside of the eyes of the sick and people of lively fancy, like Cardan, who saw in the dark whatever he thought vividly and glowingly, are explained in my hypothesis.
In regard to the brain there are two errors; but Heaven save my friends only from one of them. For from the other Reimarus can guard them, who has fully proved that the brain is no aeolian harp with trembling strings, nor a camera-obscura with sliding pictures, nor a barrel-organ with pins for every idea, which the spirit turns, in order of itself to play to and from itself its ideas. If now not even the pre-established _harmony_ of the brain and the mind, nor the mutual _accompaniment_ of the two, is conceivable, so is their _ident.i.ty_ absolutely impossible; and this is precisely the error from which the abovementioned Heaven has to keep my friends. The materialist must first set up all that which Reimarus has overthrown; he must petrify in the brain-pap the millions of picture-cabinets of seventy years, and yet again make them movable like _Eidophysica_,[137] and deal out the shuffled card-images to every second of time; he must see to it that these _animated_ dancing images are forced into rank and file. And then, after all, and only then, does his difficulty properly begin; for now--even if we grant him that the images see themselves, the thoughts think themselves, that every imagination darkly mirrors all others, and even the conscious "I," as a monad, does the universe--now (we say) he must first get him a generalissimo who shall command and array this immeasurable, fluctuating host of ideas, a compositor who shall set up the idea-book from an unknown ma.n.u.script, and, when dreams, fevers, pa.s.sions, have shaken all the letter-cases into _pi_, shall rearrange all the letters alphabetically. This ruling unity and power--without which the _symmetry of the microcosm_ is as inexplicable as that of the _macrocosm_, that of _the ideal world_ as that of the _actual_--is precisely what we call a spirit. To be sure, by this unknown power neither the origin nor the succession of ideas is _mediated_ or explained, but, a.s.suming only the known force of matter, motion, all that is not only incredible, but absolutely impossible; and Leibnitz can more easily explain motion by dark imaginings, than the materialist can imaginings by motions. In the former case motion is only semblance, and exists only in the second contemplating being, but in the latter the representation would be show and would exist in the second--_representing_ substance.
I have often quarrelled with men of the world who make good observations and miserable conclusions, because in case of the least dependence of the soul upon the body--e. g. in old age, intoxication, &c.--they made the one a mere repeating-work of the other; nay, I have even said, no dancing-master was so stupid as to conclude: "Inasmuch as I dance awkwardly in leaden shoes, more nimbly in wooden ones, and best of all in silk ones, I see clearly from this, that the shoes have special springs to communicate rapidity; and as with leaden shoes I can hardly lift my feet, if I were barefoot I could hardly make out a single _Pas_." The soul is the dancing-master, the body the shoe.
We cannot conceive any action either of bodies upon bodies or of monads upon monads; consequently, of the organs upon the conscious being, still less. This we know, that the cohesion and community of goods between soul and body is always the same, or at most greater at the times when others would expect it to be less; for the greatest depth of thought, the holiest emotion, the highest flight of fancy, are precisely what need the waxen wing-work of the body most, as its consequent exhaustion also gives a.s.surance; the more incorporeal the object of the ideas is, so much the more corporeal hand-and-draught-services are necessary to the holding of it fast, and at most the periods of stupid sensuality, of spiritual enervation, of blear imbecility, are the ones with which we must make coincide the periods of liberation from the chains of the body. Even the moral power with which we trample down wanton, upshooting bodily impulses works with bodily crows and tools; and the soul in this case merely summons the brain against the stomach.--Add to this, that the limits and hindrances to such fettering and unfettering are as little to be a.s.signed as the causes of the same. Still less can the bonds of the soul, as some think, grow looser and longer in dream. Sleep is the rest of the nerves, not of the whole body. The involuntary muscles, the stomach, the heart, keep on working therein, not much less than when one lies down awake. Only the nerves and the brain, i. e. thinking and perceiving, are suspended. Hence slumber refreshes men while riding and driving, who therefore rest nothing but the nerves. Hence weak-nerved patients, whom all rest wearies, are refreshed by dreamless sleep. By the way, without the theory of _disorganization_ which a.s.sumes negative and positive nervous electricity, the phenomena of sleep are inexplicable;--e. g. it is inexplicable in that case, why opium, wine, manipulation, animality, childhood, plethora, nourishing food, perfumes, on the one hand, are precisely what promote sleep; while, on the other hand, torture, exhaustion, old age, temperance, pressure on the brain, winter, loss of blood, fear, grief, phlegm, fat, spiritual enervation, also provoke it.----At most in deep sleep, when the nerve-body rests, could we suppose the soul loosed from earthly chains; in dream, on the contrary, it should rather be supposed the more closely fastened, because dreaming, as well as deep thinking, which also locks the gates of the five senses as well, is surely no sleeping.
Hence dreams wear out the nerves, to the inner overstrainings of which they add outer impressions. Hence morning lends both the brain and our dreams equal animation. Hence the sleeping animal--except the effeminate tame dog--has no unhealthy dreams. Hence even Aristotle a.s.signs unusual dreams as forerunners of the sick-nurse. Hence--I have now dreamed enough, and the reader has slept enough.--
37. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Amoroso at Court.--Preliminary Recesses of Marriage.--Defence of Courtly Back-bending.
On the morning after that great night Victor took leave of this consecrated burial-ground of his fairest days with unconcealed tears.
Often he looked back on these ruins of his Palmyra, till nothing of them was left standing except the mountain-ridge as a fire-proof wall.
"When I come back hither four weeks hence," thought he, "it will only be to see the death-angel lay my Emanuel on the altar and under the sacrificial knife." He bethought himself how dearly he paid for this feast of tabernacles by the death of a friend;[138] and how the latter, without such compensation, suffered just as great a loss. For he felt that the frightful word "scoundrel" had now come in as an eternal wall of rock between their sundered souls.--He called to mind, indeed, and right gladly, what there was to acquit his late friend, particularly his being hounded on by Matthieu and his listening when _he_ swore eternal love to Clotilda; nay, he even suspected that the Evangelist had perhaps let poor Flamin see far in the background peculiar motives (these suggested by the Apothecary) for a love, by whose object the favor of the Prince was to be secured,--but his _feelings_ incessantly repeated to him: "He still ought not to have _believed_ it!--ah, hadst thou only," said he with emotion, at the sight of the city, "pierced me with b.a.l.l.s or with other terms of contempt, that I might have easily forgiven thee!--But that thou shouldst have done it with just this ever-gnawing venomous sound!"--He is right; the injury of honor is not therefore the less, because the other inflicts it from full conviction of right.--For the conviction is precisely the offence; and the honor of a friend is something so great, that a doubt of it should hardly dare to arise except by its own confession. But thus do separations easily grow out of little concealments, as from March _clouds_ July _tempests_. Only a perfected n.o.ble soul can forbear to try any longer the tried friend,--can believe when the enemies of the friend deny,--can blush as at an impure thought, when a dumb, flying suspicion soils the gracious image,--and when at last the doubts are no more to be conquered, can still banish them for a long time from one"s actions, willing rather to fall into an economical improvidence than into the heavy sin against the Holy Spirit in man. This firm confidence is easier to deserve than to have.
In the noisy foundery and mill of the city he felt as if in a dreary forest. Accustomed as he was to tender souls, the city ones appeared to him all so th.o.r.n.y and unpolished; for love had, like tragedy, purified his pa.s.sions in exciting them. All hung over so ruinous and moss-grown as if on the verge of a collapse, whereas the clean mirror-walls of Maienthal rose firm and radiant. For love is the only thing which fills the heart of man to the brim, although with a nectar-foam that soon sinks again; it alone composes a poem of some thousand minutes without the rattling repet.i.tions of the letter R, as the Dominican Cardone[139]
executed a poem upon it quite as long under the name _L" R_-- _sbadita_[140] without a single R,--hence, like crabs, it is finest in the months without an R in their name.
The first thing he had to do in Flachsenfingen was to write to Clotilda. For as the Evangelist Matthieu would now in all probability go out into all the world and preach the gospel of the pistol-duel between the two friends to all people, there was nothing else to do for the sacred reputation of his beloved than to transform her into a betrothed by a publicly declared engagement. Flamin"s newly kindled pa.s.sion could not be considered at all in comparison with Clotilda"s justification. The exclamation, "Thou art my brother," which the convulsions of anguish had wrung from Clotilda, had of course been incomprehensible to Flamin, and had fallen unheeded on his ear; but for the listening Mat it had become a grand text and _dictum probans_ of his doctrinal system respecting their being brother and sister.--In the letter, therefore, Victor besought his friend for a tacit a.s.sent to his suit; he left it to her, by his silence, to guess the most disinterested motives of his prayer.
He appeared now on the war-theatre of souls, of which one seldom catches an exact map, the court;--to his heart, filled with paradises, even the apartments seemed like gla.s.s cases of a stuffed aviary, which one strews with powder-bra.s.s, conchs, and flowers, and the live articles of the rooms like dried birds stuffed with wood or a.r.s.enic; through the snakes wire was drawn, as through the tails of great beasts, and the tree-runners on the throne stood on wire.----So very much had he become through the Whitsuntide festival the antipode of us who in colder blood easily remark what is sublime and n.o.ble about a court.--The newest news he heard there was that the Prince in company with the Princess was to take a journey to the mineral springs of St.
Luna, he to cure his gouty feet, she to cure her eyes. Victor was really not quite tolerant, when he thought to himself, "If you will not fare any better, then, for all I care, go to the D----." The Paullinum was to him a slaughter-house, and every antechamber a chamber of torture; the Prince treated him not with courtly courtesy, but with coldness, which pained him so much the more as it proved that he had loved him,--the Princess more proudly,--only Matthieu, who loved best to talk with people who mortally hated him, had a face full of sunshine. From him and from his sister and some unknown persons he had to take and worry down some light snake-poison of persiflage about his duel, which the stomach indeed digests, like other snake-poison, but which injected into wounds dissolves the blood of life.----Does not even my correspondent fall into a fury and send his fury to me through his _Capsarius_,[141]--the Pomeranian dog, saying: "Let any one keep cool, if he can, who is warm, that is to say in love, and whom death has not yet made cold, let him keep cool, I say, before the stinging smiles of a court-sisterhood at his sensitive love, especially before those higher ladies who are G.o.ddesses, and on whose Cyprian altar always (as with the Scythians) a stranger is sacrificed, and to whom (as the Gauls believed of their G.o.ds) malefactors, _roues_, Orleanses, are the most acceptable offerings!--Or, even if he can dispose of that, let him composedly hear himself mocked for his love by an Evangelist who invents and dresses up on the subject the following maxims: _La decence ajoute aux plaisirs de l"indecence: la vertue est le sel de l"amour; mais n"en prenez pas trop.--J"aime dans les femmes les acces de colere, de douleur, de joie, de peur: il y a toujours dans leur sang bouillant quelque chose qui est favorable aux hommes.--C"est la ou la finesse demeure courte, qu"il faut de l"enthousiasme.--Les femmes s"etonnent rarement d"etre crues, foibles; c"est du contraire qu"elles s"etonnent un peu.--L"amour pardonne toujours a l"amour, rarement a la raison_.[142]--Blessed are the adversaries [sighs Knef] who are at liberty to cudgel one another."
The Evangelist threw a corrosive drop on the nerves of Victor"s heart, when, despite his knowledge of Flamin"s n.o.ble extraction, he twitted him with this, that like a modern French Equilibrist of Freedom, he could not marry indeed a citizen, but yet could--fight with one. And it went through his soul to see the friend who had been stolen from him so sorely impoverished in friends, that this Matthieu was the last scion and support of the line, who did not even before Victor take the trouble in the higher circles to a.s.sume and continue playing the part of a friend of Flamin. A good man has his sensitive heart screwed, as it were, into a flattening press, when he is obliged to stand before people (as Victor here is before so many) who hate and insult him,--in the beginning he is cheerful and cool, and is glad that he cares nothing about it,--but he unconsciously arms himself with more and more contempt, by way of opposing something to the insult,--at last the growth of the contempt announces itself by the disagreeable feeling of love going out and hatred coming in, and the bitter aqua-fortis seizes and devours its own vessel, the heart.--Then the pain becomes so great, that he lets the old human love, which was the warm element of his soul, run again in streams into his bosom. With Victor something else was added to the embittering elements,--his previous softening; one is never colder than after great warmth, just as water, after boiling, a.s.sumes a greater coldness than it had before. Love, intoxication, and sometimes the inspiration drunk from the sight of nature, make us too kind towards our favorites, and too hard upon our antipodes. Now when Victor in this bitter mood looked on at a card-table, and delivered to himself internal lectures upon the whole a.s.sembly, _lectures on heads_,[143] in which, instead of heads of pasteboard, he availed himself of thicker ones: then the recollection of the still, humane tolerance wherewith Clotilda had accommodated herself to these very people out of love to her parents, made the whole ice-panoply which had formed around his heart, as round a flower, melt down, and his warmed heart said with the first joy it had known to-day: "Why then do I hate these full as much tormented as tormenting shapes so bitterly? Are they here only on my account? Have not they also their conscious being? Must they not drag with them this defective, afflicted self through all Eternity? Is not each of them still loved by some soul or other? Why shall I then see in them only matter for detestation, and draw acid from every look, every tone? No, _I will love men merely because they are men_."--Yes, indeed! friendship may desire merits, but philanthropy only the human form. Hence it is precisely that we have all such a cold changeable love of man, because we confound the _worth_ of men with their _claim_, and will not love anything about them, but virtues.
Our Victor felt as light as after a tempest; the bitterest thing which insults can do to us is, that they compel us to hate. On the other hand, he felt now how impure our resistance to evil, which we give out for virtue, is, sand how disagreeable it is even to a n.o.ble soul to combat enemies without bearing malice against them; for this is still harder than blessing and protecting them without loving them.
Thus some weeks elapsed during his enforced landings at the hostile court,--for the request of his father ruled his heart,--and vain hopes of Clotilda"s decision, and tearful retrospective yearnings toward the suspended days of love and the _desolated_ days of friendship.
Clotilda"s silence, however, was precisely an a.s.sent to his coming; still he superfluously announced to her by a second letter the day of the same. For the rest, to him, thus bound to the throne as to a whipping-post, thus hurled out from all the objects of his love, thus fixed upon nothing but a far-off thundering future, in which his Emanuel after fourteen days sinks into the earth and his Clotilda into a thousand sorrows, the present grew close and sultry. Around him whirled an unripe tempest, and, as at the equinoxes, the clouds hung immovably about him as a great thick ma.s.s, and the secret laboring in the high element had not yet decided whether it was to run together in tear-drops or break up into blue.
At last he went to St. Luna ... in sooth only sadly blest! O could he glance at the Luna footpath or at the Parsonage, which covered the stages of buried friendship, without turning away his overflowing eye, without thinking how much vainer is the loving than the life of men, how fate employs precisely the warmest hearts for the destruction of the best (just as one uses only _burning-lenses_ for the calcining of _precious stones_), and how many a silent breast is nothing but the sunken coffin of a beloved and faded image?--It is a nameless feeling to wish to love a friend for memory"s sake, and be obliged to shun him from honor. Victor _wished_ he _could_ forgive his infatuated darling; but in vain: the a.r.s.enical word which pains me in his name remained still, in spite of all sweetening juices with which he swathed it, lying undissolved and corroding and deadly in his soul. Good Flamin! a stranger could love thee, I, for example; but the friend of thy youth, no more.
Victor strode along tremblingly before the picture-gallery and music-hall of his mirrored and echoed childhood, the parsonage, likewise before the scouring Apollonia, to whom he gladly gave a deeper greeting than his rank allowed, and before old Mops, who mixed himself up in no family feuds, but cordially invited him with his tail.--Not his pride kept him back from visiting the (a.s.sumed) parents of his adversary, but the anxious apprehension that the good people would perhaps worry themselves to death before him in an embarra.s.sing conflict between politeness, between old love and new resentment. But he resolved by a letter to the n.o.ble-souled Parson"s wife to satisfy his love and her sensibility.