_Victor_: "We see, like David, our Solomon"s Temple only in dreams, and in our waking hours the tabernacles of the Covenant; but it were a sorrowful philosophy which should require nothing of men but what they had hitherto rendered without philosophy. We must fit reality to the ideal, not the reverse."
The ardently-philosophical _Melchior_: "Most modern movements are only the starts of one sleeping under the ear-wig[86] and grasping at his b.l.o.o.d.y scalp.--But the falling stalact.i.te of regentship forms at last with its drops one column with the ascending stalagmite of the people."
_Flamin_: "But do not Spartans imply Helots, Romans and Germans Slaves, and Europeans Negroes?--Must not always the prosperity of the whole be based upon individual victims, just as one cla.s.s must devote itself to tilling the soil, that another may apply itself to knowledge?"
_Cato_ the elder: "Then I spit on _the whole_ if I am the victim, and despise myself if I am the whole."
_Balthazar_: "It is better that the whole suffer voluntarily for the sake of a single member, than that he should against his just vote suffer for the whole."
_Matthieu_: "Fiat just.i.tia et pereat mundus."
_Victor_: "In plain English: the greatest physical evil must be preferred to the least moral evil, the least unrighteousness."[87]--
_Melchior_: "The physical inequality of men produced by nature no more excuses any political inequality than pestilence does murder, or a failure of crops corn-monopoly. But inversely political equality must be the very compensation for the want of physical. In a despotic state enlightenment as well as prosperity may be greater in inward contents, but in the free state it is greater in outward contents, and is distributed among all; for freedom and enlightenment reciprocally beget each other."--
_Victor_: "As unbelief and tyranny do. Your a.s.sertion shows to nations two ways, one slower, but more just, and one which is neither. Wild clutchings at the _dial plate-wheel_ of Time, which is turned by a thousand little wheels, dislocate more than they expedite it; often they break off its teeth.[88] Hang thy own weight on the _weight_ of the clock-work, which drives all the wheels; i. e. be wise and virtuous, then wilt thou be, at the same time, great and innocent, and be building up the city of G.o.d, without the mortar of blood, and without the stone blocks of death"s-heads."--
Here we strike the bell that closes this political sermon, during which Victor, despite his Socratic continence and moderation, made all these wild heads friends of his own. With Matthieu alone jest was the only object, to which he turned everything serious, instead of the reverse.
He had in a characteristic degree that shamelessness of rank, at the same time to commit and to ridicule certain follies, to seek and to despise certain fools, and to avoid and praise at once certain philosophers. Wherever he could, he covered the good Prince of Flachsenfingen with satirical c.o.c.kle-b.u.t.tons[89] which he threw at him, and showed hostility to the husband, which is generally the sign of too great a friendship for the wife. Thus he said to-day in reference to Jenner"s or January"s _penchants_, which contrasted with those of the month and saint from which he derived his name: "For the St. Januarius in Puzzolo[90] a fish was the Dr. Culpepper."--
I confess, I have, during the whole session of the Club, again had the freakish thought, which, wild as it is, I have often before been unable to drive out of my head,--for it is, to be sure, a little confirmed by the fact that, like an atheist, I know not whence I am, and that with my French name, Jean Paul, I was impelled by the most wondrous accidents to a German writing-desk, on which I one day will copiously report them to the world,--as I was saying, I hold it myself to be a folly, my sometimes getting the conceit in my head, that it is possible since thousand-fold examples of the kind are extant in Oriental history--that I might be actually the unknown son of a Kniese[91] or Shah, or something of the sort, that was trained for the throne, and from whom they concealed his n.o.ble birth the better to educate him. The very entertaining of such an idea is of itself folly; but so much is nevertheless correct, that the examples are not to be erased from universal history, in which many a one, even to his twenty-eighth year,--I am two years older,--knew not a word of it, that an Asiatic or some other throne awaited him, wherefrom he afterward, when he came to it, wielded a magnificent sway. But let it be a.s.sumed I was changed from a Jean Lack-land to a John With-land,--I should go forthwith to the billiard-room, and tell everybody whom he had before him. Were one of my subjects there joining in the game, I should forthwith govern him on the spot; and if it were a female subject, without scruple. I should proceed with considerateness, and invest only subjects from my billiard-shire with the weightier offices, because the Regent must be acquainted with him whom he appoints, which, as is well known, he can best become at the gaming-tables. I would strictly command my va.s.sals and all by a general _reglement_ for all times to be happy and well-off, and whoever was poor, him I would put as a punishment on half-pay; for I think, if I interdicted poverty so emphatically, it would come at last to be the same as if Saturn and I ruled together.--Like a Sultan in his harem, so I in my state, would desire no physical mutes or dwarfs, but, as occasion required, moral ones.--I confess, I should have a peculiar predilection for geniuses, and should appoint to all, even the wretchedest places, the greatest heads. I should fear nothing (enemies excepted) but dropsy on the brain, of which a crowned or mitred head must always be in an agony of dread, if, like me, it has read in Dr. Ludwig"s, or else in Tissot"s, treatises on the nerves, that it comes on at first with close bindings around the head, which I should fear still more from my crown, especially if the head which was forced into it was _thick_ and _it_ was _tight_....
We come back to the story. The next day Victor and Flamin, in the fair, newly a.s.sumed bonds of the covenant of friendship, returned to Flachsenfingen. Now could Victor enter through the heavenly gates of Maienthal, if Clotilda did not bolt them. All depended on Emanuel"s answer. The May-airs breathed, the May-flowers exhaled, the May-trees rustled. O how this fanning kindled the longing to enjoy all these blisses in Maienthal, and to get from his friend the admission-ticket to the finest concert-hall of nature. None came; for it had already--come through the Bee-father Lind of Kussewitz, who as feudal-postilion had been sent by Count O. to Matthieu, and had taken the route through Maienthal. It was from Emanuel:--
"Horion!
"Come sooner, beloved! Hasten to our valley of Eden, which is a summer-house of nature, with green-growing walls between nothing but avenues running out of heaven into heaven. The light, flowery hours move by before the eye of man as the stars do before the optic tube of the astronomer. Blossom-snares of honeysuckle are laid for thee, and covered with fragrances; and when thou art caught in them, the up-welling incense envelops thee in a cloud, and unknown arms press through the cloud, and draw thee to three hearts full of love! I have already taken up lilies of the valley out of the wood, and planted them near me.--Thy city is indeed also a wood around thee, still lily of the valley! I have already transplanted two balsamines and five summer carnations; but my first transplanted Balsamine was Clotilda. Thou seest how spring, with its exuberant, swelling juices, penetrates through my budding soul also, and May splits open therein, as I am now doing on the carnations, all the buds.--Appear, appear, ere I become melancholy again, and then tell thy Julius who the angel was that handed him the letter for me.
"EMANUEL."
Julius had probably thought on this occasion of that other letter which a hitherto unknown angel had given him to unseal on this Whitsuntide.--But what have I to do here with angels and letters? Write by courier is what I will now do, that so I may have got through the 32d Chapter before the dog appears with his 33d Whitsuntide Chapter, which, not merely because it has thirty-two ancestral chapters, but on account of the probable effusion therein of a holy spirit of joy, or on account of a whole dove-flock of holy spirits, and on account of the historic pictures it will contain,--and by reason of my own exertions,--must be (it is believed) a chapter like which in each Dionysian[92] period hardly half a one, and in each Constantinopolitan hardly a whole one, can be written.--The Whitsuntide dog-day may turn out long, but it will be good and divine,--Philippine will shake her brother and say (she loves to flatter): "Paul! St. Paul was _also_ in the third heaven, but he never described it like this in his Epistle to the Romans!" I myself could wish that I might read my 33d dog-day before I had made it....
The much in little which, with my previous haste, I have still to throw out, is, according to the gourd-doc.u.ments, this: Victor set his heart full as much as I do on the Whitsuntide-gospels. His conscience placed not the thinnest pasture-bars, not the lowest boundary-stone, in the way of his enjoyment, and he could go like an innocent pleasure to the beloved Clotilda, and say to her, Accept me. He paid now his farewell and professional visits regularly at court, and cared nothing for any word full of human caustic, or any eye full of basilisk"s poison. He redoubled his fairer visits to Flamin, in order to reward his n.o.ble reconciliation with a warmer friendship, and he stamped upon the past history and on the subject of jealousy the privy-seal of forbearing silence. His dreams did not, to be sure, on their stage full of shadow-plays and airy apparitions, present Clotilda"s form (the most loved faces are just those dream denies), but by conducting him into the old, dark, rainy months, when he was again unhappy and without love and without the dearest soul, they gave him by means of the rained-out night a brighter day, and redoubled melancholy became redoubled love.--And when in the morning after such dreams of the past dream he walked out through the May-frost, and by the swollen joy-drops of the vine-leaves, and under the morning wind, which rather wafted than cooled him, in order to touch with his yearning eyes as precious relics the fixed western woods, which hung a green curtain before the opera-stage of his hope,----a reviewer, who shall put himself in my place, cannot possibly expect me with this shortness of time, and in my extra post-coach to the carriage of Ph[oe]bus (now in the shorter days), to give this long antecedent member of the period its conclusion.
Even the perpendicular climax of the barometer, and the horizontal streams of the east wind, swelled the sails of his hope, and wafted him into the silent sea of the Whitsuntide-future, and into the Almanach of 1793, to see whether the moon fulled on Whitsuntide.--By Heaven, it will at least be half full, which is much better still, because one will have it at hand in the middle of heaven when one is about to begin his evening....
I have, after all, by extraordinary racing, brought matters so far, that I have done with the 32d dog-post-day before Spitz with his goblet of joy on his neck has made his way across the Indian Ocean.--And as, besides, according to the _capitulatio perpetua_ with the reader, (at which, notoriously, the benches of princes and cities bite the dust,) I must now make an Intercalary Day: I will spend the Dog"s vacation in that way; but I earnestly beg all my day-electors, those of my subscribers who have hitherto skipped across the Intercalary Days on the leaping-pole of the index-finger, not to do it in this case, first, because I agree to be shot, if in this Intercalary Day I in the least exercise my intercalary-day privilege, though confirmed under several governments, of delivering the wittiest and weightiest matters,--and, secondly, because the dog even on the Intercalary day may run into port, and bring me facts which I may serve up not in the 33d Dog-post-day, but already in the----VIIIth _Intercalary day_, or in the VIIIth _Sansculottide_.--The contents of this, like the present, are a rambling overture to the Future.--
I must say, if, in the first place, as Bellarmin (the Catholic champion and contradictor) a.s.serts, every man is his own Redeemer,--whence follows, in my judgment, that he is also his own Eve and serpent for his old Adam,--if, secondly, the pen of an extraordinarily good author is the snuffers of truth, just as, inversely, to Herr von Moser in prison the snuffers were a pen,--if, thirdly, Despotism may at last, instead of the living tree-stems (for it saws right into the world as if blind,) saw into the throne-saw-horse itself,--further, I must say, if, fourthly, every action (even the worst) has, like Christ, two unlike genealogies,--if in fact, fifthly, one and another reviewer carries his critical eye, wherewith he surveys everything, not on the apex of his skull (as Mahomet"s saints are said to, in order not to see _beauties_), nor, like Argus, before and behind, but actually in front, under the stomach, over the gut, in the midst of the navel; if this man, in addition thereto, possesses no other heart than the linen one which the seamstress has st.i.tched in the corner of the shirt-frill, and which lies over the pit of the heart, which one would call more sensibly the pit of the stomach,--finally I must say (at least I can do so), if, in the sixth place, true coherence, strict _concatenation_ of paragraphs, is perhaps the greatest ornament and soul of the so-called _unbound discourse_, or prose, which, however, is like a _bound_ harpsichord, and if, therefore, the sense, like an epic action, must begin at the end of the (rhetorical and temporal) period, because otherwise there would not be any at all....
--But neither will there be any to come.--These four points, however, look like the _hare"s tracks_ in the snow.--In short: the Pomeranian dog, my biographical hod-bearer and forwarder, is already lying under the table, and has discharged some Elysian fields and heavenly kingdoms.--As, besides, I did not wholly know in the above paragraph what I was after (I hope not to sit a well man before the public, if I knew)--accordingly the dog did me a true labor of love in actually biting off, so to speak, the tail, or second member. It was, besides, my plan merely to make caprioles in a period of an ell"s length until the dog should have removed my anxiety about the doubtfulness of the Whitsuntide journey.--In fact, I never wanted to lay out words and thoughts together, but to save the _latter_, while I spent the _former_; Peutzer wrote long ago to the men of Ratisbon and Wetzlar, Many thoughts need a small stream of words, but the greater the brook is, so much the smaller can be the mill-wheel.--An honest reviewer is offended also by a laconic book if only for this reason, (not merely that the public does not understand it but) because a German has in the jurists and theologians the very best models before him for writing prolixly, and indeed with a diffuseness which perhaps--for the thought is the soul, the word the body--establishes among _words_ that higher friendship of men, which, according to Aristotle, consists in this, that _one_ soul (one thought) inhabits several bodies (words) at once.----
--I now begin Victor"s vigils, the holy eve of Whitsuntide. It was already Sat.u.r.day,--the wind (like the sciences) came from the east,--the quicksilver in the barometer-tube (as it does to-day in my nervous-tubes) almost leaped out at the top.--Flamin had parted in peace with his friend on Friday, and was not to return for five days.--Victor will to-morrow, on the first day of Whitsuntide, sally forth before the sun, in order to come back again on the third, when he alights in America.--(I wish he would stay longer.)--It is a fine _blue-Monday_[93] in the soul (every blue day is one), and a fine dispensation from the mourning of life, when one (like my hero) has the good fortune on a holy even-tide, during the tolling for prayers, and when the moon is already up above the houses, to sit tranquil and innocent in Zeusel"s balcony in the presence of the prospects of the fairest Whitsuntide-days and the fairest Whitsuntide-faces, to take a first cut of all the preparatory dishes of hope, to gather all the bosom-roses and signs of the fairest morning, and, amidst the noisy booth-preludes to the Festival, to read the second part of the _Mumien_[94] precisely in the Sectors of joy in which I sketch my own and Gustavus"s entrance into the heavenly Jerusalem at Lilienbad.----All this, as was said, my hero had....
But when he who found out so much affinity between his Whitsuntide-journey and that journey to the watering-place in the book, came at last with his agitated soul to the destruction of that Jerusalem; then, with the first sad sigh of to-day, he said: "O thou good Destiny, never lay such a sacrificial knife on the heart of my Clotilda; ah, I should die, if she became so unhappy as Beata."--And he further reflected how the ruddy morning clouds of hope are only high, hovering rain, and how often sorrow is the bitter kernel of rapture, like the golden Imperial Apple of the German Emperor, which, to be sure, weighs three marks and three ounces, but inwardly is filled up with earth....
By Heaven! we are here needlessly embittering with night-thoughts the holy evening, and none of us knows why he sighs so.--I a.s.sure the reader I have the whole Whitsuntide-festival before me in copy, and there is not a single misfortune there, unless Victor joins on a fourth Whitsuntide-day as after-summer, and in that there should something be developed. I confess I like to be an aesthetic _frere terrible_, and to point the sword at the breast of the world, which is reading deep into my Invisible (mother) Lodge, and play other like tricks,--but that comes from the fact that in youth one reads and owns the Sorrows of Werther, of which, like a ma.s.s-priest, one prepares a bloodless victim before one enters the Academy. Nay, if I this very day were composing a romance, I should--as the blue-coated Werther has in every young Amoroso and author a quasi-Christ who on Good-Friday puts on a similar crown of thorns, and ascends a cross--myself also do the same over again....
But it is time I opened my Maienthal, and let every one in. Only I will no longer make a mystery of it that I am minded to present outright this whole Paphos and knightly seat to the reader, as Louis XI. cast the Duchy of Boulogne at the feet of the Holy Mary. I think thereby to tower, perhaps, above other writers, who bestow only their quills upon their readers, full as much as the king does above old Lipsius, who made over to Mary only his silver-pen. In the beginning I meant to retain for myself this Elysium with thrice-mowed meadows and pine-groves, because I am in fact a poor devil, and really have no more income than a Prince of Wurtemberg formerly, namely ninety florins Rhenish of appanage-money, and ten florins for a coat of state, and because, as to the two square miles of land set off to me by G.o.d and equity,--for so much does the whole earth at an equal division, according to a good plan, lay off to each man,--verily I make so small account of that, that I would gladly give up my two miles to any one for a miserable sheepfold.--And what most kept me back from making this presentation of my Maienthal to living men, was the fear that I should turn over a _feudum_ to people, readers, provincial deputies, who are possessed of a thousand times greater palatinates and patrimonial estates, and whom one would provoke, if one should make them resemble the holy Mary, who from a Queen of Heaven became a d.u.c.h.ess of Boulogne, or the Roman Emperor who must on the day of his coronation become at the same time a member of the Order of Mary at Aachen.
But what then can all their _majorats_,--their Teutonic-knights"
estates,--their mesne-tenures,--and their _patrimonia Petri_ (an allusion to _my patrimonium_ PAULI),--and their grandfathers" estates and all their cargoes stowed into the ship of earth,--in short, their European possessions on the earth,--what, I say, can all these Dutch farms yield, in the way of products, that could stand even at a distance before those of Maienthal? And do there grow on their crown-estates heavenly blue days, evenings full of blissful tears, nights full of great thoughts? No, Maienthal bears loftier flowers than those which cattle pluck off, fairer apples of the Hesperides than are laid up in fruit-cellars, super-terrestrial treasures on subterranean rival-pieces to Eden, like Clotilda and Emanuel, and all that our dreams paint and our tears of joy bedew.--
And this is just my excuse, if I deny the Maienthal domain of joy to a thousand rival claimants, if I as its fee-provost cannot invest with this Swabian reversionary fief such people as are not fit for a proper _feudum_, morally blind, lame, minors, eunuchs, &c.--And here I must make myself many enemies, when, from among the va.s.sals and joint subjects of invest.i.ture to whom Maienthal, with all its poetic privileges, is given in fee, I expressly exclude old gabblers who can no longer make the _knight"s leap_ of fancy,--forty-seven inhabitants of Scheerau and one hundred of Flachsenfingen, whose hearts are as cold as their knee-pans, or as dogs" noses,--the greatest ministers and other grandees, in whom, as in _great_ roasted lumps of meat, only the middle is still raw, namely the heart,--one half billion economists, jurists, exchequer and finance-counsellors, and plus- i. e.
minus-makers,[95] in whom the soul, as in Adam"s case the body, was kneaded out of a clod of earth, who have a pericardium [or heart-bag], but no heart, cerebral-membranes without brain, shrewdness without philosophy, who, instead of the book of nature, read only their papers for law-cases and their tax-books,--finally, those who have not fire enough to kindle at the fire of love, poetry, religion, who for _weep_ say _blubber_, for _poetry_, _rhyme_, for _sentiment_, _craziness_....
Am I then crazy that I work myself up here into such a rage, as if I had not before me on the other side the finest college of readers, which I am promoting to the _primus adquirens_ of the freehold and ap.r.o.n-string-hold of Maienthal; a mystical, moral person, who discerns that utility is only an inferior beauty, and beauty a higher utility?--It is peculiar to all emotions (but not to opinions) that one thinks he alone has them. Thus every youth holds his love to be an extraordinary celestial phenomenon which has been only once in the world, as the star of love, the evening star, often looks like a comet.
But the world is not all Flachsenfingenites and Dutchmen, who climb the Alps less to have great thoughts and elevations than to get _sedes_,[96] or go to sea, not to throw a poet"s glance over the sublime ocean, but to escape consumption.... but there are everywhere to be found, in every market-town, on every island, fair souls who rest in the bosom of nature,--who reverence the dreams of love, though they themselves have awaked from their own,--who are encased with rough men, before whom they have to veil their idyllic fantasies about the second life, and their tears over the first,--who give fairer days than they receive,--to this whole fair society I finally make a present of the _Feudum_ of Maienthal, of which there has been already so much talk, and go in at the head with some friends of both s.e.xes and my sister as investing fief-provost.
_Postscript_ or autograph bull of dispensation:--The Mining Superintendent cannot deny that the S. T. author of this biography, by the fact that the dog is lazy, and that these post-days are more than commonly voluminous, and that in this chapter he has actually melted two into one, is sufficiently excused with those who have the right to ask him why he has not ended the 32d Post-day till the middle of September or Fructidor. He still sits with his description four months distant from the history, 1793.
J. P.
33. DOG-POST-DAY.
FIRST WHITSUNTIDE-DAY.
Police-Regulations of Pleasure.--Church.--The Evening.--The Blooming-Cavern.
Hardly had Victor waked from his sleep, though not from his dreams, when the low talking of all his thoughts, the Elysian stillness that pervaded his whole heart, told him that to-day his _Sabbatical weeks_ came on. Without reproach or design of a misstep, without a sigh of his conscience, he went guilelessly to meet joy and love. The tenderer and more delicate a flower of joy is, so much the clearer must be the hand that plucks it, and only cattle pasture can bear filth; just as those who pick Imperial tea deny themselves beforehand all gross fare, that they may pluck the fragrant leaf unsoiled.--Victor had, out of doors, hardly dawn enough to see on his broad hour-watch of Bee-father Lind"s the first hour of his Sabbath; but this watch, the step-marker on the so beautiful road of the Bee-father"s life, and the morning-service of nature, which consists in stillness, fortified his purpose of prefixing his present life to the second life after death as a still, cool, starry spring-morning.
"By you I swear,"--said he, as, by degrees, more and more larks soared up singing out of their dew into the morning-hora,[97]--"I will even in joy remain composed for thirty whole years together, at least for three whole Whitsuntide days,--I will be a university-friend and house-friend, but not a Wertherish lover of enjoyment.--Does not man act as if his path of life must be a bridge of connected honey-combs, through which he has, moth-like, to chew his way, as if his hands were only sugar-tongs of pleasure?--I will again apply the sportive faculty as a bridle to my pleasures and my pains. The warm tears of melancholy, especially those of rapture, a sort of hot vapor which propels and decomposes more mightily than gunpowder and Papin"s[98] machines, I will indeed shed, but cool them a little beforehand.--And if I do not get sight of Clotilda every forenoon, I will simply say, A man cannot be always in the third heaven, he must also sometimes stay over night in the first."--He has, perhaps, more reason than power; but, it is true, health of heart is equally removed from hysteric spasms and from phlegmatic torpor, and rapture borders more nearly on pain than on tranquillity. But no tranquillity or coolness is worth aught but that which is _attained_,--man must have at once the _capacity_ and the _mastery_ of pa.s.sion. The _freshets_ of the will resemble those of _rivers_, which for a time muddy all the _springs_; but take away the rivers, and the springs are gone too.--
The increasing dawn veiled one distant sun, after another; and when at last the near one had risen, or rather nature, then could Victor see and read and take my work (the well-known _Mumien_) out of his pocket.
A book was for him, in the midst of free, stimulative nature, a pair of _garden-shears_ to his wantonly up-shooting dreams and joys. This morning sparkling with a whole spring, this flashing on all brooks, this humming out of blossoms into blossoms,--this blue hanging sea, over which the sun sailed like a Bucentaur,[99] in order to throw on the bottom of that sea, the earth, the marriage-ring,--such a Present beside such a Future would even now at the third hour have deprived him of the strength, in obedience to his new const.i.tution, to rule over his ecstasy, and to preserve steadily so much repose as is needed for a _mezzotint_ between a rapturous and a dull day,--I say he would not have had that power without his biographer, I mean, if he had not had my book before him, in the second part of which he had still the schoolmaster Wutz[100] to read. But this learned work--I venture without self-conceit to flatter myself--set the proper limits to his rapture. For thus,--as he walked along reading,--(as others, e. g.
Rousseau and I, read while eating, and take a bite now from the plate and now from the book,)--as he contemplated the life of the schoolmaster till a new valley or a new wood opened,--as he listened now to this printed chorister, and now to a living one before whose Whitsuntide songs he pa.s.sed by: in this way he could keep his ideas, with all their rondos and knights"-jumps, in such a fine ball-room-order and church-discipline, that he was as happy as the Wutz he was reading of. Besides, I was still crying to him on the stretch out of my _Mumien_, to be discreet, and to give heed to my little schoolmaster as a file-leader in the arts of happiness, and to _get the kernel_ out of every day, every hour. "Besides, I am a reprobate," said he, "if I do not do it; good G.o.d, is not then the very sense of existence,[101] and the first sweet breakfast after every waking, a _standing_ enjoyment?"--He reflected, to be sure, that culture gives us spectacles, and takes away in return the papillae of the tongue, and compensates to us for our pleasures by the better definitions of them (just as the silk-worm, as caterpillar, has _taste_, but no _eyes_, and, as b.u.t.terfly, has eyes without taste), he confessed to himself, indeed, that he had too much understanding to have so much contentment as the Auenthal schoolman Wutz, and that he philosophized too deeply besides; but he also insisted upon this: that "a higher wisdom must nevertheless (because otherwise the all-wise would be necessarily the _all-unhappy_) find a way again out of the sweltry parterre of the lecture-room into a parterre of flowers. Lofty men produce, like mountains, the sweetest honey." ...
Although, even while he was in the last village, the suburbs as it were of Maienthal, he heard the last tolling, still he was not provoked at the belated arrival. Nay, to show himself that he was the philosopher Socrates, he pa.s.sed on with a diligent increase of slowness, and did not, like the Athenian, make a libation of the cup of joy, but did not, in fact, yet fill it up. "Float on," he said to a little cloud formed of collected lily-pollen, "and be wafted before me in advance over the _good hearts_, thou pillar of cloud at the entrance of the promised land!--And may thy little shadow silhouette for them the more fixed one, which follows more lazily, and which is absorbed later by the blue of heaven!"--And ere the winding footpath placed him before the flower-curtained gate of the valley, wherein stood the beloved cradle and nursery-garden of his fair three-days future, he was arrested by a closed thistle, around whose sealed honey-cups a white b.u.t.terfly was drawing his third parallel,--and the mosaic thistles on Le Baut"s floor started into life before him, and showed him the stings of the past; then he felt it incomprehensible how he had been able to endure his sorrows, and easier to bear the heaven of joy....
He took out Lind"s watch, in order to know the birth-hour of his honeymoon or honey-week,--precisely at 11 o"clock he came out before the neat village, before the green-house of his heaven, before the colony of his hope, before Eden.... Ah, the murmuring little village buried in foliage seemed to throw all its blooming twigs, like arms, around, and knit himself to itself; it was green and white and red,--not painted, but overspread with leaves and blossoms. And when, as the ringing died away,--in order avariciously to h.o.a.rd up for himself the embrace of his Emanuel, and in order to come upon the Maienthal church music with a heart opened by Nature,--he stole into the long, clean village, and ran Friendship"s toll for a few minutes at Emanuel"s house, it seemed to him as if his peacefully glad heart in the still lanes rocked with the birds on the cherry-twigs that latticed the window-panes, and hovered with the bees in the cherry blossoms.
"Come right in," all seemed to say, "thou good man, we are all happy, and thou shalt be so too."--He approached the shining church, whose dazzling stucco flung by contrast upon the blue of the sky a sublime darkness, and his beating heart trembled blissfully with the waves of the organ within, and with the rustling birch-tree fixed in the ground before the church-door, and with the dry May-pole, in the middle of the village, bowed by the morning-wind....
"But," says my reader, "could then his eye so long deny itself the fairer prospects, and his heart the more beloved beauty, and, instead of the Abbey, seek out only the church?"--Oh, he looked after that the very first thing of all, and his eye ran trembling around all the windows of his sun-temple; but as he found all of them open and empty, and all the curtains drawn up, he guessed that its fair conclave of sisters, and among them the conclave-sister of his heart, were there where he sought--and found them,--in the temple. He went up unheard, during the tramping down of the church-goers, into the front-stall of the n.o.bility, which from without appeared empty, that flower-stand of the convent-nuns. There was nothing there but dropped birch-leaves; for the body of nuns and the Abbess and Clotilda stood--below in the Church, and encircled the altar with a choir of singing angels, and took the sacrament there.--With a thrill of joy he beheld the queen of his heaven, the so dearly loved and undeserved, the shining angel, melting her vestment of earthly snow with heavenly warmth to tears, in order soon to become invisible.----His spirit bowed itself as she knelt: "Drink heaven"s peace," he said, "out of the sacred chalice of the great man, among whose thoughts was never a cloud nor a sigh,--and may the thought which thou now contemplatest with such steadfast devotion be destined to become more and more luminous and immovable, like a sun, and always to throw a warm evening-light over the weary soul!"--This angel in mourning-attire called forth in his inner being by an awakening of the dead all the virtues of his life and all its faults, and gave those a heaven and these a h.e.l.l; he was, therefore, now too holy to disturb a saint by making his appearance, even supposing her tranquil eye, absorbed in pious emotions, which did not so much as fall on the nearer devout beauties to the height of the waist, had been able to lift itself to him. The birch at the first window of the loft he kept before him as a leafy fan;--this green veil playing on his cheeks covered his attentiveness and his tears of joy from the whole church. The place where he was so happy seemed, to judge from an inscription on the gla.s.s, to have been once the usual stand of Clotilda; for Giulia"s was near by, as I know for certain, because on the stall-window a G and C, enclosed by a wreath, had been cut in with the words by Giulia: "Thus are we united by the flowers of life and the circle of eternity." ...
Victor slipped away unseen and early out of this niche of removed G.o.ddesses, and bore his heart filled with love to the open breast of friendship,--to Emanuel. He saw already the latter"s tabernacle of the covenant in the temple of Nature,--when his rapture was delayed by one of earlier date. Julius lay in the blooming gra.s.s with its waves rippling over him, and holding a cherry-twig full of open honey-cups in his hand, in order to draw the bees to him, and to delight himself with their murmurous hovering over the blossoms. Victor embraced him, and forgot in the ecstasy to name his name,--"Art thou my angel?" said he.--"I am only thy Victor!"--"O come! O come!" said the blind youth, trembling like a melody, and drew his friend to Emanuel"s house; but he led him, behind the cloud of his blindness, the longer way, and, besides, he turned round at every fourth step for a renewed embrace.
When they came to the water-wheel, which loudly emptied its sprinkling-cans on the flower-beds, and whose shivered lightnings flitted against Emanuel"s windows and ceiling, then the blind one said, "Embrace me once more right heartily."--But amidst the din of the rain-shower, and amidst the stupefaction of love, they were pressed together by other arms than their own, and the two young hearts were linked to a third, and the East Indian gazed like a G.o.d of love from one to the other, and said: "O ye good youths, remain ever thus, and weep on in your blissful love!--Blessings on thee, my Horion, and a welcome in the great spring round about us!"--And when Emanuel and Victor sank on each other"s necks, then was it as if all the flower-beds bowed down for rapture, as if all the waves flamed more radiantly under super-earthly lightnings flying over them, as if the zephyrs swelled with sighs of love, as if higher beings must needs whisper in the over-measure of joy: O ye good human beings, verily ye love like us!--
An arm out of a river of Paradise lifted and bore this loving trinity into the leafy rooms, and here, for the first time, Victor saw that the spring was on Dah.o.r.e"s cheeks and the summer in his eyes, as well as twelve May months in his heart. The white mourning-roses on his cheeks, which always seemed to bloom like _mural crowns_ of death against St.
John"s-day, had given place to the red ones,--in short, Emanuel"s face gave the hope that he had been, in regard to his death, a false prophet.--
In this waving apartment, whose golden wall borders were linden-boughs, and whose splendid tapestries were linden blossoms, and over whose door, as door-paintings, flickered the reflection and the mock-suns of the flashing water-wheel, in this four-walled island, surrounded by Nature"s roaring sea of joy, through whose open windows the zephyrs flung bees and b.u.t.terflies over the window-flowers among the lindens, my hero, to whom, besides, the noonday hum of bells appeared like a ringing call to a peace-festival of the earth, felt himself wading through flowers of joy up to his heart.--Emanuel"s poesy sounded to him, in this epic intoxication, like prose; he was, as it were, sunk in a thicket of flowers, and, lifting his eyes, saw overhead a healed immortal who bent apart the blooming envelopment,--and still higher up an eternal Whitsuntide sun in the infinite blue,--and nearer above him the sprouting of the flower-leaves, and above this the swarming of bees,--and a golden morning-red, wound as a living frame round about the whole variegated incense-breathing woodland....