Ottomar's Letter.
When we have read Ottomar's letter, we will take our places at
Gustavus's new theatre and look at him. In the following letter a
spirit reigns and riots, which, like an Alp, oppresses and often
possesses all men of the higher and nobler quality, and which--much as
it outweighs even Holland spirits--a _higher_ spirit only can overpower
and crowd out. Many men live in the _Perigee_, some in the _Apogee_,
few in the _Perihelion_.--Fenk so often yearned for his Ottomar,
especially since his complete silence of some years' standing, and
spoke of him so often to Gustavus, that it was well the address of the
letter was from a strange hand and to Doctor Zoppo in Pavia: else the
Doctor had sinned at once against the first line of the letter.
* * * * *
"Name not my name, oh eternal friend, to the bearer: I must do it. On
the last year of my life there lies a great black seal; break it not,
count the past as the future--I make it for thee the present, only not
just yet--and if I should die I would appear before and tell thee my
last mystery of earth.
"I write to thee, simply that thou mayst know that I am living and am
coming in autumn. My thirst for traveling is quenched with Alpine ice
and sea-water; I repair home now to my resting-place, and if there, at
my street-door, a tempting voice of secret desire should call me again
to cross the mountains, I should say to myself: the same panting and
pining human heart gazes down into the waters of the Gaudiana and the
Volga, which sighs in thee beside the Rhine stream, and that which
climbs the Alps and Caucasus, is what thou art, and turns a longing eye
over toward thy street-door.[62] But if I sit here, and every morning
go to the close-stool, and am glad to be hungry, and afterward that my
appetite is satisfied, and if I daily put on and pull out breeches and
hair pins, ah! what in the end does all amount to? What was it then I
wanted, when in my childhood I sat upon the stone in my gateway, and
gazed yearningly in the direction of the long road and thought how it
ran on and on, shot over the mountains, still onward and onward ... and
at last?... Ah, all roads lead to nothing, and where they break off,
there stands another looking longingly back over the hills to where we
sit. What was it then I would have, when my little eye swam along with
the waves of the Rhine, that it might waft me to a promised land,
whither all streams, I thought, were flowing, not knowing, meanwhile,
that the same river, which bore in its bosom many a heavy heart,
murmured along by many a crushed form, which it alone could release
from its anguish, that then, like man, it frittered and crumbled itself
away, and filtered itself at last into Holland sands?--Orient land!
morning land! toward thy fields also did my soul once lean as trees do
toward the East:--'Ah! how must it be there, where the sun rises!' I
thought; and when I traveled with my mother to Poland, and at last into
the land lying toward morning, and came among its nobles, Jews and
slaves--.... But there is no other sunny land of the morning to be
found on this optical ball, than that one which all our steps can
neither _remove_ nor _reach_. Ah, ye joys of earth, none of you can do
more than satisfy the breast with sighs and the eye with water, and
into the poor heart, which opens under your heaven, ye only pour one
more wave of blood! And yet these two or three wretched pleasures lame
us as poisonous flowers do children who play with them, in arm and
limb. Only let there be no music, that mocker of our wishes; do not, at
her call, all the fibres of my heart fly asunder and stretch themselves
out like so many sucking polypus's-arms and tremble with longing and
seek to embrace--whom? what?... An unseen something waiting in other
worlds. I often think, perhaps it is, after all, nothing; perhaps,
after death, all goes on just as now, and thy longings will reach
forward out of one heaven toward another[63]--and then I crush under
this fantastic nonsense the strings of my harpsichord, as if I would
bring a fountain out of them, as if it were not enough that the
pressure of this yearning untunes and snaps the thin strings of my
inner musical system.
"In Rome there lived opposite the Church of St. Adrian a painter, who
during a rain always placed himself under the spouts, and laughed till
he was crazy, and who often said to me: 'There is no dog's death, but
only a dog's life.' Fenk! take at least what man is or does: so very,
very little! What power, then, is wholly developed in us, or in harmony
with the other powers? Is it not a piece of good fortune, if so much as
one faculty gets drawn in like a branch into the hot-house of a
lecture-room or library and is forced by partial warmth to bloom, while
the whole tree stands outside in the snow with hard black twigs? Heaven
snows two or three flakes together to make one inner snow-man, which we
call our education; the earth melts or muddies a quarter of it, the
tepid wind loosens the snow man's head off--that is our cultured inner
man, such an abominable patch-work in all our knowings and willings!
From individuals to universal humanity I have no desire to pass; I care
not to think, how a century is ploughed and harrowed under to manure
the next--how nothing will round itself to anything--how the eternal
writing in books and stratifying of the _Scibile_ has no aim, no end,
and all dig and drive in opposite directions! What does man do? Even
less than he knows and becomes. Tell me, what then does thy
penetration, thy heart, thy swiftness effect before the princely
portrait over the President's chair, or in fact before an emasculated
reigning face? The crooked twigs pressed back into each other are
squeezed against the window of the winter-house, the Regent causes
their fruit to pass by his dish in the _compotiere_, the blue sky is
denied them, the cleverest thing at last is, that they rot! What, then,
do the noblest faculties avail in thee, when weeks and months glide
away, which do not use, do not call out, do not exercise them? When I
have thus contemplated, as I often do, the impossibility, in all our
monarchical offices, of being a whole, a really active, a universally
useful man--even the monarch cannot, with those innumerable black
subaltern claws and hands which he must first fasten to his own hands
as fingers or pincers, do anything completely good--as often as I have
contemplated this, I have wished I were hanged with my robbers, but
were first their captain, and with them ran down the old
constitution!... Beloved Fenk! _Thy_ heart no one can tear out of _my_
breast, it propels my best blood and never canst _thou_ misunderstand
me, let me be as unknowable as I will! But, oh friend, the times are
coming on, when for thee this misunderstanding may after all grow
easier!
"Veiled Genius of our overshadowed globe! ah, had I only been
something, had the globe of my brain and had my heart, like Luther's,
only earned by some lasting and far-rooting deed the blood which
reddens and feeds them; then would my _hungry pride_ become _satisfied
lowliness_, four humble walls would be large enough for me, I should no
longer sigh for anything great except death, and first for the autumn
of life and age, in which man, when the birds of youth are dumb, when
over the _earth_ lies haze and flying gossamer-summer, when the heavens
hang bright, but not blazing, over all, lays himself down to sleep upon
the withered leaves.----Farewell, my friend, upon an earth where one
can no further do any good except to lie down in it; _next_ autumn we
shall be with one another!"
* * * * *
To this letter, which takes possession of my whole soul and renews my
errors as well as my wishes, I can add nothing more, than that to-day
the first man in this history has been buried on a mountain. When,
after four or five sections, I come to speak of his evening-euthanasy,
then will the outlines of his form already have grown paler and
fainter, as well in the coffin as in the hearts of his friends!