The Great Parsonage-Park.--Orangery.--Flamin's Promotion.--Festal
Afternoon of Domestic Love.--Rain of Fire.--Letter to Emanuel.
His Lordship excepted, all are now sitting and waiting for me in the
parsonage-garden; but the garden itself not a mortal soul is yet
acquainted with. It is a Chrestomathy[76] of all gardens, and yet no
larger than the church. Many gardens resemble it in being at once
kitchen-gardens, flower-gardens, and orchards; but it is also a _jardin
des animaux_, as it contains in fact the whole Fauna of St. Luna, and a
botanical garden, too; it is overgrown with the entire Flora of the
village; and it is a garden of honey-bees and humble-bees also, as
often as they happen to fly into it. Meanwhile such minor merits are
really hardly worth naming, when a garden once has, like this, the
merit of being the greatest English garden through which a man ever
strode. It hides not only its end,--as every park, like every purse,
must do,--but even its beginning, and seems to be merely the terrace
from which one can see into that which one cannot see over, but, like
Cook, may well circumnavigate. In the English parsonage-garden there
are not single ruins, but whole broken-up cities, and the greatest
princes have rivalled each other in their passion for furnishing it
with romantic wildernesses and battle-fields and gallows-trees, to
which (and that carries the illusion still higher) real rogues are
tied, into the bargain, as fruit-pendants. The buildings and shrubs of
different parts of the world are there, not huddled together into an
absurd neighborhood, but neatly kept apart from each other by regular
seas or water-scapes, which its size easily makes possible, since it
contains over nine million square miles; and with what taste, in fact,
these masses are brought together, the reader may estimate from the
fact that all lords and all reviewers in the literary periodicals, and
the readers themselves, are drawn into the garden and often stay
therein sixty years.--
The Parson thinks also to get some credit from it as a Dutch garden,
particularly by a peruke made of water, which hangs not on a wig-stand,
but on a tin pipe, and which leaps so in curls that already several
city-parsons have wished they could wear it. Butterfly-show-glasses
kept off the night-chills from precocious roses of silk and early
cucumbers of wax. Cucumbers which consisted of real cucumbers, he was
the first among all pastors to put in, in order to worry himself with
the fear that they might freeze; for this fear he must have, in order
to rejoice whenever a glass bottle was broken in his house: he could
then carry this ice- or glass-mountain (which, in the case of wines,
unfortunately heightens every year as our thirst does) into the garden,
and with this manure-bell cover the heart-leaves. Round more important
beds he ran a motley, mosaic border of crockery; his family was his
verge-tool,--I mean, they had to break for him the few porcelain cups
which he needed, in order with this motley powdered sugar to set off
the more considerable patches, as a prince enchases and berings himself
with the variegated order-ribbons drawn through the button-holes of his
antechambers. As he could not set _whole_ cups round the beds, but must
first analyze them by his chemists, a reviewer who eats with him must
avail himself of my hint to understand how it happens, if such a
consumptive patient is not beside himself for rage, when some very
valuable vessel is broken; for only when it happens to worthless ones
is he no longer master of himself. Every housewife should set off such
a bed as an Arndt's garden of Paradise, as a Golgotha for porcelain
whereof the _fashion is changed_, for the good of her soul, in order
that she may not lose her senses when a cup falls. "Dearest!" I would
say, "bear up under this misfortune like a Christian woman; it, will
turn out for thy advantage either in eternity yonder, or here in the
garden."
Near a house, Dutch garden-ornaments, with their homely minuteness,
make a better figure than thrilling Nature, with her eternal majesty.
Eymann's clipped and carved parsonage-garden was in fact merely a
continued family-room without roof or partition.
As the Parson twitched our Victor round through the garden, the guest
almost forgot to praise the garden as a magazine of ideas, simply
because he was looking forward too curiously and warmly to the arrival
of Clotilda, and her demeanor towards his friend. Fortunately it
occurred to him that the Parson counted upon incense-offerings and
censers; he was so unwilling to defraud a laurel-hoping heart, that he
for that very reason loved to attach himself to people of some merit,
that so he might indulge his humane disposition to praise, without
expense to the truth. Victor rejoiced at the prospect of Flamin's and
Clotilda's meeting: how beautifully, he thought, will the moonlight of
soft love fall upon his and her proud faces! And he held in store a
rich tolerance and love for their love. For he not only had so much
insight into the fleeting nature of our pleasures, that he could hardly
be angry over the maddest, but he could even be present at the
journeyman's greeting (or methodology) of--two lovers with real
pleasure. "It is very foolish,"--he said in Göttingen,--"every
good-hearted man opens his arms in sympathy, when he sees friends,
brothers and sisters, or parents embrace each other; but if a couple of
monkeys in love dance round before us at the end of Cupid's string, and
though it were on the stage, not a devil of us will take any interest
in them, unless they dance in a romance. But why? Certainly not from
selfishness, otherwise the wooden heart in the human block would also
in the presence of friendship between others, or filial love, remain
nailed fast; but, because the love of lovers is selfish, we are so too;
and because in a romance it is not so, we are not so either. I, for my
part, go on in my thinking, and make believe to myself in regard to
every span of lovers I meet, that they were printed and bound, and I
had them from the circulating library for paltry reading money. It
belongs to the higher disinterestedness to sympathize even with its
opposite. And by all means with you, poor women! Would you or I, then,
oftentimes, with this life of yours so frittered away in sewing,
cooking, washing, know that you had a soul, unless it fell in love?
Many of you through long tearful years have never lifted your head
except in the short, sunny day of love, and after it your bereft heart
sank back again into the cool depths; so water-plants lie all the year
drowned in water, only at the time of their bloom and love do their
ascending leaves sit upon the water and sun themselves gloriously,
and--then fall down again."
At last Clotilda entered, in conversation with the Parson's wife. She
had on a crape hat, with a black lace portcullis, which at once
beautified, divided, and concealed with a pierced shadow her beautiful
face. But her eye avoided Flamin's eye, and only at times stole
thoughtfully after it. He proved that precisely people of the greatest
courage have the least with regard to beauty; he advanced not towards
her one step. She asked our Victor eagerly about the arrival and the
health of his Lordship. She then proposed to him, with the usual
medical uncertainty of her sex, whether such an operation often
transpired so easily, and whether he had already restored to many so
much as he had to his father: he answered both questions in the
negative, and she sighed openly. His respectful distance towards her
would have increased by that at which his friend kept himself from her,
had he not had something to hand her,--Emanuel's note. He could not
steal it, as he had already repeated to her the first line; secondly,
he must present it _under four eyes_ (he could not through Agatha, for
example), because he knew how she carried discretion to the extreme
limits. Clotilda was one of those persons--troublesome to this
biographer and his hero--who love to conceal all trifles: e. g. what
they eat, where they are going to-morrow; who are furious with a friend
if he blabs out how on St. Thomas's day last year they had a slight
headache. With Clotilda it arose not from fear, but from a dark
presentiment that he who babbled indifferent mysteries might at last
tell weighty ones. He felt towards her, notwithstanding her pride, a
mighty drawing to sincerity. He led her aside to the pomegranate-tree,
and there--sparing her by his open-hearted lightness of manner the
burdensome obligation she might feel with regard to a secret--handed
her back the leaf. She was astonished, but said at once, her surprise
related merely to her own negligence; i. e. she trusted him, but had
some suspicion or other of her house-mates, and of the manner in which
it got into the arbor. She took advantage of the orangery, and bent her
inspired face close to the pomegranate blossoms. Victor could not
possibly stand there alone so stupid; he, still a little struck with
her astonishment, and at last with her almost too great pride, felt
also a hankering after the pomegranate incense, and held his face down
in it toward hers. He should have known, however, that any one who
smells of anything does not look at the thing, but straight before him.
Hardly, then, had he applied his olfactory nerves to the blossoms, when
he opened his eyes, and Clotilda's large eyes stood opened full upon
him; they were just at the highest and most effective elevation, of
45°, whether you speak of eyes or bow-shots. He turned his pupils
forcibly down toward the leaves; she, still more prudently, stepped
back from the bewildering orangery.
However, she was not embarrassed. He thought it unjust toward Flamin to
observe her sentiments towards himself; but still he remarked this
much,--that the observatory on which one would watch the occultations
of her heart must be higher than is necessary in regard to other women.
The custom of being admired had made her proof against that showing up,
as in a glass, the impression of her charms with which men so often win
to themselves the attention of woman's vanity. She was, as I have said,
not embarrassed, but went on to tell her listener something further of
Emanuel's character, which she lately, out of respect for her teacher,
had not been willing to lay before such unholy ears,--namely, that he
firmly believed he should die a year hence in the midnight of St.
John's day.[77] Victor could easily guess that she herself believed it;
but what he did not guess was, that this proud one, from pure
tenderness of heart, had hastened her purpose of leaving Maienthal on
St. John's day, in order not to meet the beloved man on the anniversary
of the future day of his death. According to her account, this Emanuel
had had a painfully exalted position among men; he was alone; he had
had great friends on his bosom, but all had passed into the grave, and
therefore he would also hide there his own head. Years give to stormy,
over-vigorous men a finer harmony of the heart, but from refined, cold
natures they take more than they give. Those strong hearts resemble
English gardens, which age always makes greener, fuller, more leafy;
whereas the man of the world, like a French one, is covered by years
with dried-up and disfigured boughs.
Victor grew more troubled; every word which he won from her he regarded
as a sacrilege upon his friend, the more so as the latter did not
understand so well as he the art of opening a conversation with a lady.
He had not the heart to shine, because he feared thereby to be a rival
of his friend for her good graces. His Flamin seemed to him to-day
taller, more beautiful, and better than ever, and he himself shorter
and more stupid. He wished a thousand times his father had already
come, that he might deliver to him with the greatest ardor Flamin's
prayer for his aid in obtaining Clotilda.
At last he came, and Victor drew a full breath again. The good youth
often seeks, by acts of sacrifice, to reconcile his conscience again
with his _thoughts_. With heart-beatings of enthusiasm he awaited the
moment of solitude. A garden detaches and draws together people in the
easiest manner, and only in such a place should one impart secrets;
Victor could soon, in an arbor which wove itself on four chestnut-trees
with its blooming vein-work nest-wise over their heads, embrace his
father with trembling emotion, and speak and glow for his friend with
tongue and heart. His Lordship's surprise was greater than _his_
emotion. "Here," said he, "is something which has long since fulfilled
thy prayer in a different way; but I wished to reserve for thee the joy
of bearing the message";--and therewith he gave him a most gracious
autograph, wherein the Prince called the practising Advocate Flamin
into the Administrative Council.
A most gracious autograph is the _Tetragrammaton_[78] and means of
grace, which works supernatural effects and state-miracles; and the
illustrious writing-thumb is the magic thief's-thumb,[79] as it were,
by which the different wheels of the state-repeating-watch--the
lever-wheel, the face-wheel, often merely the hand--is shoved forward
or backward, according as it desires an hour earlier or later.
Hence ministers often climb up and cut off for themselves such a
thief's-thumb to carry in their pockets.
Sebastian is seized by joy, as by Habakkuk's angel, by the hair of the
head, and carried through the garden, and driven with his news to the
first he might meet, and that proved to be the Chaplain, who, with a
comic face, swore it was all a fib of Victor's; but his restrained
jubilation almost burst his compressed veins. Victor had no time for
refutation, but hurried off with such a message to the heart to which
it rightly belonged,--the mother's. The mother could not shape her
mouth to anything but a blessed smile, into which the drops of joy
overflowed from her eyes. No joy in nature is so sublimely affecting as
the joy of a mother at the good fortune of a child. But the son, in
whose soul, such as it was to-day, this sunbeam of fate was really
needed, could not, in the surprise, be immediately found.
His Lordship, meanwhile, talked with Clotilda as with a daughter, and
gave her a letter from her mother and the intelligence of his
approaching departure. His manly kindness, guided by respect and graced
by refinement, ennobled her attentiveness to his looks; and as she came
forth from the affectionate and low-toned conversation with sparkling
eyes, her tall form, which usually stooped a little, was raised by a
certain inspiration to a noble stature, and she stood in the temple of
Nature, as a priestess of the temple, infinitely beautiful. His
Lordship separated from her. She found Flamin near the tulip-formed
letter C, and the Goddess of Fortune appeared to him in the sweetest
human incarnation, to deliver to him her gift. We need not say that the
news and the news-bearer threw him into equal ecstasy.
Joy had shaken up the whole bee-garden in a swarming-bag and turned it
into chaos. The foaming wine-fermentation could not work itself off
till it ended in clear, tranquil rapture. His Lordship took himself out
of the way of a gratitude swelled by so many ripieno[80] voices and off
to his carriage, when the mother with her dumb heart-fulness overtook
him; but nothing could she get from her blissfully burdened heart to
her lips, save the modest words, that "to-day was his birthday, and his
son did not know it, and ought _also_ to have been surprised with a
rapture." He tried to escape from her with a grateful smile, and said
that he must hasten back to the Prince, who perhaps had taken as kind
an interest in this very day as she; but Sebastian, with his friend
whom he had found, overtook him at the garden-gate, and the hurrying
lord was delayed a little longer by a swift embrace of his son. Not
until he was off did the mother, who longed to unburden her love, clasp
tenderly Victor's hand, and, forgetting the agreement, asked: "O
dearest, why, then, did you not congratulate him on his birthday? For,
indeed, _I_ could not." Now for the first time he understood and felt
the sudden embrace of his father, and stretched out his arms after him
and would fain reciprocate it.
Here the old Parson, also coming out of the garden, struck in and said,
as if talking nonsense, "I wish he were Administrative Councillor"; but
his wife, without making any reply to that, said to him with
overflowing voice and love, "Such a cradle-festival thou hast never yet
lived to see as to-day's, Peter!" Agatha looked at her inquiringly and
admonishingly. "Just out with it," said she, and enfolded the children
and drew them both into the paternal embrace, "and wish your good
father length of days and three more blessed children."
The father could not say anything, but stretched his hand toward the
mother, to round the group of the loving Eden. Victor's sympathetic
blood swelled up in his heart, to dissolve it in love, and he thought
the silent prayer: "Never may any misfortune, All-gracious One, tear
these entwined arms asunder!" But Flamin soon drew himself out of the
concatenation, and said to Victor with a most grateful pressure of the
hand, "Thou knowest not how I am always wronging thee." The Chaplain
thought he should hide his emotion from all by saying: "I wish I had
not deceived you. I have let myself be bled, but it was a stupid thing;
if I had only known! only known! It is true; there, see for
yourselves!" And finding that this mask was not adequate to cover the
whole emotion of his soul, he called, in an overloud tone, to the poor
forgotten Apollonia, who was rocking at the house door the awakened
Bastian, to "come here!" But the poor girl, whose merely distant
participation in the general mingling of hearts touched our Victor's
tenderest feelings, shyly hesitated, till the mother came and
indemnified her against any loss by all that for which mothers are
never repaid. But not until the Parson's wife held her child in her
arms and on her lips, did she feel that the imprisoned flames of her
affections found vent, and her heart its alleviation.
Ah, that man should receive the fairest love precisely at the time when
he does not yet understand it!--alas that not until late in life's
year, as he contemplates with a sigh the love of other parents and
children, he should say hopefully to himself, "Ah, thus did mine
certainly love me too!"--alas that then the bosom to which thou wouldst
hasten with thy thanks for half of a life, for a thousand unappreciated
anxieties, for an inexpressible, never returning love, is already lying
crushed under an old grave, and has lost the warm heart which so long
loved thee!...
In domestic happiness the calm, cosey pleasures driven in between four
narrow walls are only the most accidental constituent; its nervous and
vital fluid is the blazing fire-fountains of love which spring out of
kindred hearts into each other. The involuntary surprise had
disconcerted the intentional ones. But the flood of joy had swept all
parties together; and they still remained in the same confidential
closeness to each other, when it had abated again. They sat down to the
entertainment in the summer-house. Seldom are banquets spiced as this
one was, by two extraordinary advantages,--want of food and want of
room. Nothing whets the appetite so much as the fear of its not finding
enough to satisfy it. It had been contrived by Sebastian, that for each
guest only his favorite dish should be provided; for the Parson,
stuffed crabs and potato cheese; for Flamin, ham; for the Hero, good
Harry's beans. But in this case every one wanted another's favorite
dish, and set his own up at auction.[81] Even the ladies, who generally
eat and do not eat, like fishes, nibbled a little. The second
intoxicating ingredient which they had, thrown into their cup of joy,
was the table, together with the garden-house, of which the former
would not hold the food nor the latter the feeders. Sebastian had
betaken himself, with Agatha, to an affiliated table which had been
adjoined outside to the window of the banquet-hall, merely for the
purpose of screaming in from out there and whining, more than eating.
This caprice was, at bottom, a covered modesty which feared being
honored inside at the expense of the other guests, on his Lordship's
account. His own solitude--perhaps in a painful sense--pictured to him
the shy Appel, who, as vestal of the hearth, ate only the drawback toll
of returning dishes, merely to try how they had tasted to others. He
could not longer endure the thought of this separation, but took wine
and the best of the dessert, and carried it in to her in her kitchen
winter quarters. As, in doing so, he displayed upon his face, instead
of his gayety towards girls, of which she might have made a too humble
interpretation, the greatest seriousness of courtesy; he was so happy
as to have given to a soul pinched up by nature itself--with no other
flower-pot here to send its roots round in than a cooking-pot, and only
the kitchen for its concert-hall and the spit for its music of the
spheres--a golden evening and a long memory of pleasure. Let no one
maliciously thrust his fist in the way of such a good snail-soul, and
laugh to see how she wriggles over it; and let him who stands upright
willingly stoop and gently lift her along over her little stone.
As to Clotilda, before dinner things went very well, but after dinner
very ill. I speak of Sebastian, who, after the handing in of the
petition to his Lordship, was happier and more light-hearted, and
actually talked as frankly with Clotilda as if she were--a bride. For
he had already said in Hanover, that "there was not a more tedious and
holy thing than a bride, particularly if it were a friend's; sooner
would he fritter away his time about the musty Pandects in Florence, or
a holy body in a glass shrine at Vienna, than about her." In fact, it
was hard to fall in love with Clotilda; I know the reader would not
have done it, but would have gone coldly away again. "Her Grecian nose
under the almost manly breadth of forehead," he would have said, "this
sister-nose to all Madonnas and this frontier wild-game[82] so rare on
German faces, her still but bright eyes, which seek nothing beyond
themselves, this British gravity, this harmonious thoughtful soul,
raise her above the rights of love. And even if this majestic form
should incline to love, who could ever be so selfish as to pocket the
present of a whole heaven, or so proud as to shoot his heart into hers
like a smoke-ball, and becloud thereby this still, pensive serenity?"
The reader will be glad to read his own words.
But after dinner things went differently. Under Victor's cerebral
membrane, some hobgoblin had so thrown into pi all the letters of his
ideas in the inner letter-case, that he was up to this time gay, but
unsatisfied. He had tried to tie and untie Agatha's hair, to separate
her double-bows into unequal, and for that very reason into equal
halves again; but the operation had not pleased him as usual,--to-day's
interludes of domestic love had put his mirthful spirit wholly out of
joint,--and it seemed to him as if, withdrawn from the present joy, he
should be happier, at least for a few minutes, in some quiet corner,
and he particularly longed to see the sun set.
Add to all this the sight of Clotilda's increased love towards
Agatha,--the sight of his friend, who, by the deepening silence of his
tenderness, his mildening voice, and by a devotedness so irresistible
in impassioned natures, commanded every heart, "Love me,"--and,
finally, the spectacle of night....
He had already been long sad, when he seemed still gay. Now the mother
took the little hero of the forenoon out under the bland evening heaven.
They all stood outside of the garden-tabernacle-of-the-covenant, in the
first temple of man's devotion. The evening-blood of the sinking sun
flowed into the clouds, as into the sea sinks the blood of its giants
dying in its depths. The porous cloud did not avail to hide the heavens;
it swam round about the moon, and let her pale silver glisten from
amidst the slags.
The red clouds painted the infant. Every one took lightly his soft
hands, which had already burst from the bud of pillows and the
chrysalis of swaddling-bands. Clotilda--instead of lavishing on the
little one carnally coquettish caresses, as many girls do _before_ or
_for_ men--poured down a steadily streaming look full of hearty love on
the new man, untied his too tight and cutting shirt-sleeve, screened
from him the moon at which he was squinting, and said, playfully,
"Smile this way and love me, _Sebastian_!" She could not possibly have
meant to charge this line with metaphorical _ricochet_-shots; besides,
the elder, unswaddled Sebastian knew full well that she could have
anticipated no double sense; nay, he knew the rule, that the very
anxiety wherewith some people banish certain subjects from their talk
betrays the presence of the same in their thoughts. And yet, for all
that, he had not the courage to smile like the rest, or to take the
little hand which she had touched in his. She turned to him, and said,
"But how does the child learn _our language, unless it has already a
language it can master_?"
... I have, out of mere regard to the philosophers, had this printed in
italics.
"Then it follows," he answered, "that the language of pantomime must
signify just as much as articulate speech. As often as I see a deaf and
dumb man go to sacrament, I think of this,--that all the instruction
you can give imports nothing into man, but only indicates and arranges
what is already there. The child's soul is its own drawing-master, the
teacher is simply its colorist."
"What if this lovely evening," she continued, "should one day come up
again to the memory of this little one? Why does the sixth year look
more beautiful in remembrance than the twelfth, and the third still
more beautiful?" A beautiful woman one cannot interrupt so easily as an
ex-Dean; and so she was permitted to recur to this reminiscence: "Herr
Emanuel once said, one should relate to children every year the story
of their past years, in order that they might one day look back through
all their years, even into the haze of the second." It is as if I heard
the above-mentioned maid of honor[83] personally speaking, under whose
thin lace cap there lay more philosophy than under many a doctor's
beaver, as quicksilver sticks in crape, and runs through leather.
Victor answered, with the usual sympathy of his good heart: "Emanuel
stands near to man, and knows him. Two scene-painters lead man, beset
by magic, through the whole stage,--_Memory_ and _Hope_; in the present
he is uncomfortable; enjoyment is poured out for him, as for Gulliver,
only into a thousand Liliputian moments; how shall that intoxicate or
satisfy? When we picture to ourselves a happy day, we compress it into
a single happy thought; when we come upon it, this thought is diluted
through: the twenty-four hours."
"I think of that," she replied, "as often as I walk through meadows; in
the distance are flowers upon flowers, but, near at hand, they are all
scattered apart, and separated by the grass. But yet, after all,
_memory is enjoyed only in the present_."
Victor continued to think only of the flowers, and said, abstractedly,
"And in the _night_ the flowers themselves look like grass,"--when it
began suddenly to sprinkle.
They all stepped, in solemn mood, into the summerhouse, on whose
roof the rain pattered down, while through the open windows the
alternately shutting and opening moon's eye threw in like a glacier its
snow-glances,--the tepid blossom-breath of the whole glistening
landscape stole with healing balm on every human sigh, every burdened
bosom. In this confined circle, separated from nature by the
alternation of night and moonshine, one must needs take refuge in
something near and familiar, in the old harpsichord. Clotilda's voice
might make a flute-accompaniment to the whispering rain without. The
Parson's wife begged--her to favor them, and with her favorite _aria_
from Benda's Romeo,--"Perchance, my lost repose! perchance one day in
the grave I may find thee!" &c.,--a song whose tones like fine
dissolving perfumes penetrate the heart through a thousand entrances,
and tremble there, and tremble more and more intensely, till at last
they shiver it to atoms, and leave nothing of it behind in the
harmonious annihilation but tears.
Clotilda without any hesitating vanity consented to sing. But for
Sebastian, in whom all tones came in contact with naked, quivering
feelers, and who could work himself into sadness at the very songs of
the herdsmen in the fields--this, on such an evening, was too much for
his heart; under cover of the general musical attentiveness, he had to
steal out of the door....
But here, under the great night-heaven, amidst higher drops, his own
can fall unseen. What a night! Here a splendor overwhelms him, which
links night and sky and earth all together; magic Nature rushes with
streams into his heart, and forcibly enlarges it. Overhead, Luna
fills the floating cloud-fleeces with liquid silver, and the soaked
silver-wool quivers downward, and glittering pearls trickle over smooth
foliage, and are caught in blossoms, and the heavenly field pearls
and glimmers. Through this Eden, over which a double snow-shower of
sparks and of drops played and whirled through a misty rain of
blossom-fragrances, and wherein Clotilda's tones, like angels that had
got lost, went flying about, now sinking and now soaring through this
magic-maze, Victor staggered, dazzled, overwhelmed, trembling and
weeping, and sank down exhausted into the arbor where he had to-day
fallen on his father's heart. He thought over the wintry life of that
good father amidst mere strangers to the heart, and his solitary, sad
celebration of today's festival, and the cold, empty room in the
paternal bosom, which once the lost form of the beloved one had
inhabited, and he yearned painfully for the heart of his invisible
mother. He lifted his leaning head into the rain, and from the large
open eyes fell not strange drops alone. He glowed through his whole
being, and night-clouds must cool it. His finger-tips hung down,
lightly folded in one another. Clotilda's tones dropped now like molten
silver-points on his bosom, now they flowed like stray echoes from
distant groves into this still garden. He spoke no name, he thought no
thought, he neither acquitted himself nor accused himself; he saw it
all as in a dream, when now a thick night glided across the garden, and
now a sea of light swept after it.
But it seemed to him as if his bosom would burst, as if he should be
blest could he at this moment embrace beloved persons, and crush in the
closeness of that embrace in a blissful frenzy his bosom and his heart.
It was to him as if he should be over-blessed, could he now before some
being, before a mere shadow of the mind, pour out all his blood, his
life, his being. It was to him as if he must scream into the midst of
Clotilda's tones, and fold his arms around a rock, only to stifle the
painful yearning.
He heard the leaves drip, and took it for a continuing rain. But the
_Staub-bach_ of the heavens had scattered itself in spray, and only
Luna's fall of light any longer besprinkled the landscape. The sky was
deep-blue. Agatha had been seeking him during the rain, and had only
just found him. He woke up, obediently and silently went out with her,
and met only cleared-up heavenly faces,--then all his nerves quivered,
and he was compelled with a mute obeisance to take his painful and
friendly leave. Each one had his own thoughts on the subject. But the
Parson's wife told the company, he loved to hear music at a distance,
only it always made him too melancholy.
Ah, when he reached his chamber, a happy and consoling thought embraced
his soul. Clotilda's dirge, and all, fixed before his sight the form of
the exalted Emanuel,--and it seemed to say: "In a year I shall be
already under the ground, only come to me, poor child, I will love thee
till I die!" Without desiring a light, he wrote with streaming eyes,
which no light could have helped, this letter to Emanuel:--
"EMANUEL!
"Say not to me, I know thee not! How can man, on this little grain of
sun-dust called the earth, on which he warms himself, and during the
swift moments which he counts off on his pulse between the flash of
life and the stroke of death, still make a distinction between
acquaintances and non-acquaintances? Why do not these little creatures,
who have wounds of the same kind, and for whose coffins Time takes the
same measure, fall without hesitation into each other's arms, and sigh,
'Ah, we are doubtless like each other and acquainted!' Why must first
these fleshly statues into which our spirits are chained move towards
and touch each other, before the beings disguised therein can imagine
and love each other? And yet it is so human and so true a thought: what
then does Death take from us except fleshly statues, what from our eyes
but the loved countenance, what from our ears but the dear voice, and
the warm bosom from our own? Ah, Emanuel! be to me no dead man! Accept
me! Give me thy heart! I will love it!
"I am not very happy, my Emanuel! When my great teacher, Dahore,--that
shining Swan of heaven, who, fastened to life by his broken wing-joint,
looked up wistfully at other Swans, as they winged their way toward the
warmer latitudes of the second life,--ceased to write to me, he did it
in these words: 'Seek my duplicate! Thy breast will continue to bleed,
until thou coverest its scar with another, and the earth will agitate
thee more and more violently, if thou standest alone,--and only around
the solitary do ghosts creep.'
"Emanuel, art thou not tranquil and gentle and indulgent? Does not thy
soul yearn to love all men, and is not a single heart too narrow for it
to shut itself up therein with its love, as a bee is shut up in a tulip
when it folds itself to sleep? Hast thou not had enough of the
repeating-work of our merry bells and mourning-bells, and art thou not
weary of the family likeness of all evenings and times? Dost thou not
look, out from this fleeting earth over the long way above thee, that
thou mayst not grow nauseous and giddy, as one for the same reason
looks out of a carriage into the road? Believest thou not in men around
whom floats the mountain air of a higher position, and who up on their
height stand in the midst of a still heaven, and look down into the
thunders and rainbows near the earth? Believest thou not in a God, and
seekest thou not his thoughts in the lineaments of nature, and his
eternal love in thy breast? If thou art and thinkest all this, then
thou art mine; for thou art better than I, and my soul would fain lift
itself to a higher friend. Tree of the higher life, I embrace thee, I
twine around thee with a thousand faculties and tendrils, that I may
mount up out of the trampled mire around me! Ah, a great man might
heal, tranquillize, quicken, exalt me,--me, poor creature, only rich in
wishes, distracted by the war between my dreams and my senses,--flung
sorely to and fro between systems, tears, and follies,--disgusted at
the earth, which I cannot replace for myself, laughing merely from
anguish at the tearful comedy, the most contradictory, saddest, and
merriest shadow among all the shadows in the wide night.... O fair,
good soul, love me!
"HORION."
Leaning his head on his hand, he let his tears flow, without thinking
or looking, till nature was spent. Then he went to the harpsichord, and
sang over to its accompaniment the most passionate passages of his
letter; what strongly moved him always impelled him to singing,
especially the emotion of longing. What can it matter to us that it was
prose?
At the last line of his epistolary song the door slowly opened.
"Is it thou?" said a voice.
"Ah, come in, Flamin!" he answered.
"I only wanted to see whether you had come back," said Flamin, and went
away.
I think it is necessary that I should here insert at least the
following, namely, that Victor possessed too much fancy, humor, and
thoughtfulness not to give out, when these three strings were violently
struck at once, pure dissonances, which, with more harmonious intervals
between these faculties,[84] would not have appeared; that he had,
therefore, more _leaning_ to enthusiasms and enthusiasts than
_disposition_ that way; that his negative-electrical philosophy had
always to contend with his positive-electrical enthusiasm for the
balance of power, and that from the effervescing of these two spirits
came nothing but humor; that he wanted to have all his carnations of
joy on the same bed, although one adulterated the colors of the rest
(e. g. refinement and enthusiasm, exaltation above the world and
familiarity with the tone of the world); that from all this, beside
irony and the highest tolerance, must also result a heavy, immovable
feeling of the nothingness of our inner moods, so fleeting and sketched
with such a contrariety of colors; and that he, whom the bad man
regards as two-sided and the well-disposed one as changeable, needs
nothing, for the gracing and rounding off of his Adam or Palladium
buried up in so much wood, but the scythe of Time. Time then be it.