A Heavenly Morning; a Heavenly Afternoon.--A House
without Walls; a Bed without a House.
Ah, the poor miner, the delver in rock-salt pits, and the island-negro
have in their calendar no such day as is here described or repeated!
Sebastian stood on Thursday, as early as three o'clock, on the
flying-board of his bee-hive, in order in one day to land in _Great
Kussewitz_ and be off again before people were up. A reader who
has an atlas on the floor at his feet cannot possibly confound this
market-town, where the presentation of the Princess takes place, with a
namesake of a town, which the city of Rostock has annexed to its
immovable property. Unfortunately, the whole house loved him so that it
had already, for half an hour earlier, been out of the morning feathers
of which the greatest wings of dream are made. Amidst the din of
carriage-chains, dogs, and cockerels, he tore his tender heart away
from eyes that were all love, and, as the beating of the former and the
melting of the latter annoyed him, all grew still worse; for external
noise stills the inner tumult of the soul.
Out of doors all the grass-pastures and grain-fields were bathing
in the _shower-bath_ of the dew and in the cold _air-bath_ of the
morning-wind. He hardened in it, like hot iron; a morning-land full of
immeasurable hopes encircled him; he stripped his breast, threw himself
all aglow into the dripping grass, washed (but not with any higher
purpose than girls have) his firm face with liquid June-snow, and;
strung with tenser fibres, stepped back from the shower-bath to his
toilet,--only hair and breast he confined in no imprisonment.
He would certainly have started earlier, but he wanted to avoid the
moon, whom he could no more marry to the sun than he could their
respective children to each other,--namely, night-thoughts and
morning-thoughts. For when the morning-clouds envelop man in their dew,
when the loving birds dart noisily through the gleaming mist, when the
sun looms forth out of the hazy glow, then does man, quickened in
spirit, press his foot more deeply into the earth, and cling with new
ivy-twigs of life more firmly to his planet.
Slowly he waded through a low avenue of hazel-bushes, and reluctantly
swept off their chilled chafers; he held himself in, and stopped at
last, in order to make himself late, that he might not reach the
neighboring thicket just when the sun was entering his theatre. Already
he heard the musical _mêlée_ in the thicket; rosy clouds were spread
like flowers in the sun's pathway; the watch-tower of the parsonage and
village, that high altar whereon his first lovely evening had glowed,
kindled again; the singing world of the air hung exulting in the hues
of morning and the heavenly blue; sparks of clouds darted up from gold
bars along the horizon; at last the flames of the sun streamed in over
the earth....
Truly, were I every evening to depict sunrise, and every morning to see
it, still I should cry, like the children, Once more, once more!
With benumbed nerves of vision, and with flakes of color swimming
before him, he passed on slowly into the wood, as into a dark minster,
and his heart swelled even to devotion....
--I will not assume that my reader has such a prosaic feeling in regard
to morning as to deem this poetic one irreconcilable with Victor's
character; nay, I venture to presume that his knowledge of human nature
will find little trouble in discovering the _key-note_ between two such
distant tones in Victor as humor and sensibility. I will therefore
commit myself unconcernedly to the happy contemplations of his feeling
soul, and to my assurance of having all hearts in unison with mine.
The planet Venus and a grove show most beautifully in the morning and
the evening; on both, at these hours, more rays of the sun fall than at
any other. Hence our Victor felt, in the thicket, as if he went through
the gate of a new life, as on this fiery morning he sauntered onward
with the sun, which darted beside him from twig to twig, through the
murmuring wood, away along under symphonious branches, which were so
many music-barrels set in motion, over moss that lay in green sun-fire,
and under evergreen bathed in heavenly blue. And this morning renewed
in his heart the painful likeness of _four_ things,--life, a day, a
year, a journey, which resemble each other in their fresh, exultant
beginning, in the oppressive interlude, in the weary, sated close.--
Outside in the copse, in the background of the woodland, Nature
unrolled before him her altar-piece, miles long, with its chains of
hills, with its dazzling country-houses, which had decked themselves
with gardens as with festoons, and with the miniature-colors of the
flowerets which played on the silver line of beauty traced by the
brooks. And a cloud of enraptured, sporting, buzzing little creatures
of silk-dust swept or hovered over the undulating picture.--What way
should Victor take in the labyrinth of beauty?--All the sixty-four
radii of the compass stretched themselves out as so many fingerposts,
and he had sense enough not to propose to himself any particular hour
of arriving. He therefore slipped off everywhere, to the right and to
the left; he climbed over into every vale that hid itself behind a
hill; he visited the pierced shadow-projection of every row of trees;
he laid himself down at the feet of a more than commonly beautiful
flower, and refreshed himself with pure love by its spirit, without
breaking its body; he was the travelling-companion of the powdered
butterfly, and observed his burying himself in his flower, and the
hedge-sparrow he followed through the bushes to her brooding-cell and
nursery; he let himself be spell-bound in the circle which a bee drew
around him, and quietly suffered himself to be immured in the shaft of
his own nosegay; he exercised upon every village which the motley
landscape held up to him the right of way, and loved best to meet the
children, whose days played even like his hours--
But men he avoided....
And yet there leaped from his heart a high fountain of love, which
penetrated even to the remotest brother; and yet was he so entirely
free from egotism, from that _sensitive_ intolerance, which has its
degree and source in common with the _Moravian_.---The reason, however,
was this: the first day of a journey was wholly different from the
second, third, eightieth; for on the second, third, eightieth, he was
prosaic, humoristic, social,--i. e. his heart adhered everywhere like
hooked seed, and sent the roots of its happiness into every other
being's lot. But on the first day came veiled spirits from all hours
into his soul, who vanished if a third spoke,--a soft intoxication,
which the atmosphere of nature, like that of a wine-store, communicated
to him, spread itself, like an enchanted solitude, around his soul....
But why shall I depict the first day before I depict him?
In the first hours of the journey, he was to-day fresh, glad, happy,
but not blissful; he drank as yet, only he was not drunken. But when he
had thus for some hours wandered on, with drinking eye and absorbing
heart, through pearl-strings of bedewed web-work, through humming
vales, over singing hills, and when the violet-blue sky peacefully
joined itself to the smoking heights and to the dark woods, rising like
garden-walls behind each other,--when Nature opened all the pipes of
the stream of life, and when all her fountains leaped up, and,
flashing, played into each other, painted over by the sun,--then was
Victor, who went through these flying streams with a rising and thirsty
heart, lifted and softened by them; then did his heart swim, trembling
like the sun's image in the infinite ocean, as the salient point of the
wheel-animal[110] swims in the fluttering water-globule of the mountain
stream.--
Then did flower, meadow, and grove dissolve into a dim immensity, and
the color-grains of Nature melted away into a single broad flood, and
_over_ the glimmering flood stood the Infinite One as a sun, and _in_
it, as a reflected sun, the human heart.--
All was one; all hearts grew to one greatest heart; a single life
throbbed; the blooming pictures, the growing statues, the dusty clod of
earth, and the infinite blue vault became the beholding face of an
immeasurable soul.--
He might shut his eyes as much as he pleased, still there lingered in
his dark breast this blooming immensity.
Ah, if he could have plunged up into the clouds, so as to sweep thereon
through the undulating heavens over the boundless earth!--ah, if he
could have floated with the flower-fragrance over the flowers,--could
have streamed with the wind over the summits, through the woods!--O now
would he rather have fallen on the heart of a great man, and sunk,
enraptured and weeping, into his bosom, to stammer out, "How happy is
man!"
He must needs weep, without knowing why; he sang words without sense,
but their tone went to his heart--he ran, he stopped--he dipped his
glowing face into the cloud of blossoming bushes, and would fain lose
himself in the humming world between the leaves; he pressed the
scratched face into the deep, cooling grass, and hung delirious on the
breast of the immortal mother of Spring.
Whoever saw him from a distance took him for a madman; perhaps many a
one does so still, who has never himself experienced how, through the
cleared-up, blissful breast, as through the serenest sky, storm-winds
may sweep, which in both dissolve in rain.
In this hour of his regeneration-day, his genius gave his heart the
fiery baptism of a love, which clasped all men and all creatures into
its flames. There are certain precious minutes of rapture--ah, why not
years?--when an inexpressible love towards all human creatures flows
through thy whole life, and opens thy arms softly to every brother. The
least that Victor could do, whose heart was on the sunny side of love,
was, if any one met him near a mountain, to turn out for him toward the
steep side,--not to pass by any one who was fishing, for fear of
throwing a frightening shadow on the water,--to wander slowly through a
flock of sheep, and, if a child was shy of him, to make a long circuit
aside. Nothing could surpass the soft voice with which he wished every
pilgrim more than _this_ good morning; nothing the look of anticipating
emotion with which in every village he sought to spy out any poor body
whose calluses and scars and gashes required a sponge or pain-killing
drops. "Ah, I know as well as an amanuensis[111] to a Professor of
Morals," he said to himself, "that it is no virtue, but only a luxury,
to take away the crown of thorns from a lacerated brow, the prickly
girdle from sore nerves; but this innocent pleasure will still be
begrudged me, and when on so many roads mangled men are lying, why on
mine does no one stretch out his hand that I might place in it some
compensation for this undeserved heaven in my breast?"
He would fain carry his joy to another's heart to be tasted, as the bee
delivers its mouthful of honey to the lips of another bee. At length
two children came puffing along, one of whom was tackled as pulling
beast of burden to a wheelbarrow, and the other harnessed on in front
as pushing driver. The barrow was freighted with six porous bags full
of pine-cones which the poor span were hauling to feed a consumptive
fire. The two frequently exchanged places, so as to hold out; and the
driver always wanted presently to be the horse again. "My good
children! can't your father push, then?"--"The tree has broken
both his legs short off."--"Then certainly your big brother could go to
the wood?"--"He has to plough over yonder."--Victor stood on the
fallow-field beside a waistcoat with full as many colors as holes, and
near a dirty bread-sack, both which belonged to the brother, who at a
distance was ploughing on the stage of this scene with half a post-team
of lean cows. The emptying of a full hand into the lap of misery
lightened Victor's heavy soul, as did the outgushing, which followed,
of the full eye; his conscience, not his selfishness, was his objector
to the _greatness_ of his gift--he gave it, however, but in coins of
small denominations--the children left their merchandise, and while one
of them ran across the field to the plough, the other ran down to the
village to his mother. The ploughman in the distance pulled off his
hat--would fain have uttered loud thanks, but could only blow his
nose--went on ploughing without his hat; but when at length he called
out his thanks after the youth, the latter had already escaped far
beyond earshot....
Do not, dear reader, wish this or the succeeding interlude of human
sorrow left out of the great scenes of happy nature; and may thy heart,
like Victor, by giving deserve to receive!
In his good-hearted haste he soon overtook a journeyman blacksmith sick
with fever, whose travelling-trunk or portmanteau was a filled
handkerchief; he also carried on a stick a wretched, faded pair of
boots, which he had to spare, because the other which he dragged along
on other sticks, namely, on his legs, was still wretcheder and less
without color than without soles. When he had tenderly greeted the
feverish man and made him a present, he looked into his pale, livid
face, and he could not deny him some smart-money.... Ah, the whole
smart-money for this life is not paid out till we reach a higher! When
he had civilly questioned him and informed himself about his hungry
journeyings, about his correction-house fare, about his flights from
one country to another, and about his thin viaticum which the mistress
denied him when the master was out,--then was he ashamed, before the
All-gracious One, of his flower-field of rapture, which he no more
deserved "than that poor devil there," and he made him an additional
present; and when he again waited for him to speak, and learned that he
was fifty years old without any prospects, and when the distress
overmastered him which he always felt at the sight of _old_ but
_undeveloped_ men, gray apprentices, old clerks, old dispensers, old
amanuenses, then was he somewhat excusable for running back again and
silently giving the astonished old man the new signs of his
overflowing, benignant soul; and when, at this renewed parting, he felt
his heart, which was dissolved into love, and only floated, as it were,
round his soul, thirst more and more for doing good, and felt an
incomprehensible inclination for fresh giving, and a longing to pour
out upon somebody to-day everything, everything, then for the first
time did he perceive that he was now too tender and too happy and too
giddy and too weak.
So soon as the people in the village had in hand the certain
intelligence of this transit-toll of generosity, in the afternoon about
fifteen children stationed themselves on different posts along the way,
manned the narrow passes, and distributed sentries and _enfans perdus_
to prevent evasion of the revenue-laws....
A man who, like Victor, construed three straight leagues into seven
crooked ones, is often hungry, but certainly more so than he;--he took
merely a Leibnitz's monad-meal out of his pocket, biscuit and wine, and
appeased therewith the stomach which hung and drew upon his spirit, in
order not to darken and foul, by throwing in any pieces of flesh, the
clear lake of his inner being, with its reflected arch of heavenly blue
and heavenly red. In fact, he hated gormandizers as men of too gross
selfishness, as well as all living larders, where layers of fat crush
in the spirit, as masses of snow do a house. The soul, he said, takes
an odor from the contents of the body, just as wine does from the fruit
which is near it in the cellar, and in the mephitic vapor in which the
souls of the Flachsenfingenites bob up and down over the brew-kettles
which seethe their potatoes and beer, the poor birds must surely fall
down tipsy and stifled into this dead sea.
He broke his biscuit not in any house, but in the skeleton, i. e.
framework of a house, which had just come from the hands and axes of
the carpenters into the sight of the village. As he looked through all
the divisions and subdivisions of this architectural skeleton, and saw
at once through sitting-room, kitchen, stable, and loft, he thought to
himself: "Another play-house for a poor, little human troupe, who are
here to play out their benefit comedy, their Gay's Beggars'-opera, with
no voice to cry from the stage-box, _Encore!_ Ah! before these beams
have blackened to ebony by the winter smoke, many an eye-socket will
have grown red with grief; many a northwester of life will blow through
the window upon trembling hearts, and into these nooks, which are yet
to be darkly walled up, will many a back, sore with bruises from the
warfare of common life, creep away to wipe off sweat or blood. But joy
(he went on soliloquizing as he looked at the place for stove and
table) will also set a gilliflower-tree or two before the window for
your inmates, and drive up before your house-door, which is yet to be
hung, and unload its freight of the three holy feasts, and the church
fair, and the child's baptism.--Heavens! how foolish that I should
prefer thinking all this in the mere ribs of a house to seeing it
yonder in the walled-up houses of the village!"
During this table-talk and house-warming-oration, whereat, however, no
drinking-glass was shivered, the white breast of a swallow swooped low
across the road, and her bill took up a load of slacked lime for her
little garret. The wasp shaved off from the joist-work paper-shavings
for the layers of her bulbous sphere. The spider had already knit her
spider's house into the larger one. All creatures played the carpenter
and mason in building up for themselves their little islands in the
infinite sea; but grovelling man looks not over his shoulder, and sees
not that all is like him.
Sebastian quitted his wooden inn, his skeleton of a Frankfort Red
House, more intoxicated with happiness than he could have gone from a
fully-built one. In certain men a dark melancholy diffuses itself,--a
shadow of the soul all the greater when the shadows around them are the
smallest: I mean about one o'clock of a summer afternoon. When in the
afternoon the lawns lie more intensely perfumed, and the woods with
drooping leaves stand, more softly sighing and sleeping beneath the
brooding sun, and the birds sit on the trees as dumb figurants or
supernumeraries,--then in the Eden that lay sweltering under the cloud
of blossoms an oppressive yearning seized upon his heart,--then was he
wafted by his fancies under the eternally blue sky of the East, and
under the wine-palms of Hindustan,--then did he rest himself in those
still lands, where, without stinging necessities or scorching passions,
he sank dissolved into the dreamy tranquillity of the Brahmin, and
where the soul in its elevation holds itself steady and no longer
trembles with the trembling earth, like the fixed stars whose gleam
trembles not, seen on mountains,--then was he too happy for a German
colonist, too poetic for a European, too luxurious for a neighbor of
the North Pole.... Every summer morning he feared that in the summer
afternoon he should fantasy too effeminately.
Fasting, wine, heaven, and earth had to-day so lavishly filled the
chambers of his heart with the sleep-potion of rapture, that they must
needs, when anything more was poured in, overflow through the eyes.
These now gushed forth; and behind his dimmed eyes, in the overshadowed
inner chamber, lined with the green of nature, and darkened, as it
were, with curtains of evening redness, a colored night came on,
wherein all the little shapes of his childhood rose cloudily before
him,--the earliest playthings of life were laid out,--his first May
months played like little angels on an evening cloud, and they could
not in their wing-clothes fly round the great cloud, and the sun did
not scorch them.
Ah! what he had long forgotten,--long lost,--long loved,--songs without
sense and tones without words, nameless plays,--buried nurses,--dead
servants,--all these came to life again; but before all, and greatest
of all, moved the form of his first, his dearest teacher, Dahore, in
England, who said to his melted soul, "We were once side by side."--O
this eternally loved spirit, who even then saw in our Victor the wings
that lift themselves toward the next world,--who even then was more the
friend than the master of his so tender, tempestuous, loving, aspiring
heart,--this never-to-be-forgotten spirit would not leave him; his form
pushed aside the shroud, began to shine and to say, "Horion, my Horion,
did I not hold thee by the hand, wast thou not in my heart? But it is
long since we loved each other, and my voice is no longer recognizable
to thee, scarcely my face; ah, the seasons of life roll not back, but
onward, downward, forever." He leaned against a tree and kept drying
his eye, which could no longer find the road, and his sight was fixed
calmly on the woods which stretch toward St. Luna, and on the hazy
hills that separate him from Maienthal and from his second teacher....
Kussewitz burst upon him. But too soon; his soul in its emotion was not
ready to go among strangers. He was glad to come upon an overturned
trough, out of which sheep were licking salt, and a hedge-pen, which
folded them at night, and the hut on two wheels wherein their keeper
slept. He had a peculiar curiosity and predilection for little copies
of houses; he always walked into or up to every collier's hut, every
hunter's and fowler's house, for the sake of saddening and comforting
himself with his own confinement, and with the parodies of our little
life and with the ground-floor of poverty. He never went blindly by
anything small, over which the world's man and business man stalk so
scornfully; just as, on the other hand, he never stopped before any
pomp of citizenly life. He opened, therefore, a little door to the
travelling bed of the shepherd: it looked so poverty-stricken in
there, and the straw, which took the place of eider-down and silk
pillow-cases, was so lowly and rumpled, that he felt an indescribable
longing to enter; he needed now a diving-bell that should separate him
from the rushing, crushing, sublime sea around him. I wish one could
conceal the fact from the European cabinets, the Imperial Diet, and the
Chief Commissary, that he actually laid himself down therein. But now
the excitement of his senses, into which the door of his bedchamber
admitted only a small section of the blue sky, soon passed over into
the exhaustion of slumber, and over the hot eye the lid closed.