Concerning his Lordship's Character.--An Evening of
Eden.--Maienthal.--The Mountain and Emanuel.
In regard to his Lordship I have three words to say, that is, three
opinions to state.
The first is wholly improbable; it is, that, like all men of the
world and of business, he regards mankind as an apparatus for
experiments, as so much hunting-gear, war-material, knitting-work:
such men look upon heaven only as the key-board to earth, and the soul
as orderly-sergeant of the body; they carry on wars, not for the sake
of winning crowns of oak-leaves, but to secure the oak soil and acorns;
they prefer the successful man to the deserving one; they break oaths
and hearts to serve the state; they respect poetry, philosophy, and
religion, but as means; they respect riches, statistics of national
prosperity, and health, as objects; all they honor about pure
Mathesis[159] and pure female virtue is the transmutation of each into
impure for manufactures and armies; in the higher astronomy all they
care for is the transformation of suns into odometers[160] and
way-marks for pepper-fleets, and in the most exalted _magister
legens_[161] they seek only an alluring tavern-sign for poor
universities.
The second opinion is at least the opposite of the first, and an
improvement upon it: it is, that to his Lordship, as to other
great men, the race-course is the goal and the steps taken the
garlands.--Fortune and misfortune differ, with him, not in _worth_, but
in _manner_; both are, in his view, two converging race-tracks toward
the eternity's ring of inner promotion; all accidents of this life are
to him mere arithmetical examples in _unknown_ terms, which he solves,
not however as a merchant, but as an indifferentialist[162] and
algebraist, to whom products and multiplicands are of equal interest,
and to whom it is all one whether he reckons by letters or by
hundredweights.
Verily, a man has almost as much to reproach himself with, if he is
discontented, as if he had committed a crime; and inasmuch as it
depends upon his ocean of thoughts, whether he will raise out of it as
an island an Otaheite-Arcadia or the lowest hell, he deserves all that
he creates....
Nevertheless, the third opinion is the true one, and at the same time
it is mine: his Lordship, how much soever he may seem to be an
indeclinable man, who has no object, but is a verb in _mi_, has
nevertheless the following paradigm (and so inversely we find in the
most ordinary man a short plan for the most singular one): he is one of
the unhappy great ones who have too much genius, too much wealth, and
too little repose and knowledge, to be habitually happy; they hunt
pleasure instead of virtue, and miss both, and cry out at last
over every bitter drop which is given them in a sugar-loaf; like
silver-plate, precisely at the point of melting in the fire of pleasure
are they the most inclined to overspread themselves with a dark skin;
their ambition; which otherwise hides with plans the emptiness of high
life, is not strong enough for their heart, which in this emptiness
withers; they do good from pride, but without the love of doing it;
they play with the empty shell of life as with a ringlet, and deem it
not even worth the while to shorten it; and yet they do deem it worth
the while, when they, who stand through this night-frost of the soul,
outwardly smiling and cold, inwardly all in a fever, without hope,
fear, or faith, renouncing all, making light of everything, and shut up
in themselves,--when they feel a stroke of death, a great sorrow clutch
at their unhappy hearts.----Ah the poor lord! can thy heart then find
no rest till it finds it under the lid of black marble?
"Ah the poor lord!" his son incessantly repeated, as with oppressed
soul he went toward Maienthal. The outward heaven around him was still;
a great cloud completely overspread it, but rested on a blue rim along
the whole circle of the horizon. In Victor's breast, on the contrary,
streams of air rushed against each other and whirled together into a
hurricane, drinking up brooks and tearing up trees. His father's image
hung pale in this tempest. Victor's future days were hurled to and
fro.--His future life was compressed into a narrow, veiled image, and
it distressed him just as much to think that he _must_ live it as _how_
he must.
What saddened him most was the mere external and trifling circumstance
that his father had remained alone and concealed in the depths of the
island. Once the conjecture came over him, whether the greater part of
what he had witnessed had not been mere dramatic machinery which his
father (who in his youth had been a tragic poet) had employed to give
more firmness to his vow of silence; but he was immediately disgusted
at his own heart. Why are the purest souls tormented with a multitude
of disgusting, poisonous thoughts, which like spiders crawl up on the
shining walls, and which they only have the trouble of crushing to
death? Ah, our _victories_ are not wholly distinguishable from our
_defeats_!
It is singular that the _perspective_ thought of Clotilda's
blood-relationship to Flamin was the one which he followed out least of
all.
When man can obtain from reason no balsamic relief, he begs it at the
hands of Hope and Illusion; and they two then willingly share his
sorrow. Just as the blue sky of to-day by little and little peered
through light seams in the clouds, and the sea of mist collected into
hanging lakes, so also did the dark thoughts break asunder in Victor's
soul.--And when the swollen masses of cloud in the broad blue passed
into fleece, till at last the blue sea swallowed up all banks of vapor,
and bore nothing on its infinite expanse but the blazing sun, then did
Victor's soul also cleanse itself from vapors, and the sun-image of
Emanuel, whom he was to-day to reach, shone soft and warm and cloudless
into all his wounds.... The form of his loved Dahore, the form of his
loved father, the form of his hidden mother, and all beloved images,
reposed like moons in a mournful group over his head; and this sadness,
and the sacred oath to keep himself virtuous and obey all his father's
wishes, breathed upon his inflamed bosom some solace in regard to his
father's fate.
He could even to-day see the sun go down behind the church-tower of
Maienthal.
The broad cleared-up sky made him more tender, the thought of falling
to-day upon the heart of a noble man, whose soul dwelt above this blue
atmosphere, made him more exalted, the hope of being consoled by this
man for his whole life made him more tranquil.--
He hastened, and, his haste drew out the saddest lute-stop of his soul.
For he seemed not to be going over the summer fields, but they seemed
rather to be hurrying along before him; landscape after landscape,
theatres of woods, theatres of grain-fields, flew by; new hills rose
with other lights, and lifted up their woods, and others with theirs
dropped down; long, shadowy steppes ran backward before the flood of
yellow sunlight; now valleys full of flowers billowed around him, now
bare, hot hill-shores carried him upward; the stream murmured close to
his ear, and suddenly its windings glistened from far away across
poppy-fields; white roads and green paths met him, and fled from him,
and led round the broad earth; full villages, with gleaming windows,
swept by, and gardens with undressed children; the declining sun was
now lifted up, now lost again, and now withdrawn to the summits of the
hills.--
This fleeting of Nature's dissolving views bedimmed his moistened eye,
and brightened the inner world; but the steady abiding of an incessant
music, the constant choir of larks above him, whose contending cries
melted to one in his soul, this distant hum from air and woods and
bushes, this harmonica of Nature, moved him to say to himself: "Why do
I in this solitude hold back every drop that would fall? No; besides, I
am too sensitive to-day, and I will exhaust myself before I see the
beloved man."
At last he ascended the broad mountain that stations itself with its
scattered columns of trees and gray cubes of rock before Maienthal,
which lies in greenness at its foot.... Then the earth, tuned by the
Creator, rang with a thousand strings; the same harmony stirred the
stream, divided into gold and gloom, the humming flower-cup, the
peopled air, and the waving bush; the reddened east and the reddened
west stood stretched out like the two rose-taffeta wings of a
harpsichord, and a tremulous sea gushed from the open heavens and the
open earth....
He burst into a mingling flood of tears at once of joy and sorrow, and
the past and the future simultaneously stirred his heart. The sun with
ever-increasing swiftness dropped down the heavens, and the more
swiftly did he climb the mountain, the quicker to follow its flight
with his eye. And there he looked down into the village of Maienthal,
that glimmered among moist shadows....
At his feet, and on this mountain, lay, stretched like a crowned giant,
like a transplanted spring-island, an English park. This mountain
toward the south and one toward the north met and formed a cradle in
which the peaceful village rested, and over which the morning and the
evening sun spun and spread out their golden veil. In five gleaming
ponds trembled five duskier evening heavens, and every wave that leaped
up painted itself to a ruby in the hovering fire of the sun. Two brooks
waded, in shifting distances, darkened by roses and willows, over the
long meadow-land, and a watering fire-wheel,[163] like a pulsating
heart, forced the sunset-reddened water through all the green
flower-vases. Everywhere nodded flowers, those butterflies of the
vegetable world, on every moss-grown brook-stone, from every tender
stalk, round every window, a flower rocked in its fragrance, and
scarlet lupines traced their blue and red veins over a garden without a
hedge. A transparent wood of gold-green birches climbed, in the high
grass over there, the sides of the northern mountain, on whose summit
five tall fir-trees, as ruins of a prostrated forest, held their eyrie.
Emanuel's small house stood at the end of the village, in a tangled
growth of honeysuckle, and in the embrace of a linden-tree which grew
through it.--His heart gushed up within him: "Blessings on thee, quiet
haven! hallowed by a soul which here looks up to heaven, and waits to
launch into the sea of eternity!"--Suddenly the windows of the
abbey where Clotilda had been educated flung upon him the flames
of the evening-redness,--and the sun went, softly as a Penn, toward
America,--and the thin night spread itself over nature,--and the green
hermitage of Emanuel wrapped itself in obscurity.... Then he knelt
there alone on the mountain, on that throne-step, and looked into the
glowing west, and over the whole still earth, and into the heavens,
and expanded his spirit to think on God.... As he knelt, all was so
sublime and so mild,--worlds and suns came up from the east, and the
little insect, with his play of colors, nestled down into his mealy
flower-cup,--the evening-wind flapped its immeasurable wing, and the
little naked lark rested warmly under the soft-feathered breast of the
mother,--a man stood on the mountain-ridge, and a golden-chafer on the
stamens; ... and the Eternal loved his whole world.
His spirit was now made up to take in a great man, and he yearned for
the voice of a brother.
He staggered, without following any path, down into the village, with
the pewit in its great circles, and the may-chafer in its little ones,
sweeping around him. At the foot of the mountain the hybrid day grew
darker,--in the starry heaven the curtain rose,--the vapor of evening,
which had gone up hot, fell cold, as men do, back to the earth: one
more loud lark went circling upward, as the last echo of day, over the
mountain.
At last he neared Emanuel's linden. He would rather have embraced him
under the great heavens than under the close ceiling of a room. Through
the window he saw an uncommonly beautiful youth standing and playing on
a flute. The player drew out of its heavenly gates a fugitive and
floating elysium. Victor listened to him for a long time, in order to
still his beating heart; at last, with tearful eyes, he went round the
house, and would fain have fallen speechlessly and blindly on the necks
of the youth and of Emanuel. As he passed along before the window, the
youth did not return his greeting; as he opened the house-door, a soft
chime of bells began to make music. Then the youth came out
immediately, and asked him, in a friendly tone, who was there; for he
was blind. Victor stepped into a Holy of Holies when he entered the
apartment lined with linden-leaves, which was the nest of the winged
man, who at this moment was out of it, under the great night of God.
Emanuel was to return toward midnight. The room was open and clean;
some leaves of fruits which had been eaten lay on the table; flowers
glowed around all the windows; a telescope leaned against the wall;
remains of an Oriental wardrobe bespoke the East Indian....
The voice of the beautiful youth had in his ear something inexpressibly
touching, because it seemed like one he knew; it went deep into his
heart, like the melody of a song that sounds up from childhood. He
could rest freely with the steady gaze of love upon that face, that
looked out into an eternal night; he wanted to kiss those childish lips
full of melodies, and still he hesitated. But as he went out of the
house again in quest of Emanuel, and when the bells began to chime
again,--for they sounded whenever the door opened, to announce to the
blind one every arrival,--then he could no longer restrain himself
amidst the lovely music, but he touched the mouth of the blind one, as
he leaned at the open window, with a kiss as soft as a breath. "Ah,
angel! art thou, then, come down again from heaven?" said the blind
one, confounding him with some well-known being or other.
How good was it to be out of doors! The evening-bell of the village
sounded its call over the slumbering fields, and a distant soul was
inclining its ear, perhaps, to catch the dying echoes of its broken
tones. The evening wind, rustling through twigs full of green fruits,
joined in. The evening star--the moon of our twilight--rested kindly on
the road of the sun and of the moon, and sent its solace in the
interval during the absence of both.--"Where mayst thou be at this
moment, my Emanuel? Art thou resting, perhaps, in the sight of the
evening-red,--or gazing into the starry sea?--art thou in the ecstasy
we call a prayer,--or ..."
At this moment, all at once the thought flashed up in him, that, as
to-night St. John's day began, his Emanuel might have expired in the
enjoyment of the evening.... The more eagerly did he seek after him
with his eyes under every tree, in every deeper shadow; he looked up to
the hills, as if he might see him there, and to the stars, as if even
there he might venture to seek him.--He went round the village, whose
circular wall was a festoon of cherry-trees which silvered the green
circumference with a milky-way of blossoms long since fallen, and
hurried over the ruins of the houses which the children had built
during the day, towards the fading windows of the abbey, which rose on
the southern mountain down whose slope he had entered the village; for
the blind one had told him that this mountain was Emanuel's
observatory, and that he went thither every night. The green stairway,
which made its successive landings of terraces and moss-banks, and on
which a balustrade of bush-work ran upward, led him to a mountain which
terminated sublimely in the ether with a tall weeping-birch. With every
grass-plot, as from a bath, new limbs of dark Nature lifted themselves;
he went on, as if from one planet to another. Across the ascending,
darkling fields streamed the night-wind, and lonesomely swept on from
wood to wood, and its ruffling fingers played with the plumage of the
sleeping bird and the down of the whirring night-butterfly. Victor
looked over toward the evening-red which Night had taken as a rose to
wear on the bosom whereon suns repose. The sea of eternity lay in the
form of night on the silver-sand of worlds and suns, and from the
bottom of that sea the grains of sand glistened far up through the
deep.
Around the weeping-birch swelled an unaccountable melodious murmur,
which he had this very day heard on the island. At length he stood up
there under the birch, and the music, like that of an harmonica which
has just stolen over paradises and through hedges of flowers, was loud
around him; but he saw nothing further, save a high grassy altar (the
birthplace of Emanuel's letter) and a low grassy bench. From what
invisible hand, he thought with awe, can these tones issue, which seem
to glide off from angels, as they fly over the next world, from
mingling souls, when a too great bliss breathes itself out into a
sigh, and the sigh dissipates itself into distant dying sound? It must
be forgiven him, if on such a day, which threw his soul into growing
agitations, in this awful hour of night, under this melodious
mourning-tree, on this Holy of Holies of the invisible Emanuel, he at
last came to believe that _he_ had this evening taken his flight from
life, and that his soul, full of love, was still floating around him in
these echoes and yearnings for the first and last embrace. He lost
himself more and more in the tones and in the silence round about
them,--his soul grew to a dream within him, and the whole nocturnal
landscape grew to a cloud made of the sleep in which this light dream
hung,--the fountain of endless life, flung up by the Eternal, flew far
above the earth in the immeasurable arch with the spraying silver-sparks
of suns over immensity; gleaming it encircled the whole vault of night,
and the reflection of the Infinite overspread the dark eternity.
O Eternal One, if we saw not thy starry heaven, how much would our
heart, sunk into the mire of earth, know of thee and of immortality?--
Suddenly in the east the night grew lighter, because the floating
glimmer of the moon darted up on the Alpine ridges that hid the orb,
and all at once the unaccountable tones and the leaves and the
night-wind grew louder. Then Victor awoke as out of a dream and out of
life, and clasped the harmonious, fleeting airs to his languishing bosom,
and, amidst the gushing tears which, like a rain-cloud, veiled from him
the whole landscape, he cried out, beside himself: "Ah, Emanuel,
come!--Ah, I thirst for thee--Float no more in sound, thou blessed one;
take thy deposed human face, and appear to me, and slay me by a
shudder, and keep me in thy arms!" ...
Lo! while the dim tear-drop still stood in his eye, and the moon still
lingered behind the Alps, there came up the mountain a white form with
closed eyes,--smiling, transfigured, blissful,--turning toward
Sirius....
"Emanuel, dost thou appear to me?" cried Horion, trembling, and melted
into a new flood of tears. The form opened its eyes,--it spread out its
arms. Victor saw not,--heard not; he glowed and trembled. The form flew
to meet him, and he gave himself up, saying, "Take me!" They touched
each other,--they embraced each other,--the night-wind swept through
them,--the strange music sounded nearer,--a star shot down,--the moon
flew up over the Alps....
And when with its Eden-light it suffused the cheeks of the unknown
apparition, Victor recognized that it was his dear teacher, _Dahore_,
who had to-day cast his image into the mirror on the island. And Dahore
said: "Beloved son, dost thou still know thy teacher? I am Emanuel and
Dahore." Then the embrace grew closer. Horion would fain have
compressed his gratitude for a whole childhood into one kiss, and lay
dissolved in the arms of the teacher and in the arms of loving ecstasy.
Twine around each other tightly, ye blessed ones; press your full
hearts to each other even till you press tears out of them; forget
heaven and earth, and prolong the sublime embrace!--Ah! so soon as it
is dissolved, then has this frail life henceforward nothing firmer
wherewith to knit you together than the beginning of the--second....
At last Emanuel drew himself out of the attitude of love, and, bending
aside, gazed like a sun, with large and open look, into Horion's face,
and confronted with rapture the ennobled spirit and countenance of his
blooming favorite. The latter sank before the look of love
involuntarily on his knee, and said, with uplifted face: "O my teacher,
my father! O thou angel! dost thou, then, still love me so
exceedingly?"--But he wept too much for utterance, and his words were
unintelligible, and died in his heart....
Without answering, Emanuel laid his hand on the head of the kneeling
pupil, and turned his glorified eye toward the glittering heavens, and
said, with solemn voice: "This head, thou Eternal One, dedicates itself
now to thee in this great night. Let only thy second world fill this
head and this heart, and may the little, dark earth never satisfy
them!--O my Horion! here on this mountain, on which, after a year, I go
up from the earth, I conjure thee, by the great second world above us,
by all the great thoughts wherewith the Eternal at this moment appears
in thee,--I conjure thee to be still good, even when I shall have long
been dead."
Emanuel knelt down to him, held up the exhausted youth, and bent
towards his paling face, and said, in a low and prayerful tone, "My
beloved! my beloved! when we both are dead, in the second world may God
never part us,--never part me and thee!"--He wept not, and yet could
say no more; their two hearts, knit together, rested on each other, and
night veiled silently their mute love and their great thoughts.