The Philosophical Arcadia.--Clotilda's Letter.--Victor's
Confessions.
I have only two things to explain before going further,--the mysterious
music and the shutting of the eyes. The former proceeded from an Æolian
harp laid on the weeping-birch. As often as Emanuel came hither by
night he let these breathed-out tones intermingle like blossoms with
the whispering leaves, in order to exalt himself when he looked alone
upon the exalted night. His eyes he often closed before the sun and the
moon, whenever his inner man, winged like a cherub, had leave to bury
itself in soft fantasies; into the streaming, many-colored waves of
light which crowd through the eyelids he would then plunge, as into a
zephyr, for a delicious swim, and in this light-bath the higher
light-magnet within him drew heavenly light out of earthly light. As
there are but few souls that know how far the harmony of outward nature
with our own reaches, and in how very great a degree the whole creation
is but an Æolian harp, with longer and shorter strings, with slower and
swifter vibrations, passive before a divine breath,[164]--I demand not
that every one should forgive this Emanuel.--
After this finding of each other again, which threw a far gleam over a
whole life, the two came home to the blind youth; and his flute carried
the heart softly over in dream from the tossings of fevered blood into
the tranquil ether of heaven.
As I love so to be about Emanuel, the reader will not begrudge me the
pleasure of turning over the leaves of all the hours which we are
permitted to spend in his house, and to go along regularly, step by
step.
The morning for the first time disclosed to the pupil of Emanuel, as it
does to children, what a Christmas present the night had provided for
his heart. What a form came before him in the morning-radiance, when
the still, childlike, composed face of the teacher, over which storms
had once passed, as on the soft, white moon volcanoes have flamed,
smiled upon him in such wise that his inner being melted into mute
bliss! Especially when beheld in _profile_ did this lofty form appear
to stand on the brink of earth, and to look down into the _second_
hemisphere of the heavens, which is hid from us by the gravestone and
the rich pasture-ground of this life. His countenance was transfigured
when he lifted it to heaven, when he named God or Eternity, when he
spoke of the longest day; in its light the leaf-gold of the present
paled to the dead-gold of the past, and his spirit hung hovering over
the body, as genii bloom out of flowers in arabesques. Never did Victor
so easily attune himself, when coming out of a dream, to the new day,
as he did this morning with Emanuel's voice, which was, so to speak,
the music of the spheres to the blue heaven of his eyes, from which,
as from that of Egypt, never a drop fell; from incapacity of the
tear-glands, he could never weep; nor did this life any longer agitate
his soul.
The pure morning-apartment seemed to make the soul pure and still. He
was the greatest bodily Purist; he washed his body quite as often as
his clothes; and the uncleanness of medical language, even to the very
words,--as, e. g. toothpicks, &c.,--was avoided by his stainless
tongue. Even so did his heart remain unsoiled by so much as the images
of great sins, and this unconscious innocence, as well as an
unacquaintedness with our artful manners, made him, in the eyes of
three different classes, either a child--or a maiden--or an angel.
The breakfast of fruits and water, which, in fact, made up his whole
bill of fare, called up reprovingly before our Victor the wine and
coffee-grounds wherewith he had sometimes had to manure, like earthly
ones, the flowers of his spirit. Flower-pots were Dahore's snuff-boxes,
and glowed under the linden-green, which, with two tame, and yet
free, ground-sparrows skipping through it, was the live, growing
ceiling-piece of the apartment. His soul seemed also, like a Brahmin,
to live on poetical flowers, and his speech was often, like his
manners, Indian,--i. e. poetic. So was there throughout, as with divers
magnates of men, a striking pre-established harmony between outward
nature and his heart; he readily found in the corporeal the physiognomy
of the spiritual, and _vice versâ_; he said matter, considered as
thought, was just as noble and spiritual as any other thought, and that
we represented to ourselves in it, after all, only the Divine
conceptions of it. For example, during breakfast he lost himself in the
glimmering dew-drop on a stock-gillyflower, and, by moving his eye to
and fro, played through the gamut of its harpsichord of colors. "There
must," said he, "be some harmony or other of accordant sounds between
this minute particle of water and my spirit, as between virtue and me,
because otherwise neither could so ravish me. And is, then, this accord
which man makes with the whole creation (only in different octaves) a
mere play of the Eternal, and no resonance of a nearer, greater
harmony?" In the same way he would often gaze at a glimmering coal,
till in his eyes it had expanded to a flaming meadow, on which,
illumined by tender fancies, he roamed up and down....
Have patience, reader, with this flowery soul; we will both think that
men can more easily have one religion than one philosophy, and that
every system presupposes its peculiar weaving in the heart, and that
the heart is the bud of the head.
The only circumstance that pained the blessed Victor this morning was,
that he could not embrace the fair blind youth, and ask, "Have we not
already once lived together, and is not my voice as familiar to thee as
thine is to me?" For he looked upon him (as I do too), for several
reasons, as the concealed son of Pastor Eymann. But as Dahore kept
silent on the subject,--into whose clear, bright heaven one could
otherwise look down even to the least nebulous star,--he feared before
these holy ears he should be speaking too near to the verge of his oath
of silence, though he should only disclose his inquiring conjectures
about the blind one. This Julius seemed to have only two root-fibres in
his nature, of which the one went to his flute, and the other to his
teacher. On his white face, whereon the rapture of the musical genius
and the abstractedness of the blind dreamer were blended with an almost
womanly beauty, lay the reflection of his teacher, and its fibres had,
like lute-strings, stirred only to harmonious movements. The poor blind
one, who looked upon his Dahore as his father, was turned about, like
down, by his lightest breath. Victor often drew the head of the dear
blind one close to his face, in order to inspect the disordered eyes,
and judge whether they might be restored. But though he saw with pain
that the unhappy one must remain incurable on the full, radiant earth,
nevertheless he kept on repeating his minute investigation, merely for
the sake of having the dear, enchanting form nearer to his eye and his
soul.
In the morning Emanuel, as cicerone of Nature, led his guest through
the ruins and antiques of the earth: for every tree is an eternal
antique. How different is a walk with a religious[165] man from one
with a vulgar, worldly soul! The earth appeared to him holy, just
fallen from the hands of the Creator; it was to him as if he were
walking in a planet hanging over us and clothed with flowers. Emanuel
showed him God and love everywhere mirrored, but everywhere
transformed,--in the light, in--colors, in the scale of living
creatures, in the blossom and in human beauty, in the pleasures of
animals, in the thoughts of men and in the circles of worlds; for
either everything or nothing is his shadow. So the sun paints its image
on all creatures,--great in the ocean, many-colored in the dew-drop,
small on the human retina, as mock-sun on the cloud, red on the apple,
silvery on the stream, seven-colored in the falling rain, and gleaming
over the whole moon and over all its other worlds.
Victor felt to-day, for the first time, the enlargement and
transfiguration of his conscious being before a spirit which, _like_
his, but _excelling_ his, like a spherical concave mirror reflected all
the features of his nobler part in colossal size. The whole vulgar
portion of his nature crept away when the higher, painted by Dahore on
a large scale, erected itself above the low impulses. A man whom the
perihelion of a great man does not set on fire and beside himself is
nothing worth. He was hardly willing to speak, so that he might only
hear _him_ all the time, although he had it in mind to stay here a good
many days. As before a higher being and before the woman of his love,
in whose presence one will neither show his head nor his tongue, so had
he, renouncing self, sunk into pure truth and love. All the varnish of
the little relations of place and citizenly respectability had cracked
so clean off, and they all stood before him there so moss-grown, that
he would not so much as name the names of Göttingen, of Flachsenfingen,
or empty incidents of life, or strange personalities. In fact, Victor
had a slight contempt for men who care more for the directions to the
bookbinder than for the book, and more for the review of an author than
for his system, and to whom the earth is no deciphering chancery of the
book of nature, but a parlor (a talking-room), a news-office of
wretched personalities, which they care neither to profit by, nor to
retain, nor to estimate, but merely to tell; and he was disgusted with
the German societies, in which there is so little philosophizing.--Oh,
how blest he was, for once to think a whole day in company with
another, and, what is still finer, to be permitted to poetize with him!
His doubts upon the greatest matters which can weigh down our minds and
lift up our hearts grew to-day to questions; the questions, to hopes;
the hopes, to presentiments. There are truths of which one hopes that
great men will be more strongly convinced than one can be one's self;
and one will therefore by their conviction confirm and complete his
own. Dahore held the two great truths (God and immortality) which, like
two pillars, bear up the universe, firmly to his heart; but, like the
rarer men to whom the truth is not merely the _shew-bread_ of vanity
and the dessert of the head, but a _holy supper_ and _love-feast_ full
of the _spirit of life_ for their weary heart, he cared little, if he
could make no proselytes. Victor felt that _he_ understood handling the
artillery-train and the electric pistols and batteries of the art of
disputation better than Emanuel; he would have abhorred his own tongue
if he had directed its readiness against this fair soul. He was silent
for two reasons. "Undertake," said he, "to give a molten image, an
altar-piece, of a great, shining truth that embraces thy whole
being,--to do this on the flying second-hand whereon one stands in
transient conversation, with the few dry paints wherewith human ideas
are to be colored, and with the clumsy human tongue wherewith you must
daub on these grains of color,--I tell you, a _silhouette_, a
transparent asterism, will be all you can produce." The light heaven of
certain simple-hearted men of deep feeling veils, like the outer one,
all its suns, except the warmest, under the sheen of a void blue; but
the unclean heaven of others full of wit and logic is bedizened with
_mock-suns_, bows, northern lights, clouds, and redness.
The second, better reason why he scorned the honor of opposition was
his heart, which contained in itself more than the head could throw
light upon. Certain views cannot be detached so easily as wall-pictures
in Italy, and transferred from one head into another. The _light_
which another can give thee _shows_, but _constructs_ not, the
house-furniture of thy interior, and what the light really _creates_
with some is meteorological appearance, optical illusion, but no
substance.[166]--Hence all turns not upon the showing and seeing of a
truth, i. e. of an object, but upon the effects which it works through
thy whole inner being. For how is it that there are men who, as
Socrates did Aristides, make us better merely by our being with
them?--How do great authors bring it about, that their invisible
spirit in their works seizes and holds us fast, without our being
able to quote the words and passages whereby they do it, as a thickly
leaved forest always murmurs, though not a single branch stirs?--Why
did Emanuel overmaster his beloved Horion--more than by broad
thesis-formulas, _rationes decidendi_ and _sententiæ magistrales_--merely
by the transfiguration in his countenance, by the low echo-tone of his
voice, by the radiance of his look, and by the devotion in his breast,
when he spoke solemnly truths which were old to speech and new to the
heart, like the following?--
Man goes, like the earth, from _west_ to _east_; but it seems to him as
if he went, with it, from east to west, from life to the grave.
What is highest and noblest in man conceals itself, and is without use
for the practical world, (as the highest mountains bear no herbage,)
and out of the chain of fine _thoughts_ only some members can be
detached as actions.[167]
Our aimless activity, our clutchings at the air, must appear to higher
beings like the clutching of dying men at the bed-clothes.
The spirit awakes and will awake when the light of the senses goes out,
just as sleepers awake when the night-light is extinguished.
* * * * *
Why did these thoughts linger like things of awe in the soul?--Because
Horion felt something higher than language, which is invented only for
every-day sensations, can ever represent; because, even in his
childhood, he hated systems which thrust out of sight all that is
inexplicable; and because the human spirit feels itself as much
oppressed in the explicable and finite as it is in a mine, or in the
thought of the heavenly space overhead being somewhere or other boarded
up.
How should he have had the heart or the occasion on such a day to ask
Emanuel about his dying-day, or about Clotilda? Victor had that poetry
of fellow-feeling which easily puts itself into the place of the most
unlike persons, of women and philosophers. In the evening Dahore went
to the abbey to teach astronomy, his most beloved science. During the
astronomical school-hour the open face of Julius became an open heaven;
he told his Victor everything, as if he were a second father. Now he
related to him frankly that the year before an angel had again and
again come to him, who grasped his hand, gave him flowers, spoke to him
kindly, and at last vanished from him into heaven, but had left him a
letter, which he was permitted to have read to him a year after, at
Whitsuntide, by Clotilda,--yes, and that this good angel had yesterday
flown by him with a kiss. Victor smiled with delight, but concealed his
conjecture that _he_ looked upon the angel to be a shy, loving maiden
from the boarding-school.--"But yesterday," said Victor, "I only was
the angel that kissed thee _thus_!" and repeated it. Julius knew
no fairer gift to make to those he loved than the picture of his
father,--the portraiture of his exalted love, which forgot no human
being, because it was based, not upon the superiorities, but upon the
necessities, of men,--further, of his indulgence, of his
disinterestedness, since a long virtue spared him the battle against
his heart, and now he did nothing but what he wished to, and since the
next world, hanging low down before him, preached a peculiar
independence upon necessities. Five hundred thousand fixed stars of the
first magnitude, according to Lambert, hardly give a light equal to
that of the nearer full moon,--and so the present always outshines our
inner world; but soar nearer to the fixed star of the next world, then
does it grow to a sun, which transforms the moon of time and of the
present into a petty nebula.--As to this Emanuel, all Maienthalers
loved him (even the Parson, although he was a non-Catholic,
non-Lutheran, and non-Calvinist); and he loved to be dependent on
something, on others' love.[168]--During this description Victor
yearned for him again with as much emotion as if they had been
separated a year; accordingly, in the flush of evening he laid himself
down under the birch-leaves opposite the school, in order immediately,
with ardent arms, to take him prisoner.
And as Victor lifted his soul on the tall, white columns of the park
planned by his Lordship, on the sublime sculpture which wrote out a
great thought that looked like a tempest, and just as he had carried a
bee that had dropped down, his wings being glued up with honey, to the
beehive sill,--just then Dahore, with a friendly manner, came up. The
latter entered, himself,--for Victor would have held the covert
starting of a subject as a sin,--on that of Clotilda, and said this
used to be her favorite spot, and the resting-bench of her quiet soul.
The place was not grand, but, what is more, it was opposite to
something grand (even physical greatness, e. g. a mountain, needs
distance as a pedestal); it lay in the deepest part of the dell,
encircled with Emanuel's flower-chains, which he often laid out
without enclosure, because all Maienthalers respected his little
joys,--breathed upon by great clover-fields,--overspread by the moon,
which in spring, only after reaching the mountain-top, beamed down this
deep valley with a mournful medley of birch-shadows, water-glistenings,
and bright spots,--and, finally, adorned with a grassy bench, which I
should not have mentioned had it not been planted at both ends with
great, drooping flowers, which, with a tender feeling, no one crushed
who sat down between them. How was Victor surprised or enraptured when
Emanuel asked about this Clotilda! Like jewels of dew, like tears of
joy, all the words of his teacher fell into his languishing heart,
because they were eulogies upon her tender soul, which leads its own
tears only into those of _others_, and hides them before dry hearts;
upon her fine ambition, which men's criticism misconstrues into
_coldness_ and women's into _pride_; and on her warmth of love, which
one would not have looked for in a heart like hers, fast closed as a
bud, which now confounds inanimate with animated nature, in order by
the former to learn to love the latter. It touched Victor even to tears
when Emanuel so warmly praised his pupil, now withdrawn from this Eden;
and when he actually went on to beg, in all simplicity, that he would
be the friend of _his_ friend, and now especially because he was going
to die, and because she would never come back again,--for she had been
here the last time merely for the purpose--on Whitsuntide, where her
parents could not smile at it--of publicly taking the sacrament with
the boarding-school girls,--that he would now take _his_ place towards
this starward-soaring eye, this heart aspiring to eternity,--then could
he have fallen at the feet of his friend and _his_ maiden friend for
emotion and love.... From such lips praise bestowed upon its object
always gives to love an extraordinary growth, because that sentiment
always seems a pretext,[169] and ripens at once, so soon as it has
found it.
If thy heart, my friend, does not beat quickly and intensely enough for
another's,--although, in my opinion, it already pulsates at the
fever-point, namely, a hundred and eleven times in a minute,--then just
go, in order to transform thy cold fever into a warm one, thy quartan
ague into a quotidian, to other particularly respected people, and
let them praise her, the good soul, or only name her often before
thee,--mortally sick, and provided with thy good hundred and forty
pulsations to the minute, thou wilt go thy way, and have the desired
fever.
The innocent Emanuel, who did not guess Victor's warmth, thought he
must do still more by way of giving him the sevenfold consecration as
priest of friendship for Clotilda, and gave him a--letter from her.
_Thou_ couldst do it, East Indian, since thou art here a child that has
been made into an angel in the _limbus infantum_ (the children's
heaven), since thou hast no mysteries, excepting the mystery of the
three children (hence his Lordship did not make thee the reader of his
letters), and since thou dost not at all dream that the giving away of
another's letter is anything wrong. Still thy scholar should not have
read it.
But he did read it. He cannot defend himself by anything except by my
reader, who here holds in his hand this very same letter of another who
never wrote it for him, and nevertheless reads it through word for word
in his chair. I, for my part, read nothing, but only copy off what the
dog brings me.--It is a beautiful coincidence that this letter should
have been written by her on that very same raining, melodious night of
the garden-feast when he wrote his first to Emanuel.
"St. Luna, May 4, 179*.
"You will not, perhaps, expect any excuse from me, revered teacher,
that, when I have hardly left Maienthal, I come back in the form of a
letter. In fact, I meant to write it even while on the road, then the
second day, and finally yesterday. This Maienthal will spoil for me
many other valleys; all music will sound to me like an Alpine horn,
making me sad, and bringing to my heart the remembrance of the Alpine
life under the weeping-birch tree.
"In this mood I should not have been able to deny my heart the pleasure
of opening itself and pouring itself out before yours in the warmest
thanks for the most beautiful and instructive days of my life, had I
not formed the resolve after some days to be in Maienthal again; after
my second return home, my heart must have its will, and way.
"In our house I found nothing changed,[170] nor anything in our
neighbor's; and I found in all souls the same old love with which we
had parted from each other,--only my Agatha, to be sure, is merry, but
yet less so than she used to be. The only change in Herr Eymann's house
is a guest whom every one calls by a different name,--Victor, Horion,
Sebastian, young Lord, Doctor. This last name he fully deserves by his
first action and first joy in St. Luna, which was the healing of the
blind Lord Horion. What a piece of happiness for the saved and for his
saviour!--May this youth one day only pass through your Eden, and meet
with your good Julius, so as to repeat upon him the beautiful art--Oh!
as often as I think upon it, that the male sex is blest with the means
of the greatest, godlike benefactions,--that they, like a god, can
distribute eyes, life, justice, science,--whereas my sex must confine
its heart, so yearning to do good, to lesser services,--to the drying
away of a tear for another, to the concealing of its own, to the
exercise of a secret patience with happy and unhappy;--then the wish
rises, O that that sex which has the highest benefits in its hands
would vouchsafe to us the greatest,--that of imitating itself, and
getting into our hands good things which should bless us by our
distribution of them!---At present, a woman can have nothing in her
soul to make her great, except only wishes.
"I have just come in out of the open air from a little garden-feast at
my Agatha's; and never is any fair bit of deep-blue sky exactly right
to me, if it does not stand over your weeping-birch, where your eye
counts up all its treasures and suns, and shows my heart all the tokens
of Infinite Power and Love. To-day, in the garden, I thought with
almost too sad a longing on your Maienthal; Herr Sebastian reminded me
of it still oftener, because he seems to have had a teacher who
resembled mine.[171] He talked very well to-day, and seemed to be made
up of two halves,--a British and a French. Some of his fine
observations have not gone from me,--e. g., 'Sorrows are like
thunder-clouds: in the distance they look black, over our heads hardly
gray.--As sad dreams betoken a glad future, so may it be with the
so-often-tormenting dream of life when it is over.--All our strong
feelings, like ghosts, hold sway only up to a certain hour; and if a
man would always say to himself, This passion, this grief, this
rapture, will in three days certainly be gone from this soul,--then
would he become more and more tranquil and composed.' I report all this
to you so exactly, in order, as it were, to punish myself for a too
hasty judgment which I passed some days since (though within myself) on
his propensity to satire.--Satire, also, seems to be merely for the
stronger sex; I have never yet found one of my own who had found in the
works of Swift or Cervantes or Tristram anything to her taste.--
"_Two days later_.--I and my letter are still here; but to-day it
starts four days in advance of me. I cannot help thinking, This last
time every flower in Maienthal, and every word my best teacher says to
me, will give me still greater and deeper joy than ever, because I
journey thither right from the turmoil of visiting, and with such a
melancholy heart. The morning after that lovely night of the
church-going festival I sat alone in an arbor near the great pond, and
made myself sadder with all that I saw and thought; for during that
whole morning, by reason of a dream I had had, my faded friend[172]
stood before my soul,--her grave lay transparent above her, and I looked
down through it, and saw that lily of heaven lying within there pale and
still,--I reflected, indeed, as the gardener buried flowers with their
pots in the earth, that the body in which we are planted must, in like
manner, go down into the earth for future blooming, but, nevertheless,
I could no longer control my tears.--In vain did I look upon the
sparkling spring, which draws every day new colors, new insects, new
flowers out of the earth,--I only grew sadder, since it rejuvenates
everything, but not man.[173]--And when I saw Herr von Schleunes with a
frog-bow approaching the pond, I was obliged, as he could see my eyes
at a great distance as he passed by, to make believe asleep, in order
not to betray them.... But before my dearest teacher I would have
opened them as now, because he forgives me my weaknesses.
"CLOTILDA v. L. B."
Victor had kept his left hand, with which he held the letter, too near
to his heart, and his arm and letter began to tremble with the thumping
heart, and he could hardly read and comprehend it for emotion. "Such a
teacher! such a pupil!"--beyond that his looks could say nothing more.
There was a struggle within him whether he should tell his friend his
love for Clotilda. In _favor_ of the confession was Emanuel's request
to seek her society,--that eye of his beholding, as if out of fixed
stars, all trifles of earth,--Victor's grateful desire to repay one
secret with another, and, most of all, oh! this love for his teacher,
this love of his teacher for him.... And this, too, conquered, however
much there was otherwise to be said _per contra_. For if Victor's whole
nature glowed in the fire of friendship, so did his heart mount higher
and higher, and burn to lay itself open,--he still wrestled with it,
and still it was silent,--it loved boundlessly,--it lifted itself up as
if by an invisible power,--at last it burst asunder,--his bosom opened
wide as before God,--and now, beloved, look in, but forgive him all!
He was still in this inward conflict, when the moon, which had gone up
behind their backs, projected their two shadowy knee-pieces before
them.--He was reminded, by Emanuel's outstretched shadow, of a passage
in his letter,[174] and of his sickly life and early passing away....
This clove open his inner being; he gently turned his Emanuel round
toward the moon, now pouring down its radiance, and told him and showed
him everything,--not merely his love, however, but his whole history,
his whole soul, all his faults, all his follies,--everything; he was,
at this moment, as eloquent as an angel, and full as great; his heart
undulated in the melting glow of love; and the more he said, the more
he wanted to have to say.
No sublimer and more blessed hour strikes on this earth than that in
which a man erects himself, exalted by virtue, softened by love, and
despises all dangers, and shows a friend how it is with his heart. This
trembling, this dissolving, this exaltation, is more precious than the
itching of vanity to disguise itself in idle refinings. But perfect
sincerity comports only with virtue. Let the man in whom suspicion and
darkness dwell by all means apply to his bosom night-screws and
night-bolts,--let the bad man spare us his opening of coffins,--and
whoso has no heaven's door about him to open, let him keep the
hell-gate shut!
Emanuel felt the divine or motherly joy which a friend experiences at
the virtue and improvement of a friend, and forgot in his joy the
different occasions of it.
Reluctantly do I tear myself away for a night from this virtuous pair.
May I get many more days of Maienthal to paint, and may Victor spend
there many days more!