It always gives me pleasure to see the people keep their seats during
church-music, because it is a proof that no one is bitten by the
tarantula; for, if they should run out, one would see that they could
not endure any discords, and so had been bitten. I, as profane
music-master, compose for few churches,--that is to say, only
the consecration-noise for new ones, or old ones that have been
repaired,--and therefore, in truth, I understand nothing of the matter
whereupon, in passing, I purpose to express myself; but thus much let
me still be allowed to assert, that the Lutheran church-music is good
for something,--in the country, not in the capitals, where, perhaps,
the fewest discords are correctly delivered. Verily, a miserable,
sottish, blue chorister, who in bravura-airs sings himself brown
and beats others brown,--there are, therefore, two kinds of
_bravura_-airs,--is able, with a few mechanics who on Sundays work at
the fiddle, with a trumpeter who might blow down without an instrument
the walls of Jericho, with a smith who lays about him with the sticks
of the kettle-drums, with a few spasmodic youngsters that do not yet
even understand singing, and still resemble a female singer, who
labors, not, like the fine arts, for _ear_ and _eye_ alone, but also
(only in a worse acceptation than the youngsters) for a third sense,
and with the little wind which he draws from the lungs of the organ and
his own lungs,--such a thumper, I say, is able, with so extraordinarily
little musical rubbish, nevertheless, to get up a much louder
thundering and fiddle-rosin-lightning around the pulpit Sinai--I mean,
to draw a far more vehement and discordant church-music out of his
choir--than many much better sustained theatre-orchestras and
chapels, with whose harmonies temples are so often desecrated. Hence
such a noisy man is pained afterward, when people misunderstand and
falsely judge his church scraping and squeaking and groaning. Shall,
then, the soft, low Moravian music steal into all our provincial
churches?--Fortunately, however, there are still city choristers who
are working against this, and who know wherein pure choral tone and
discord are to be distinguished from court-tone.
I expect, not readers, but organists, to know why mere dissonances--for
consonances are to be endured only among the voices of the
instruments--belong to the choir. Dissonances--according to Euler and
Sulzer--are relations of tones which are expressed in high numbers;
they displease us, therefore, not on account of their incongruity, but
on account of our inability to reduce them rapidly to an equation.
Higher minds would find the near relations of our harmonies too easy
and monotonous,--the larger ones of our discords, on the contrary,
charming and not above their comprehension. Now, as divine service is
held more in honor of higher beings than for the profit of men, the
church style must insist upon this, that a music shall be made,
suitable for higher beings,--namely, of discords,--and that precisely
that which is the most abominable to our ears shall be chosen as most
appropriate for the temple.
If we once open the church-doors to the instrumental music of the
Moravians, then we shall at last be infected with their singing, and by
degrees all that vocal bleating and bellowing will be lost which makes
our churches so lively, and which to castrated ears is such a
disagreeable hammer of the law, but for us so good a proof that we
resemble the swine, which the Abbé de Baigne, at the command of Louis
XI., arranged according to the scale, goaded with jacks, and set to
squealing.--These are my thoughts on church-music, or modern German
battle-song.
_End of the Extra-Syllable on Church-Music_.
I should not have let the hair-dresser sing and strut so long, if my
hero had been available for anything else, all this Sunday, than
a supernumerary; but he did nothing of consequence the whole day,
except, that, out of a sort of humanity, by unpacking, himself; her
chests-of-drawers and bandboxes, he compelled old Appel, who would
rather dress hams than her person, to prepare the usual Sabbath edition
of the latter, printed with typographic splendor, as early as three
o'clock in the afternoon; otherwise she would not have delivered the
same till after supper. The Jews believe that they get, on the Sabbath,
a new Schabbes-[222] or Sabbath-Soul: into maidens there enters one at
least; into the Appels, two or three.
But why do I expect my hero to make any more active demonstration
to-day,--him who, to-day, buried in that dream-night and in the coming
evening, his emotions stirred by every kindly eye, and by the
_rudera_[223] and urns of a spring which he had dreamed away,--softly
dissolved by the calm, bland summer, which still lay smiling and dying
on the incense-altars of the mountains, on the crape-clad fields, and
amidst the mute funeral escort of birds, and at the rising of the first
cloud would pass away from the boughs,--Victor, I say, who to-day,
greeted with a melancholy smile by nothing but tender remembrances,
felt that he had hitherto been too mirthful? He could only look upon
the good souls around him with glistening eyes of love, then turn them
away, more intensely glistening, and go out. Over his heart and all
its notes stood written, _Tremolando_. No one is more profoundly sad
than he who laughs too much; for when this laughter ceases, everything
has power over the exhausted soul, and a meaningless lullaby, a
flute-concert,--whose D sharp and F sharp keys and mouthpieces are
merely the two lips wherewith a young shepherd whistles,--opens the
flood-gates of the old tears, as a whisper loosens the poised and
trembling avalanche. He felt as if his dream of this morning absolutely
did not allow him to address Clotilda; she seemed to him too holy, and
still escorted by winged children, and placed upon icy thrones. As,
upon the whole, he had to-day neither a tongue nor an ear for Le Baut's
conversations in the realm of the morally dead, he preferred to listen
unseen in the great leafy garden to this Stamitz concert, and at the
farthest let himself be introduced to the company by accident. His
second reason was, that his heart was made for a sounding-board of
music, and gladly drank in the fleeting tones without disturbance, and
loved to conceal their effects upon him from ordinary men, of the
world, who can truly quite as little do without Goethe's, Raphael's,
and Sacchini's things (and for not a whit inferior reasons) as without
Löschenkohl's own. Emotion, it is true, raises one above being ashamed
to show emotion; but while his emotions lasted, he hated and shunned
all attention to another's attention, because the Devil smuggles in
vanity among the best feelings, often one knows not how. In the night,
in a shady nook, tears fall more gracefully, and by-and-by evaporate.
In all this he was strengthened by the Parson's wife; for she had
secretly sent to town and invited her son, and artistically prepared in
the garden a surprise.
The Parson's family repaired at last to the embowered concert-hall, and
gave not a thought to the consideration how much they were despised by
Le Baut's household, who held only noble metals and noble birth, never
noble deeds, to be cards of admission, and who, highly valuing the
people of the Parsonage as friends of his Lordship and of Matthieu,
would, however, have valued them still higher as lap-dogs of either.
Victor kept back a little in the Parsonage garden, because it was
still too light, and also because he pitied poor Apollonia, who was
peering solitary and unseen, in full finery, from the window of the
summer-house, out into the air, and dandling perpendicularly the little
god-son, whom she hung now over her head, now under her stomach. After
the manner of a cit, he did not put on his hat in the summer-house, in
order to strengthen her spirit by courtesy. An infant is, as it were,
prompter and bellows-blower to the nurse: the young Sebastian sent
Appel timely and sufficient succor under the siege by the elder one,
and she undertook at last to speak, and remark that the god-son was a
dear, good, beautiful, little "Basty." "But," she added, "the young
leddy (Clotilda) must not hear that: she will have it that we should
call him Victor, when she hears father call him Basty." Now she began
to magnify how Clotilda loved his godchild, how often she would snatch
the little monkey and smile on him and hug and kiss him; and the
eulogist repeated on a small scale everything that she praised. Nay,
the grown-up Sebastian did it after her, but he sought on the little
lips only the kisses of _others_; and perhaps, in Appel's case, again,
_his_ were among the things which are sought. Made happier himself, he
left one whom he had made happier; for Love despatched now one gayly
attired hope after another as messengers to his heart, and all said,
"Truly, we do not deceive thee: trust us!"
At last Stamitz began to tune up, about whom the stiff family of the
Lord Chamberlain would certainly not have concerned themselves, because
to-day there were no strangers present, had not Clotilda begged for
this garden-concert as the only festival of her birth-night. Stamitz
and his orchestra filled a lighted bower,--the noble audience sat in
the next brightest niche, and wished the thing were already over,--the
commonalty sat farther off, and the Chaplain, for fear of the
catarrhal, dewy floor, twisted one leg round the other above the
thighs,--Clotilda and her Agatha reclined in the darkest leafy box.
Victor did not steal in, till the overture announced to him the seats
and the seating of the company: in the remotest arbor, in a true
aphelion, this comet took its place. The overture consisted of that
musical scrawling and flourishing, of that harmonious phraseology, that
crackling of fire-works produced by the mutual contact of sounding
passages, which I so extol, when it is nowhere but in the overture.
There it is in place; it is the sprinkling rain which softens the heart
for the great drops of the simpler tones. All emotions in the world
need _exordia_; and music paves the way, or the tear-ways, (lachrymal
ducts,) for music.
Stamitz--after a dramatic plan which not every conductor marks out for
himself--gradually descended from the ears into the heart, and from
allegros to adagios: this great composer sweeps in ever-narrowing
circles around every bosom in which there is a heart, until at last he
reaches it and folds it in a rapturous embrace.
Horion trembled alone, without seeing his loved ones, in a gloomy
arbor, upon which a single withered twig let in the light of the moon
and of its pursuing clouds. Nothing ever stirred him more during music
than to look at the chase of the clouds. When he accompanied with his
eyes and with the tones these nebulous streams in their everlasting
flight around our shadowy globe, and when he imparted to them all his
joys and his wishes, then he thought, as in all his joys and sorrows,
on other clouds, of another flight, of other shadows, than those above
him,--then did his whole soul pine and languish; but the strings
stilled the panting bosom, as the cold leaden bullet in, the mouth
allays thirst, and the tones discharged the heavy tears from the full
soul.
Dear Victor! there is in man a mighty wish which was never fulfilled:
it has no name, it seeks its object, though all that thou namest it and
all joys are not its reality; but it recurs, when in a summer night
thou lookest to the north or towards distant mountains, or when
moonlight is on the earth, or the heavens are studded with stars, or
when thou art very happy. This great, vast wish lifts our soul aloft,
but with sorrow: ah! here below we are thrown upward in a prostrate
position like epileptics. But this wish, to which nothing can give a
name,--our strings and tones name it to the human spirit; the yearning
soul then weeps more profusely and can no longer comprehend itself, and
calls inward in rapture of lamentation between the tones: "Ay, all that
ye name to me is what I want!" ...
Mortal man, the enigmatical creature, has also a nameless, monstrous
dread, which has no object, which awakes at hearing of spiritual
apparitions, and which one sometimes feels when one only speaks of
it....
Horion yielded up his bruised heart, with quiet tears which no one saw
flow, to the high adagios which laid themselves with warm wings of
eider-down over all his wounds. All that he loved entered now into
his shady arbor,--his oldest friend and his youngest; he hears the
thunder-storm-bells of life toll, but the hands of friendship stretch
forth to meet each other, and they clasp each other, and even in the
second life they hold each other fast in withering grasp. All tones
seemed the unearthly echoes of his dream, sent back by beings whom one
neither saw nor heard....
He could not possibly stay longer in this dark inclosure with his
burning fancies, at this too great distance from the Pianissimo. He
went--almost too boldly and too closely--through a leafy avenue up to
the tones, and pressed his face far through the leaves, in order at
last to see Clotilda in the dim and distant green glimmer....
Ah, and he saw her! But in too angelic, too paradisiacal a form! He saw
not the thinking eye, the cold mouth, the calm person, that forbade so
much and desired so little; but he saw for the first time her mouth
encircled by a sweet harmonious sorrow, with an inexpressibly touching
smile,--for the first time her eye weighed down under a brimming tear,
as a forget-me-not bows itself beneath a tear-drop of rain. O, this
good soul surely concealed her fairest feelings most of all! But the
first tear in a beloved eye is too mighty for a soft heart.... Victor
knelt down, overpowered by reverence and rapture, before the noble
soul, and lost himself in the darkling, weeping form, and in the
weeping tones. And when he saw at length her features turned to
paleness, because the green foliage overspread her lips and cheeks with
a deathly hue from the reflection of the lamps,--and when his dream
came back to him, with Clotilda sunk under the flowery hill,--and when
his soul, dissolved into dreams, into sorrows, into joys, and into
wishes for her who consecrated her birthday festival with devout
tears,--oh, was there then any need, for the completion of his
euthanasia, that the violin should die away, and that the second
harmonica, the _viole d'amour_, should send its music-of-the-spheres to
his naked, enkindled, palpitating heart? O, the pang of bliss quieted
him, and he thanked the Creator of this melodious Eden, that He, with
the _highest_ tones of His harmonica, which with unknown forces shiver
the heart of man to tears, as high tones shatter glasses, had at last
exhausted his bosom, his sighs, and his tears: amidst these tones,
after these tones, there were no more sounds; the full soul was wrapped
up in foliage and night and tears; the speechless swelling heart drank
the tones into itself, and took the outer ones for inner ones; and at
last the tones played like zephyrs around the head that was drowsy with
bliss, and only in the innermost part of the dying soul still stammered
the too happy wish: "Ah, Clotilda, could I surrender to thee to-day
this mute, glowing heart!--ah, that I might on this imperishable
heavenly evening, with this trembling soul, sink dying at thy feet, and
say the words, 'I love thee!'"
And as he thought of her festive anniversary, and of her letter to
Maienthal, which had given him the greatest praise, that of being a
scholar of Emanuel, and of little tokens of her regard for him, and of
the sweet fraternization of his heart with hers,--ay, then did the
heavenly hope of winning this ennobled heart for the first time draw
near to him amidst the music, and that hope caused the sounds of the
harmonica, like dying echoes, to float far and wide over the whole
future of his life....
"Victor!' said some one, in a slowly lengthened tone. He sprang up and
turned his exalted features toward the--brother of his Clotilda, and
embraced him with joy. Flamin, into whom all music flung war-flames and
more open sincerity, looked at him wonderingly, inquiringly, and with
an imperceptible suspicion, and with that friendliness which resembled
scorn, but which was never anything but the smarting of injuries
received.
"Why didst thou not take me, too, with thee to-day?" said Flamin, in a
friendly tone.
Victor pressed his hand, and was silent.
"No! speak!" said he.
"Let it be for to-day, my Flamin; I'll tell thee some time," replied
Victor.
"I will tell it to thee myself," Flamin began, more quickly and warmly.
"Thou thinkest, perhaps, I shall be jealous. And look thou, did I not
know thee, I should be so: truly, another would be so, if he had thus
lighted upon thee here, and put all things together,--thy late retreat
from our summer-house out into the foliage, thy writing without a
light, and thy singing of love"----
"To Emanuel," said Victor, softly.
"Thy sending off that leaf to her"----
"It was another from her album," said he.
"Still worse; _that_ I did not even know. Thy lingering in St. Luna,
and a thousand other signs, which do not immediately occur to me,--thy
going off alone today"----
"O my Flamin, this is going too far! thou seest with other eyes than
those of friendship."--
Here Flamin, who never could dissemble without immediately becoming
what he assumed, and who could never recount an offence without
falling into the old anger, grew warmer, and said, in a less friendly
manner,--
"And others, too, see it,--even the Chamberlain, and the Chamberlain's
wife."
This tore Victor's heart.
"Thou dear old friend of my youth! so, then, we are to be drawn and
torn asunder, bleed we ever so much; so, then, this Matthieu is to
succeed (for all comes from him, not from thee, thou good soul!) in
getting thee to torment thyself, and me to torment thee. No, he shall
not succeed; thou shalt not be taken from me. See, by Heaven!" (and
here the feeling of his innocence stood in Victor erect and sublime,)
"and though thou shouldst for years misunderstand me, still the time
will come when thou shalt start back, and say to me, 'I have done thee
wrong!'--But I shall gladly forgive thee."
This touched the jealous one, who to-day, indeed, (for a special
reason,) was more composed.
"See," said he, "I believe thee always: say, dost thou never do
anything against me?"
"Never, never, my dear fellow!" answered Victor.
"Now, then, forgive my heat," the other continued. "Thus have I
already, with my cursed jealousy, once tormented Clotilda herself in
Maienthal. But wrong not Matthieu; it is he, rather, who tranquillized
me. He told me, to be sure, what Clotilda's parents thought they
observed; nay, still more,--see, I tell thee everything,--he said they
had even, on account of thy presumed liking and thy present influence,
which the Chamberlain would fain avail himself of for his
reinstatement, spoken of a possible betrothal to their daughter, and
had even spoken to her and sounded her on the subject; but (to thee,
however, this is a matter of indifference) my beloved remained true to
me, and said, No."
Now was the hitherto so happy heart of our friend broken: that hard No
had never yet been uttered to him. With an inexpressible, crushing, but
meek woe, he said, softly, to Flamin,--
"Be thou, too, always true to me, for I have very little; and never
torment me more as thou hast to-day."
He could say no more; the stifled tears stormed surging up over his
heart, and painfully collected themselves under the pupil; he must
needs now have a still, dark place, where he could weep to his heart's
content; and in his lacerated and smarting bosom there remained only
one soft and balmy thought: "Now, in the night, I can weep as much as I
will, and no one can see my shattered face, my shattered soul, my
shattered fortune."
And when he thought, "Ah, Emanuel, if thou shouldst see me as I am
to-day!" he could hardly any longer contain himself.
He fled, with suppressed tears, unconcerned who saw it or did not see
it, out of the garden, over which a dark angel let float a great
funereal banner and the music of a dirge. He bruised himself against
a stone garden-roller which was used to crush the _sprinkled_
grass-blades and _flowerets_,--he wept not yet, but on the observatory
there would he satisfy himself and steep himself in abundant
sorrow,--he kept repeating, "But she remained true, and said, No, no,
no!"--the concert-tones glided after, like fire after the conjurer,--he
waded through moist, slumbering lawns, which concealed their flowers,
and, swifter than he, swept over the earth the shadowy outlines of the
clouds overhead chased by the wind,--he stood at the foot of the
observatory, still held back every tear, and hurried up,--he threw
himself on the bench where he had seen Clotilda for the first time afar
off, in a white dress,--"Rest thou, too, Horion!" she had called to
him out of his dream from under the flowery hill, and he heard it
again.----
Here he tore open joyfully all his wounds, and let them bleed out
freely in tears; they overspread with mournful streams the face which
once had often smiled, but always good-naturedly, and which from other
eyes had never wrung any, but only wiped them away; every flood was a
load taken off, but the heart grew heavy again upon it, and poured out
a fresh one.--At last he could hear the tones again; most of them sank
and were lost before they were wafted to the tower; little ones arrived
dying, and expired in his darkling heart; every tone was a falling
tear, and made him lighter, and expressed his anguish. The garden
seemed to consist of softly resounding, dark-green waves of shadow,
veiled under a broken twilight. Stung by memory, he tore his eye away
from it: "What does it concern me any longer?" he thought. But at last
from this shadowy Eden and from the _viole d'amour_ came up the song,
"Forget me not," to his weary heart, and gave him back the softer pang
and the past love. "No," said he, "I never will forget thee, though
thou hast not loved me! thy form will assuredly forever move me, and
remind me of my dreams! ah, thou heavenly one, it is, indeed, now, the
only thing that does not pain me, to think I forget thee not!"
All was silent and extinguished; he was alone in the presence of night.
At length, after remaining a long time in silence, he went down and
back to Flachsenfingen, exhausted with weeping, and a poor man. And as,
on the way, he cast a hurried glance up at the dark-blue heaven, in
which floating clouds lay flung around the moon like _scoriæ_, and a
hurried glance again over the half-annihilated shadowy landscape, over
the shadow-hills and shadow-villages, all appeared to him dead, empty,
and vain, and it seemed to him as if, in some brighter world, there
were a magic-lantern, and through the lantern glasses moved on which
earth and springs and human groups were painted, and we called the
descending, dancing images of these glasses _us_ and an earth and a
life; and _after all that was bright and many-colored, a great shadow
followed on_.----
Ah, I stir up, perhaps, once more, in many a breast, long-forgotten
troubles! But it is good for us--since sorrows occupy so large a place
in our memory--that this bitter winter-fruit should grow mild by lying,
and that there is but a small difference between a past sorrow and a
present bliss.
Poor Victor arrived after midnight, with a pale face and burning eyes,
at the house of the Apothecary. He asked for nothing, that he might not
betray his broken voice. When he saw his every-day overcoat hanging in
the moonbeams, and when he imagined himself a strange person to whom
the coat belonged, and who took it off so joyfully in the morning and
now would put it on again so sorrowfully, then did a certain compassion
which he had for himself seize again with too strong an impression his
exhausted heart. Marie came, and he turned not away from her even the
signs of this compassion. She stood surprised; he said to her with the
softest voice, woven of sighs, that he wanted nothing; and the good
soul went slowly out without courage to console or to weep, but all
night long she shed invisible tears for those of another, and for a woe
which had not been whispered in her ear.
Why did Fate to-day, of all days, open all the veins of his heart? Why
must the Senior Pastor's silver wedding and the first marriage of his
daughter to the preacher of the Orphan-House fall just on this day?
Why, if indeed the two nuptial feasts had to coincide on this day, must
they last till after midnight, when they gave poor Victor occasion to
gaze into all the mouldering scenes of his burnt-up hopes, when he
could see from his dark chamber, in a brilliantly lighted room, the
love which linked hand in hand, pressed lips to lips, and mingled eyes
and souls? At another time he would have smiled at the Orphan-House
preacher and at two catechists of the poor; but tonight he could only
sigh over them,--and it is a soft line of beauty on his inner man, that
he did not grudge, but felicitated, the poor people's possession of
what he was deprived of himself. "Ah, you are happy!" said he. "O, love
each other truly, press your throbbing, transitory hearts ardently to
each other, ere the wing of Time shatters them, and glow on each
other's bosoms during the short minute of life, and exchange your tears
and kisses ere eyes and lips freeze in the grave! Ye are happier than
I,--I, who can give my heart full of love to no one but the worms of
the grave, and on whose coffin a joiner shall paint the inscription,
which like myself shall be buried in the earth: 'Ye good children of
men, you loved me not, and yet I loved you so well!'"
Every happy smile, every fleeting touch of the violin, every thought,
became now, to his soft tear-bathed heart, a hard, sharp corner,--just
as a hand which dips itself under the water feels everything hard to
the touch.
His unbounded sincerity, his unbounded tenderness, he could now satisfy
in no other way than by a letter to Emanuel, into which he let his
whole soul overflow.
"O Dearly Loved Friend!
"Ought I to hide it from thee, when griefs or follies unman me? Ought I
to show thee the faults I have repented of, and never my present ones?
No, come hither, dear one, to my wounded breast! I will lay open to
thee the heart therein, let it bleed and beat under the exposure as it
will. Thou wilt, perhaps, still cover it up again with thy fatherly
love, and say, 'I love thee still.'
"Thou, my Emanuel, reposest in thy lofty solitude, on the Ararat of the
saved soul, on the Tabor of the shining One: there thou gazest, softly
dazzled, into the sun of Deity, and seest calmly the cloud of death
swim in over the sun; it veils the orb: thou growest blind under the
cloud; it melts away, and again thou standest before God. Thou lovest
men as children who cannot offend,--thou lovest earthly enjoyments as
fruits, which one plucks for refreshment, but without hungering for
them; the storms and earthquakes of life pass by thee unheard, because
thou liest in a life-dream full of tones, full of songs, full of
meadows,--and when death awakes thee, thou art still smiling over the
bright dream.
"But, ah! more than one tempest thunders into the life's-dream of the
rest of us, and makes it distressful. If a higher being could enter
into the hurly-burly of ideas which encompasses our spirit, and from
which it must draw its breath, as we breathe in an air composed of all
kinds of gases poured together,--if he were to see what kinds of
nutriment pass through our inner man, from which it has to extract its
chyle: that medley of comic operas,--Bayle's Dictionaries,--concerts of
Mozart,--Messiahs,--military operations,--Goethe's poems,--Kant's
writings,--table-talks,--lunar observations,--vices and virtues,--men
and sicknesses and sciences of all sorts:--if the Being should examine
this _olla-podrida_ of life, would he not be curious to know what
heterogeneous and mutually repulsive juices thereby run together in the
poor soul, and would he not wonder that anything settled and uniform is
left as a residuum in man? Ah, Emanuel! if thy friend is now in a fine
banquet-hall, now in a garden, now in an opera-box, now under the
great night-heavens, now in the presence of a coquette, and now before
thee,--surely, this ambiguous alternation of scenes must bring him
sorrows, and perhaps leave stains....
"No, I will not deceive my Emanuel----O, are, then, the trifles and
the pebbles of this life worth our choosing crooked paths to avoid
them, as the sapping-caterpillar submits to winding courses through the
twig-work of its leaf? No, all that I have said is true; but I should
not have said it, had not other sorrows led me to speak of these also;
and yet, thou innocently, simple-heartedly, sublimely trusting teacher,
thou wouldst have believed me! Ah, thou hast too good an opinion of
me!... O, it is a long and weary step from admiration to imitation! But
now look into my open heart!
"Since I have, here in the charnel-house of my childish joys, in the
beds where my childhood's years bloomed and faded, been conversing with
perhaps too many dreams of the past,--and, still more, from the day
when thou gavest my heart the provocative to the fever-stroke which has
shaken my whole life,--since thou disclosedst to me the life wherein
man exfoliates, and the thin, sharp moment whereon he so painfully
stands,--since that farewell-night when my soul was great and my tears
inexhaustible,--an eternal wound has been running within me, and the
sigh of a longing which nothing can name but dreams and tears and
love has lain like a stagnant vein, oppressive and consuming in my
breast.----Ah! I still smile as ever, I still philosophize as ever, but
my innermost heart only the beloved friend sees to whom I now lay it
bare.
"O Fate, why dost thou strike in man the spark of a love which must be
smothered in his own heart's blood? Have we not all, abiding within us,
the sweet image of a beloved, of a friend, before whom we weep, after
whom we seek, for whom we hope,--ah, and so vainly, so vainly? Does not
man stand before a human bosom, as the turtle-dove before a mirror,
and, like her, coo himself hoarse before a dead, flat image therein,
which he takes for the sister of his complaining soul? Why is it, then,
that every fair spring-evening, every melting lay, every overflowing
rapture, asks us, 'Where dost thou find the beloved soul to which
thou wilt tell and impart thy bliss?' Why does music give the
tempest-stricken heart, instead of peace, only greater waves,--as the
tolling of bells, instead of dispelling, draws down the thunder-storms?
And why is it, that out of doors, on a fair, still, bright day, when
thou lookest over the whole unrolled picture of a landscape, over the
seas of flowers that tremble upon it, over the shadows flung down by
the clouds which fly from one hill to another, and over the mountains
which stretch like shores and walls round our flowery circle,--why does
then a voice within thee cry incessantly, 'Ah! behind the smoking[224]
mountains, beyond the clouds that repose upon them, there rests a
fairer land, there dwells the soul thou seekest, there heaven lies
nearer to the earth'? But behind the mountain and behind the cloud
there sighs also an unappreciated heart, that looks over towards this
thy horizon, and thinks, 'Ah, in that far region I should doubtless be
happier!'
"Are we _not_, then, all happy?----Do not assert it, nor say to me,
Emanuel, that, in the winter of this life, the few warm sunbeams that
interrupt it burst and destroy the better man like a vegetable; say not
that every year steals away something from our heart, and that, like
ice, it grows less and less, the farther it drifts down the stream of
Time; only say not that the wandering Psyche, though she hears her
second self in her prison, yet can never get into its arms.----But thou
hast already somewhere said: 'All loving souls on earth dwell apart
from each other in two bodies, as on two hills; a waste lies between
them, as between solar systems; they see each other, speak across by
distant signs; at last they hear each other's voices from hill to hill;
but they never touch each other, and each embraces only its thought.
And yet this poor love crumbles like an old corpse, when it is
exhibited; and its flame flickers like a burial-lamp, when it is
uncovered.'
"Are we, then, all not happy?--Do not say so!--Ah, man, who, even from
childhood up, has been calling after an unknown soul that grew up in
_one_ heart with his own,--that entered into all the dreams of his
years, and therein gleamed from afar, and, after his waking, started
his tears,--that in spring sent him nightingales, that he might think
of her and long for her,--that in every tender hour visited his soul,
with so much virtue, so much love, that he would so gladly have offered
in his heart, as in a sacrificial chalice, all his blood to the
beloved,--but who, alas! never, appeared, and only sent her image in
every fair form, but forever kept back her heart;--oh, if at last, oh,
if suddenly, oh, if blissfully, her heart beats against his heart, and
the two souls embrace each other forever, he can no longer say it, but
we can: 'This man, indeed, is happy, and is loved.' ...
"Good Emanuel, thou forgivest me the pain of the fear that I may never
be the happy man,--no, never!--Oh, even for this earth, broken up into
graves, I should be perhaps too happy, I should be permitted to enjoy,
perhaps, too great an Eden for so young a life, and one justified by
such slight merits, if my too soft soul, which even now gives way under
three happy minutes, which loves every human being, and hangs with the
arms of a child on the heart of the whole creation,--oh, which is
already made too blissful by this mere dream of love, and is
overpowered by this description!--no, it were too blessed, such a soul,
long since dissolved by melancholy and humanity, if it should once,
after such a long, deathly yearning, at last, at last--O Emanuel, I
tremble again for joy, and yet it can never, never be!--if it should
find all its wishes, its whole heaven, so much love, accumulated in one
dear, dear soul; if in the presence of great Nature, and before the
face of Virtue, and before God himself, who gave love to her and to me,
I could dare to say, weeping, to this only, this sweet, this beloved--O
God, how shall I name her? this fore-loved one, whom in my frenzy I
would now name: 'At last my heart has thee, thou good soul! to-day God
gives us to each other, and we remain together through all eternity!'
No, I would not say it; I should for ecstasy be dumb and die!
"--Lo! it seemed to me just now as if a form passed across my chamber,
and called, 'Victor!' I looked round, and beheld my empty room, and the
Sunday clothes which I had taken off, and now, for the first time, I
remembered that I was unhappy and not loved.
"But thou, irreplaceable friend, misunderstand me not. I swear to thee
that I will give thee these sheets unaltered, though to-morrow, when
the whirlpools of to-night flow stiller and smoother, I should find all
sorts of alterations necessary. Thy foolish friend remains,
nevertheless, thy friend forever.
"S. V. H."