Letters.
Had I or any one else been lying in wait behind a bush or in a narrow
pass, and had we darted out in the nick of time, we might have taken
away the two letters, sealed up one into the other, which Victor was
sending to Maienthal, from the hands of the messenger, who understood
no German, namely, his Italian servant. The letter to Emanuel was the
wrapper of the letter to Clotilda,--friendship is always the envelope
of love. Of the wrapper I will give only an extract before I
communicate in full the letter to Clotilda. He begged his Emanuel to
take this only as a letter-cover, and to hand the enclosed to Clotilda
alone;--he told him without further explanation he was held not by his
own wishes, but by flowery chains which drew him back from the other
chains of flowers in Maienthal, and that a manifold fettering with
garlands was something one _could_ not break through, because one
_would_ not,--he was intentionally obscure in regard to his new
connection with Clotilda, because he could not presume upon her
permission of the contrary;--he playfully begged his friend to beg his
lady-friend to command him to make the journey to Flachsenfingen, that
they might get a sight of each other,--(I lose my way in this period if
I show the design of this way of putting the thing);--he erased again
in his head the question, whether Clotilda still needed the physician,
merely because he was one for her in a double sense, and only asked
whether she had recovered.--Finally he concluded thus:--
"And thus then I flutter with tolerably dusted butterfly's[59] wings in
the immense temple which to our butterfly[60] eyes breaks up into
smaller ones, and the leafy ornaments of whose columns we take for the
columns themselves, and whose rows of pillars become invisible from
their greatness; there flutters the human butterfly[61] up and
down,--strikes against windows,--rows through dusty cobwebs,--flaps his
wings at last around a hollow flower,--and the great organ-tone of the
eternal harmony tosses him about with merely a _dumb_, rising and
falling tempest, which is too great for a mortal ear.
"Ah, now I know life! Were not man even in his desires and wishes so
_systematic_,--did he not in all things aim at roundings-off as well of
his Arcadias as of the kingdom of truth,--then he might be happy and
brave enough for wisdom. But a looking-glass wall of his _system_, a
living hedge of his _paradise_, neither of which lets him _sally_ or
_see_ into the infinite, fling him back forthwith to the opposite side,
which receives him with new railings and throws in his way new
limits.... Now, when I have gone through such various states,
passionate, wise, foolish, æsthetic, stoic; now that I see that the
most perfect of them crooks and cripples either my earthly roots in the
earth, or my twigs in the ether, and that, even if it did not do that,
still it could not last over an hour, to say nothing of a life;--as,
therefore, I clearly see that we are a fraction only and not a unit,
and that all reckoning and reduction of the fraction is only an
approximation between numerator and denominator, a change of the
1000/1001 into 10000/10001, I say: 'Well, for all me--be it so! Let
wisdom, then, be for me the _finding out_ and _enduring_ of merely the
_least_ gaps in our knowing, enjoying, and doing.' Accordingly, I no
longer let myself be led astray, nor my neighbor either, by that most
common illusion, that man regards every change in himself--every
improvement at all events, but also even every deterioration--as
greater than it afterward proves.
"--Enough! but since this observation--and still more since high
destiny has given me joys, _in order that_ I might deserve them--new
morning-light has fallen on my shady path, and I have new courage to
improve myself. The clear stream of time runs over a sloping flower-bed
of fair hours, on which I once stood, and upon which I can distinctly
look down.--O when this Eden-lawn once comes up again, and I can take
thy hand and walk upon it, and kneel down beside thee and look
gratefully now to the morning-sky and now over the waving flower-fields
of this life; then will I fall back upon thee speechless, and
gratefully embrace thy breast, and say: 'O my Emanuel! only through
thee do I indeed deserve it all.' Nay, I say it to-day, beloved
teacher, and do thou stay a good long while by the side of thy scholar
on the earth, even until he is worthy to accompany thee out of it."--
* * * * *
Long as this letter was, still Victor after all loved his teacher
too much,--and hated too much the princely rudeness of making men
tools,--not to have told him outright, that this letter owed--not so
much its origin as--its birthday to the letter to his beloved. Here is
the one to Clotilda, into which with the following words he brings his
request to see her:--
"If I knew that I should even for a moment oppress or disturb by this
sheet the beloved soul, which will now be enjoying itself by the side
of the lofty Emanuel, in the presence of spring and amidst its fair
thoughts, O most gladly would I sacrifice this blessed hour, in order,
perhaps, to deserve it. But no, my friend forever! your tender heart
desires not my silence! Ah, man must so often conceal coldness and
bitterness, why, too, even love and joy?--Nor should I be able to do it
today.
"O, if an inhabitant of earth had in a dream gone through Elysium; if
great unknown flowers had waved above him; if a saint had handed him
one of these flowers with the words, 'Let this remind thee when thou
awakest that thou hast not dreamed!'--how would he pine for the Elysian
land, as often as he looked upon the flower! Never-to-be-forgotten one!
you have, in the glimmering night, when my heart twice succumbed, but
only once from pain, given a mortal an Eden, which reaches out beyond
his life; but to me it has seemed till now as if I were waking more and
more out of the receding dream-night,--when, lo! I received from the
paradisiacal dream a flower,[62] which you left behind for me, that I
might remain inexpressibly happy, and that my longing might be as great
as my bliss. Why does this crape draw up all the hot tears out of the
depth of my heart, why do I see behind this woven lattice the eyes
open, which are so far from me, and which so move my inmost being to
sadness? O, nothing appeases the loving soul, but what it shares with
the loved one; therefore do I gaze upon the spring with such a sweet
stir of emotion; for she enjoys it, too, I say,--therefore it is that
thou pleasest me so, dear moon, with thy evening star; for thou
weavest the web of thy silver-threads round her shadows also and her
May-flowers,--therefore it is that I so love to bury myself in every
shaded dell of your Eldorado; for I think, in the magnified shadows, in
the fragrance-breathing blossoms of these pictures, she is now roaming,
and the moon-sickle deflects the softened lightnings of the sun upon
her eye. Then when I am too full of joy, when the _evening-rain_ of
memory falls upon the hot cheeks, when my rapture rocks up and down on
a single long trembling tri-clang of the harpsichord, then does the
trembling and the silence and the infinite love too heavily oppress
with woe the tumultuous heart, then do I yearn for the least sound,
wherewith I may tell the beloved of my heart how I _love her_, how I
honor _her_, that for _her_ I will live, for _her_ will die!----O my
dream, my dream steals now like a tear into my heart! In the night of
the third Easter-holiday I dreamed: Emanuel and I stood in a dusky
nocturnal region. A great scythe on the western horizon flung flying,
reflected flashes at the high lawns, which forthwith dried up and
turned pale. But when a flash flickered into our eyes, our hearts,
sweetly fainting, drew themselves up in the breast, and our bodies grew
lighter for soaring away. 'It is the scythe of Time,' said Emanuel,
'but whence does it, haply, catch the reflection?' We looked toward the
east, and there hung far in the distance and high in the air a broad
dark-glowing land of vapor, which occasionally lightened. 'Is not that
Eternity?' said Emanuel. Then fell before us light snow-pearls, like
sparks. We looked up and three gold-green birds of paradise poised
themselves overhead and swept round incessantly in a little circle, one
after the other, and the falling pearls came from their eyes, or were
their eyes themselves. High above them stood the full moon in the blue,
but on the earth there was still no light, but a blue shadow: for the
blue of heaven was a great blue cloud, opened only in one place by the
moon, which poured down radiance on the three birds of paradise, and
down below on a bright form averted from us.--_You_ were that form, and
turned your face toward the East, toward the hanging landscape, as if
you would presently see something there. The birds of paradise
sprinkled their pearls faster and faster into your eyes; 'They are the
tears which our friend must shed,' said Emanuel; and then, too, they
fell from your eyes, but more brightly, and lay glittering on the
flowery ground. The blue on the earth suddenly grew brighter than the
blue in the heavens, and a steep cavern, whose mouth yawned towards
Eternity, sank back deeper and deeper through the earth towards the
west, down even to America, where the sun shone from below into the
opening,--and a stream of evening-red, broad as a grave, shot upward
out of the earth, and diffused itself with its evening sheen over the
far haze-land of the vapory Eternity like thin flames. Then trembled
your outspread arms, then trembled your songs full of blissful longing,
then could we and you see perfectly the illuminated Eternity. But it
shifted with playing colors under the gaze, we could not retain even in
thought what we saw; they were elusive forms and dissolving hues,
they seemed near, seemed far, seemed to be in the midst of our
thoughts.---Little clouds going up from the earth floated around the
glowing Eternity, and each bore a human being, standing upon it and
singing, up to that luminous island, which clove itself open toward the
earth, with only an endless row of white trees, moulded of light and
snow, and instead of blossoms putting forth purple flowers.--And we saw
our three shadows lying sublimely projected on the radiant white grove;
and on Clotilda's shadow the purple flowers hung down as garlands; an
angel hovered round the lovely shadow and smiled upon it tenderly and
touched the place of the heart upon it. Then didst thou suddenly
tremble, Clotilda, and turn round towards us, fairer than the angel in
Eternity; thy whole ground gleamed under the fallen tears and became
transparent. And now when thy dropping pearls dissolved the ground into
a rising cloud, then didst thou hastily reach thy hand to us, and say,
The cloud takes me up, we shall see each other again.--Ah! my fainting
heart no more retained its blood: I knelt down, but I could say
nothing; I would fain have melted my soul into a single sound, but the
fettered tongue could not frame one, and I stared at the ascending
immortal with infinite and inconsolable love.--Ah! thought I, life is a
dream; but I could perhaps say to her how I love her, were I only
awake.
"Then I woke. O Clotilda, can man say how much he loves?
"H."
* * * * *
His character and the contents of this dream shut out the suspicion of
invention.--For the rest, even if Clotilda refuses his veiled wish to
see her in Maienthal, still she must do it with a leaf of paper and
three lines, which he can then read a thousand times over, and with
which the cabinet of pictures and seals, wherein already are contained
the hat and the views, will be considerably enriched. Meanwhile he
stood in his fair Alpine valley between two high mountains, on each of
which was mustering material for an avalanche,--one is perhaps already
started up there in its crushing course, and he is not yet able to see
it. The first avalanche, which the least sound of his may topple down
upon him, is his crazy relation with his court acquaintance. He can
boast of having angered them in a body: the Princess, Joachime,
Matthieu. But, even independently of that, some conductor or
other--merely because he stands not with the rest on the social
isolating stool of the throne--must soon dart a diminished flash at his
fingers or his eyes; at boards and at courts no one can stand upright
without connections; it is there as in galleys, where all the slaves
must move their oars together, if no one is to feel the cutting of the
chain. But Victor said to himself, "Be not a child! be not the reversed
fox who pronounces _sour_ grapes, because he cannot reach them by
leaping, to be _sweet_! I flatter myself, thou canst dispense with
courtly hearts, which like their viands must first be warmed over a
chafing-dish full of flickering spirits of wine.--By heaven! a man will
surely be able to eat, even though that which he puts on the spit is
not fetched by a guard from the kitchen, then handed to a page, then
served up by a chamberlain or some other regulation-cavalier.--Only my
father,--if it makes no difference to him!" That was just it: in the
son there was nothing to be felled, but there was in the father,[63]
for whom they will probably let the uplifted woodman's and sacrificial
axe hover, till he stands under it with his head, which without his
return is not to be had.
But deuse a bit does a Pastor-fido care for the first avalanche. On the
harmonica-bells of his fancy the external dissonances of fate, as the
rolling of carriage-wheels over the pavement does on the strings of a
musical instrument, die away in softly ascending murmur. With him, as
with the astrologers, April, like my book, was dedicated to the
evening-star, i. e. to Venus.
On the contrary, the other avalanche lay already beforehand on his
breast,--the possibility of a breach with Clotilda's brother. A
jealous man the twelve Apostles and the twelve minor Prophets cannot
convert;--if he is cured on Sunday, then on Monday he is sick again, on
Tuesday he is raving mad, and on Wednesday you can loose him again; he
is weak and cunning and----only lies in wait. The cancer of jealousy on
the breast can never wholly be cut out, if I am to believe great
masters of the healing art. This time, furthermore, there was something
true at the bottom; and then too the jealous man insures it in good
season; jealousy enforces infidelity, and the provoked woman will not,
so far as in her lies, leave the man in _error_. I cannot give myself
the trouble (but the reader may) to enumerate in my biography all the
little crannies and wood-holes through which he has hitherto let his
Flamin see and _hear_ into his love-smitten heart: these knot-holes are
so much the larger, as he was _before_ the _third_ Easter-holiday more
improvident, for the very reason that he was more innocent, or, rather,
more unhappy.
To this add, that Flamin--who every day thought the dear Evangelist
Mattheus more honest and _open_ (like a burnt-out _touchhole_)--every
day looked upon his faithful Bastian as more artful and impenetrable. I
could wish the Regency-Councillor were more discerning; but crowded
souls like Victor's, that have more powers, and for that very reason
more sides, than common, seem, of course, to be less _porous_, just as
authors full of meaning seem less clear. A man who exposes to you with
frankness all the colors of his heart playing into each other, loses
thereby the glory of frankness;--one who like Victor, from humor,
collects and shows up other people's tricks, seems to imitate them;--a
changeable, an ironical, a fine man is in the eyes of narrow ones a
thorough-going false thief. Then, too, Victor, when it could be done
without noise, jumped out of the way of any long mentionings of
Clotilda, i. e. long dissemblings; and this very flight from artifice,
even his present increased human-kindliness toward Flamin, precisely
overshadowed his noble form; and nothing consoled him for the
distortions of suspicion, but the sweet reflection that to please the
brother of his beloved and of his heart he had turned his back upon the
fairest days in Maienthal.