Towards noon he opened his weary eyes, but only to let them fall into
the grave, which death had opened beside him during his sleep. However,
one madman had been the God of Medicine to the other; his dream of
Elysium was dreamed out, shortly before it seemed about to be
fulfilled, and he was rational again. Victor saw by all signs, that
toward sundown at least death with his fruit-gatherer would pluck this
white fruit from its stem; but he saw it more calmly than yesterday. As
he had already rehearsed the part of disconsolateness, the instruments
of grief sawed no fissure into his heart, but only moved bloodily to
and fro in the old one. Whoever after years deposits for the second
time in the coffin one who has been once awakened therein, scarcely
mourns with so much intensity as the first time.
With what altered eyes did Emanuel awake in the evening hour, when he
yesterday had shed the first tears for joy! His soul, like the mourning
tree of Goa,[158] let fall by day the nightly load of blossoms; to his
chilled head the earth turned no longer the meadow-side of poesy, but
the light side of cold reason. He confessed now that he had nourished
into fulness of blood the nobler parts of his inner man at the expense
of the lower,--that his hope of death had been too great as well as his
poetic wing-feathers,--that he had contemplated the earth not from the
earth, but too much from Jupiter, seen from whose observatory it must
needs dwindle to a fiery spark, and that he had therefore lost the
earth without getting Jupiter instead. Vainly did Victor oppose him
with the true proposition, that the higher man, as the painters do with
water-colors, always begins his life-piece with the _background_ and
with the _sky_, which the painters in oil and inferior men make last;
his answer was the complaint that he unfortunately had not completed
his picture so far as the foreground. At last he reproached himself
with having made too much ado about so slight a separation as death
was, at least for him who goes, since the other separations on the
earth were after all _longer_, more _bitter_ and _two-sided_.
They came in this way upon the subject of _recognitions_ on the other
side of this stage of being. Victor said, he could not decry, as many a
philosopher had done, conjectures reaching out beyond the earth; for
after all we _must_ guess about what was beyond this world, whether we
asserted or denied. "Without the continuance of memory," said he, "the
continuance of my conscious self is no more than that of my knowledge
of another's, i. e. nothing at all; so soon as I forget my present
self, then surely might any other one instead of me be immortal.
Nor does the destruction of my memory follow from its earthly
dependence on my body; for this dependence all the spiritual powers
have in common with it, and in that case the destruction of the others
would follow from this dependence; and what then would be left for
immortality?"--Emanuel said: the thought of recognition, however much
it presupposed of the sensuous, was so sweet and transporting, that, if
men could make themselves _sure_ of it, no one would be willing to
tarry here an hour, particularly if one painted out to himself the
heavenly thought of finding all great and noble men at once. "I have
often," said he, "pictured out the future recollection after the
analogy of the present, and always had to leave off for rapture when I
thought to myself how in that remembrance the earth would shrink up to
a dim morning-meadow, and our life to a far-removed day illumined with
moonlight.--Oh, if we now, dissolve at the image even of a few years of
childhood, how tenderly will the image of _all_ childish years one day
look upon us!"--Victor waived off these deathly raptures, and after
saying, by way of transition, "_one_ connection, at all events, this
world must have with the second," he came upon something else, which
had struck him so much among the incidents of this night....
* * * * *
* * * * *
I still throw a veil to-day over what Victor asked and what Emanuel
disclosed; the new perspective would draw away our eyes too long from
the great patient.
The blind one held in one steady and agonized grasp his hot hand, in
order not to lose the beloved father; and when Emanuel had for a long
time been laying soft consolation concerning his death, like cool
leaves around the inflamed temples, he still said nothing except, in a
tone of fervent supplication, "Ah, father, if I had only seen thee,
only once!"--
Emanuel seemed to be composed; but he deceived himself; his present
indifference to the earth was in fact more piercing than that in the
night, which was merely a different enjoyment of life mixed with the
magic drinks of fantasy. With his remorse for his poetic suicide there
seemed almost to mingle joy at its consequences. Hence he said, with a
look of touching certainty: "To-day towards evening he should certainly
go, and no longer torment his two last and best friends with these
delayings of his departure. The genius of the world would forgive him
his last fault, and not let their _to-day's_ separation from him, which
for him was too long, be followed by any second one yonder."
The longer he spoke, so much the more did the old blooming Eden
re-enter into his languid soul.--Now he made a singular, heart-rending
request to his friends. As, notoriously, the sense of hearing remains
longest with the dying, when all other senses have already closed to
earth, Emanuel said to Victor: "So soon as thou seest that a change is
about to come over me, then give thy Julius the flute, and thou! play
me then the _old song of rapture_, that I may die upon the tones, as I
have already often wished, and continue to play on some minutes after
the end."
He began now to reflect how beautifully tones would glide around his
last thoughts, like the song of birds around the setting sun; and in
his extinguished spirit the old sparks flew up again: "Ah, I shall go
hence blissfully,--O my soul could even to-night lay upon this earthly
soil a super-earthly adornment, and take it for Eden: ah then, at
length; when the soil is fairer and the soul is greater...."
He swooned away again, but the pulse still beat faintly.--And here, in
this brooding state, it was that he received from the earth as a last
gift the awfully-sweet dream, into which the body infused the feelings
of its sickliness, and which, after his resuscitation, he related with
a new after-dreaming. It is the last soft triad of our body with our
expiring soul, that the former, even in its dissolution (as we know by
fainting persons and those apparently dead under the water, &c.),
communicates to the latter sweet plays and dreams.--