Brotherly Love.--Friendly Love.--Maternal Love.--Love.
The Dog is here, but not his Lordship,--the noise is small, but not the
joy,--all is prepared for, and yet unexpected,--vice maintains the
battle-field, but virtue the Elysian fields.--In short, it is very
foolish, but very fine.
I think this is the last chapter of the book. I look upon the
Post-Dog--my Pomeranian messenger,[190] whose tail is his official
pike--with real emotion, and it vexes me to think that he, too, has
fallen in Adam, and has eaten a bone under the forbidden tree; for in
Paradise the first canine parents shone like diamonds, and one could
see through them, as Böhme asserts.--For this very reason, as the
Mining Superintendent will soon have written himself out, let it be
forgiven him that, in this chapter of love, he is more ardent and
agreeable than ever, and in fact writes now as if he were possessed.
In the beginning, the heavenly chariot is still drawn by mourning
steeds.... It was very early, on the 21st of October, 1793, when the
court-page ran into Flamin's block-house out of his own, and announced
to that brother, doing penance there, the whole budget,--his
release,--his relation to Clotilda as brother and sister,--his
affiliation into the princely house,--his ascending career, and at the
same time the amnesty of the murderer and messenger, namely, his own. O
how did joy kindle his stagnant veins at Matthieu's acquittal and
intercession, and at his elevation of rank! For Flamin mounted the
higher station as an eminence whence he might send out farther his
benefits and plans; Victor, on the contrary, had rejoiced at his
bankruptcy of rank, because he craved stillness, as Flamin did tumult.
The former was more desirous to amend himself; the latter, to improve
others. Flamin thrust the live crew overboard, and nailed the Bucentaur
of state full of galley-slaves, in order to propel it more swiftly
against the winds. But Victor allowed himself to make only _one_ corpse
by way of lightening the privateer,--namely, his own. He said to
himself, "If I can only always sacredly maintain the courage _to
sacrifice myself, then I need no greater_; for a greater sacrifices
after all stolen goods.--Fate can sacrifice centuries and islands to
benefit millennia and continents;[191] but man, nothing but himself."
Exultingly Flamin hastened with his savior to St. Luna, to embrace
gratefully and apologetically the true sister in the untrue
mistress.--Ah! as the high observatory rose upon his sight, with pain
and bleeding did the covering fall from them like scales, which had
hitherto obscured the innocence of his best friend, Victor! "Ah, how
will he hate me! O that I had trusted him more!" he sighed, and nothing
any longer gladdened him; for the grief of a good man who has been
unjust, even under the notion of the fullest justice, nothing can
console, nothing but many, many sacrifices. He stole, sighing, not to
his new mother, but sank softly on the unoffended heart of the three
true twins. The honest souls all welcomed the Evangelist as a friend in
need; and this gayly-colored spider crawled round with his unclean
spider-warts over all these noble growths of an open love. The spider
heard everything, even the agreement that the Englishmen should take
the injunction to go off to their island literally, and seclude
themselves in the English island of his Lordship, until such time as
Flamin and her Ladyship were ready to embark with them all for their
greater island,--the workshop of freedom, the classic soil of erect
men.
The same morning the Chaplain betook himself to his quarry, and lay at
anchor there, because he knew as yet nothing of the latest news. There
in the open air, all day long, he sat away his agony, and at night he
came home again. He conversed there with no one but his own body,--as
many commune with their souls, so do others with their bodies,--and
looked from time to time, not at Nature, but at his water, in order--as
its want of color, according to physiology, betokens sorrow--to
ascertain from it whether he was pining away very much or not with
grief; although his _protomedicus_ will answer for him, that he shall
not have mistaken _urinam chyli_ or _sanguinis_ for _urinam potûs_. As
the physicians assert that sighs are beneficial, to quicken the pulse
and lighten the lungs,--accordingly a prince can benefit whole
countries at once, by compelling them to sigh,--Eymann, therefore,
prescribed to himself a definite number of sighs, which he had daily to
draw for the benefit of his lungs.
The same morning went my Lady to the wife of the Parson to tell her
that Flamin was an innocent man, but not her son; and Clotilda went
with her to take the hands of the two daughters and say to them, "You
have another brother"; for Victor had still concealed his extraction.
"O God!" said the Parson's wife, now becoming impoverished, and clasped
Flamin's mother and sister to her pining maternal bosom, which, with
hot sighs, yearned for a son,--"where, then, is my child?--Bring me my
true son!--Ah, I had a presentiment that the duel would certainly cost
me a child! He regains all, but I lose all.--O you are a mother, and I
am a mother, help me!" Clotilda looked upon her, weeping with a desire
to give consolation; but the Lady said, "Your son lives, and is happy
too; but more I cannot say!"
And the same morning, this son, our Victor, was _not_ happy. It seemed
to him, at the report of Flamin's discharge and of Matthieu's
officiousness, as if he heard the hissing and the bullet-like whistle
of the swooping hawk, that hitherto in motionless poise, as if with
nailed pinion, had hung high in the blue above his prey.--Think not too
hardly of the Doctor, that he mourned the lost opportunity of freeing
his friend out of the narrow prison, and himself out of the wide one of
life. For he has lost too much and is too lonely; men appear to him as
people in the Polish rock-salt mines, who grope round with a light
bound to their heads, which they call "I," encircled with the
unenjoyable glitter of the salt, clad in white and with red
fillets,[192] as if they were bandages.--The speech of his
acquaintances, like that of the Chinese, is monosyllabic.--He must live
to see the mortifying day when January and the city will set down
against him the lowliness of his rank as a fraud.--Before every eye he
stands in a different light, or shade rather. Matthieu regards him as
coarse; January, as intriguing; the women, as trifling,--just as
Emanuel regarded him as pious, and Clotilda as too ardent; for every
one hears in a full-toned, harmonious man only his own echo. What heart
could henceforth induce him--his own could not--to hold an oar any
longer in the slave-ship of life? O, one could do it, a warm and mighty
one,--his mother's! "Only once plunge out of this world," said his
conscience, "then will thy mother, in the fulness of love, die after
thee, and appear before thee in the next world with so many tears, with
all her hot wounds, and say, 'Son, this sorrow is thy work!'"--He
obeyed, and perceived that, if it is noble to die for a mistress, it is
still nobler to live for a mother.
He therefore determined this very evening--in the evening, so that
night might place its screen before certain weather-wasting ruins of
better times, before certain gliding _night-corpses_ of memory--to go
to St. Luna, to call to his mother, and to refresh her sick and weary
heart with at least _one_ flower of joy, and say to her,--as no oath
any longer bound him,--"Now for the second time thou givest me life!"
How sweet was the thought to him!--A single good purpose makes up and
airs the sharp sick-bed of a shattered life.
But at evening, you good, oppressed souls, in the evening--not of life,
but--of the 21st of October, all will be lighter and fresher to you,
and the ball of your fortune will revolve from the stormy to the sunny
side.
At evening, Victor arrived at St. Luna, and ensconced himself in the
arbor of the parsonage garden, where he had given Clotilda the first
tears of love.--The parsonage, the hall, the observatory, the two
gardens, lay around him like dilapidated knightly castles, from which
all joys and inmates have long since departed!--All so autumnally
still, so stationary around him,--the bees sat mute on the sill of the
hive beside the executed drones,--even the moon and a little cloud
stood fast beside each other,--the wax mummy stood with rigid face
turned round toward the still chamber!--At last the Parson's wife came
through the garden, on her way to the hall. He knew how exceedingly she
must needs love him again, now that his fidelity to the jealous Flamin
had come to light. O, she looked so weary and sickly, so red with
weeping, and exhausted with bleeding, and prematurely old! It grieved
him, that he must say first an indifferent word, in order to call her
into the arbor. When she entered, he raised himself up, and bowed low,
and laid himself, as if he would expire, on the dear bosom, within
which was a world full of sighs and a heart full of love, and said: "O
mother, I am thy son!--accept me; thy son has nothing, loves nothing
more on the whole wide earth, nothing more but thee.--O dear mother, I
have lost much before finding thee.--Why dost thou look on me thus?--If
thou despisest me, then give me thy blessing, and let me flee.... Oh!
and besides it was only for thy sake that I chose to live any
longer."--She looked upon him, bending backward, with a moist eye, full
of inexpressible tenderness and sorrow, and said: "Is it true, then? O
God! if you were my son!--Ah, good child!--I have long loved thee as a
mother.--But deceive me not, my heart is so sore!"--The son gave his
oath.... and here let the curtain slowly sink on the maternal embrace,
and when it has wholly covered son and mother, then let a good child
look back into his own soul, and say, here dwells everything that thou
canst not describe!
And now, at evening, the Chaplain was stealing home from the field and
through the garden, and cried out, as he came to meet his new son: "Ah!
Herr Hofmedicus, I am falling away abominably. I look really and
manifestly like an _Ecce Homo_ and feverish patient. I am doomed.--I am
destined to make a _soiffre-douleur_, a _persona miserabilis_, a
Patripassian."[193]--When Victor had reported to him, "It is all over,
the Regency-Councillor is liberated and innocent," Eymann looked
steadfastly up at the observatory, and said, "Verily there sits the
Councillor up there, peeping over," and was on the point of going up to
him; but Victor gently held him back, and said tenderly, "I am your
son," and disclosed to him all.--"What?--you?--thou?--the son of such
an eminent Lord, my son?--I to have begotten my Herr Godfather?--That
is unheard of, one brother to be another's godson.--I have two
Sebastians in my house at once."--He got sight of the Parsoness, and
began a quarrel,--which was always with him a sign of joy.--"So, wife!
thou hast known this all day, and let me sit out there in the quarry,
on the anxious seat, in the midst of grief, tolling away till night at
the poor-sinners'-bell? Couldst thou not have let the bellows-blower
come out to notify me? That was very ill done,--the wife sits at home
and drinks bitters, into which are thrown whole casks of sugar and
dishes of comfits,--and the man keeps himself in stone-quarries, and
swills down steadily his bitter extracts out of an emetic-cup."--She
never answered a word.
Now, for the first time, Victor learned from his mother that it was
only for his friend (Matthieu), and for his country, Flamin had meant
to die; that he repented his unjust jealousy, and bewailed the
friendship he had trifled away; and that she had sent for him for the
very reason that she might conduct him to the arms of his true mother,
and before the face of an afflicted sister. It had been this morning a
human weakness, that the frozen limb of friendship, his heart, had been
a little more cold and unfeeling towards Flamin, when he heard of his
deliverance from imprisonment,--but it was now, at evening, the part of
human kindness, that Flamin's great resolve to die restored, like a
chilblain ointment, to his stiff heart warmth and motion. His inner
being stirred itself mightily, welled up, overflowed his crushed
resentment, and the image of the youthful friend rose up and said:
"Victor, give thy hand again to thy school-friend,--O, he has suffered
so much, and acted so nobly!" Tears shot from his quivering eyes, as he
resolved to ascend the observatory, and say to his old favorite, "Let
it be forgotten,--come, we will go together to thy sister." He went
alone up to the tower,--intending to present him to the lady afterward.
The Parson's wife flew off some minutes before Victor started, to
inform and bring his two sisters, and send for the blind Julius to be
conducted from the city, that no link might be missing in the golden
necklace of love.
What a Jacob's ladder, on which every minute is a higher round, is set
up this night on the swinging earth, whereon good beings climb up one
after another!--
Down on the lowest step of the throne of reconciliation was Victor's
heart laboring mightily in the hot blood through which it struggled.
Flamin saw him slowly coming up, but he came not to meet him; because
he was uncertain whether Victor came angry or forgiving. When the
latter at last reached the top, Flamin, ashamed, supported his averted
face in the branches; for he could not look his so sorely abused
darling in the eye, till he knew that he had forgiven him. They
maintained an awful silence beside each other, under the rippling
linden-top,--they could not wholly guess each other's feelings, and
that made the silence more gloomy, and the reconciliation doubtful. At
last, Flamin, breathing intensely, and with his face buried in the
foliage, reached out to him a trembling hand. When Victor saw the
trembling of this dumb hand imploring reconciliation, boiling tears
dropped through his heart and dissolved it asunder, and only from
sadness and loving forbearance he delayed taking the lowly hand; but at
this moment Flamin turned round (under the influence of a false
suspicion), proud, blushing, full of tears and full of love, and said:
"I beg thy forgiveness with all my heart for having been a devil to
thee, an angel; but then if thou dost not grant it to me, I hurl myself
down, that only the devil may get me!"--Singular! this extortion of
forgiveness contracted a little Victor's open soul; but still he
embraced the friendly wildling, and said with the mild voice of
tranquil love: "From the bottom of my soul have I to-day forgiven thee;
but loved thee I ever and always have, and in a few weeks would have
died for thee, to save thy life."--Now their souls approached each
other without reserve, and disclosed their lives,----and when both had
told all, and Victor had unfolded to him, that he had been substituted
in his place, and was the son of the bereaved mother, then would Flamin
have died for remorse, and only pressed his face more closely for shame
into Victor's bosom,--and their newly wedded souls celebrated their
silver wedding on the nuptial altar of the watchtower, under the bridal
torch of the moon; and their bliss was equalled by nothing but their
friendship.
They wandered in the tender intoxication slowly into Le Baut's garden,
and the stream of rapture grew deeper and deeper; but suddenly ice-cold
waves, as from the river Styx, terrified the softly warmed Victor, when
he came to the mournful bower, where, exactly a year ago to-day, on the
21st of October,--to-day then is Clotilda's birth-day,--he had torn her
image out of his distracted heart, and where he now arrived again,
perhaps again to tear it out from the old scars. For the lowering of
his rank had made him a little--prouder, and his love for Clotilda more
shy. To tell the truth, he could not himself fully believe that his
inferior extraction had been unknown to her; he rather inferred the
opposite, from the interest which his Lordship had let her take in his
letters, and all secrets,--from her struggle in the beginning against
her germinating love, and from the slight haughtiness towards him on
the first day,--from her praise of misalliances,--from her favoring of
Giulia's love for Julius, whom she knew to be his Lordship's son,--from
her ready assent to the betrothal, which certainly otherwise her
father, after the recognition, would no longer have granted,--and from
other signs which one will more easily gather up for himself on the
second reading of this work. As was said, this hope, that she had all
along known who he was, refuted certain objections of his delicacy and
of his spirit of renunciation, and bloomed out still higher to-day,
among so many joys and pleasant incidents.--Ah! if he had been devoid
of all hope, then he would certainly, in the midst of the circle of so
many blessed ones, have been obliged to fall as the last victim!--But
that something in man, which always prefigures to him a great loss as
so probable, and a great gain as so improbable, united with melancholy
remembrances, now tormented his soul.
He therefore begged Flamin to leave him alone for a while in the bower,
and to hasten alone (as the Parson's wife was already in the garden) to
the friendly arms of the newly-found sister and mother, and added that
he would presently follow him. When Flamin was gone, Victor began to
tremble more and more at the thought of the agitation of Clotilda,
which would perhaps get the mastery of her at the intelligence of his
pedigree; and it oppressed him sorely when he thought that for all in
the garden sorrow had been removed from the black-hung mourning-chamber
of earth, only for him haply not.--
But at that moment came his mother, beaming with the reflection of new
raptures, and before questioning him first wiped his eyes. Her new
raptures proceeded from this, that Clotilda, when she had related his
descent, had fallen on her neck and begged her forgiveness for so long
a concealment of the so long continued robbery of a child,--and that
she had reminded the mother of a promise which had been given during
the walk after the betrothal and was now redeemed. Much had escaped the
mother,--and, I fear, the reader,--and Clotilda only glided hastily and
blushingly over the matter; but had she not there said to her, "We
change not our _relation_"? namely, that of a sister by marriage.--The
Parson's wife concluded her report with the entreaty of her Ladyship,
that she would bring her new son to her as speedily as possible. Victor
could say nothing, for tearful rapture, except, "Have not then my good
Agatha and the blind one yet arrived?"--And both stood--behind him; and
he concealed the overmeasure of his bliss under the caressings of the
sister and the friend; his capacious cup of sorrow was truly poured
full of tears of joy.
As, in the accompanying circle of three loving souls, he entered upon
the fair road to the dear united ones, they all came to meet him with
radiant features,--with swimming glances,--with remembrances from which
the sting had been extracted, or rather which had been turned into
joys; for from the crushed flowers of gladness on the road of life a
sweet perfume is wafted over to the present hour, as marching armies
often send out from heaths the fragrance of trampled plants. Her
Ladyship was conducted by her two children, and said, with an obliging
smile: "I present to you here my beloved children; continue towards
them the friendship which you have hitherto shown them."--Her son
Flamin, heedless of decorum, flew to him and flung himself upon his
neck. Clotilda bowed lower than she would have done before a Prince,
and in her eye swam the question of melancholy love, "Art thou still
unhappy? Have I still thy heart? Why is thy eye moistened? why is thy
voice broken?"--Victor replied with quite as much tenderness as
dignity, as he turned to the Lady, "You could not on a fairer day find
again your son than on the birthday of your daughter." ...
Of _that_, in the previous whirlwinds, no one had thought. What a chaos
of gladness! What a hearty, loving confusion of tongues on the part of
congratulating improvisators! What affecting eye-thanks from Clotilda
for such an obliging remembrance!
They went in ecstasy through the cool garden to the hall. O, when
sisterly love, filial love, maternal love, love of lovers, and
friendship burn side by side on the altars, then does it make a good
man feel glad that the human heart is so noble, and preserves the
material for so many flames, and that we feel love and warmth only when
we dispense them out of ourselves, just as our blood never appears to
us warm, until it flows, outside of our veins, in the open air.--O
love! how happy are we that thou, when contemplated by a second soul,
regeneratest and redoublest thyself,--that warm hearts attract and
create warm ones, as suns do planets, the greater the lesser, and God,
all,--and that even the dark planet is only a lesser, veiled,
monœcian[194] sun!... All these souls stood today high on their Alp,
and saw--as on a natural one--the _rainbow_ of human fortune hanging as
a great completed _magic circle_ between the earth and the sun.--In the
hall the Lady begged her daughter to go alone into the dark Jew's-harp
chamber; she wanted to give her her birthday present. Clotilda's eye
bade her friend, as she left him, with a second expression of thanks
for his soul, a tender farewell.
After her departure, the Lady gave him a sign to stay with her behind
the rest,--then he gladly fell on his knee before Clotilda's mother,
who had not yet been asked her consent to his love, with the words, "If
you do not guess my prayer, I have not the courage to begin it." She
raised him up and said, "Prayers that are made so silently are quite as
silently fulfilled; but rather come now and see what present I make to
my daughter."--He must first, however, for a long time, moisten and
kiss the hand which is about to offer him the lime-blossom honey of a
whole life.
The two proceeded now, in this evening sent over out of the millennial
kingdom, to the dark chamber of the daughter. Why did tears flow from
Clotilda's eyes for rapture, even before her mother spoke?--Because she
could already guess everything. The mother conducted the lover to his
beloved, and said to the bride: "Take here thy birthday present. Few
mothers are rich enough to give such a one; but then few daughters good
enough to receive such a one."--The bridal pair were brought to their
knees before her by the weight of overwhelming bliss and great, dumb
gratitude, and took respectively the two beneficent hands of the
mother; but she gently drew them out of theirs, and laid those of the
loving ones in each other, and slipped away with the whisper, "I will
bring our guests hither!"----
--O ye two good souls, kneeling beside each, blest at last! how unhappy
must a man be who, without a tear of joy, or how happy one who, without
a tear of longing, can see you now fall speechless and weeping into
each other's arms,--after so many painful partings, at last linked
together,--after so many exhaustive bleedings, at last healed,--after
thousands and thousands of sighs, yet at last blest,--and inexpressibly
blest by innocence of heart and peace of soul and God!--No, I cannot
to-day take my wet eyes away from you,--I cannot to-day behold and
sketch the other good souls,--but I lay my eyes, with the _two_ tears
which belong to the happy and the unhappy man, softly and steadfastly
on my two still lovers in the dusky chamber, where once the breath of
the harmonica tones wafted their two souls together like gold- and
silver-leaves.--O, as my book now ends, and my beloved vanish from
me,--withdraw thyself, dim Holy of Holies, with thy two angels,--send
back a long echo, when thou fliest upward with thy melodious souls, as
swans in the night glide with flute-tones through the heavens.----But,
alas! does not the Holy of Holies already stand far away and high above
me, and hang as a little silver cloud on the horizon of dream?--O these
good souls, this good Victor, this good Emanuel, this good Clotilda,
all these vernal dreams have gone up, and my heart looks up sorrowfully
and calls after them without hope, "Dreams of spring, when will ye
return?"
O why should I do it, were it not that the friends whom we firmly grasp
by the hand are also dreams that soar upward? But the convulsive,
prostrate, moaning heart on the gravestone does not call after these,
"Dreams of spring-time, when will ye return?"----