Gunther continued, "I am only a physician, who has held many a hand hot
with fever or stiff in death in his own. The healing art might serve as
an illustration. We help all who need our help, and do not stop to ask
who they are, whence they come, or whether when restored to health they
persist in their evil courses. Our actions are incomplete, fragmentary;
thought alone is complete and all-embracing. Our deeds and ourselves are
but fragments--the whole is God."
"I think I grasp your meaning [replied the Queen]. But our life, as you
say, is indeed a mere fraction of life as a whole; and how is each one
to bear up under the portion of suffering that falls to his individual
lot? Can one--I mean it in its best sense--always be outside of
one's self?"
"I am well aware, your Majesty, that passions and emotions cannot be
regulated by ideas; for they grow in a different soil, or, to express
myself correctly, move in entirely different spheres. It is but a few
days since I closed the eyes of my old friend Eberhard. Even he never
fully succeeded in subordinating his temperament to his philosophy; but
in his dying hour he rose beyond the terrible grief that broke his
heart--grief for his child. He summoned the thoughts of better hours to
his aid,--hours when his perception of the truth had been undimmed by
sorrow or passion,--and he died a noble, peaceful death. Your Majesty
must still live and labor, elevating yourself and others, at one and the
same time. Permit me to remind you of the moment when, seated under the
weeping ash, your heart was filled with pity for the poor child that
from the time it enters into the world is doubly helpless. Do you still
remember how you refused to rob it of its mother? I appeal to the pure
and genuine impulse of that moment. You were noble and forgiving then,
because you had not yet suffered. You cast no stone at the fallen; you
loved, and therefore you forgave."
"O God!" cried the Queen, "and what has happened to me? The woman on
whose bosom my child rested is the most abandoned of creatures. I loved
her just as if she belonged to another world--a world of innocence. And
now I am satisfied that she was the go-between, and that her naïveté was
a mere mask concealing an unparalleled hypocrite. I imagined that truth
and purity still dwelt in the simple rustic world--but everything is
perverted and corrupt. The world of simplicity is base; aye, far worse
than that of corruption!"
"I am not arguing about individuals. I think you mistaken in regard to
Walpurga; but admitting that you are right, of this at least we can be
sure: morality does not depend upon so-called education or ignorance,
belief or unbelief. The heart and mind which have regained purity and
steadfastness alone possess true knowledge. Extend your view beyond
details and take in the whole--that alone can comfort and
reconcile you."
"I see where you are, but I cannot get up there. I can't always be
looking through your telescope that shows naught but blue sky. I am too
weak. I know what you mean; you say in effect, 'Rise above these few
people, above this span of space known as a kingdom: compared with the
universe, they are but as so many blades of grass or a mere clod
of earth.'"