"Yes, but this space and these people constitute my world. Is purity
merely imaginary? If it be not about us, where can it be found?"
"Within ourselves," replied Gunther. "If it dwell within us, it is
everywhere; if not, it is nowhere. He who asks for more has not yet
passed the threshold. His heart is not yet what it should be. True love
for the things of this earth, and for God, the final cause of all, does
not ask for love in return. We love the divine spark that dwells in
creatures themselves unconscious of it: creatures who are wretched,
debased, and as the church has it, unredeemed. My Master taught me that
the purest joys arise from this love of God or of eternally pure nature.
I made this truth my own, and you can and ought to do likewise. This
park is yours; but the birds that dwell in it, the air, the light, its
beauty, are not yours alone, but are shared with you by all. So long as
the world is ours, in the vulgar sense of the word, we may love it; but
when we have made it our own, in a purer and better sense, no one can
take it from us. The great thing is to be strong and to know that hatred
is death, that love alone is life, and that the amount of love that we
possess is the measure of the life and the divinity that dwells
within us."
Gunther rose and was about to withdraw. He feared lest excessive thought
might over-agitate the Queen, who, however, motioned him to remain. He
sat down again.
"You cannot imagine--" said the Queen after a long pause, "--but that is
one of the cant phrases that we have learned by heart. I mean just the
reverse of what I have said. You can imagine the change that your words
have effected in me."
"I can conceive it."
"Let me ask a few more questions. I believe--nay, I am sure--that on the
height you occupy, and toward which you would fain lead me, there dwells
eternal peace. But it seems so cold and lonely up there. I am oppressed
with a sense of fear, just as if I were in a balloon ascending into a
rarer atmosphere, while more and more ballast was ever being thrown out.
I don't know how to make my meaning clear to you. I don't understand how
to keep up affectionate relations with those about me, and yet regard
them from a distance, as it were,--looking upon their deeds as the mere
action and reaction of natural forces. It seems to me as if, at that
height, every sound and every image must vanish into thin air."
"Certainly, your Majesty. There is a realm of thought in which hearing
and sight do not exist, where there is pure thought and nothing more."
"But are not the thoughts that there abound projected from the realm of
death into that of life, and is that any better than monastic
self-mortification?"
"It is just the contrary. They praise death, or at all events extol it,
because after it life is to begin. I am not one of those who deny a
future life. I only say, in the words of my Master, 'Our knowledge is of
life and not of death,' and where my knowledge ceases my thoughts must
cease. Our labors, our love, are all of this life. And because God is in
this world and in all that exist in it, and only in those things, have
we to liberate the divine essence wherever it exists. The law of love
should rule. What the law of nature is in regard to matter, the moral
law is to man."
"I cannot reconcile myself to your dividing the divine power into
millions of parts. When a stone is crushed, every fragment still remains
a stone; but when a flower is torn to pieces, the parts are no
longer flowers."
"Let us take your simile as an illustration, although in truth no
example is adequate. The world, the firmament, the creatures that live
on the face of the earth, are not divided--they are one; thought regards
them as a whole. Take for instance the flower. The idea of divinity
which it suggests to us, and the fragrance which ascends from it, are
yet part and parcel of the flower; attributes without which it is
impossible for us to conceive of its existence. The works of all poets,
all thinkers, all heroes, may be likened to streams of fragrance wafted
through time and space. It is in the flower that they live forever.
Although the eternal spirit dwells in the cell of every tree or flower
and in every human heart, it is undivided and in its unity fills the
world. He whose thoughts dwell in the infinite regards the world as the
mighty corolla from which the thought of God exhales."
Translation of S.A. Stern.