In my opinion the state favors duelling in order to set limits to the increase of the nobility, as Titus for that very reason made the Jews challenge each other. As in chanceries they still continue to make nobles, but no burghers,—as, besides, a burgher must always be used and demolished for the purpose, before the Imperial Chancery can set up a nobleman on his building-ground,—as standing armies and coronations increase simultaneously, and consequently the manufacture of nobles too; the state would accordingly possess too many, certainly, rather than too few noblemen (as is not the case, however), were not a mutual shooting or stabbing of each other allowed them. In reference to the petty princes who are made in the chancery-bakehouse, nothing more were to be wished than that at the same time subjects also—say one or two herds, with every prince—should fall off from the potter's-wheel; just as, in fact, I know no reason, either, why the Imperial Chancery will make poets only, when it might certainly quite as well scrape off from its saltpetre wall historians, publicists, biographers, reviewers.—Let it not be objected to me, that at court they seldom shoot each other; here Nature herself has in another way set beneficial bounds to the increase of courtiers. Somewhat as with marmots, of whose depopulation Bechstein finds a wise design in the fact, that, though they generally assert their own with a malicious rabidity, nevertheless they do not reckon their brood as their own, but willingly let it go. Even Dr. Fenk may possibly be nearer right, who takes their part and says, he grants they are of no use to the weightier members of the state, the teaching class, the peasantry, &c., but of much, however, to the lesser, unprofitable members, the mass-attendants of the stomach and of luxury, the mistresses, the lackey-department, &c., and that an impartial person must compare them with the stinging nettles, on which, while they are of little use to men and large animals, most of the insects get their living.
End of this Apologetic Extra-Leaf.
Flamin's soul worked itself off all day in images of revenge. In such a boiling of the blood, moral skin-moles became to him bone-black,[167] the typographical mistakes of the state appeared to him as grammatical blunders, the peccata splendida of the regency-college as black vices. To-day, too, he saw the Prince always before his eyes, whom in the clubs of the twins and still more in relation to Clotilda he mortally hated. He despised the load of life, and in this heat, wherein all materials of his inner being were melted into one flood, the inner lava sought an outbreak in some foolhardy venture. His to-day's exasperation was, after all, a daughter of virtue; but the daughter grew over the mother's head. The three twins, who, although not with the tongue, yet with the head, were as wild as he, kindled absolutely the whole vaporous atmosphere of his full soul.
At length, when night came, the two seconds and Flamin and Matthieu disguised as the third Englishman rode out to the shooting-ground. Flamin contended furiously with his prancing, smoking steed. By and by a gray nag brought along in curvets the Chamberlain. Mutely they measure off the murdering and shooting distance, and exchange pistols. Flamin, as insulted party, first lets fly like a storm against the other; and, on his snorting steed, and in the trembling of rage, he shoots his ball away over his adversary's—life. The Chamberlain fired intentionally and openly far aside from his antagonist, because the fall of the (supposed) Matthieu would have killed at the same time his whole prosperity at court. Matthieu, with all his slyness, too precipitate and too full of energy, foaming already amidst the very preparations for the fight, and still more exasperated at the frustration of both his alternatives, and too proud to let himself be shamed before the Englishmen by receiving his life as a present under another's name and from so contemptible an adversary, thrust down his own mask and Flamin's too, and rode coldly up to the Chamberlain and said, by way of humiliating him with the disclosure of his ignoble opponent, "You have been under a mistake about rank,—but now let us exchange shots." ... Le Baut stuttered, confused and offended; but Matthieu backed his horse—stopped—screamed—shot with petrified arm, and hit, and snuffed out the bald life of poor Le Baut.... Quick as lightning he said to all, "To Count O.'s!" and—with the conviction of an early and easy forgiveness on the part of the princely couple and of the widow—trotted off over the limits towards Kussewitz.
Flamin became an iceberg,—then a volcano,—then a wild-fire,—then he grasped the hands of the Britons, and said: "I, only I, have killed this man. My friend would have had no quarrel with him; but, as he has sinned for me, it is my duty to suffer for him.—I will die: I shall give myself up to the judges as the murderer, that I may be executed,—and you must back my asseveration."—But he disclosed to them now a much higher motive for his bold lie; "If I die," said he, more and more glowingly, "they will have to let me say at the place of execution what I will. Then will I throw flames among the people, which shall turn the throne to ashes. I will say, 'Lo! here beside the sword of justice I am as firm and cheerful as you; and yet I have sent only one good-for-nothing fellow out of the world. You could catch and confine bloodsuckers, wolves, and serpents, and a lamb-vulture at once;—you could reap a life full of freedom, or a death full of fame. Are then the thousand staring eyes around me all blind with the cataract, the arms all palsied, that none will see and hurl away the long bloodsucker that crawls over you all, and whose tail is cut off, so that the court and the boards in turn suck from it behind? Lo! I too was once part and parcel of all that, and saw how they flay you,—and how the messieurs of the court go about in your skins. Take one look into the city; are yours the palaces or the dog-kennels? The long pleasure-gardens in which they walk, or the stony fields in which you must work yourselves—to death? You toil, indeed; but you have nothing, you are nothing, you become nothing,—on the contrary the lazy, dead Chamberlain there beside me'" ... No one smiled; but he came to himself. The three twins, to whom the body and time and the throne were a fire-proof wall, or a stove-screen against their self-devouring blaze of freedom, vowed to him tied tongues, steadfast hearts, and active hands; yet were they silently resolved, after the flashing speech, to rescue him with their blood, and to reveal his innocence. One consequence of this dithyrambic of freedom was, that Cato the Elder, the day after, blew up in the storm the powder-house at Maienthal, which was the only powder-magazine in the country (magazines of corn they had not so many), as he rode towards Kussewitz to join Matthieu.
Now they carried the lie into the village, that Flamin had availed himself of Matthieu's disguise, and in a similar one had attacked the Chamberlain, whom, for want of ancestors, he could not shoot in duel, and blown out with a pistol his lamp of life. The Regency-Councillor was, upon a slight, specious flight, arrested, and placed as a statue of a god alone in that temple, which, like the old temples, was without windows or furniture, and which the gods inhabiting them furnish, as Diogenes did his tub, with inscriptions, and which the common man calls merely a prison.—I will, however, first and foremost, call this and the following words an
The chapel or vestry of such a temple is further called a dog's hole or dungeon. The priests and fellows of this pagoda are the gaolers and constables. In fact, the times are no more when the great folk were indifferent to truths; now they rather seek out a man who has uttered weighty ones, and hunt after him, and (with more justice than the Tyrians did their god Hercules) make him fast in the aforesaid temples with chains and iron postillons d'amour, that he may there on this insulating-stool (Isolatorio) the better concentrate and accumulate his electric fire and light. When once such a Mercury is so fixed; and has for a sufficient length of time had, in common with the fixed stars, beside light, immobility also, then they can finally, if more has been made out of him by this process, get him even up to the tripod,—as they call the gallows,—for a hanging seal of truth, where he can shrink up into a regular, dried, natural specimen, because he may not otherwise be stuck as a useful example into the herbarium vivum of the philosophic martyrology. Such a hanging is a more dignified and profitable imitation of the crucifixion of Christ, than I have seen in ever so many Catholic Churches on Good Friday, and in fact not a whit less forcible than that which Michael Angelo, according to the tradition, arranged, who crucified re verâ the man who sat, or rather hung, to him for the Crucified. Hence in Catholic countries, beside the bloodless masses, there are sundry bloody ones; for such a quasi Christ, who is raised by a little hemp, not into the third heaven, but still into the tremulous heaven[168] (cœlum trepidationis), must—and for that reason they slay him—render to his doctrines by his death the service which the higher death of the Cross once rendered. And verily the dead still preach;—to die for the truth is a death not for one's country, but for the world;—the truth, like the Medicean Venus, is handed over in thirty fragments to posterity; but posterity will fit them together again to form a goddess,—and thy temple, eternal Truth, which now stands half under the earth, undermined by the burials of thy martyrs, will at last rear itself above the earth, and stand, made of iron, with every pillar in a precious grave!
End.
Cato rode after Matthieu, who had fled to Kussewitz, and laid before him, with French eloquence, Flamin's plan to die, and their own to save him. Mat approved all, but he believed nothing of it; he still staid over the limits. Yet he begged for himself the favor, not to take it ill of him, if he should requite Flamin's noble sacrifice with something which would be against their plan, but beyond their hopes. Would he perhaps mention to the Prince that his son lay in prison?
In three minutes the readers and I will go into the apothecary's shop to our hero, when we have waited only to be first informed that, as the riderless, bloody nag of the Chamberlain and the three twins with the lying Job's tidings of the murder came up to the window of the parsonage, the Court Chaplain was lathered and half shaved. He had therefore to sit still, and only say slowly under the razor: "O sorrow above all sorrows!—pray shave quicker, dear Mr. Surgeon,—wife, howl for me!" He waved his hand loosely in his suppressed agony, in order not to shake his arm and chin: "For God's sake, can't you scrape more speedily?—You have a poor Job under the razor,—it is my last beard,—they will march me and my household off to prison.—Thou unnatural child, thy father may be decapitated for thy sake, you Cain, you!" He ran to every window: "God have mercy on us! the whole parish has by this time got wind of it.—Dost thou see, wife, what a Satan we have together brought up and borne: it is thy fault.—What is the fellow listening there for? Shear off to your customers, Mr. Shearer, and don't go to blackening your spiritual shepherd anywhere, nor spread the news about."—At this moment came the gentle Clotilda, downcast and with her handkerchief in her hand, because she guessed what the heart of a disconsolate mother needed; namely, two loving arms as a band around the shattered breast, and a thousand balsam-drops of another's tears upon the splintered and swelling heart. She went up to the mother with open arms, and enfolded her therein with speechless weeping. The whimsical Parson fell at her feet and cried: "Mercy, mercy! none of us knew a word about it. I only heard of the murder just now while in the hands of the barber. I lament only for your sainted father and his relicts.—Who could have said ten years ago, good lady, that I should have raised a scamp that would shoot down my master and patron? I am a ruined man, and my wife too. I can no longer now for shame be Senior Consistorii.—I can send off no christening paper and present to his Highness, even though my wife should be taken in labor on the spot.—And if they behead my son, it will bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave."—When Clotilda, without smiling, assured him, on her sacred word, that there was an infallible way of rescue,—by which she meant Flamin's princely extraction,—then the Chaplain looked on her with sparkling eyes and dumfounded mien, and kept calling her half aloud at intervals, "Angel of heaven!—Angel of God!—Archangel!"—But the two female friends retired eagerly into a cabinet; and here Clotilda poured the first vulnerary water into the widely rent soul of the mother, by asseverating and pledging the intervention of a redeeming mystery, and concerting with her on that account the journey to London.—This withdrawal was partly also wrung from her by her false position with the Chamberlain's lady, whose last windlass-maker, together with all the levers of her sunken fortune, had now been buried with her husband; and who, as she threw all the blame upon Clotilda's conduct, sought still more to afflict this mourning spirit by an intentional exaggeration of her own mourning. As Lady Le Baut, for the rest, liked nothing so much as prayer-books and freethinkers, she now compensated for the latter with the former.
Some of my readers will already have darted on before me, and have peered into Victor's balcony to find his grief hidden within four walls;—frightfully stands the solitude before him, unfolding to him a great black picture, with two fresh graves. In one great grave lies lost friendship; in the other, lost hope. Ah! he wishes the third, in which he might also lose himself. He had the sublime mood of Hamlet. The darkened Julius appeared to him like a galvanically quivering dead man. He wholly avoided the court; for his self-regard was far too considerate and proud to keep up a fleeting pomp with a stolen nobility, and the surreptitious privileges of a lord's son. Moreover, a slight chilblain was raised on his heart by the thought that his Lordship, according to the degenerate way of all statesmen and state-machinists, of managing men only as bodies, not as spirits; only as caryatides, not as tenants of the state-edifice; in short, merely as dancing-girls of Golconda,[169] who have their limbs yoked and tied together as a beast of burden to a single rider,—that his Lordship, I say, this otherwise exalted soul, had misused even his Victor too much as the tool of his virtue. But he forgave the man for it, whom, after all, he had nothing to reproach with, except that he had only the kindnesses of a father, without his rights.
As Victor no longer paid court to any one, naturally the Apothecary cared no more to pay it to him. The former smiled at that, and thought: "So should every good courtier act, and, like a clever ferryman, always leave that side of his boat which is sinking, and step over to the other." Zeusel stepped over to the favored Watering-place-doctor, Culpepper, to whose judgment they ascribed January's recovery, which was the effect of summer; and he prostrated himself to lick with his little snaky tongue the feet whose heels he had formerly stung with his poisonous bite. But churls never forgive; Culpepper despised the "ninety-nine per cent fellow,"[170] and the "ninety-nine per cent fellow" again despised my court-physician, although, from fear,—as the Prince from love of ease,—he ventured not either to browbeat him or to turn him out of his house.
Poor Victor! the unhappy needs activity, as the happy needs repose; and yet thou wast compelled to look, with bound limbs, into the future, as into an approaching, distending storm.—Thou couldst neither suppress nor guide nor hasten it, and hadst not even the comfort of forging weapons for sorrow, and, like Samson, to express and—extinguish the convulsion of agony by shakings down of the pillars!—He could not even do anything for the imprisoned darling, whom he had plunged into a still greater anguish; for Flamin's sufferings brought back again into his bosom friendship for him, though disguised in the domino of philanthropy. He must wait to see; but he could not guess whether his Lordship was coming or was living,—neither of which suppositions, in consequence of his silence and of the non-appearance of the fifth princely son, had much in its favor.—At last he came to be afraid of sleep, especially the afternoon nap; for slumber lays, to be sure, its summer night over our present as over a future. It draws two eyelids like the first bandage over the wounds of man, and with a little dream covers over a battle-field; but when it departs again with its mantle, then do the hungry pangs pounce so much the more fiercely upon the naked man, amidst stings he starts up out of the more tranquil dream, and reason must begin over again the suspended cure, the forgotten consolation.—And yet—thou good Destiny!—thou didst still show our Victor a streak of evening-redness in his broad night-heaven; it was the hope of perhaps receiving from Clotilda, whom his heart no longer dared call his own, a letter from London....
I was going to close this chapter, first with the intelligence that the chapters come in, in ever-widening comprehensiveness of periods and lessenings of size,—which betokens the end of the story,—and afterward with the request that readers will not take it ill, if the personages therein play and speculate more and more romantically; misfortune makes romantic, not the biographer.
But I by no means conclude,—even on account of the last request,—but rather prefer to freshen a little in the mind of the reader the image of the old, joyous Victor, of whom he will hardly any longer be able to conceive. It is an uncommonly fortunate incident that the dog, on the third Dog-Post-Day, handed in one or two facts, which I at the time entirely omitted. For that reason I can now unexpectedly state them. It must certainly give me and the reader the greatest pleasure, when my picture—which was even at that time quite finished—is hung up here on this page.
The hiatus of the third chapter, wherein I paint Victor's arrival at the parsonage from Göttingen, reads, when filled out, thus:—
"The Chaplain had the peculiarity of many people, that, in the midst of the choir of joys and visits, he thought on his most trifling employments; e. g., on the wedding day, of his mole-traps. To-day, in the servants' room,—while his Lordship was communicating his secret instruction to the Court-Physician,—he was cutting in halves seed-potatoes. There were few to whom he could intrust the cutting up of this fruit, because he knew how seldom a man possesses sufficient stereometry of the eye to split a potato into two equal conic sections or hemispheres. He would sooner have passed the seed-time than have divided a germinal globe into unequal sections; and he said, 'All I want is order.'—It may throw a shade over my hero, if it comes out,—and certainly it must through the press,—and especially if it reaches the ears of Nuremberg patricians and people in offices and membra of the supreme court, that Victor in the afternoon marched in state behind the Chaplain and Appel over the vegetable garden, and there executed what they call in some provinces planting potatoes. They gave him the credit, that he incorporated the subterranean bread-fruit in the ground at quite as symmetrical distances as the chaplain; in fact, both looked sharply after the rectitude of the potato-row, and their eyes were the parallel rulers of the beds. The Chaplain had already beforehand looked after and helped on the plough behind a dioptric rule or alidade, in order that the field about which I and the judicial membra are now standing might be cut up into equal prisms or beds. When at evening both came home with great gravity and little waistcoats, the whole house loved him so that they could have eaten him; and the Parson's wife asked him what he would have done in his waistcoat, if the Chamberlain's lady had met him; would he have made a bow or an apology, or done nothing?
"'O thou dear Germany!' (he cried and smote his hands together,) 'shall not then the whole country make a joke, except as the court decrees?' (Here Victor looked at the old, deaf coachman Zeusel; for every humorous effusion he regularly addressed to him who least understood it. I will here, however, have it addressed to the patricians and membra.) 'Is there, then, my dear man, nothing in the country but gallowses and carpenters and officers of justice, so that, I mean, the former cannot touch an axe, unless the latter have struck the first blow with it? Will you, then, get all follies, like fashions, from above downward, as a wind always roars in the upper regions of the atmosphere before it whistles down below at our windows?—And where, then, is there an imperial recess or a vicariate conclusion which forbids a German of the empire to play the fool? I hope, Zeusel, a time is yet to come when you and I and every one will have sense enough to have his own, and his own private folly, begotten of his flesh and blood, as Autodidact in all folly and wisdom.—O men, poor creatures! catch, I pray, at the wing and tail feathers of joy amidst the forced marches of your days! O ye poor creatures! will no good friend, then, scribble an imperial folio, and prove to you that, like the Devil in the Apocalypse, you have but a short time? Ah! enjoyment promises so little,—hope performs so little,—the mowing and planting days of joy stand in the Berlin Almanac so few in number,—if, now, you were absolutely so stupid as to put away and lay up whole hours and olympiads full of pleasure, like preserves in your cellar, in order, the Devil knows when, to come upon them as fifty or sixty entire pickled and salted years—I say, if you did not press out on the cluster of every hour the berry of each moment at least with some lemon-squeezers—what would come of it at last?... nothing but the moral to my first and last fable, which I once made in the presence of a Hanoverian.' ...
"I wish the reader wanted it; for it runs thus: 'The Stupid Marmot is the title. The said marmot was once led by the full crop of a pigeon, the contents of which he was eating, to the prize question, whether it would not be better, if, instead of single grains of corn, he should rather bring in pigeons with whole corn magazines in their throats. He did so. On a long summer day, he arrested half a flock of pigeons with full crops. He slit open not a single crop, however, but, though hungry, saved all up for evening and morning: first, in order to catch a goodly lot of pigeons; secondly, to feast on the batch of corn thoroughly softened in the evening. At last, when evening came, he ripped open the crops of his tithe-officers, six, nine, all,—not a grain was any longer there; the prisoners had already digested all themselves, and the marmot had been as stupid as a miser.'"
So far the Third and the Fortieth Dog-Post-Days.—Poor Victor!
Postscript.—The history stops now in the month of August, and the historian in the fore part of October,—only a month lies between the two.
barstart
Letter.—Two new Incisions of Fate.—His Lordship's Confession of Faith.
One must excuse a man, who, like horses, increases his speed as night and home draw near, from a tenth intercalary day; at the end of a life and of a book, man makes few digressions.
I have already said, that nothing presses the spiritual and spinal marrow out of a man more than when his misfortune allows him no action; fate still held our Victor fast with one hand, in order to beat him sore with the other, when in these weeks of sorrow the water-wheel of time filled up two new lachrymatories out of the hearts of men, and emptied them into eternity. First came the dismal tidings, like a funeral knell, to Victor's ear, that the sometime friend of his youth, Flamin, was about to expiate a step which, but for the falling out with him, he never would have taken, with his death. Some days after the canicular holidays,—precisely when, a year previous, the poor prisoner had entered on his new office with so many philanthropic hopes,—that rumor came forth like a pestilential cloud out of the session-chambers. Victor flew, incredulous and yet trembling, to the Apothecary, in order to get, by inquiry, a refutation. The latter candidly unfolded before him—for the very reason that he despised and wanted to shame the Court-Physician—all the rapport-lists of the court and the reports of the cercles, and recited to him so much as this out of them: it was not otherwise. Victor heard, what he already presupposed, that the Prince had on now the leading-strings or curb-bit of his own wife, and that she came nearer to him in consequence of Clotilda's withdrawal, and, with her ear-[171] and ring-finger, moved the bridle, threaded through the nose-ring, as if she were in fact nothing less than his—mistress; which is a new and mournful example, how easily in these times a fine married lady steals the privileges of a concubine. Zeusel found it natural, "that she, as the friend of the Minister, who, as well as his son Matthieu, had been the friend of the Chamberlain, should seek to avenge the death of the latter upon Flamin, and that the Minister, in order the better to get his hand into the handle of the Parcæ's scissors, and cut in twain the thread of the Regency-Councillor's life, himself ordained and maintained the continued absence of his son, that the latter might not in any way protect the unhappy favorite." In all this there was not a true word,—Victor knew better; but so much the worse. O, does not everything betray that Matthieu has drawn the Princess, by hints respecting Flamin's birth, into his faithless interests, in order, like magicians, to destroy at a distance, and by few characters? Would the mere fear of the stigma of the challenge hold him so long beyond the limits of the country?—Add to this, that the sun of princely favor brooded more and more warmly over the ministerial frog-spawn. It is true,—and Victor did not deny it,—one might expect of the Princess that she would in time overturn with her foot the Matthieu's- or Jacob's-ladder on which she climbed the princely heart, (whereas she had previously reached only January's hand,) just as the marten lets the drowsy eagle snatch him up into the air, and only up aloft begins to hack at him, and keeps doing it till the bearer falls and dies; but by this time, I think, her steadfast gratitude toward Schleunes is abundantly excused with honest men by the fact, that still more remains to be gotten of the uncompleted gift. An old lawgiver ordained a punishment for every case of ingratitude; in my opinion, every one falls into the same fault as he, if one censures and punishes every instance of gratitude, since often the most selfish at court may have his good reasons for it.[172]
Victor went sadly into his chamber, and looked on Flamin's picture, and said: "O, may it not be the will of Heaven, poor fellow, that it should be no longer possible to save thee." Victor could never, three days after an offence, any longer avenge himself. "I forgive every one," he used to say, "only not friends and maidens, because I am too fond of both." But what helping hand, what twig, could he reach down into prison to the sinking Flamin?—All he could do was to go to the Prince with a naked prayer for his pardon. Thousands of generous acts remain undone, because one is not entirely certain that they will produce their legitimate fruits. But Victor went nevertheless; he had made for himself the golden rule, to act for another even when the result is not a matter of certain hope. For if we chose first to wait for that certainty, sacrifices would be quite as rare as they were devoid of merit.
He went to the Prince, for the first time after so long, an interval,—with the disadvantage against him of terminating a long absence with a petition,—spoke with the fire of a recluse in behalf of his Flamin,—besought the Prince for the postponement of his fate till his Lordship should return,—received the decision, "Your honored father and I must simply leave it in the hands of justice,"—and was coldly and proudly dismissed.
Now precisely it was, on the 5th of September of this year, when a great eclipse of the sun made the soul as well as the earth sad and gloomy, that the water-wheel of time had filled the first lachrymatory vessel in his breast; it rolled over farther, and the second overflowed. Clotilda's letter arrived on the 22d of September, at the beginning of autumn.
"Dear Friend:—
"Your honored father was still in London at the beginning of February, and had much French correspondence; then he went off to Germany, and since that my mother knows nothing of his movements. May Destiny watch over his important life! Upon three oaths,[173] which his absence makes inviolable, hang many tears, many hearts, and, O God! a human life.—I enclose a leaf from your honored father, which he wrote at my mother's, and which contains a philosophy that makes my spirit and my prospects more and more sad. Ah, although you once said, neither the fear nor the hopes of man hit their mark, but always something else; still I have the mournful right to believe my apprehensions and all the dreams of anxiety, as I have hitherto been mistaken in nothing but in hope.—How insatiable is man!—But even though all should come true, and I should become too unhappy, still I should say, how could I now be too unhappy, had I not once been too happy?"—
You will readily forgive me, if I am silent about London, and about the impression which it might make on so distrait a heart as mine. The active stir of freedom, and the glitter of luxury and of commerce, simply oppress a sorrowing soul, and do not make one more cheerful who was not cheerful before. Be happy, beloved native city, my heart said, be long and greatly happy, as I was in thee in my youth!—But then I love rather to hasten with my mother to her country-seat, where once three good children[174] so joyously bloomed, and there I am inexpressibly softened, and then I fancy myself happier here than among the happy. I only fancy it, I may well say: for when I contemplate there all the playthings of those good children, their task-books and their little clothes; when I seat myself under three cherry-trees planted close together, which they in play had set out in the child's garden, which was too narrow for them; and then when I think how on this stage they exercised and built up their hearts for a happier life than they have won, for a higher virtue than their relations allowed them, and for better society than they have found,—then am I sorely distressed, and then I feel as if I must weep and could say, I too was born in England, and was educated in Maienthal by Emanuel.
"Ah, I cannot hide the feelings of my heart, when I write the name of that great soul.—He was often on a mountain here, where lies a ruined church, and where he climbed a column that was still standing, in order to lift his eye to the stars, above which he now dwells.—I was just on the point of writing to you now what my mother told me of his departure; but it makes me too sad, and I will tell it to you orally. I visit this mountain very often, because one can look down on the whole plain eastward: here is the old tree, still hanging with its roots and twigs down into the quarry, which lies full of broken temple columns. Emanuel often at evening took thither the child whom he loved most,[175] and who, when he prayed on the column, with one arm wound round the tree, looked out and leaned out, longing and singing, over the broad landscape, and, without knowing it, wept in sweet distress at his own tones, and at the distant fields, and at the pale morning-red which gleamed back from the red of evening. Once, when the teacher asked the child, 'Why art thou so still, and leavest off singing?'—the answer was, 'Ah, I long for the morning-red. I should like to lie in it and go through it, and look, over into the bright lands behind there.'—I often seat myself under that tree, and lean my head against it, and silently follow with my eye the stretch of distance even to the horizon, which stands before Germany; and no one disturbs my weeping or my still prayer.
"I was there to-day for the last time; for to-morrow we go with my mother, without whom my orphan heart can no longer live, back to Germany, to the best friend of
"The truest friend,
"Cl."
O thou good soul!—
How hard, after this, sounds the singular leaf of his Lordship, which seems to be no letter, but a cold apology for his future conduct. "Life is a petty; empty game. If my many years have not refuted me, then a refutation by my few remaining ones is neither necessary nor possible. A single unhappy man outweighs all drunken ones. For us insignificant things, insignificant things are good enough; for sleepers, dreams. Therefore, neither in us nor out of us is there anything worthy of wonder. The sun near to is a ball of earth; an earthly globe is merely the more frequent repetition of an earthly clod.—What is not sublime in itself and for itself can no more be made so by repetition than the flea by the microscope; at most, smaller. Why should the tempest be sublimer than an electric experiment, a rainbow greater than a soap-bubble? If I resolve a great Swiss landscape into its constituent parts, I get fir-needles, icicles, grasses, drops, and gravel.—Time resolves itself into moments, peoples into individuals, genius into thoughts, immensity into points; there is nothing great.—A trigonometrical proposition, often thought over, becomes a tautological one; an oft-read conceit, stale; an old truth, indifferent.—Again I assert, what becomes great by steps remains little. If the poetic power, which paints either images or passions, is not already admirable in the invention of the most commonplace image, then it is nowhere so. Every one can, like the poet, put himself into the place of another, at least in some degree.—I hate inspiration, because it is raised as well by liquors as by fancies, and because, during and after it, one is most inclined to intolerance and sensual pleasure.—The greatness of a sublime deed consists not in the execution, which amounts to mere corporeal pitiablenesses, going and staying; not in the simple resolve, because the opposite one, e. g., that of murdering, requires just as much energy as that of dying; not in its rarity, because we all are conscious in ourselves of the same capacity for the act, but have not the motive;—not in any of these, but in our boasting.—We hold our very last error for truth, and only the last but one as none at all; our today as holy, and every future moment as the crown and heaven of its predecessors. In old age, after so many labors, after so many appeasings, the spirit has the same thirst, the same torment. As in a higher eye everything is diminished, a spirit or a world, in order to be great, should be so even before a so-called Divine eye; but then the one or the other would have to be greater than God, for one never admires his own image.—In my youth, I composed a tragedy, and put all the above principles into the mouth of my hero, and made him, shortly before he plunged the dagger into his own heart, add these further words: But perhaps death is sublime; for I do not comprehend it. And so, then, will I lead aside the columns of blood which leap up out of the heart and so sportively keep up the human head and the human individuality at such an elevation, as a fountain bears the hollow ball balanced on its flickering stream,—this fountain will I draw off with the dagger, so that the I may be precipitated.—I shuddered at this character at the time; but afterward, I reflected upon it, and it became my own!"
* * * * *
Frightful man! Thy blood-stream and the I on the top of it have perhaps already collapsed, or will soon fall through.—And precisely this dark presentiment is also in the hearts of Victor and Clotilda—O that thou, thou other bowed man, whom I dare not name here before the public, mightest guess that I mean thee, that thou, just as well as the unhappy Lord, art eating away thy own self like blood-sucking corpses, and that, in the starry night of life, thou still bearest a deadly mist of thine own around thee! O the spectacle of a magnanimous heart, which merely through ideas makes itself helpless, and which lies inaccessible and benumbed in its arbor of philosophical poison-trees, often dyes our days black!—Believe, not that his Lordship is anywhere right! How can he find anything to be small, without holding it over against something great? Without reverence there could be no contempt; without the feeling of disinterestedness, no perception of selfishness; without greatness, no littleness. When thou canst explain the tears of the adagio by the vibration of the strings, or by the blood-globules and threefold skins of a beautiful face thy regard for the same; then and as well canst thou think to justify thy rapture for the spiritual in Nature by means of its corporeal filaments, which are nothing but the flute-pieces and flat and sharp valves of the unplayed harmony. The sublime resides only in thoughts, whether those of the Eternal One, who expresses them by letters made of worlds, or those of man, who reads them and spells them out!—
I postpone the refutation of his Lordship to another book, although this, too, is a refutation.—
shieldstart
Self-Sacrifice.—Farewell Addresses to the Earth.—Memento Mori.—Walk.—Heart of Wax.
There is a sorrow which lays itself with a great sucker-sting to the heart and thirstily drains its tears,—the whole heart runs and gushes and spasmodically contracts its innermost fibres, in order to become a stream of tears, and does not feel the wrench of grief under the deadly-sweet effusion.... Such a deadly-sweet pang our Victor felt at Clotilda's letter.
But deadly bitter was that of his Lordship. "O this tormented and worn-out spirit," he exclaimed, "longed, indeed, even on the Isle of Union, for the repose of the dead;—ah! it has surely fled already from the sweltry earth, which seemed to it so small and oppressive." If this were so, then all the oaths, on whose remission Flamin's life hung, were made eternal, and he was lost. If it was not so, then was there at least no hope of his return, since Emanuel's death and confession, Flamin's imprisonment, and all the previous occurrences, all of which his Lordship might learn, had wiped out his whole finely delineated plan. Now a voice cried aloud in Victor's soul, "Save the brother of thy beloved!"—Yes, a way to do it was at hand;—but it was perjury. If, namely he committed that crime by disclosing to the Prince who Flamin was, then he was rescued. But his conscience said, "No!—The downfall of a virtue is a greater evil than the downfall of a man,—only death, but not sin, must be;—shall it cost me still more to break my word, than it has hitherto cost me to keep it?"
It is well known that on the day of this year's equinox, when he had received the two London leaves, there was a cold storm of snow and rain, from which the summer afterward seemed to bloom out a second time.—Victor went on in his, pondering. He called up before him once more, with all its moments, that great day on the Isle of Union, and found that he had absolutely sworn to his Lordship forever to be silent, except an hour before his own death. We may still remember that he had at the time reserved this very condition, because he had once sworn to Flamin to throw himself down with him from the observatory, if they should be obliged to part as enemies; and because now, when Clotilda's sisterly relation was announced to him, he feared beforehand it might come to that separation and suicide. In that case, he would at least reserve to himself the liberty, only an hour before his death, of saying to his friend that he was innocent, and that Flamin's beloved was only a—sister.
"So then, an hour before my death, I may disclose all?—O God!—Yes!—Yes!—I will die, that so I may speak!" he cried, enkindled, throbbing, fluttering, exalted above life.—The tempest hurled the torrents of heaven and the powdered glaciers against the windows, and the day sank gloomily in the whelming flood.... "O," said our friend, "how I long to escape out of this black storm of life,—into the still, bright ether,—to the steadfast, immovable breast of death, which does not disturb sleep...."
If he disclosed to the Prince that Flamin was his own son, then was the latter delivered, and he needed only an hour after that to—destroy himself.
And that would he gladly do; for what had he left on earth except—recollections? O, too many recollections, too few hopes—Who would be grieved at his fall?—the loved one, who, after all, resigns him,—or her brother, whom he saves and flies from,—or his good lord, who perhaps rests already in the earth,—or his Emanuel, whose loving arms are already crumbling to dust?—"Yes, him only will my dying affect," said he, "for he will long for his faithful scholar, he will on some sun open his arms and look down along the way to the earth, and I shall come up with a great wound on my breast, and my streaming heart will lie naked on the wound.—O Emanuel, despise me not, I shall cry; I was truly unhappy, after thou hadst died; receive me and heal the wound!"
—"Seest thou my father?" said the blind Julius, and his face approached a smile of rapture. Victor started and said, "I talk with him, but I do not see him."—But this checked his exaltation. He had been hitherto the paraclete and nurse of the poor blind charge; he could not leave him, he must needs put off the retreating-shot of life till the arrival of Clotilda, that she might protect the helpless one. Ah, the good night-walker and night-sitter (in the proper sense) had at first every day prayed Victor to operate upon his eye, and give him back the light, before his dear father should crumble to pieces, that he might see once more, only once more, the fair countenance not yet undermined by worms; yes, he would at least touch blindly the cold mask,—this he had in the beginning implored; but in a few weeks he had drawn his arms away from under the dead man, and folded them entirely (like a true child) with all his caressing love around Victor, who always stayed at home with him. And in the night they reached out to each other their warm hands out of their adjoining beds, and thus linked together went into the evening-lands of dreams. To the childlike blind one, even the continuous din of the city turmoil, which his village had wanted, had been a comfort....
Victor, therefore, waited first for the arrival of Clotilda;—ah! he would have done it even without reference to the blind youth.—Must he not see once more his good mother, hear once more the voice of his never-to-be-forgotten beloved?—For the rest, I cannot disguise the fact, that not merely the salvation of Flamin, but a real disgust at life, guided his hand in his death-sentence. The verdict of murderous disgust had, for its grounds of decision, the sunset of Emanuel,—Victor's oft-recurring night-thoughts upon this our lucubration of life,—his entire revolution of his social relations,—the corresponding past or future example of his Lordship,—his panting for a deed full of energy,—and, most of all, the death-chill about his forlorn and naked bosom, which once was covered by so many warm hearts. One can do without love and friendship only so long as one has not yet enjoyed them;—but to lose them, and that without hope, this one cannot do without dying. Upon his conscience he played off the optical deception and stage-trick of asking it whether he might not draw his friend out of the water at the hazard of his life; whether he might not leap from the plank, which could hold only one, into the waves, in order to make his death the purchase-money of another's life.—Two singular ideas sweetened for him his deadly purpose more than all.
The first was, that on his death-day (after the disclosure to the Prince) he could repair to Flamin's prison, and grasp his hand, and boldly say: "Come out,—to-day I die for thee, that I may prove to thee that Clotilda was thy sister, and I thy friend.—I quench the black word, which can only be forgiven on the death-day, with my innocent blood, and death folds me again to thy arms.—-O, I do it gladly, so that I may only love thee once more right heartily, and say to thee, My good, precious, never-to-be-forgotten youthful friend!"—Then would he fall upon his neck with a thousand tears, and forgive him all; for in the neighborhood of death, and after a great deed, man can and may forgive man everything, everything.
Every tenderer soul will easily divine the second thought that sweetened that of death.—It was this, that he could go once more to his beloved and think, though not say, before her, "I fall for thee." For he now felt, after all, that the resolve of a parting for life was too hard, and only that of doing so by death was easy.—O right easy and sweet it is, he felt, to close the wet eye in the presence of the loved one, then to see nothing more on the earth; but with the high flames of the heart, and with the dear image pressed to the bosom, like the encoffined mother with the dead darling, to step blindfold to the brink of this world, and throw one's self headlong into the still, deep, dark, cold sea of the dead.... "Thou art," he often said, "painted on my conscious being, and nothing can sever thy image from my heart; both must, as in Italy the wall and the picture upon it, be transported together."—And as now there was no longer any need to care for his body, he could call forth, of his own accord, the tears which agitated him. He wanted really to offer something of his life to Clotilda: therefore he rehearsed, for some days in succession, the part of the bloodiest farewell scene, even to exhaustion, and made pen-and-ink sketches of his sorrow, and said to himself, when thereby headaches and heart-beatings came upon him, "I can thus at least suffer something for her, though she knows nothing of it."
Here is one such mournful leaf.
"O thou angel! Were it not that it would affect thee too sadly, I would go to thee, and before thy eyes fill my heart with tears, with images of the fairer time, with the bitterest sorrows, until it broke and sank,—or I would slay myself in thy presence. Ah! it were sweet to pierce my heart with lead, as it leaned on thy bosom, and to let my blood and life flow out on thy breast.—But, O God! no, no! Smiling will I go to thee, good soul, when thou comest back again, as if it were merely for joy at thy return,—only the pink with the red drop will I beg of thee, that my heart, adorned with it, may moulder under the last flower of life. I will, indeed, bleed so near thee, heavenly murderess, as the corpse does before its murderess, but yet only inwardly; and every drop of blood will fall merely from one thought to another.—Then, at last, will I be silent for a long time, and go, and that forever, only saying this and no more: 'Think of me, beloved, but be happier than heretofore.'—Whither then will I go, after an hour? I shall take the dumb, dreary road to the poisonous Buo-upas-tree,[176] to where death stands solitary, and there die all alone, all alone.—The dead are mutes, they have bells, and in the blue a mute will hover, and toll the death-bell.... Clotilda, Clotilda! then our love on earth is over!"
Dost thou, reader, still recognize the voice which, in his inner being, always, amidst the weeping of music, rang in the cadence of verse? Here it rings again.—But his hurricane of resolve soon gave place to gentler deeds and hours, just as the equinoctial storm of autumn dissolved into still after-summer days. The thought, "In a few weeks thou wilt fly to the land beyond the grave," made him a free-born creature and an angel. He forgave everybody, even the Evangelist. He filled his little sphere with virtues as with an after-bloom of life, and devoted his short hours, not to sweet fantasies, but to needy patients. He denied himself every expenditure, in order to leave to Julius his paternal property unimpaired. He was neither vain nor proud. He spoke frankly about and against the state;—for what is there to fear so near to the storm- and weather-shed of the coffin-lid?—But for the very reason that he felt only love for what is good, and no passions and no cowardice in his inner man, therefore he resisted gently and quietly; for when once man is convinced for himself that he has laid up courage for a day of need, he no longer seeks to make a show of it before others. The thought of death used to incline him to humorous follies, but now only to good actions. He was so happy, men and scenes around him appeared to him in the mild, soothing evening-light, wherein he always beheld both in the sicknesses of his childhood. It seemed as if he wanted (and he succeeded in it) to bribe his conscience by this piety to a legible indorsement of his autographic sentence of death. To him, as to the departed Emanuel, men appeared as children, the light of earth as evening-light, everything seemed softer, everything a little smaller; he had no anxiety or hankering; the earth was his moon; now for the first time he understood the soul of his Dahore....
—And thou, my reader, dost thou not feel that thou, too, so near to the cloister-gate of death, wouldst improve just so? But thou and I are in fact already standing before it. Is not our death as certain as Victor's, although the certainty ranges through a longer interval? O, if every one only had a fixed belief that after fifty years, on an appointed day, Nature would lead him to her place of execution, he would be a different man; but we all banish the image of death out of our souls, as the Silesians on Lætare-Sunday cast it out of the cities. The thought and the expectation of death improve us as much as the certainty and the choice of it.
And now the fair, blue after-summer days of this year's October floated on tender butterfly-wings of spider-webs across the heavens. Victor said to himself, "Fair earthly heaven, I will take one more walk beneath thee! Good mother-land, I will look out upon thee once more, with thy woods and mountains, and fix thy image in the immortal soul, ere thy yellow green grows over my heart, and strikes its roots therein. I will see thee, St. Luna of my childhood, and you, my fair Whitsuntide paths, and thee, thou blessed Maienthal, and thee, thou good old Bee-father,[177] and will give back to thee thy watch that counts the hours of joy—and then I shall have lived long enough."
He asked himself, "Am I, then, ripe for the granary of the churchyard?—But then is any man ripe? Is he not in his ninetieth year still incomplete as in his twentieth?"—Yes, indeed! Death takes off children and Patagonians; man is summer fruit, which Heaven must pluck before it matures. The other world is no uniform alley and orangery, but the tree-nursery of our present seed-nursery.
Before Victor left the blind one, with tears and kisses, he sent for poor Marie the evening previous to come to the cabinet, and commended to her (as well as to the Italian servant) the care of the dependent youth. But his design was to give and announce beforehand to the crushed and powerless soul the hope of some hundred florins; for so much he could already expect as inheritance from his well-circumstanced father, Eymann. The selfishness of this humiliated creature, which would have made others cold, was precisely what moved his innermost being. Long since he had said, "One should not have compassion on any man who thought philosophically or loftily, least of all on a learned man,—with such a one the wasp-stings of fate hardly went through the stocking,—on the contrary, with the poor vulgar soul he suffered and wept infinitely, which knew nothing greater than the goods of earth, and which, without principles, without consolation, pale, helpless, convulsed, and rigid, sank at the sight of the ruin of its goods."—It therefore only redoubled his pity when this Marie in wild gratitude passed in his presence from abrupt utterances of thanks, ejaculations, gushes of joy, to kissing of the coat, silly laughing, and kneeling.
When he went the next morning,—first to St. Luna,—and passed along before the convent of Mary, where once the adopted daughter of the Italian Tostato would have offered a sixth finger, Marie was just coming out of a limb-shop,[178] where she had bought two wax hearts. Victor drew out from her by long and ingenious questioning that she was going to hang one of them, which represented hers, on the holy Mary, because hers no longer pained her so much nor was so much oppressed as it had been the week before.—As to the second, she would not for a long time let anything out; at last she confessed: it was Victor's own, which she was going to offer to the Holy Mother of God, because she thought it must pain him also right sorely, as he looked so pale and sighed so often.—"Give it to me, love," he said, too deeply moved, "I will offer my heart myself."
"Ay," he repeated out under the still heaven, "the heart behind the wall of the breast will I offer,—that, too, is of wax,—and to mother Earth will I give it, that it may heal,—heal." ...
Let him weep freely, my friends, now that he beholds smiling the still, pale earth, even up to its hazy mountains.—For softness of sensibility loves to ally itself with petrifying processes and the art[179] of Passau against the calamities of fate. Let him weep freely, as he looks upon this flowerless earth, spinning itself, as it were, into the silk of the fugitive summer, and feels as if he must fall down and kiss the cold meadow as a mother, and say, "Bloom again sooner than I; thou hast given me enough of joys and flowers!"—The silent dissolution of nature, on whose corpse the full-blooming daisy stood as if it were a death-garland, softly unnerved his powers by this loosening friction,—he was exhausted and stilled,—nature reposed around him and he in it,—the exhaustion overflowed almost into a sweet, tickling faintness,—the tear-gland swelled and pressed no more before it ran over; but its water trickled down like dew out of flowers, easily and without stopping, as the blood flowed through his breast.
He saw now St. Luna lying before him, but, as it were, withdrawn from him in a moonlight. He passed not through, in order not to see the wax statue, whose funeral sermon he had delivered, and for which he also possessed a heart of wax; but he went round along the outskirts. "Grow ever broader and more bustling, fair spot: never may an enemy beleaguer thee around!" He said no more. For as he passed by the church-yard he thought, "Have not all these, then, also taken leave of the place; and am I the only one who does it?"—The mere backward glance at the slated roof of the parsonage kindled one more lightning flash of pain at the thought of a mother's tears for his death; but he soon whispered to himself the consolation, that the maternal heart of the parson's wife, never weaned from Flamin, would cure its sorrow for the victim by its joy over the rescued favorite.
He went now towards Maienthal, and carefully kept away his dreaming thoughts from its exalted places, in order (at evening on the arrival) to enjoy so much the more—sorrow. But now his conscious soul spun itself into a new ideal web. He thought over the pleasure of sinking without any sick nights into the earth, bright and erect, not prostrate, but upright like the giant Cænæus,[180]—he felt himself shielded against all disasters of life, and purged from the fear perpetually gnawing on in every heart,—all this, and the joy of having fulfilled his duties and controlled his impulses, and the lights of the blue day standing as if in flower-dust, so cleared his turbid life-stream, that at last he could have wished (had not his determination forbidden it) to play longer in the bright stream.... So great does contempt of death render the beauty of life,—so sure is every one, who in cold blood renounces life, of being able to endure it,—so sound is the advice of Rousseau, before death to undertake a good deed, because one can then do without dying.... —As Victor thought thus, Fate stepped before him and asked him sternly, "Wilt thou die?"—He answered, "Yes!"—as, just before sundown, he beheld again in Upper Maienthal Clotilda's carriage, which he had seen there at its starting upon the journey. Now the death-cloud fell upon the landscape. He hurried by,—at the window he saw his mother and the lady, the mother of Flamin,—his inner being was in a tumult,—his eyes glowed, but remained dry,—for he was choosing among the instruments of death.—-Why did he go, so late, in the dark, with a stormy soul, which obscured all sweet dreams, to Maienthal?—He would go to Emanuel's grave; not to mourn there, not to dream there, but to seek for himself a hollow there, namely, the last. His impetuous grief had sketched a picture of his dying, and he had approved the sketch; namely, so soon as fate had decided the necessity of his death by the disappearance of his father and by the peril of Flamin, he meant to scoop out his grave near the weeping birch, lay himself down in it, kill himself therein, and then let the blind Julius, who could not know nor see anything of it, fling the earth over him, and so, veiled, unknown, nameless, flee out of life to the side of his mouldering Emanuel....
Black funeral processions of ravens flew slowly like a cloud through the sunless heavens, and settled down like a cloud into the woods,—the half-moon hung above the earth,—a strange, little shadow, as big as a heart, ran fearfully beside him. He looked up: it was the shadow of a slowly hovering hawk; he rushed through Maienthal; he saw not the leafless garden nor Dahore's closed house, but ran through the chestnut alley toward the weeping birch.—
But under the chestnuts, at the place where Flamin would have killed him, he saw Clotilda's withered pink, with the bloody drop in its chalice, lying on the ground.... And as a lark, the last songstress of Nature, still quivered over the garden, and called with too ardent tones after all the spring-times of life, and pierced the heart with an infinite, deathly yearning, then did my Victor look up and weep aloud; and when, up on the grave, he had wiped away the great, dark tears, there stood—Clotilda before him.
One thrill ran through him, and he was dumb.... She hardly recognized the paled form, and asked, trembling, "Is it you? Do we see each other again?"—His soul was torn asunder, and he said, but in another sense, "We see each other again." She was in the bloom of health, having been restored by the journey. But there was blood on her handkerchief;—it was the blood which Emanuel's bosom had shed during the duel in the alley. He stared inquiringly at the blood. She pointed to the grave, and veiled her weeping eyes.—With the question, "Has your honored father come?" the good soul sought gently to lead him aside; but she led him to his grave,—his eye sought wildly the place for the last cool grotto of life,—she had never seen her gentle lover thus, and would fain soothe his soul by quiet remembrances of Emanuel,—she filled out the chasm in her letter, and related how quietly and composedly the dead man went from England, and previously at his departure lowered down into an extraordinarily deep hollow of the fallen temple all his East-Indian flowers, three pictures, written palm-leaves, and collections of loved ashes....
Victor was beside himself,—he supported himself by his hand on the dew-cold, wet, yellow grave,—he wept in one steady stream, and could no longer see his beloved,—he threw himself upon her quivering lips, and gave her the farewell-kiss of death. He could venture to kiss her; for there is no rank among the dead. He felt her streaming tears, and a cruel longing seized him to provoke these tears forth; but he could only not speak. He choked her words with kisses and his own with grief. At last he was able to say, "Farewell!" She extricated herself with terror, and looked on him with greater tears, and said, "What is it with you? You break my heart!"—He said, "Only mine must break!" and hurriedly drew out the heart of wax, and crushed it to pieces on the grave, and said, "I offer my heart to thee, Emanuel; I offer thee my heart." And when Clotilda had fled with alarm, he could only call after her, with exhausted tones, "Farewell! farewell!"