The two fell softly on each other's hearts and were silent over their thoughts; Emanuel's love glorified theirs, and Victor had too great a respect for his friend and his beloved to console the latter. He did not once ask her, how she answered Emanuel's prayer; he knew that she must refuse it, because otherwise her heart would break beside the loved one.
When at last he parted from her and from St. Luna, and she was compelled to reflect that in a few days he would go to Maienthal,—and when in his eyes and hers tears stood which indicated more than one sorrow, and which not, man dries away but death or God,—then Victor during the farewell looked upon her with the mute question, "Shall I say nothing to our beloved?"—Clotilda's soul remained most erect under burdens, and she never appeared greater than through tears, as the stars in a heaven full of rain come out brighter and larger; she looked up to heaven as if asking, "Couldst thou, all-gracious One, crush us so deeply?" then she weighed with oppressed heart the heavy grief,—then she found it too great for utterance—and too great for endurance,—and she no longer believed it, and said ambiguously, with wet eyes and with ambiguous smile, "No, Victor, we shall surely all meet again!"
Victor went off not long before the two crowned bathing-guests arrived with a considerable retinue.—I remark it with quite as little resentment as Victor felt on the occasion, that Agatha, notwithstanding the maternal example, broke off entirely, first with Victor, i. e. with the Antipode and Anti-Christ of her beloved brother; secondly and still more with Clotilda.
It may be stated, that I suppressed the foregoing letter of Emanuel in the first edition, for the simple reason—for I had it in my hands early enough, as well as many other documents of this history, which nevertheless (for reasons) will never be published—that I feared it would be affecting; a susceptible soul finds, as it is, too many sorrows in this volume!—But for that very reason we will not leave out what there was, in the first edition, of the comic, and accordingly I proceed.
We readers will, with Victor, take leave of the Chamberlain, who, with his half upright eyebrows,—they incline to each other at the bridge of the nose in the form of the mathematical sign of the root,[146]—parts from us with true, obliging courteousness. I know, when we are gone, he will let us find justice, and will make too much out of us; for he never calumniates either from malice or from levity, and whom he calumniates, him he has a serious intention to destroy, because he would rather make one unhappy than paint him black.—When I saw him bend down so to us, I executed in thought a half-satire upon him, whereof the true and serious purport may be this: that men are actually created for the purpose of making themselves as crooked as the spiritus asper[147] is. I do not exactly build much upon this, that geometers have written: If the Gods assumed a form, it must be the most perfect, that of a circle; I might, to be sure, draw this conclusion from that, that a crooked back is at least an approximation to the divine form, because it is an arc of a circle,—but I do not care to; for the physical is child's play on this subject, and only of consequence in so far as it partly indicates the crooking and creeping of the soul, and partly (e. g. by the narrowing of the chest) promotes it. Even at court they would dispense with the external bending, if they could be sure that the inner and nobler crook of the disposition were there, without the sign; for as, according to Kant, the subjection and casting down of our self-conceit is a requirement of the purer and the Christian morality: accordingly one who has absolutely no moral excellences must with his self-consciousness thereof stoop still lower than to lowliness, which even the virtuous has; he must sink to that which I call a noble crawling. I confess I do not despise the practice which the little rules of breeding insure herein, and which besides undertakes to be nothing but virtue in trifles, the rules, namely, that one shall bow when one contradicts,—when one praises,—when one receives an insult,—when one offers one,—when one bows another down,—when one would just precisely play the Devil. But it is well that such a virtue of crooking has its own places of exercise, and does not depend on chance. At court a man with straight body and spirit would be cast out as dead, in the court sense, like a crab with a straight tail, which only a dead one carries. If formerly hermits chose lowly cells, in order not to stand upright, a man of the world does not need this; lofty banquet-halls, temples of pleasure, dancing-halls, press him down so much the lower, the higher they are themselves.—It were bad, if this so important virtue of bending downward presupposed a special strength of mind or body, which no one, indeed, can bestow on himself; but exactly the reverse is the case; it will have only weakness, which with horses is not so, for they can no longer let down the tail when its sinews are cut. If the Pharisees carried lead in their caps in order to make it easier for them to stoop,[148] the lead which one brings into the world with him, and which lies in the head, renders perhaps still greater services. Hence it is a fine arrangement, that great souls, for which, as for tall statures, stooping is disagreeable, fortunately (but for their punishment) never come to anything, whereas mediocre ones, who make nothing of it, flourish and put forth a goodly crown: thus have I often seen in the baking of bread, that every moderate loaf in the oven rose and arched beautifully, but the big one remained sitting there flat and miserable.—But we should be subjects for pity, if a virtue which constitutes the worth of the civilian, the virtue of becoming not merely like children, but like fœtuses, which double themselves up in the mother's body,—if this could only prosper in the highest place, as one must almost suppose, since the courtier after the fall goes upright again on his estate,—whereas the serpent before the fall and during the temptation did not creep.—But in all civil relations educational institutions for crooklings are provided; everywhere there stretches out in the air now a spiritual and now a secular arm, which gives us the regular crook, and still higher are the longest of all set, which reach over whole nations. The scholar himself bends over his writing-desk under the birth of introductions and courtly dedications and opinions. By the mere hoariness of old age the body as well as the spirit ripens to a bony humpback, and the lower clergy, because they are always looking downward into the grave, work themselves into the crooked posture.—I conclude with the consolation that bending does not exclude inflation, but includes it; just as the circle, of which one is a section, runs innumerable times around the swollen surface of the sphere....
I would truly have written over this "Extra-leaf" that title as a heading,—so that the reader might have skipped it,—had I not wished that he should read it, by way of diverting himself, and of sharing more easily with my Victor his dismal hours. For every stroke of the clock is a death-bell sounding out a dead march for the wreck of his fairer hours.
The very evening he entered into Flachsenfingen, stories quite as ugly as probable came to his ears; Mat had told the Apothecary a good deal; but this time I give in to his reports.
That is to say, the Parson, so soon as he heard of the betrothal, had set out for the city in order to frustrate murderous deeds and duels on the part of his son. As during his dressing the whole of his travelling uniform did not lie at the very instant before his eyes, he threw off to his family light red-crayon-drawings of the bloody scenes and bloody scaffolds, upon which, he said, he reckoned, as he probably, on account of the detention in dressing, should arrive too late. The shrunk boot which Appel had dried a little at the fire could not be got on to the foot,—Eymann gasped,—pulled, "It is possible," said he, "that they are at this very moment letting fly at each other";—at last he let his arms fall back powerless, and sat calmly and firmly bolt upright, and waited silently for them to fire at him and question him. When nothing came, he said with fury: "Whatever Satan it may be that has got into my house, and has made my boots shrink up so, (I would undertake to get my foot into a leather queue, through a needle's eye, but not into one of them,) he has the murder of my child upon his soul.—Is there then no child of misery about here, that will just polish my heel for me with a little soft soap?"—While they were forcing in his foot, he saw Appel still busily ironing away at his shirt-bosom: "Enough, Appel! very good!"—said he,—"I really shall not unbutton myself." She glided away lightly on the flat, which was, as it were, the skate under her hand. "Daughter, thy father wants his shirt. The life of thy own brother is put in jeopardy by thee,—it is just as if thou wert giving him the finishing stroke!" She glided nimbly only once more on her hand-skate over the whole, and then handed it to him with pleasure.
On the way the chaplain sketched to himself a safe and sound plan of proceeding in the business. He would in the beginning make no disclosure of the engagement to Flamin,—then he was going to read to him only the penitential text upon the Maienthal duel,—then to extort from him the Urphede or solemn oath to keep quiet,—and only at the very last to come out with the report. While he was thinking over the plan and the danger, he ran himself into a hotter and hotter sweat of anxiety. Just as he had once, by a long drawing out of consequences, driven himself and a patient who had a slight buzzing in the ears to such a pitch, that they both expected the next minute apoplexy and paralysis of half one side: so, in the present instance, by a picturesque treatment of the details of an imaginary duel he at last removed from himself so thoroughly all doubts about one's having already transpired that he passed in through the city gate with the firm conviction that the Regency-Councillor was lying either in chains or on the bier. "Thank God that I see thee without wounds and without chains," was the expression that escaped from him on his entrance; and he had almost spoiled his whole business plan, or at least reversed it. Flamin understood him to refer to the first duel. Eymann could so much the more easily follow out the management of the case and phlebotomical table of rules which he had laid down, and, so to speak, fight a duel with the duel. The silent son had nothing to oppose to him—but light beer. While he was getting it, the Parson had pulled at the knobs of all the canes to see whether there were no sword-canes. A pistol-like tinder-box at a distance was a suspicious object to him. A double-barrelled gun on the wall near by, with its—stock aimed at him, took away much of his courage. Flamin excused his taciturnity on the ground of legal plethora and over-freighting of the brain, and pointed to the pile of criminal documents before him. When he was called upon to give him an extemporaneous abstract of them, and when of course the war-cries prison, blood-guiltiness, avenging sword, whizzed like a hissing rain of bullets round Eymann's ears; then did the agony which he aggravated by the more rapid douche of the pale ale expand itself so mightily within him that the double-barrelled gun had to be hung up in the chamber: "I get nothing by it," said he, "if it goes off and bursts, and the lock flies into my face, or if the stock actually kills me." Now he began in a compound fit of emotion and intoxication to weep and to exhort: that a man ought to think on the fifth petition in the Lord's prayer,—that a country clergyman could with ill-grace preach to his spiritual fold reconciliation, if he had a son in the city, who during the sermon was fighting a duel,—and that Flamin must never say he was his son, if he either got or gave the fatal shot in a duel. Nothing so easily drew the storm-wind of Flamin's anger out of its cavern, as a doleful voice and long religious edicts. "For God's sake," cried Flamin, "let that be enough now,—God shall punish me, I will be lost to all eternity, I swear to you, if I ever touch him even." This oath which escaped him was magnificent marshmallow-paste and soft ice-cream for the heated court-chaplain, who from forgetfulness of his order of business now adopted the opinion that the betrothal was already full well known to the Regency-Councillor. "Thinkest thou not, son," said he joyfully, "that such an oath refreshes and comforts an anxious father like the latter rain, especially as, since her betrothal to him, I have had absolutely nothing better to look for than murder and assassination? Am I right or not?"—Flamin flung up by a single question the cover from this murderous armed spectre of his heart,—and now he heard his father no more; pale, full of convulsions, he sat there in silence,—the back of the chair cracked under his pressure,—he twisted and tied his watch-chain round his fingers, and tore it off and mashed the remnant again round the bruised finger and crushed it to pieces,—in his glassy eyes stood two heavy, rigid, cold drops,—his heart shrank up empty and spiritless before an approaching and frightful death-chill, which, when a friendship is murdered in a bosom, always precedes the burning wrath thereby excited.—Ah, who of us does not pity the unhappy, forsaken soul?—Eymann went away deceived, and took this calm for mere calm, and the broken and choked voice for emotion.
And in this bloody state he was found by Matthieu, who had just come to announce to the Regency-Councillor, as if with twenty-four blowing postilions (from a note of the wife of the Chamberlain), Victor's victory over the whole of them. This fellow now first transformed the iceberg into a volcano, and made Flamin in his pent-up fury feel as if he could shatter to pieces one quarter of the world against another.
Victor heard nothing now for some days. Flamin locked himself up. Matthieu visited him often, but not the house of the Apothecary. The crowned pair arrived at last at the baths of St. Luna.
Thus all remained till the morning when Victor took leave of the Apothecary to go to Maienthal before the curtain of a heavy scene. Here the Apothecary could not deny himself the pleasure of depriving the Court-Physician of his, by imparting to him the (probably false) intelligence, that the Page had challenged the Chamberlain on account of his breach of promise with regard to Clotilda. Little or no importance is to be attached to the report, for the reason, if for no other, that the Apothecary wanted only to cough out his own praise and disguise it in the shape of a commendation of Victor, that the latter had known how, with such infinite finesse, to carry out his recent hints of undermining the Evangelist. The hints were, as will be recollected, the two propositions of becoming the lover of the Princess and the husband of Clotilda, in order to gain the Prince, and thus, as a swine does a rattlesnake, to swallow Mat with impunity. One must forgive the soul of Victor, gnawed by a worm's-nest of afflictions, for blazing up and attacking Zeusel with an eye full of the profoundest contempt, "I know not who would deserve to listen to such propositions,—unless it is he who can make them."
My correspondent leaves off abruptly and sadly with the words: "Late in the evening, Victor arrived with swollen eyes at Maienthal, to see whether on the next day his noblest teacher and greatest friend would wither away."—We can all conceive what must be the embrace of a loved one a few paces from his grave. The friend who threatens us with his death takes a painful hold of our soul, even if we doubt it. We can all imagine the wet eye which Victor must have cast on the still blooming scene of his withered rose-feast.—What consoles him is the improbability of the predicted death, since Emanuel is as well as usual, and since suicide is still more impossible with this pious spirit, who long since compared the suicide to the lobster, who cannot draw out the claw which he himself in his stupidity has jammed and crushed with its mate, but snaps it off.—May the reader bring with him to the description of the longest day,[149] which I am to make all alone under the exalting stillness of night, a heart like that of the East Indian, which like old temples is dumb and dark, but vast and full of holy images!
barstart
The Sublime Hour before Midnight.—The Blissful After-Midnight.—The Soft Evening.
To-day I present Emanuel's last day (which now lies cooled off and extinguished among the days of eternity) with pale outlines to the fantasies of men. My hand trembles and my eye burns before the scenes which in funeral veils glide around me and lift their veils so near to me.—I shut myself up to-night,—I hear nothing but my thoughts,—I see nothing but the night-suns which move across the heavens,—I forget the weaknesses and the stains of my heart, that I may get the courage to lift up my head as if I were good, as if I dwelt on the height where around the great man like constellations lie only God, Eternity, and Virtue. But I say to them who are better,—to the silent great heart, which increases its obligations in fulfilling them, and which satisfies itself as its conscience grows only with daily increasing merits,—to the lofty men who have warmly pressed the hand of death, who can calmly ask him, when he walks round on morning-meadows, "Seekest thou me to-day?"—to the panting soul which cools itself under the cypress-tree,—to the men with tears, with dreams, with wings,—to all these I say, "Kinsmen of my Emanuel, your brother stretches out his hand after you through the shortest night; grasp it, he would fain bid you farewell!"
Victor rose sadly from his dreams, in which he had seen nothing but graves and funeral piles for his friend; but he gathered secret hopes at the morning-greeting, as he saw him step forth into his alleged death-morning without fever, without oppression, without change. His only concern was about the impression which the disappointed hope of departure would make upon the heart of the beloved friend, already half torn from the earthly soil and laid bare from earthly environment. The latter, on the contrary, still held fast to his dreams, to which even his nightly ones gave nourishment; and he looked yearningly into the starless blue, and calculated the long road to the twelfth night-hour, when, out of heaven should peer forth the stars, and death with that dark, immense mantle of his, in which he bears us through his cold realm. His heart lay in a sweet siesta, which proceeded partly from bodily exhaustion and from the beauty of the day. His inner calm, never so great and magical as in souls in which whirlwinds and hurricanes have swept to and fro, overspread his whole being with a bliss of yearning which in other eyes than his would have melted in tear-drops.
O Rest! thou soft word!—autumnal bloom of Eden! Moonlight of the spirit! Rest of the soul, when wilt thou hold our head, that it may be still, and our heart, that it may cease beating? Ah, ere the one grows pale and the other stiff, thou comest often and goest often, and only down below with sleep and with death thou abidest, whereas above, men with the greatest wings, like birds of paradise, are whirled about most of all by the storms!
The tranquillity with which Emanuel played out the star-part of life, even to the last catch-word,—with which he packed up everything—set all to rights—gave all directions—took leave of all,—stirred up tears and tempests together in his tormented friend. His heart had been, indeed, dragged till it was sore over a stony road, but its inflammations were now softly cooled off by the thought of death; yet he could not—though with the greatest incredulity about Emanuel's death—endure to hear it, when Emanuel committed to him at a distance the blind Julius, from whom this death was concealed, with the low-spoken words, "Hold him dear as I do, protect, provide for the poor child, till thou canst deliver him over to Lord Horion." His trembling hands could hardly take from him a packet to that lord, which the friend handed to him with tender eyes and with the words, "When these seals are opened, then my oaths have ceased and thou wilt learn all." For his tender conscience allowed him to conceal only the import, not the existence of secrets.—It will not astonish us, as Victor's veins received one wound after another, that, in order not to increase their bleeding by agitations, he begged the flute-player not to play to-day; music would, on this day, have had too much power over his dissolved heart.
The morning they spent in farewell-visits to old paths, bowers, and heights; but Emanuel performed not here the sharp, passionate climax-part of the fifth act; he broke not forth, upon an earth where death grazes, into any unphilosophical outcry because he should not see the flowers plucked and the grain cut, nor the green fruit grow yellow; but with a higher rapture, which beyond the earthy spring promised itself still fairer ones, he took his leave of every flower, went through every leafy winding and shadowy night-piece, drew out of every mirroring pond his transfigured form lying as it were in the earth, and showed a more affectionate attentiveness to nature, now that he hoped to-night to come nearer to Him who created it. He sought and Victor shunned every occasion to speak of all this. "Only not for the last time!" said the latter. "Not?" said Emanuel.—"Does not everything happen only once and for the last time?—Do not Autumn and Time, as well as Death, separate us from all?—Does not all part from us, even if we do not part from it?—Time is nothing but a death with softer, thinner sickles; every minute is the autumn of the past one, and the second world will be the spring of a third.—Ah, when I one day retire again from the flowery surface of a second, and when on the heavenly death-day I see the twilight of the memory of two lives,—O in the future lies a groundwork for infinite bliss as well as woe, why does man shrink with awe only before this?"—Victor disputed the immortality of memory. "Without memory," said Emanuel, "there is no life, only existence, no years, only seconds,—no I, only representations of it.—A being breaks up into as many million beings as it has thoughts,—memory is merely consciousness of present existence."[150]—Even the Poet philosophizes at least for poetry and against philosophy.—Victor thought: "Thou good man! to myself, not to thee, I made these objections."
It was towards noon; the sky was clear, but sultry; the flowers announced by their shutting up the gathering of the electric fires; all meadows were altars of incense, and fragrances went forth as prophets of the storm-clouds. With the physical stormy material there accumulated in Victor a corresponding moral element;—he reflected that often a hot day ended the life of consumptive patients;—he confounded at times the bitterness of parting with its probability; for man, deceived by the aerial perspective of fear, fancies a shape of terror so much the nearer, the larger it is; he wept at the very thought that he might weep; but nevertheless reason would have held the upperhand of the feelings, had not the following occurrence benumbed both.
In Maienthal there dwelt a madman whom they called by no other name than that of the crazy skeleton. For three reasons he was called so: first, because he was an anatomical preparation of leanness; secondly, because he carried round the fixed idea, that Death was after him and wanted to seize and abduct him by the left hand, which he therefore concealed; thirdly, because he gave out that he could see when any one was going to die soon by the look of the face, which in that case was already overspread with the indentations and abscesses of corruption. In Moritz's experimental psychology[151] a similar man is described, who is also said to be able to detect the forerunners of death and its triturating hand on faces which appear to others smooth and ruddy, whereas he sees them seamed with the lunar caustic of corruption.—This skeleton it was, which, on the night of the fourth Whitsuntide day, when Clotilda was in the churchyard, cried out, Death! I am already buried.[152]—Victor and Emanuel went home during the striking of the twelfth hour, and on their way passed a hill, whereon the skeleton sat agitated; the left hand, at which Death grasped, buried itself deep into the opposite arm-pit: "Brrr!" it said, shaking its head at Emanuel, "he has thee, but not me! Nothing but mould is hanging on thee! The eyes are gone! Brr!"
The words of the insane are, to a man who listens at the gate of the invisible world, more memorable than those of the wise man, just as he listens more attentively to sleepers than to the waking, to the sick than to the well. Victor's blood stiffened under the ice-cold clutch at his warm life. The crazy skeleton ran off, shielding the left hand with the right. Victor took his friend's left, looked up at the warm sun, and sought to conceal and to warm himself and could say nothing. Down near the margin of the deep-blue heaven little clouds smoked up, the germs of an evening tempest; and in the sultry air nothing but vermin flew abroad.
Emanuel was more quiet and almost troubled, but it was not the anxiety of fear, but that uneasiness of expectation with which we always look upon the folds and flutterings of the curtain of great scenes. The stinging sun kept the couple at home. To Emanuel, oppressed by the sultry atmosphere, the last afternoon was almost too long. But his friend saw all the time hanging in this atmospheric vault a mouldering countenance, which seemed to work its way into the beloved fresh one, and he continually heard the crazy skeleton repeating in his ear, "His eyes are out!"
In the sultry stillness, when the sun dug and charged the mining pits of the thunder, and when the two friends ventured before the ears of the blind Julius to speak only with looks of to-day's future, towards four o'clock a fanning, evening-breeze came up, which refreshed all drooping wings and heads. Emanuel let in these cool waves, which ran lullingly and comfortingly over the bent flowers at the window, and flowed down along the wavering folds of the curtains, and strayed and plashed through the fragrant foliage of the room. Then came an infinite stillness, a dissolving bliss, an inexpressible yearning into Emanuel's heart. The joys of his childhood, the features of his mother, the images of Indian fields, all beloved, mouldering forms, the whole gliding reflection of his youth's morning, flowed along glimmeringly before him;—a melancholy longing for his native land, for his dead friends, distended his bosom with sweet, distressful emotions. That evergreen palm-grove of youthful memory he laid as a cooling herb around his own and Horion's brows, and brought over the whole first circle of his existence out of the Indian Eden into this narrow housing before the two latest objects of his affection. But as he thus heaped up the ashes of the Phœnixes of joy on the altar of the evening-sun,—as he thus at his exodus looked back over all the Elysian fields of his life as they lay behind each other,—as the whole of earth and life, overspread with morning dew and morning redness, transformed themselves before him into the glimmering playground of humanity;—then was he unable to master any longer his emotion and his melted heart, and in a blissful agitation, in a trembling gratitude to the Eternal, he begged the blind youth to take his flute and let the Song of Ecstasy, which he always had played for himself on the morning of the new year and of his birthday, sound after him as an echo of his dying life.
Julius took the flute. Horion went out under a loud-rustling tree and looked into the setting sun. Emanuel placed himself at the breezy window opposite the purple stream of the evening light, and the song of rapture began and flowed in streams into his heart and round the sinking sun.
And as the tones of the spheres seemed to well out from the sun, which in the evening redness, like a swan dissolved in melodies, died of rapture before God in gold-haze and dew of joy,—and as all the flowers wherewith the Eternal goodness covers our heart, and all the blissful fields through which its gentle hand conducts uncertain man, flew by before Emanuel like angels,—and as he saw the future heavens, into which the way of life leads, drawing nearer,—and as he saw these infinite arms cover all wounded hearts, stretch over all millenniums, bear all worlds and yet even him too, him, puny son of earth;—O then was it impossible for him longer to restrain his full heart; it burst with gratitude, and from his eyes again fell the first tear-drops after long, long years. These holy drops he wiped not away; in them the evening-red ran to a blazing sea; the flute died away; Victor found his eyes still glistening; Emanuel said, "O see, I weep for joy at the thought of my Maker!"—Then were there between these exalted men, on this holy spot, no more words,—death had lost his form,—a sublime sorrow deadened the pangs of separation,—the sun, over which the earth had rolled, touched with his erect beams the heavens and the night and the bottom of the clouds,—the earth glimmered magically like a dream-landscape, and yet it was easy to quit it, for the other dream-landscapes covered the sky.
The earths of night (the planets) had already come out, the suns of night (the fixed stars) had already come forth after them, the moon had already enveloped itself in the southeast storm: when Emanuel saw that it was time to end the scenes of the valley and go up to his Tabor, to give Death the wing-casing of his soul. Hesitating, he begged Victor to go forward a little, that he might not see his parting with the blind one, and haply betray himself by sympathy; for Victor had represented: to the blind one the journey into the other world as only one upon this earth. He stationed himself unhappily out before the hushed sultry fields through which once had passed the rivers of paradise of his love, on which he had once at Clotilda's side seen fairer evenings; on the earth was the stillness of death, as in a church by night, only a leaden cloud, bent down toward the earth, blustered round the heavens, and Death seemed to go from cloud to cloud and array them for battle.
At last he heard Julius weeping. Emanuel came flying out, but in his eyes stood heavier drops than his former ones. And as the forsaken blind one turned away his dark head from his friends in the house-door-way, either because he knew not which way they had gone or would listen to know, then was Victor barely able, for inward sadness, to call back to the bowed form, which dwelt in a double night, that he would return after twelve o'clock.
In the bald evening greeting, "Good night, a pleasant sleep," which Emanuel gave and received, there was more stuff for tears than in whole elegies and farewell-speeches; so true it is that words are only the inscriptions upon our hour,[153] and the ripieno[154]-voices of the scoring of our keynotes.
So soon as Emanuel came out before the night heavens, before the hurricane chained thereto and before his death-mountain, angels lifted up again his softened soul,—he saw death descend from heaven and set up the liberty-tree on his grave,—he saw the friendly stars draw nearer, and they were the heavenly eyes of his friends and of all blessed beings. Victor dared not disturb his poetic hopes by any reasons; much rather was he himself from hour to hour drawn deeper into the belief of his death; at least he feared that to-day's storm of rapture might rend asunder the frail dwelling of this fair heart and of its sighs, and that death would creep about the noble soul till by its very wings, as it rose in its ecstasy, he could pluck it away from life, as children go round and round the butterfly till at last it lifts its wings folded on one another into their predatory fingers.
Emanuel delayed by circuitous paths the ascent of the mountain, in order to raise his broken friend, whose eyes were no longer dry, from one sun to the other, so that in that high position he might look down from the midst of lights upon this shadowy earth and hardly notice the corpse of his friend on account of its littleness. "Yes, this is the reason," said he, "why the earth is every day darkened, like the cages of birds, that we may in the dark more easily catch the higher melodies.—Thoughts which the day makes a dark smoke and vapor stand round about us in the night as flames and lights, as the column which floats over Vesuvius appears a pillar of cloud by day and is a pillar of fire by night." Victor perceived the design, namely, of consoling him, and became the more disconsolate and continued silent.
They did not go up on the side of the mountain to the weeping-birch, but over its slowly ascending ridge. They overlooked the theatre of night, over which the moon and the storm were coming up under a veil; Emanuel stopped and said: "O look up and see the eternally sparkling morning-meadows which lie around the throne of the Eternal! Had never a star shone out of heaven, only then would man lay himself down with anguish in his last sleep, on a dark earth built over like a burial vault without an opening." Before eyes which were fastened on suns, flashing glowworms trailed by, and a bat whizzed after a gray night-butterfly,—three St. John's day fires; lighted by superstition, brought three distant hills out of night,—all life slept under its leaf, under its twig, nearer to its mother, and in the dreams that were strewed about lay storms,—fishes tumbled up like corpses on the surface of the water as forerunners of the thunder.
Suddenly Emanuel began, with an ill-fitting, not sufficiently controlled voice: "Verily we should stand more composedly beside the genius who lets fall the last sands of slumber on the eyes of our loves, if they did not afterward sleep out their last sleep in church vaults, in churchyards, but upon meadows, under the open heavens, or as mummies in chambers.... Now then, my beloved," they heard already the waving of the weeping-birch, "control thy fantasy; thou wilt see near the birch-tree my resting-pit open; I have for four weeks sown and clothed it with flowers which are now mostly in bloom,—thou wilt lay me thus to-morrow, without any other preparation, in my night-dress among the flowers,—and cover it up to-morrow,—but do not, thou good man, give my little flower-piece such hard names as other men do,—to-morrow, I say; to-day go immediately home to thy Julius, when I...." (am dead, he would have said, but could not find for emotion the soft paraphrase).—
Ah! Horion with a sigh tore his agonized eyes out from the cold open grotto of his beloved, and could not look down to its blooming flowers. He sobbed aloud and looked out through tears faintly into Emanuel's face, to see whether he was living or dying. Two glowworms crossed one another in glimmering curves above the grave, they settled down beside it, and were extinguished, for their light ceases with their motion.
The thunder now struck into Victor's wounds with its first clap,—a dissolving lightning covered the Eastern horizon, and the flame ran over the Alpine ridges,—the lightning-rod on the powder-house glowed, its alarm-bells rang, the ignes-fatui played about the tower, and in mid-air a hovering luminous point moved fearfully towards it.
In Maienthal eleven o'clock was called,—at twelve Emanuel believed he should be gone hence. At last Emanuel, unmanned himself by another's sorrow, fell upon his friend and said: "What hast thou further to say to me, my beloved, my inexpressibly dear friend?—by hours are fled,—our farewell approaches,—say thine, and then disturb not my dying. Be still, when death climbs the mountain, and send no lamentations after me, when he takes me up.—What hast thou more to say to me, my eternally beloved?"—"Nothing more, thou angel of heaven! nor can I," said Victor with bleeding and exhausted heart, and laid his oppressed head with streams of tears on Emanuel's shoulder.
"Now then break off thy heart from mine, and farewell,—be happy, be good, be great. I have loved thee very much, I shall love thee once more and then forever. Good, faithful one,—mortal like me, immortal like me!"
The storm-bells tolled more violently,—the hovering luminous point advanced upon the powder-house,—all the covered cloud-volcanoes bellowed side by side and flung their flames together, and the thunders passed like alarm-bells between them,—the two friends lay in each other's arms, close, mute, gasping, clasping, trembling before the last word.
"O speak once more, my Horion, and take leave of thy friend,—only say to me, Rest well! and leave the dying."
Horion said, "Rest well!" and left him. His tears ceased and his sighs were hushed. The thunder came to a fearful pause. Nature was mutely ordering her chaos in the tempest. Not a flash gleamed through the funeral pile in heaven. Only the funeral tolling of the alarm-bells on the lightning-rod continued to speak, and the luminous point to creep onward.
Under the wide stillness lay sleep, dreams, and a friend's inconsolable heart.
In this stillness of eternity Emanuel went up without any other hand in his to the high gate which soars away in black darkness above time.
Silence is the speech of the world of spirits, the starry heaven its nunnery-grating,—but behind this nunnery-grating appeared now no spirit, not even God.
The moment was coming when man looks upon his body and then on his individual self, and then shudders.—The I stands alone beside its shadow,—a foam-globe of being trembles, snaps, and collapses, and one hears the bubble vanish and is one himself.
Emanuel peered into Eternity, it looked like a long night.
He looked round him to see whether he cast a shadow,—a shadow casts no shadow.
Ah! a mute lays man in the cradle, a mute stretches him out in the grave.—When he has a joy, it looks as if a sleeper smiled,—when he weeps and wails, it looks like weeping in one's sleep.—We all look up to heaven and pray for solace; but overhead in the endless blue there is no voice for our heart,—nothing appears, nothing consoles us, nothing answers us.—
And so we die....
—O All-gracious One! we die more happily; only the poor Emanuel wrestled in the silent darkness with fierce thoughts which for so long a time he had not seen, and which clutched at his paling countenance. But these masks flee away, when a friendly fraternal face appears before thee and embraces thee.—Horion raised himself up and warmed again his bowed friend by a mute farewell. A storm-wind precipitated itself out of the clear west into the dumb, laboring hell, and chased out all the lightnings and all the thunders. Lo, at that moment the bright moon flew out from the backward-drifted mass of cloud like an angel of peace into the unstained blue,—then in the light Emanuel stood distinguished from his shadow,—then did the moon illuminate a rainbow of pale color grains, which in the Southeast (the gate to the East Indies) penetrated through the dark water-columns, and arched itself over the Alps,—then Emanuel saw again, as previously, the Jacob's ladder leaning against the earthly night,—then came rapture without measure, and he cried with outspread arms: "Ah, yonder in the East, in the East, over the road to my native land, there glows the arch of triumph, there opens the gate of glory, there the dying march through." ...
And as just then it struck twelve o'clock, he spread out his hand ecstatically towards heaven, which was blue above the mountains, and toward the moon, which reposed serenely beside the tempest, and cried, breaking into blissful tears, "Thanks, Eternal One, for my first life, for all my joys, for this fair earth."—
The flute tones of Julius floated around Maienthal, and he looked down upon the earth.
"And be thou ever blest, thou good earth, thou good mother-land, bloom, ye fields of Hindostan, farewell, thou glowing Maienthal, with thy flowers and with thy people,—and ye brothers, all of you, after a long smile, come and blissfully follow me. Now, O Eternal One, take me up, and console the two survivors."
The death angels stood on all the clouds, and drew their glittering swords out of the nights,—one thunder clapped after another, as if one prison-door of this earthly life after another were flung open.
The terrible luminous point had crept out of mid-air into the powder-house.
The death-hour had already passed, and yet life had not.
Emanuel trembled with yearning and apprehension, because he felt as yet no sign of dying,—moved his hands as if he would give them to some one,—stared into the lightnings as if he would draw them upon him....
"Death! seize me," he cried, beside himself,—"ye dead friends! O father! O mother! tear my heart away, take me,—I cannot—cannot live any longer."—
At that moment a blazing, rattling globe flew up into the tempest, and the powder-house shot itself to pieces like an undermined hell.—The explosion threw the flaming Emanuel pale into his flowery grave; the whole thundering east trembled; the moon and the rainbow were darkened....
Victor, cast headlong, senseless, at last bestirred his arm and felt therewith the cold face, on which to-day the crazy skeleton had read this night beforehand, and which projected above the grave, turned toward heaven. He threw himself upon it and pressed his face to the pale one. Before his tears had forced their way through the hard grief, the clouds carried back their fire-buckets and their funeral torches, and transparent foam-fleeces softly overflowed the moon and settled down at last over the whole valley and over the still couple in a thousand warm drops, which so easily remind man of his own tears. The blowing up of the powder-house by one of the three Englishmen had broken up the naval engagement of the burning clouds.
The dismembered tempest had drifted about in little clouds and stood above the midnight-red in the northeast, when the cold numbness of the shock still held the two men fastened together; at last a hot hand glided down from above between their faces, and a timid voice asked, "Are you asleep?"
"O Julius," said Horion, "come down unto the grave, thy Emanuel is dead." ...
I care not to count the dismal minutes that let two wretched beings lie bound by the thorn-girdle of anguish to a pallid one. But brighter moments came, which first drove every smallest cloud out of the sky and wiped clean the tarnished moon, and then opened the hot eyes before the cleansed and cooled silvery night.
"Ah, he has perhaps only fainted," said Victor after a long while. They raised themselves up with a sigh. Wearily they drew their beloved out of the grave. They would fain carry him down to his dwelling, in order there to bring back again from its solstice this fair soul, as the St. John's sun would return from his. With the slight energies which grief had still spared them, and with the little light which still entered into two wet eyes, they struggled along with the crippled angel, while two laboring shadows beside them frightfully carried a third in the glimmer, from the mountain down into the meadows. Here Victor went alone into the village, in order, perhaps, to provide a more cheerful carriage than a hearse. The blind one stayed himself by a birch-tree, Emanuel slept like the other flowers, and upon them, before the moon.... But suddenly Julius heard the dead man speak and graze him as he passed through the grass; and, pursued by terror, he fled....
—Genius of dreams! thou that walkest through the nebulous sleep of mortals and bringest up before the lonely soul imprisoned in a corpse the happy islands of childhood! O thou that therein restorest to our mouldered friends the bloom of the cheek and showest to our poor frenzied heart past heavens and reflections of Eden and undulating lawns, on clouds!—Magic Genius! enter into this holy night before a man who is not asleep, and turn thy crape-covered glass to my open eye, that I may see therein, and paint, the Elysian world of light which struggles with our earthly shadow, as a pale Luna, in the double eclipse![155]—
The enraptured voice of the dead man cried: "Hail to thee, thou still Elysium!—O thou glimmering land of rest! receive the new shade. Ah, how softly thou glowest,—how softly thou breathest,—how softly thou reposest!" ...
Emanuel's eyes had opened; but in his brain burned the Elysian delirious idea that he had died and waked up in the second world. O thou over-blest! and indeed a glittering Eden did encircle thee,—ah, this glow, this breath, this fragrance, this repose, was too beautiful for an earth. The moon weaved over with silver threads, as with flying summer-gossamer, the green of night,—from leaf to leaf, from trees to trees stretched the sparkling veil of the illuminated rain,—over all waters floated glimmering banks of vapor,—a gentle fanning threw jewels from the twigs into the silver streams,—the trees and the mountains rose like giants into the night,—the everlasting sky stood over the falling sparks, over the fleeting fragrances; over the playing leaves, it alone unchangeable, with fixed suns, with the eternal world-studded vault, great, cool, radiant and blue.—Never did a valley so glimmer, so exhale, so whisper, so enchant before....
Emanuel embraced the sparkling soil and cried out from a burning breast, subdued and stammering with rapture: "Ah, is it true, then? do I really hold thee, my native land?—Ay, in such fields of rest wounds are healed, tears are stilled, no sighs demanded, no sins committed, here in sooth the little human heart dissolves for overfulness of rapture and creates itself anew to dissolve again.... Thus have I long since imagined thee, blessed, magical, dazzling land, that borderest on my earth.... O dear earth! where mayest thou be?"
He lifted his intoxicated eye to the star-bedewed heaven, and saw the low-sunken moon hanging faint and yellow in the south; this he took for the earth, from which he supposed death had borne him into this Elysium. Here his voice dissolved into emotion at the beloved earliest garden of his life, and he addressed the earth flying overhead above the stars:—
"Globe of tears! Dwelling of dreams! Land full of shadows and spots!—Ah, on thy broad shadowy spots[156] the good children of men will be at this moment trembling and sinking!... A ring of clouds[157] encircles thee, and they see not Elysium.... Ah, how silently thou bearest through the still, blessed heavens thy battle-cry—thy storms—thy graves; thy enveloping atmosphere shuts in like a coffin all the voices of wailing round about thee, and thou glidest with thy bowed and enshrouded ones only as a pale, still ball away above Elysium!...
"Ah, ye precious ones, my Horion! my Julius! Ye are still up yonder in the tempest, ye cover up my corpse, ye look weeping towards Heaven and cannot see Elysium.... O that you were already through the wet cloud of life!—but perhaps ye have already been long sleeping and waking, perhaps time goes otherwise on earth than in eternity.—Ah! that you might come down into the still pastures!" He saw in the magically magnifying glimmer two forms walking. "Oh, who is it?" he cried, flying to meet them. "O father! O mother! Are you here?"—But when he came nearer, he sank into four other arms, and stammered, "Blessed, blessed are we now, my Horion! my Julius!"—At last he said: "Where are my parents and my brothers and Clotilda and the three Brahmins? know they not that their Dahore is in Elysium?"
Victor beheld disconsolately the delirious ecstasy of his beloved, and said neither yes nor no. The latter gazed with a heavenly smile and a stream of love into the face of Julius, and said, "Look on me, thou couldst never see me on the earth."—"Thou knowest well that I am blind, my Emanuel," said the blind one. Here the frenzied man, turning away his quivering eyes suddenly and with a sigh to the moon, fled from his friends, saying to himself in a low voice: "The two forms are only shadowy dreams from the earth,—I will not look upon them, so that they may melt away.—So then the shadowy and dreamy woe of earth reaches over even into Eden. Haply I am still in a dream of death, for the region round about me looks like the landscapes in my life-dreams,—or is this only the fore-court of heaven, as I do not find my parents?" ... He looked toward the lofty stars: "Where do I now stand below you? New heavens lie on new heavens.—Ah, does one yearn then even here?"
He sighed and wondered that he sighed. He leaned down on the pearl-glistening hill of flowers, with his back to the beloved shadows and his eyes towards the kindling dawn, and groped and dreamed,—but at last the coolness of morning overspread the seeking, dazzled, burning eyes, which to-day had fallen now upon shapes of terror, now into seas of ecstasy, with gentle slumber and with corresponding dreams... "Rest softly, thou weary man!" said his friend; but the sleeper glowed with the horizon, and the old delusion played on within him again....
A dream and the morning laid for him the groundwork of a still higher Elysium.
He dreamed God would descend from a throne of suns, and in the form of an invisible, infinite zephyr's breath move over Elysium.
The first morning of summer heaped around him the bridal finery of the earth,—it lined the fields with pearl-banks of dew, and flung over the burrowing brooks the gold tinsel and spangles of the descending flush of morn, and hung upon the bushes the bracelets of burning drops.—But not until it had cloven open all the flowers,—sent out all the birds, quivering with gladness through the radiant heavens,—hid singing voices in all tree-tops,—not till it had sunk the faded moon behind the earth, and set up the sun like a god's throne over wreaths of clouds just burst into bloom, and over all gardens and around all woods had hung intertwined rainbows of dew,—and not till the blissful one stammered in his dreaming, "All-gracious One, All-gracious One, appear in the Elysium!"—not till then did the slowly flowing morning wind awaken him and usher him into the thousand-voiced jubilant choirs of creation, and set him to reeling blindly in the ringing, blazing Elysium.—
And lo! at this moment, a vast, boundless breath, cool, stirring, whispering, overflowed the whole enkindled Paradise; and the little flowers bowed themselves down silently, and the green ears soughing undulated together, and the stately trees trembled and murmured,—but only the great breast of man drank in in streams the infinite breath, and Emanuel's heart dissolved, ere it could say, "This is Thyself, All-loving One!"
—Thou, that readest me here, deny not God, when thou steppest out into the morning or under the starry heavens, or when thou art good or when thou art happy!—
—But, unhappy Emanuel!
Thou beheldest five sporting black butterflies, and thoughtest the fair creatures blessed Psyches.—Thou heardest behind thy hill a hewing into the earth, as if men were making a grave.—Thou lookedst upon thy good blind darling, and yet saidst, "Shadow! retire.... Tremble before God, who just passed by, and vanish!"—But thou saidst, before that, something else which I to-day do not disclose.—
My heart trembles before the coming line!—
Howling with pain, grinning with exultant fury, the crazy skeleton sprang forth from behind the hill into the blessed plain, bearing in its right hand a bloody hand that had been hewed off, and shook from the left stump, from which its madness had hacked it off, trickling fountain-curves of blood, and pressed to itself with the right arm a spade, designed for the burying of the hand, and screamed with a grin of exultation and agony: "Death grabbed me by it, but I snapped it off,—and when he sees the grave of the fist, he will be so stupid as to think it is I lying there ... Ah, thou there! Lay thyself, prithee, to bed in the coffin; he has bored out thy eyes and clogged thy maw with mould.... Brr!"
"O All-gracious One, thou hast damned me!" stammered Emanuel; the driven blood broke from his crushed lung, and the disconsolate one staggered and sank dying on the blood-stained flowers of his lost heaven....
Thus does one day rob another of its heaven, and ere bereaved man enters yonder into the last paradise, he has lost too many here below!—Ah, we bear into every spring-air of this life and into the ether of the second a breast yawning with wounds; and it must first be closed, before it can fill itself!...