Chapter IV: Part 4

But the light was just then carried from the chamber, and the first stream fell unseen into the lap of night.

The harmonica began the melody of the dead: "How softly they slumber." Ah, in such tones do the far-wandering waves of the sea of eternity beat against the hearts of darkling mortals who stand on the shore and yearn to put forth! Now art thou, Horion, wafted by a wave of harmony out of the mist-rain of life over into the light of eternity! Hear, what tones murmur round the broad fields of Eden! Do not the strains, dissipated into breaths, reverberate from distant flowers, and float, swollen by echo, round the swan-bosom, which, blissfully dissolving, swims on pinions, and draw it on from flood to flood of melody, and sink with it in the distant flowers, which a cloud of fragrances fills, and does not in the fragrant dusk the soul glow again like a ruddy evening, ere it sets in bliss?

O Horion, does the earth still abide under us, drawing its circle of death-hills round the breadth of life? Do these tones tremble in an earthly air? O Music! thou that bringest the Past and the Future with their flying flames so near to our wounds, art thou the evening-breath of this life, or the morning air of the life to come? Ay, thy sounds are echoes, which angels snatch from the second world's tones of gladness, to convey down into our mute hearts, into our dreary night the faint spring-melodies of heavens flying far above us! And thou, dying harmonica-tone! verily thou comest to us out of an peal of exultation, which, driven from heaven to heaven, dies at last in the remotest mute heaven, which consists of nothing but a deep, broad, tranquil, and eternal bliss....

"Tranquil and eternal bliss," repeats Horion's dissolving soul, whose rapture I have hitherto made my own, "ay, _there_ will lie the region where I shall lift up my eyes toward the All-gracious, and spread out my arms toward _her_, toward this weary soul, toward this great heart. Then shall I fall upon thy heart, Clotilda, then shall I clasp thee forever, and the flood of tranquil and eternal bliss will close around us. Breathe again toward life, earthly tones, between my breast and hers, and then let a little night, an undulating shadowy outline, swim along on your light waves, and I will look toward it and say, That was my life;--then shall I say more softly, and weep more intensely, Ay, man is unhappy, but only on the earth."

O, if there is a human being over whom, at these last words, memory draws great rain-clouds, to him, to her, I say, Beloved brother, sister, I am, to-day, as much moved as thou; I respect the sorrow which thou hidest,--ah! thou excusest me, and I thee....

The tune stopped and died away. What stillness now in the dark! Every sigh took the form of a long-drawn breathing. Only the nebulous stars of sensibility sparkled brightly in the darkness. No one saw whose eye had been wet. Victor looked into the still, black air before him, which a few minutes ago had been filled with hanging-gardens of tones, with dissolving air-castles of the human ear, with diminished heavens, and which now remained a naked, black firework-scaffold.

But the harmonica soon filled this darkness again with meteorological apparitions of worlds. Ah, why, then, must it needs strike precisely that melody which woke such restless yearnings in my Victor, the "Forget-me-not," which sounded out to him the verses, as if he repeated them to Clotilda. "Forget me not, now that fate sternly calls thee away from me. Forget me not, when the cool earth one day rests lightly upon this heart, that fondly beat for thee. Think it is I, when some soft voice shall whisper to thy thought, Forget me not." ... And O, when these tones intertwine themselves with waving flowers, when they flow backward from one past to another, when they ripple more and more faintly through the past years that repose back of man's memory,--at last only murmur under the dawn of life,--only well up inaudibly under the cradle of man,--and stiffen in our cold twilight and dry up in the midnight, when each of us was not,--then does man, deeply moved, cease any longer to conceal his sighs and his infinite pangs.

The still angel at Victor's side could no longer veil them, and Victor heard Clotilda's first sigh.

Ay, then he took her hand as if he would sustain her, hovering over an open grave.

She gave up her hand to him, and her pulse throbbed trembling in unison with his.

Finally only the last lingering tone of the song still flung out its melodious circles in the ether, and its wake undulated away over a whole past,--then a distant echo wrapped it up in a fluttering breath of air, and wafted it away through deeper echoes, and finally over to the last which lay round about heaven,--then the tone expired and flew as a soul into one of Clotilda's sighs.

Then the first tear escaped from her, and fell like a hot heart on Victor's hand.

Her friend was overpowered,--she was carried away,--he pressed the soft hand,--she drew it out of his,--and went slowly out of the chamber, in order to come again to the help of the too tender heart, over whose sweet signs night hung her veil....

The light which was brought in took away these dream-worlds. Matthieu and the Chamberlain's lady appeared also. We will not, however, in this soft mood, when one is precisely the severest against evil natures, say or think anything about the new couple which cannot help its contrast to our tenderness. Victor said this to himself, too, but more than once; because the Apothecary's lyingly alleged engagement of Clotilda to Matthieu impressed itself upon him in the liveliest colors, as resembling that platonic union, in which the pure spirit, driven out of its ether and with crooked-up wings, is immured in an unclean body. Clotilda came back. She was in a state of embarrassment towards Victor, merely because he was in one, or was to be still more so by her side in the sleigh,--the swollen ball of her eye she withdrew from the light. As condensation of tears, like inspissation of milk, oppresses and destroys; his sadness, repressed and drawn back into his innermost being, sought an outlet through the voice, which was vehement and abrupt; through the motions of the body, which were quick; even through vivacity of expression;--in short, it was well that they started.

He thought the opposite again, when he stood behind her on the sleigh. The night seemed to have withdrawn behind the clouds, whose wide arch occupied the heavens. He could not hunt up any subject of conversation, let him think as much as he would,--he ran through Clotilda's, Victor's, all his acquaintances' lives,--nothing occurred to him. The reason was, that his thoughts, which he sent out on this errand, returned every minute without his knowledge, and hung like bees on Clotilda's noble profile, or on her soft eye, or buried themselves in that tear of hers which had fallen on his hand, and in the whole ethereal sea of to-day's tones. The dark heaven above him finally put into his head Emanuel's last communication, and he could relate to her out of that the blind youth's initiation into the highest thought of man. Clotilda listened to him with delight, and at last said: "No one is more fortunate than a pupil of such a teacher: but he must never go into the world,--there he will be so no longer. His teacher has given him too soft a heart; and a soft heart, as you yourself say, hangs, like soft, fruit, so low down, that every one can reach and wound it; the hard fruits hang higher."

They had arrived now at the hard fruits of the capital, and her remark was her own history. But the new scenes,--the rattling carriages and rustling dresses,--the much ado about little or nothing,--the hall-lights like systems of fixed stars,--the double mouth-_un_harmonicas,--the masculine court-fauna,--the feminine court-flora,--the whole mobilized pleasure camp,--this din of a fair drowned the muffled echo which passed to and fro between two harmonious souls.

Our hero was received by the Princess in a more friendly manner than even by the Prince. Joachime, Clotilda's lieutenant in office, had, in addition to her cold angry friendliness, a _montre à régulateur_ rich in jewels. In a public place it costs less than in a cabinet to cover the inner man with the outer as with a theatrical mask. Victor, on whom, besides, every _sorrow_ produced the witty effect of _intoxication_, betrayed the former at most by the exuberance of his vivacity.

A woman betrays herself by the opposite,--Clotilda by nothing. He expressed to her in the singular stunned state into which outer tones of joy and inner fantasies put one, when they come together like two streams meeting, the following ideas: "Were I the Goddess of delight (if there is one), I would have it strike three; round the chandeliers I would draw prismatic colors, or in fact would hang them up in the cabinets and diffuse through the dancing-hall with incense a magic twilight,--then I should have to set back the tones of the orchestra through so many apartments, that nothing of the music should find its way hither but a soft echo,--and then if in the glimmering maze, breathing throughout with melodies, the people did not, after some silent movements, feel like sinking away with ecstasy, I greatly mistake." ... "Add further," said she, "in order that we too may have one, that we stay here and observe the dissolving."

But his composure hardly ever at any ball survived the minuet. After the first din was over, at least about the witching hour, his whole soul was always dissolved into a poetic melancholy which hardly left him the mastery of his eyes. Besides the tones, I can further adduce the _motion_ as an explanation of this phenomenon: all motion, in the first place, is sublime,--that is to say, of great masses; or rather every quick motion imparts to the object the greatness of the space hurried through: hence, in contrast with the end in view, objects in motion are more comic than those at rest. Secondly, the movement of men imaged to him their fluttering by, their fleeing into graves; often at night he would stop in sad musing under the windows of houses, where they were dancing in the second story, and look up, and the gliding by of heads in their movement was to him the mad dance of _ignes fatui_ in the churchyard.

To-night with his melted, overflowing soul, he felt this sooner than ever. The Anglaise, in which one couple after another disappears from the column, was the very image of our shadowy life, into which we all march out with drums, and encircled with thousands of playmates, and in which we grow poorer and poorer every year as we move onward, every hour more solitary, and in which we hurry to the end forsaken by all except a hired man, who buries us behind the goal. But death spreads out, as it were, our arms, and folds them around our beloved brothers and sisters; a human being feels for the first time on the brink of the tomb, when he comes upon the realm of unknown beings, how much he loves the known ones who love him, who suffer like him, and like him die.

As a woman in no way discloses to us more touchingly the whole blessed past, than when she lifts her eyelids and shows us her beaming eyes, accordingly he could not well help, during the dance, at least, looking into an eye, which pictured to him nothing but heavens that had set,--and to-night all was to set for him, even the eye itself. And as Clotilda usually grew pale with dancing, he entered through her eyes into her innermost being, and counted there the tear-drops that hung undisturbed on the still soul,--the many incisions made by the grafting-knife of fate for new virtues,--the clipped roots which fate shortens in this flower as we do in lowlier plants, before transplanting into another soil,--and the thousand honey-vessels of sweet thoughts. And as he thought on all her hidden virtues at once, on the supremacy of her womanly reason over her sensibility, on her easy consent in regard to the ball which the Prince now imposed upon her, as well as in regard to the rouging on which the Princess had before insisted, and on her ready compliance, whenever she had to sacrifice nothing but herself;--and as he held the thought before his mind how she, not like the women of court and city, who, like shrubs at the window of the greenhouse, spread themselves out after the light, but like spring flowers, loved to bloom in the shade, and yet made as little show of her fondness for country life as of her modesty;--he had to turn away his eye from the delicate, upright flower, on which death threw down the gravestone; from that loveliest soul who never yet saw her worth in the glass of an equal; from the dying heart, which nevertheless was not happy.

And then, to be sure, the thought before which he shrank into himself sprang up like a storm: "I will tell her to-day how good she is,--O, I shall certainly never see her again, and she will die, otherwise unknown to herself! I will fall at her feet and confess my inexpressible love. She cannot be angry; God knows I crave not her holy heart, which no man deserves; I will only say, Mine shall never forget thee, but it desires not thine, only it will break more gently when it has trembled and bled and wept and spoken before thee." ...

Close behind this thought came to him Clotilda herself, hand in hand with her step-mother, and, the face robbed of its color by the warmth as roses are by the sun, the tired and more sick-looking features put forth the silent prayer to come out into the fresh air and go home.

She went; her step-mother followed her at a distance. What a change of scene! Under the eastern gate of heaven stood the moon, who had taken off the funeral veil of cloud from the milky-way and the whole blue abyss. She gradually laid out a ground of silver, and sketched upon it with gleams and shadows a growing night-piece. The frost seemed to condense her light into body, into white meadows, into tumbling streams, into floating flakes; it hung glistering as white blossoming foliage on the bushes, it glimmered up the eastern mountains, which the sun had cast into ice-mirrors. And all above man and around man was sublimely still,--sleep played with death,--every heart rested in its own night.

And here, at this entrance, as it were, out of the turmoil of earth into the still twilight-shrouded underworld, cold thrills and after them glowing thrills ran over Victor's nerves. This happens when the soul of man is too full and too sorely agitated, and all the threads of the trembling web of the fleshly organism sway with it. His sleigh became now a flying gondola. The night-air blowing against him kindled all his flames. O the stream full of ice-points, if it had only swept over him! the cool coverlet of snow, if it were only laid upon him! A voice was continually crying within him: "Thou art bearing the still, the patient one with her black veil to death; it is her hearse: the noble pearl-diver has given heaven her sign that she has collected here below enough sorrows and virtues, that it may draw her up again to itself." The procession of mountains gliding by, the trees that whirled past, the fields that fled away, this flight of nature seemed to form together one great cataract that carried all before it, and man first of all, and left nothing behind it but time. And as he rolled down into the valley, where the city disappears, as did a year ago his female escort, and the moon behind the trees began seemingly to scud through the heavens, then he lifted his eyes toward the stars, and, bent backward in a rigid gaze, spoke aloud as out of a shattered heart to the heavens: "Deep blue grave over men, thou hidest thy broad nights behind crowded suns! Thou drawest us and our tears upward like vapors. Ah, cast not poor short-sighted mortals so far asunder, so infinitely far! And why cannot man look up to thee without thinking: who knows what loved heart I may not a year hence have to seek up yonder!"

His darkened eyes fell painfully from heaven--upon Clotilda's, which were lifted over against his. The tear which had just fallen from her eye down to her cheek she could neither conceal through the veil, nor make believe to be a snow-flake which had melted on her face, since the veil kept off the flakes; but such a tear needed no veil. Clotilda had thought lie meant merely Emanuel, and therefore she was touched and softened.... Like two parting angels, the two now beheld each other with tearful eyes. But Clotilda withdrew hers, and her sinking head bent. Nevertheless, she turned round again, and with her heavenly face and heavenly voice presented to him the sweet prayer: "Bestow this warm friendship upon my brother also; and forgive his sister today this prayer, as I may not for a long time have an opportunity to renew it." He bowed himself down low, and could not answer.

But when now her place of residence and her castle, from which the silver rain of the moon ran down, gleamed before their eyes,--as the moment came on, darker and darker, in which the parting (perhaps the mask of death) was to take this still angel from his side,--as every indifferent formula of leave-taking which he could imagine to himself lacerated his sick heart,--as he saw how she leaned her head on her hand and on the veil, in order, unobserved, to remove or check the first signs of her farewell,--then did the whole cloud which had so long been letting fall single drops into his eyes, rent asunder, rush down upon him and flood his heart.... Suddenly he stopped.... He looked with still gushing eyes toward St. Luna.... Clotilda turned round, and beheld a colorless face, a brow full of sorrows, and a quivering lip, and said bashfully, "Your soul is too good and too tender." Ay, then his over-full heart burst in twain. Then gushed up all the depths of his soul in which old tears had been so long accumulating, and lifted up from the roots his swimming heart, and he sank down before Clotilda, radiant with heavenly love and streaming sorrow,--mantled with the flame of virtue,--transfigured by the moonlight,--with his true, helpless breast, with his veiled eyes,--and the dissolving voice could only utter the words: "Angel of heaven! the heart breaks at last which loves thee inexpressibly. O, long indeed have I been silent. No, thou noble form, never canst thou pass out of my soul.--O soul from heaven, why have thy sufferings and thy goodness, and all that thou art, inspired me with an eternal love, and with no hope, but with an eternal sorrow?" Her agitated face lay bent aside from him in her right hand, and the left covered only her eyes, but not her tears. A dying sound implored him to rise. They heard the second sleigh far off. "Never-to-be-forgotten one! I torment thee, but I will remain where I am till thou hast granted me a token of forgiveness." She extended to him her left hand, and the gesture disclosed a holy countenance full of emotion. He pressed the warm hand to his flaming face, into his hot streams of tears. Trembling, he again asked: "O, my fault grows greater every moment! Will you, then, wholly forgive it?" ...

Then did the blushing face bury itself in the folded veil, and, turning away, stammered: "Ah, then I must share it, noble friend of my teacher."

Blessed, blessed man! After this word, the whole of earthly life has no greater heaven to offer thee! Rest now in silent rapture with thy overpowered face upon the angelic hand, into which the noblest of hearts pours the blood that kindles for virtue! Shed all thy tears of joy upon the dear hand which has given them to thee! And then,--if thou canst for rapture or for reverence,--then lift up thy pure, glistening eye, and show her therein the look of sublime love, the look of the love which is eternal and speechless and blissful and unspeakable!

Ah! he, who had ever been loved by a Clotilda, could now read no farther,--write no farther,--for ecstasy ... or else for pain!

Silent and sanctified he now sped along the fair road; the moon hung down from heaven like a dewy morning overlaid with white blossoms; spring stirred its meadows and its flowers under the veil of snow; rapture throbbed in Victor's heart, swelled in his breast, shone in his eye; but speechless reverence controlled his rapture.... They arrived. And when, in the harmonica-chamber, where in the evening he had grasped her hand for anguish, they now stood alone face to face, so changed, so blest for the first time, two such hearts,--she like an angel who had descended from heaven, he like a mortal who had risen from the earth, to fill on the heart of the timid angel, and, speechless, to go back with her to heaven.... What an hour! O, only for you, ye fair souls, who have never experienced such an hour, and yet have deserved it, do I go on picturing this one!... Like two risen ones before God, they look into each other's eyes and souls,--like a zephyr, which two swaying roses prolong, breathes between the trembling lips the speechless sigh of bliss, drunk in by the bosom in quick inspirations, and issuing with a tremulous thrill of glad awe in long expirations,--they continue silent, to look at each other, they lift their eyes, to see through the drop of joy, and cast them down again to dry it away with the eyelid.... No, it is enough: O, there is another tear that now lies heavily on the fair heart, which is silent and would say, I was never happy, nor ever shall be!

Victor had so much to say to her, and had so few minutes more left for it; and yet not so much joy as reverence made him dumb,--for sacred to the loving heart is the form that has said to it, I am thine. But think not he would make any such rude request to her, as that she would stay here on his account; only the _question_ whether he might visit her in _Maienthal_, only the _prayer_ that she would take thought of her recovery, can he venture upon. Clotilda had only one to make to him, which she could not sufficiently veil over, namely, that, for the sake of her jealous brother, he would not see her in Maienthal.

During the lingerings of rapture, they hear the bells of the second sleigh. Haste necessitated courage. Victor transformed his _prayer_ into the _wish_ that spring might favor the design of her journey (restoration to health), and the _question_ into the _joyful thought_ how happy she would be in Maienthal by the side of Dahore, how blest he had once been there, and how little he had once dreamed that one could ever be still more so there. Clotilda answered (probably to his wish of following her thither): "I leave behind quite as much to you,--my _brother_ and your _friend_; forget not my former prayer."

Not until the approaching parents reminded Clotilda to throw back her veil, and admonished her beloved to take his first leave of the heart which he had won,--not till then did they both look far into the great Eden which had opened around their life,--and the bright moment which now darted by in the stream of time projected into eternity the images of two heavenly forms,--one unveiled, pale-red, transfigured with tears, and one glorified by love, radiant with the reflection of hope. And now let no longer the hand sketch souls, which not even the great, glowing eye of love can portray....

When the parents came, he felt, but he forgave, all possible contrasts. He soon took his leave, that he might at home, in the silence of night, throw the first prayerful glance over the stream of his future life, which now glided on toward the grave in lines of beauty, and in which gay minutes played like goldfishes.

In the stillness of night, not far from his wax-mummy, the happy one thought to fall down before the Infinite Genius and thank him, with new tears, for this night, for this friend, of whom he is the first love. But the thought of doing it is the deed, and O, how could our touched heart, which even before men is dumb, find any other words before the Infinite than tears and thoughts?

And in this resigned frame, full of deep tranquillity, wherein I lay down the pen, mayst thou, dear reader, lay aside this book, and say with me, There may well be more sad days that will conclude like the Twenty-eighth Dog-Post-Day.

* * * * *

PREFACE TO PART III.

(_Which in the first edition came on a dozen sheets earlier_.)

As the Intercalary Day this time falls in with the Preface, and as it begins, too, with the letter V,[47] both indeed can, with uncommon felicity, be despatched together.

SEVENTH INTERCALARY DAY.

End of the Register of Extra-Shoots.

U. V.

Unfeelingness of Readers.--Vol. III. (Preface to.)

There were once happy times, when one had nothing to suffer from his fellow-savage and neighbor, except being struck dead,--when the hail was the only knout-master of the skin, whereas now the trade-wind of the visiting-fan is to us a whirlwind, and the cool breath over the teacup a sea-breeze,--when one took less interest in another's trouble than in his fodder,--when the ladies never wounded the gentlemen in bear-skins in any way (least of all with glances, charms, tresses), except with clubs, and when, to be sure, they possessed themselves, as well as to-day and to-morrow, of the heart of an honest man, but only in this way, by first stretching out the proprietor of it on an altar and regularly slaughtering him, before they cut out the heavenly globe from his chest.

These times we have now all forfeited; in those which are upon us, things look badly. By heaven! one really needs not much less than everything to make him happy, and little more than nothing to make him unhappy,--for the former he requires a sun, for the latter a particle of sun-dust! We should be well off, and have the key to large apartments in all pleasure-castles, if fate had provided for us that we should endure, say as many degrees of torture as the Jurists have, namely, three,--no more plagues than the Egyptians underwent, namely, seven,--no more persecutions than the first Christians stood out, namely, ten. But for such drawings of fortune a man of sense does not look; at least, no one promises himself such prizes, who like me sits down and considers our humming-bird stomachs,--our soft caterpillar skins,--our ears tingling of themselves,--our eyes which are their own tinder,--and our _culs de Paris_, which can be pierced, not by a crumpled rose-leaf, but by the very shadow of a thorn,--and our fine complexion, which without a moon-umbrella would blacken in the moonlight.... And yet in this account of our troubles,--because I am diligently intent upon lessening them,--I have not included other quite different, most accursed items, but have left out riches, e. g., entirely, that smart-money for so many thousand gashes and fractures of the breast, and in fact millions of wounds which would make our riddled self absolutely transparent, were it not fortunately clothed from head to foot in English court-plaster.... But I left out all such stuff, because I knew it would after all amount to nothing, if I should set it off against a quite different purgatory and tempest into which we male-kind particularly are thrown, if we are so unfortunate as to keelhaul ourselves, that is to say, fall in love, which in my poor opinion is a slight foretaste of hell, as well as of heaven. Let the best peeress in this department write to me, and enclose it post-paid to the publishing office in Berlin, and give me her name, if she was capable of not flaying and impaling her poor _pastor fido_, nor persecuting him with backbitings, nor filling his heart full of bruises with the compression-machines of her hands, his head full of fissures with the bastinado of the fan, his breast full of blisters with her eyes, nor of giving him, as they do to tobacco, a mellowing with her tears.... At least I myself at this present moment come straight from such a house of correction and baiting-house, and my skin looks as pitiably as if I had a scalped one over my limbs.

We will say no more of this. My intention in all this is to brace up the reader, because a wholly new rainy-constellation (Pleiad) which I have not at all named is rising in his horizon, to snow upon him. This will rage worse than all that has gone before. What I mean is this: An imperial citizen may be just giving the finishing touch to everything,--his coffers[48] and his enemies may have been already overturned, and his labors right well received by the public or the board,--his pleas for delay have been allowed, and the quinquenniats[49] of his debtors refused,--his youngest daughter, who, like the eldest of the French king's brother, is called Mademoiselle, may already have got through with the measles and her betrothal afterward; it avails him nothing, the worst of all, a whole Gehenna still awaits him on his book-shelves; for there may the fair spirits (let him have swallowed as he may all bitter salt of fate) have sliced for him, under the name of romance-manna, a hard tear-bread, which I, for my part, should be glad neither to bake nor to chew,--truly they may (to use another metaphor) have composed and placed in readiness for him dead-marches and funeral cantatas, which shall utterly upset him and make him so warm that his eyes shall run over.

And unfortunately warm-blooded and soft-skinned excellent men are just the ones least remarkable for steadiness and moderation in bearing the poetical sorrows which authors send them. I cannot, therefore, possibly leave this third part, which will too easily affect people, wholly without a preface in the way of counterpoise, unless I am willing to be myself the cause of innocent persons weeping over the best scenes of this part, and suffering from sympathy. Such too sensitive persons, to whom Nature has denied æsthetic apathy to cases of great distress in tragedies and romances, should,--unless they are fat, for sorrow is good for fatness as a fasting-cure and _lapis infernalis_,[50]--these should make themselves cold, and arm themselves against the tragic poet with philosophy; they should console themselves during the reading of a great affliction and say: "How long does such a printed misery last? How soon a book and a life are over! To-morrow thou wilt think very differently. The unhappy condition into which I am here brought by Shakespeare exists, in truth, only in my own imagination, and my sorrow over it is indeed, according to the stoic, only illusion. One must not, says Epictetus in his handbook, bewail that which lies not in our will, and the sad scene of Klopstock here is, in fact, an external thing, which thou canst not alter. Wilt thou let thyself be shamed by a North American, by a saltwork-man of Halle, by the rabble, by the Cretin from Gex,[51] who bore that whole scene from Goethe's Tasso quietly and composedly, without the moistening of an eye?"

I assure the readers that I take the field here only against their wives and sisters; for among readers of our sex stout-hearted spectators of æsthetic woes have never been wholly wanting, and still less than among the vulgar themselves; and least of all would I have the appearance of disputing the great majority of business-people, reviewers, criminal-lawyers, and Dutchmen, the possession of great composure during the reading of sad crape-clad scenes, which I and others give to the press. Much rather do I fondly persuade myself that--if there ever was hope of the like--it is precisely now, when the German promises to put on that Belgian stoicism, that noble insensibility, which so becomes him, and through which he is made bullet- and blade-proof against Melpomene's dagger, and goes through Dante's hell, as Christ did through the real one, without suffering. We never, to be sure, had the sensibility of the French, and their Racine would never have been for us anything more than a prince's jester; but we are now, if an author does not absolutely push the matter too far and bring in too many battle-fields, and cups of rat-poison, and gallows-trees,--for that takes hold of us,--but if he only half good-humoredly trots along--I seem really to see him at this moment riding--on a mourning-steed, and shakes with one hand a death-bell, and with the other swings (ah, woe!) a funeral-marshal's baton; or if, finally, he only delineates the invisible, stanched gashes of the tenderer, more delicate soul;--then are we now already in a condition to maintain our merry humor, and to show what a German can endure. People of more moderate force _sleep_ at least, so as not to _suffer_ over a Goethe's _Iphigenia_, because sleep sets sufferers right; or we absolutely forget such elegies, because, according to Plattner, we have no memory for sorrows, and because oblivion--as a prince wrote--is the only remedy for sorrows; or Heaven sends us, as after sorrow joy, after a Messiad (of which a good travesty were to be desired for us) a Blumauer's parody, over which we can easily forget the preceding epopee.

W.

Women.--Ye sweet, soft spring flowers and angel shoots by the side of us hard winter-cabbage-stumps, I have indeed already, under the former letter, remembered you and your tenderness in contrast to the German _immeltableness_! What shall I further say, except that, when you are good, you are so in the highest degree, and that you and the Cornwall tin have one and the same kind of stamp,--namely, the figure of an angel?

X (see I K S).--Y (see I).--Z (see T S).

Tz.

Spitz.--Poor Spitz likes as well to be in Prefaces among Extra-Shoots as his Master, and comes in just right with the Twenty-ninth Chapter. I can talk for hours with Pomeranian dogs, as Yorick did with asses. I will now set the messenger of the gods on his hind-feet and hold him by the fore-paws, that he may listen to me in an erect posture.----"Stand, nimble beast!--I talk with thee about something only that I may place thee in the third Preface. It deserves, Spitz, to be remarked, that thou art a rogue as men are, and like them wilt not remain _straight_, but _crooked_ and bowed down, merely for the sake of eating well; thou and they will, like Faro-cards, win by _bending_ and _crooking_, as the common English bend their bad silver money that it may not be passed for less, namely, two pieces for one. Thou hast false eyes, but nevertheless thy actions are good. The reviewers, impatient cattle, say, if they were in thy place, they would bring along the biographical building-stuff more industriously, that the biography might be over before it snows;--meet them not with the counter-assertion, that I might do like Baronius, who began his annals without a beard and ended them with a gray one. In that can only reviewers (but not I) imitate him, who have time to polish, and who can begin a work beardless, on shaving day, and not till three days after finish it, when they are lathered.---Just fall down, Hofmann, and eat; thou art at least not wholly without sense, and givest more heed to an harangue, after all, than a Dauphin-fœtus, and at least waggest thy tail, which the fœtus does not. I have now to talk with quite other people, and the fewest possible among them wag their tails in token of appreciation, Spitz!"

JEAN PAUL.

29. DOG-POST-DAY.

Conversion.--Billet-Doux of the Watch.--Crape Hat.

In the morning Clotilda went off to her poplar-Island, and at noon Victor departed to his Pontine marsh,--both contented with a separation which made them worthy to enjoy a reunion. The first thing to which the court-physician gave himself in Flachsenfingen was--afterthought, or rather after-feeling. Man is the Iceland-spar of time, which shows all scenes twice, side by side. Memory caught once more in her mirror the moonshine of last night, and the angels which floated in it, and turned the mirror with this lustre, with this perspective, towards my Victor. He thought over Clotilda's past conduct, in which he--as I hope my reader has--discovered the traits of the purest love, which looks with only one eye out of the veil, together with the traces of a decided mastery of woman's feelings over woman's wishes. She comes on the 1st of May from Maienthal with a weeping heart, which, torn away from a dead companion, still bleeds on from its open wounds.--The pupil of Emanuel meets her, and she hastens back again to the grave, there to quench in tears of mourning her first love.--But Emanuel communicates his holy fire to this love by his own, by his praise of the beloved, by his open letter full of germinating love, which the latter had written to him on the birthday festival of the 4th of May.--She returns unrestored, towards the time of his approaching departure.--But her good Emanuel, with the cruel kindness of friendship, impresses the image which makes her heart too uneasy still more deeply into its wounds, by reporting to her Victor's life in Maienthal and his confession that he loves her. Victor is silent before her, but she thinks he is so because he has no permission from his father to speak with her about Flamin's relationship.--He goes to court, and seems to forget her, nay, he puts upon her the chains of the court office, which nevertheless, as he knows, oppress her soul even to blood. Her parents, either by way of sounding her, or of flattering her secret suitor Matthieu with her female veiling of herself, extort from her by a tyrannical question the unhappy No, which deceives her brother and repels her friend. Victor steals away, on her festal evening, from the garden, without speaking to her, thereupon visits her parents again, and grows entirely cool. Now she hears nothing more of him excepting, at most, of his pleasures at court and his visits to Joachime.----Ay, thou good soul, thus, in conflict with wishes and with troubles, in sick pining after the loved soul, must all thy joys go to sleep and thy hopes die out, and thy innocent cheeks grow pale!----As, now, Victor thus thought over this sad past, and remembered how, in the playhouse, where he revealed to her his knowledge of her sisterly relation, the last bloom of her cheek, the last twig of hope, fell off, because she could regard his previous silence as owing to a command of his father,--and as all these traits conspired to form the image of a heavenly queen before whom it is easier to kneel down than to embrace her,--and as he further reflected that this noble heart, improved by an Emanuel and worthy of an Emanuel, nevertheless gave itself with all its heavens to the fickle heart of the pupil----and that the good soul could not have even this modest wish fulfilled, because fate delayed the blossoming of her love like that of a rose-bush by transplanting it, by setting it in the shade, by clipping the buds in _spring_ and _autumn_,--and as he saw that nevertheless this noble one had gone off to Maienthal with her finger on her lips, with her hand on her heavy heart, without a hint of her bitter disappointment, and that moral coldness _lifted up_ this flower, as physical cold does other flowers, but tore from it thereby the roots of life,--and as, finally, his dream on the third Easter-holiday, when it appeared to him as if he saw her rise singing from the earth on a light veil of mist, passed by before him like a great rain-cloud, and the dream with her faded hues paused before his pining soul, and a voice out of the dream asked him, "Wilt thou long continue to love her, when angels yearn for her and lift her out of her sorrow, and leave thee nothing but the grave of the too long misinterpreted heart?"----As all these thoughts, in glowing procession, like mountain chains of ruddy evening clouds, moved around his soul, then was his heart, like an altar, covered by a sacrificial fire falling from heaven, and all his earthly desires, all his stains, were consumed in this fire,--in short, he resolved to amend himself, in order, by virtue, to be worthy of a virtuous woman.

He was converted on the 3d of April, 1793, towards evening; when the moon--and the EARTH--were under his feet in the Nadir.

The reader may have laughed at this chronometer; but every man in whom virtue is anything higher than an accidental _water-sucker_ and wood-shoot, must be able to tell the hour wherein she became the Hamadryad of his inner being,--which the theologians call conversion and the Moravians the _breaking-through_. Why should not time mark off our spiritual sensations, when in fact it is only they that mark off its periods?

There is--or comes--in every man who is more solar than planetary, a lofty hour when his heart, amidst violent commotions and painful rendings, at last, by a lifting-up, suddenly turns round towards virtue, in an indescribable transition like that in which man lifts himself over from one system of faith to another, or, suddenly, from the highest point of wrath to a melting forgiveness of all faults;--that lofty hour, the birth-hour of the virtuous life, is also its sweetest hour, because it is to man as if his oppressive body were taken off from him; because he enjoys the bliss of feeling in himself _no contradictions_; because all his chains fall; _because he fears nothing more_ in the awfully sublime universe.--The spectacle is great, when the angel is born in man; when, thereafter, on the horizon of earth, the whole solar warmth of virtue falls upon his heart unobstructed by a cloud.

But poor mortal man, the prisoner man, immersed in blood, encased in flesh, soon feels the difference between his raptures and his powers; he who was going to subdue the promised land, when its clusters of grapes came to meet him, hesitates, when he has to march against its giants (the passions). I do not, however, reject even the extravagance of that enthusiasm; Man, like buildings, must be _screwed up into the air_, in order to be _rebuilt_; a syllogism does not lead off the blood streams of our desires. It is singular that the devil in us must have alone the right to spend blood, nerves, beverage, passions, upon his military operations and for his imperial treasury, but the angel not....

So it is, however; men are vicious, because they look upon virtue as too hard, and they again become so, because they held it easier than it is. Not reason (i. e. conscience) makes us good: that is the outstretched wooden arm on the road to virtue; but this arm can neither draw nor drive us thither,--reason has the legislative, not the executive force. The power of loving these commandments, the still greater power of giving one's self up to them, is a second conscience by the side of the first; and as Kant cannot indicate with ink that which makes man bad, so neither can that be set forth which keeps his heart upright above moral filth or lifts it out of it.

Who can explain the fact, if there are men who, from youth up, either possess or do without a certain sense of honor,--in the female sex this line of division is still sharper and more important,--if there are men who, from youth up either experience or forever live without a certain yearning for the super-earthly, for religion, for the nobler principle in man (and for systems which seal this nobler quality instead of disputing it)?----(With children a warm feeling for religion is often a sign of genius.) Man does not become good (though he does grow better) because he is converted, but he gets converted because he is good.

Were virtue nothing but stoicism, then it were a mere child of reason, whereas it is at the highest her foster-daughter. Stoicism represents virtue as so useful, so reasonable, that it is nothing more than a conclusion; it gives one nothing to conquer but errors. As (according to the stoical principle) it is, not the highest, but the only good,--as, according to that principle, all desires aim at an empty nothing--it follows that virtue is no merit, but a necessity. E. g. if there is nothing odious: then love and the victory over anger towards an enemy are not harder or more meritorious than towards a friend, but all one.

What then has the Stoic to sacrifice to Virtue according to his notion, but mock-goods, air-castles, and fever-images? Nevertheless Stoicism renders Virtue, as criticism does genius, negative services; the stoical _chill_ calls forth no spring, but it destroys the insects which gnaw it; the stoical winter, like the physical, removes the _pestilence_, ere the warmer months come, which bring new life....

Although Victor said: "Thou dear one, no heart can be pure, still, tender, and great enough for thine, but the weak one which thou endurest will sanctify itself through thine and come to thee improved"; still mere love was not the source of his virtue, but the reverse was the case, only virtue could manifest itself by such a love. But even without taking that into account, a half-selfish change of purpose becomes by action a disinterested one, as the love which starts from beauty of face ennobles itself at last into love for beauty of soul.

His separation from Clotilda gave him joy in the thought that so long as it lasted he should spare the delusions of her jealous brother. _General love_ now led the way to friendship for the better sort of women, and tolerance toward the worse. He annulled his satirical intolerance--which, however, was not half so great as that of young wags of authors--by toleration-mandates of his own. He read Gulliver's last journey into Horse-land (Houynheim), as a recipe against lying when one goes to court. His Kubach[52] and jewel-casket and his _collegium pietatis_ consisted of three dissimilar volumes,--Kant, Jacobi, and Epictetus.

I could wish, however, that he would not make himself ridiculous. Of a man who had been nine months at court, one was surely justified in expecting that he would behave differently, and not offend against that equality of ranks and of vices; as men practise sins best in common, as in Swiss churches the hearers must cough simultaneously, or as recruits on their march must make water at the same time. At least, the well-bred man seeks to conceal his love for his religion, as well as that for his wife.--I return to the story.

Victor determined now to make only visits that annoyed himself and pleased his neighbor. The first was an extraordinary tribute of a visit to the Princess (for his daily portioning-tax[53] of calls on her now ceased). To be sure, the thick hour-watch of old Bee-father Lind was every minute an alarm-clock to hold up before him his former foolhardy jokes, his watch-enclosure, and love-letter to Agnola. I cannot avoid the apprehension that the reader may make a slip, and not dream with what heart Sebastian went to the Princess;--O, with one full of dumb apologies and--exculpations, with a distended breast full of proud confidence, and yet full of sympathetic mildness. Whence came this?--It came from the fair soul which now, reconciled and filled up with another's _love_, could wish nothing more but _friendship_, and which was now too happy to be inexorable. But he found in her apartment two cold, refined faces, which it is quite as hard to apologize to as to forgive,--namely, her own and that of Count von O. from Kussewitz, in whose house her transfer had taken place. Victor blushed; the Count appeared not to have the least knowledge of him,--they were not introduced to each other,--but talked together as genially as if they had been (especially as it made no difference),--and so, with cold feelings, and with the greatest indifference about their own and each other's anonymousness, they politely separated. Only Victor afterward worried himself with doubts whether he had not sooner than Agnola called the unknown Count by that title.

For the rest, he now, for the first time since he had loved Clotilda, found the partition-wall between _love_ and _friendship_ with women to be very _visible_ and very _thick_: before that he could see through the partition-wall well enough. A woman cannot choose for herself a firmer or purer friend than another woman's lover.

Victor must now also, and for still more urgent reasons, visit Joachime. The evil spirit, which, like the youngest councillors, always gives its voice first in man, made the motion that "he should indulge Joachime in the slight illusion of believing that he loved her."--As this did not pass, the _filou_[54] took another voice, and proposed that "he should punish her for her former ambiguity by the most unambiguous signs of his hatred."--But he followed willingly the good spirit which led him by the hand, and said on the way, "Go now to her,--disengage thyself from her without giving her any pain,--let thy hand glide gradually out of hers, and clear one finger after another, as maidens do with their natural hand, and assume the attitude neither of her enemy nor of her lover." He went to her house without any selfish consideration; for the latter would rather have prompted him to stay at home, and enjoy and turn over the leaves of the past and future, or else to quit the house and go to St. Luna, to sit down by Agatha beside the crape hat of Clotilda which she was studying.

In order, however, not to let his visit have too much weight in the eyes of Joachime, he proposed to himself to beg of her for some weeks the views of Maienthal, which hung in her room. O Maienthal, how much thou must have, if the very sketch of thee makes one so happy!--But his visit turned out singularly. He wished on the way that he might find in her toilette-chamber the fine fool and the fragrant fool and more stuff;--there was nothing there. She received him with a careless gayety, as if she were the Columbine[55] and the Medicus the clown. He, however, was going merely to execute the gradual weakening or _diminuendo_ of his moral dissonances; therefore he became, by his constant looking off at his note-stand, and at the score of his inner harmony, somewhat stiff and awkward in his playing. Women easily distinguish the coldness of reason (if only by the very want of extravagance) from coldness of mood. Now he asked for the views. Joachime did not grow cooler, but warm, i. e. serious, and lifted up her watch in the hollow of her hand, and said, looking at it, "I give you as many minutes' grace as you have stayed away days, to excuse your staying away." Victor accepted without embarrassment--like every one who acts only according to _one_, either good or bad, principle--the allowed time for decision, and took the _montre à régulateur_ from under the looking-glass, that Joachime might not cheat him. This cursed watch of the Princess grinned at him everywhere, like a percussion-ball and powder-mine under his feet. He wound it up just to have a chance to open this Nuremberg egg (as they used to call watches), and finally for once to examine whether the love-declaration, i. e. the _punctum saliens_ of love, or the Cupid,--who also, according to Plato, came out of an egg,--was still in there. "I know well enough--he said to himself--it has been gone this long time, but I'll just try it."