Chapter VI: Part 6

Enter into my soul and into my words, ye May-feelings that throbbed in the bosom of my Victor, as he looked over the budding, swelling earth, covered with suns above his head, enclosed in a net of green life that reached from roots to tree-tops, from mountains to furrows, and borne up by a second spring under his feet, as he imagined to himself behind the transpierced earth-crust the sun standing with a day of splendor under America.--Climb higher, moon, that he may see more easily the gushing, swollen, dark-green spring, which with little pale spears crowds upward out of the earth, till it has lifted itself out, full of glowing flowers, full of waving trees,--that he may descry the plains which lie under rich leaves, and on whose green track the eye ascends from the upright flowers on which the cloven charms of light grow and fix themselves to the bushes bursting into blossoms, and to the slow trees whose glistening buds sway up and down in the spring-winds.----Victor had sunk into dreams, when all at once the cold fanning of the spring-air, which could now play more with little clouds than with flowers, and the murmur of the spring brooks, which darted away beside him from all the hills and over every patch of darker green, woke and bestirred him.--There was the moon that had gone up unseen, and all the fountains glistened, and the lilies of the valley came out in white bloom from the green, and round the lively water-plants danced silver-points. Then did his bliss-burdened look lift itself in order to rise to God from the earth and from the green borders of the brooks, and climb up the curved woods, out of which the iron-sparks and smoke columns[70] leaped above the summits, and far up the white mountains where winter sleeps in clouds;----but when his holy sight was in the starry heaven, and was about to look up to God, who has created night and spring and the soul,--then, weeping and reverent and lowly and blissful, he fell back with drooping wing.... His heavy soul could only say, He is!--

But his heart drank its fill of life from the endless, welling, breathing world around him, above him, under him, wherein force reaches to force, blossom to blossom, and whose fountains of life shoot from one earth to another, and whose void spaces are only the paths of the finer powers and the residence of the lesser ones,--the whole immeasurable world stood before him, whose distended cataract, spraying into fragrances and streams, into milky-ways and hearts, between the _two_ thunders of the summit and the abyss, rapid, starry, flaming, descends out of a past eternity, and leaps down into a future one,--and when God looks upon the cataract, then the circle of eternity paints itself thereon as a rainbow, and the stream does not discompose the hovering circle....

The blessed mortal rose up and journeyed on in the feeling of immortality through the spring-life pulsating around him; and he thought that man, in the midst of so many examples of immutability, erroneously translated the distinction between his sleep and waking into the distinction between existence and non-existence. Now his vigorous, exuberant feelings welcomed every noise, the stroke of the trip-hammer in the woods, the rush of spring-waters and spring-winds, and the whir of the partridge.--

At three o'clock in the morning he looked down on Maienthal. He came upon the mountain relieved by five solitary fir-trees, on which one can see through the whole village, and again over to the other mountain, where the weeping birch shades his Emanuel. The embowered cell of the latter he could not discern, but all the windows of the convent where his loved one dreamed glistened in the sparkling moonlight. The rapture of night was still in his breast, and the burning glow of dreams on his countenance;--but the valley drew him out to the earth, and only gave his flowers of joy a _firmer_ soil; and the morning-wind cooled his breath, and the dew his cheeks. The tears rose into his eyes, when they fell upon the white-curtained windows, behind which a lovely, a wise, a loved and loving soul was completing its guileless morning-dreams. Ah! dream, Clotilda, of thy friend, that he is near thee, that he is turning his overflowing eyes toward thy cell, and that he will vanish, if thou appearest, and that, nevertheless, he is growing more blessed from moment to moment,--ah! he too, indeed, is dreaming, and when the sun rises, the beloved vale will have sunk like thy dream with the starry heaven.--O, the mountains, the woods, behind which dwells a beloved soul, the walls which enclose her, look upon man with a touching magic, and hang before him like sweet curtains of the future and the past.

The mountain brought before him the image of the painter who had once been here for the purpose of sketching Clotilda's charms, like a golden age, as it were, only from a distance, and so of drawing them nearer,--and this again led his eye into the days of her earlier youth and her still, pure life at the convent, and it grieved him that a time had once been, and been lost, in which he had not been able to love her. As he looked around him, and thought to himself that on all these paths, by these brooks, under these trees, she had walked, the whole region became to him holy and living, and every bird that glided over it seemed to seek his friend, and to love her as he did.

But now with every star that sank back into heaven overhead, a flower and a bird woke down on the earth,--the way from night to day was already laid with half-colors,--little clouds came up on the coast of day,--and Victor was still on the mountain. His fear that the white window-veil might stir and betray him, was as great as his wish that the fear might grow greater and greater! Occasionally a curtain swayed, but none rose.--All at once the throats of the birds woke a magic flute at the foot of his mountain, and the still Julius came to meet the sun, that no more shone for him, with his morning-tones. Then, suddenly, Clotilda's window unveiled itself, and her fair, bright eyes took the freshened morning into her holy soul. Victor, not considering the distance, stepped behind one bush after another; but his flight from the beloved eyes led him nearer to the flute; he was, however, full as unwilling to appear before Emanuel, whom he supposed to be in the vicinity of the blind one, as before Clotilda herself. When now only a few bushes separated him from the tones, he espied on the mountain his friend Emanuel under the weeping birch. Now he hastened, glad and trembling, down to Julius, whom he found, with his lily-face, fair as the younger brother of an angel, with birds flying and singing around him, leaning against a birch-tree: "What forms, what hearts," thought he, "adorn this Paradise." How could he, on such a morning, on such a holy spot, toward so good a youth, have disguised himself, and handed to him, say, with the imitated voice of his Italian servant, the letter to Emanuel!--No, that he could not do; he said with a low voice, in order not to alarm him, "Dear Julius, it is I!"--Then he sank slowly upon the tender being, and embraced in one breast three hearts, and handed him the letter with the words, "Give it to thy Emanuel!" and with the warmest pressure of the dear hand flew farther down the mountain and away.--

Just at this hour, on this day, a year ago, Giulia also disappeared from Maienthal, and took nothing with her of the fair flowery ground but a--grave-mound.

And now when he had escaped behind bushy avenues from the place of the blessed, his nightly elation gave way to an uncontrollable sadness. The rising sun drew all the bright colors out of his nightly dream. "Have I then really seen Maienthal and Julius and all the loved ones, or is it all only a play of shadows that passed by before me on a cloud whose colors flickered in the moonlight, and which has melted away?" said he,--and the brooding day warmed the fresh night-air of his soul into the sultry fanning of a south-wind. Whereas man generally, like Raguel,[71] hews out graves in the midnight, and in the morning sun fills them up again, Sebastian today reversed it.----

Strictly speaking, it was not quite so: but the swift emerging and reabsorption of the beloved forms, the aggravated longing for them, the touching contrast between the din of morning and the pause of night, between the fire of the sun and the moon's twilight, and the dreary exhaustion of sleeplessness joined to the weariness of the fancy and the body, all these things wrung from the heart and the tear-glands of our somnambulist involuntary sweet tears, which had no object, which flowed neither for joy nor for sorrow, but for yearning.

All at once the fair, cloudless first May-day made to pass before him the remembrance of the one a year ago, when, like a spring and an Homeric god, he arrived in a cloud,--and the good man looked with dew-drops in his eyes upon the dew-drops in the flowers, and said, inexpressibly touched: "Ah! a year ago I came so happy, became so unhappy, and now am so happy again,--O ye flying, playing, echoing, trembling years of man!"--and the holiday-hum of bells from all the villages (it was St. Philip's and St. James's day) with the soft thrill of an echo set all his mourning-strings into a responsive quiver.

"O, a year ago," all the bells sang to him, "we escorted Giulia, as we now do thee, out of Maienthal." Then, as the sun unfolded his white blossoms in the sky, the warm thought dissolved his heart: "A year ago this morning thy Flamin went to meet thee, and shed on thy glowing breast so many tears of joy,--and at the end of this very day he drew thee again to his heart, and said as if with a presentiment, 'Forget me not, betray me not, and if thou wilt forsake me, then let me perish with thee!'--

"O thou faithful one," said all his thoughts, "how it consoles me to-day, that I once gladly sacrificed all my wishes to thine, in order to continue true to thee.[72]--No, I cannot conceal anything from him, I will go to him at once."--He went straight to Flamin, in order (though without perjury towards his Lordship, and with forbearance toward jealousy) to confess that he was going at Whitsuntide to Maienthal. His dismembered heart needed so much an eye that should weep responsive to it,--his delicate sense of honor scorned so much to make another's journey the screen of his own,--his renewed love was pained so at the thought of the least concealment from his friend,--Matthieu was so completely thrust out from this heavenly-blue Eden under the walls of the brain,--that the longer he thought and ran, the more would he lay open. He would, namely, even disclose to his Flamin that he had this very night delivered with his own hands the note of invitation to the blind youth: by an illusion, the future Whitsuntide journey was made more certain through to-day's, and this his own point of view he looked upon as another's.

But his dreamy and _night-intoxicated_ soul did not carry so far its dangerous effusion, which might do so much the more harm, as Flamin in his anger was unable to listen any longer to distinctions and justifications, and even rejected again old ones which he had before allowed. For at his entrance a May-frost on Flamin's face closed a little the opening blossom-cup of his heart. He begged Flamin with his contrasting warmth of face to take a walk on this bright day. Out of doors the contrast grew still more sharp, as Flamin thrust his cane into the ground even to the point of cracking it, beheaded flowers, whipped off leaves, stamped out footprints with the heel of his boot, while Victor sought to discourse in one steady stream, in order to maintain his soul in the warmth which he had brought with him.

One thing about him gratifies me, that he was going to pour out his heart, overrunning with to-day's renunciations, into the very one which he had to charge with those renunciations. At last he said, hurriedly, just for the sake of throwing off from his soul the confession which hall become so hard to utter, "At Whitsuntide I am going to Maienthal,"--and then flyingly passed over to the words, "O just a year ago to-day thou wentest with me."

Flamin interrupted him, and his icy face, like a Hecla, was cloven with flames: "So! so!--at Whitsuntide? Thou dost not go with _us_ to Kussewitz!--Let me once for all speak right out, Victor!"--Then they stopped. Flamin stripped the blossoms and leaves from the branch of a wild plum-tree with bloody hand, and looked not at his gentle friend, lest he should be softened himself. "A year ago to-day, sayest thou? Yes, that very evening I went with thee up to the watch-tower, and we promised each other either truth or death. Thou sworest to me to throw thyself headlong with me, whenever thou shouldst have taken all from me, all,--or, say, _her_ love; for in thy presence she hardly looks at me any more.--By the Devil, am I then blind? Do I not see, then, that the machinery of her journey and thine has been all planned out?--What hast thou to do just now with the Maienthal landscapes? To whom does the _hat_ belong?--And what am I to infer from all this?--To whom, whom? say, say!--O God, if it were true!--Help me, Victor!"--In the eyes of the misused, to-day exhausted Victor stood the bitterest tears, which Flamin, however, who exasperated himself by his own talking, could now bear. Never did the latter in a rage accept remonstrances: nevertheless he expected them, and was astounded at his being in the right, and at the other party's silence, and desired to be contradicted. He crushed in his bleeding hand the sloe-thorns. His eye burned into the weeping one. Victor bewailed his firm oath to his father, and looked on the trembling balance wherein the oath and indulgent friendship hung in equipoise. He collected once more all his love into his breast, and spread his arms wide open, and fain would draw with them the struggling one to himself, and yet could say nothing but "I and thou are innocent; but till my father comes, before that I cannot justify myself."--Flamin repelled him from him: "What is this for?--So it was at the garden-concert, too, and thou hast since that been daily with her, and at Easter-balls and in sleighs, without me. Say rather outright, wilt thou marry _her_?--Swear that thou wilt not?--O God, hesitate not,--swear, swear!--Ay, ay, Matthieu!--Canst thou not yet!--Well, then, lie at least!"

"Oh!" said Victor,--and eclipsing blood-streams shot through his brain and over his face,--"thou shalt not insult me quite too much; I am as good as thou, I am as proud as thou,--before God my soul is pure"----But Flamin's blood on the sloe-bush repressed Victor's indignant exaltation, and he merely lifted a sympathetic eye full of the tears of friendship to the brighter, softer heaven.--"Only marriage, forsooth, dost thou not forswear?----Good, good, thou hast strangled me,--my heart hast thou trampled on, and my whole happiness.--I had none but thee, thou wast my only friend, now will I go to the Devil without one.--Thou dost not swear?--Oh, I tear myself away from thee bloody and wretched, and as thy foe--we part--only go--away! it is all up--all!--Adieu!" He rushed away, striking his stick into the ground as he went, and his distracted friend, lying at the feet of Truth, who lifts the flaming sword against Perjury, and dying in tears before Friendship, who casts upon the soft heart the melting look full of entreaties,--Victor, I say, cried, as with dying voice, after the fleeing friend of his soul: "Farewell, my faithful Flamin! my never-to-be-forgotten friend! I was indeed true to thee!--But an oath lies between us.--Dost thou still hear me?--do not hasten so!--Flamin, dost thou hear me? I love thee still, we shall find each other again, and come when thou wilt." ... He cried after him more vehemently, although with stifled, smothered tones: "Honest, precious, precious soul, I have loved thee very much, and do still and still,--only be right happy.--Flamin, Flamin, my heart breaks now that thou art my enemy."--Flamin looked round no more, but his hand seemed to be on his eyes. The friend of his youth vanished from his sight like youth itself, and Victor sank down _unhappy_ under the fairest heaven, with the consciousness of innocence, with all the feelings of friendship!--O, Virtue itself gives no consolation, if thou hast lost a friend, and the heart of a man, stabbed by _friendship_, bleeds on mortally, and all the balm of _love_ avails not to heal or to soothe!--

32. DOG-POST-DAY.

Physiognomies of Victor and Flamin.--Boiling-Point of
Friendship.--Splendid Hopes for us.

Who would have thought it of Cicero (if he had not read it) that a man of so many years and so much sense would sit down in his St. John's Island, and manufacture _beginnings_, introductions, pre-existing germs in advance for the market? However, the man had this advantage, that when he wrote a torso on any subject, he had his choice among the heads lying ready made to his hand, of which he could screw one on to the trunk according to the corpuscular philosophy.--As to myself, who have nothing sedate about me, no one can wonder that I on my Moluccian Frascati[73] have reeled and twisted beforehand whole skeins of beginnings. When Spitz afterward brings a Dog-day, I have already commenced it, and have nothing to do but just to clap the historical remnant on to the introduction.--This very beginning itself I have selected for to-day.

At first, however, I had a mind, to be sure, to take this one:--

Nothing torments me about my whole book except my anxiety as to how I shall be translated. This anxiety is not to be blamed in an author, when one sees how the French translate the Germans, and the Germans the Ancients. At bottom it really amounts to one's being expounded by the lower classes and their teachers. I can compare those readers and these classes, in respect of their spiritual fare, which passes first through so many intermediate members, to nothing, except to the poor people in Lapland. When the rich in that country intoxicate themselves in the tippling-room with a liquor which is decocted out of the costly toadstool, the poor people watch around the house-door, till a Lap in easy circumstances comes out and makes----; this translated beverage, the _Vulgate_ of distilled liquor, the poor devils enjoy greatly.

This beginning, however, I am keeping for the Preface to a translation.

It is one of the juggling tricks and _lusus naturæ_ of chance, of which there are very many, that I should begin this Book just in the night of St. Philip's and St. James's day, 1793, when Victor undertook the witch's-journey to the Maienthal Blocksberg, into the midst of the enchanters and enchantresses, and when, in 1792, he arrived from Göttingen.

I cannot say, The reader can easily imagine how Victor lived or grieved through the first May-days; for he hardly can imagine it. Perhaps we all held the bands which bound him to Flamin to be a few thin fibres or unsensitive cords of custom; in fact, however, delicate nerves and firm muscles form the lattice-work[74] of their souls. He himself knew not how much he loved him, until he was compelled to cease doing so. Into this common error we all fall, hero, reader, and writer, on the same ground: when one has not been able for a long time to give a friend, whom one has long loved, any proof of that love, for want of opportunity, then one torments one's self with the self-accusation of growing cold towards him. But this accusation is itself the finest proof of love. With Victor yet more things conspired to persuade him that he was becoming a colder friend. The vesper-tilts about Clotilda, those disputations _pro loco_, did, besides, their part; but he was always afflicting himself with the self-criticism that he had sometimes refused his friend little sacrifices; e. g. the neglecting of a pleasure-party on his account, the staying away from certain too distinguished houses which Flamin hated. But in friendship great sacrifices are easier than small ones,--one would often rather sacrifice to it life than an hour, a piece of property than the gratification of some petty bad habit, just as many people would rather present you a bill of exchange than a piece of _blank_ paper of the same size. The secret is, great sacrifices inspiration makes, but little ones, reason. Flamin, who himself never made little ones, demanded them of others with heat, because he took them for great ones. Victor had less to reproach himself with on this point; but Clotilda shamed him, for her longest and shortest days, as is the case with most of her sex, were nothing but sacrificial days.--Then, too, his natural delicacy, which had now gained by his court-life the addition of the conventional kind, was wounded more deeply than ever by his friend's sharp corners.--The fine people give to their inner man (as to their outer) by bran of almonds and night-gloves soft hands, merely for the sake of feeling better the under side of the cards, and for the sake of giving neat ladylike half-boxes-in-the-ear, but not in order, like the surgeons, to handle wounds with them.

Unfortunately this delusion about his growing cold prescribed to him a friendly external effort to show warmth when with Flamin. Now as the Regency-Councillor did, not consider that even _constraint_ may full as often arise from _sincerity_, as unconstraint from falseness: accordingly the Devil had more and more his game of Bestia (in which a friendship was the high stake) till on witches' day he actually won it.

But on the 4th of May he is to lose all again, I think. For Victor, whose heart at the least motion bled through the bandage again, undertook not only, on the 4th of May, to be present at the birth-festival of the Court-Chaplain in St. Luna, but also to celebrate a birthday of renewed friendship with Flamin. He would gladly take the first, second, third, tenth step, if his friend would only stop where he was, and not take a step backward. For he cannot forget _him_, he cannot get over a compulsory renunciation, however easy for him generally the voluntary one was. He pressed every evening Flamin's fair image, which was made out of his love for _him_, out of his incorruptible honesty, his rock-like courage, his love for the state, his talents, even his excitability, which originated in the double feeling of injustice and of his own innocence,--this glowing image he pressed to his lacerated heart, and when in the morning he saw him going to his public duties, his eyes ran over, and he congratulated the servant who carried his papers behind him. Had not the 4th of May, the great day of reconciliation, been so near with its expiatory offering, he would have been obliged to accustom little Julia to himself, as a third estate between the two others, as a key-note between conflicting tones. Only the hope of May applied to his thoughts, instead of burning stings of nettle-points, at least rose-briers.--The friend of thy youth, dear reader, thy school-friend, is never forgotten, for he has something of the brother about him;--when thou enterest the school-yard of life, which is a Schnepfenthal educational institute, a Berlin scientific school,[75] a Breslau Elisabethanum, a Scheerau Marianum,[76]--then for the first time thou meetest friends, and your youthful friendship is the morning divine service of life.

Victor was sure beforehand of Flamin's placability; he even saw him very often standing at his window, and glancing across toward the balcony, from which a friendly eye, untroubled by all the misconstructions of the point of honor, looked freely and directly toward the Senior's;--this, however, did not take away his tender yearning, but it was increased by the first returning sight of the face, so fair, so lamented, and so loved. Flamin had a tall, manly form; his compact and receding narrow forehead was the eyrie of spirit; his transparent blue eyes--which his sister Clotilda also had, and which harmonize very well with a fiery soul, as, indeed, the old Germans also and the country people have both--were kindled by a thinking intellect; his compressed, and for that very reason the more darkly red, over-full lips, were settled into the kindly elevation for a kiss; only the nose was not refined enough, but was juristically or Germanly built. The nose of great jurists looks sometimes, in my opinion, as wretchedly as the nose of Justice herself when its flexible material is drawn out and twisted and tweaked under too long fingers. It is not to be explained, by the way, why the faces of great theologians--unless, indeed, they are something else great--have about them somewhat of the typographic magnificence of the Kanstein Bibles. Victor's face, on the contrary, had, less than any other, either these Bursch-like trivial features of many jurists, or the dead-gold of many theologians; his nose--its edge and the indentation of the nasal bridge deducted--descended in Grecian straightness; the angle of the thin, closed lips was (in case he did not happen to be laughing) an acute angle of 1^{_um_}, and formed with the sharp nose the order-sign and order-cross, which satirical people often wear;--his broad forehead arched itself to a radiant and roomy choir of a spiritual rotunda, wherein a _Socratic_ equally, illuminated soul dwells, though neither this brightness nor that brow consort with _inborn_ wild tenacity, though they do with that which is acquired;--his fancy, that great prize, had, as often happens, no lottery-device on his face;--his eyes, colored like Neapolitan agate, spoke and sought a loving heart; his soft, white face contrasted, like court with war, against Flamin's brown, elastic countenance, which served as the ground for the two glowing cheeks.--For the rest, Flamin's soul was a mirror which flamed under the sun from only a single point; but on Victor's several powers were ground out into flashing facettes. Clotilda had all this tinder-box and these sulphuric mines of temperament in common with her brother; but her reason covered all up. The rushing blood-stream, which with him dashed from rock to rock, glided along with her still and smooth through flowery meadows.

I should be glad to see it, if he were to renew again with the Regency Councillor the treaty of friendship: I should then get to describe his Whitsuntide journey to Maienthal, which perhaps is the Septleva[77] and the best thing to which the human understanding has yet attained. But nothing will come of this Septleva, unless they make peace again; by the side of every flower in Maienthal, by the side of every delight, the grief-worn face of his friend would appear and ask, "Canst thou be so happy, while I am so far from it?"

It were a wiser course, if both were monks or courtiers; then they might be expected, as friendship is the _marriage_ of souls, to remain continent in a _celibacy_ of souls....

Just at the very conclusion of this chapter the dog brings the new one, and I simply weave both together and go on:--

Without any remarkable vexation at the delay of the answer from Maienthal, Victor went alone on the 4th of May to St. Luna, and with every step that brought him nearer, his soul grew more soft and placable.--When he arrived:----

There are in every house days, which were forgotten in the Litany,--cursed, devilish, deused days,--when all goes criss-cross,--when everything scolds and growls and wags its tail,--when the children and the dog dare not say, Pugh![78] and the liege-and-manor-lord of the house slams-to all the doors and the house-mistress draws the bass-register of moralizing,[79] and strikes the silvery tone of dishes and the bunch of keys,--when one does nothing but hunt up old grievances, all forest-offences of mice and moths, broken parasols and fan-sticks, and that the gunpowder and the perfume-powder, and the elegant note-paper have become damp, and that the sausage-sledge is worn out by sitting to a wooden hobby-horse, and that the dog and the sofa are shedding hair,--when everything comes too late, everything is roasted to death, everything is over-boiled, and the chamber-donna sticks the pins into my lady's flesh as into a doll,--and when, after they have, in this _scurvy sickness where nothing is the matter_, vexed themselves to their hearts' content without cause, they become good-natured again without cause.----

When Victor arrived at the parsonage, he heard the birthday hero of the day, the parson, lecturing and screaming in his study. Eymann was pouring out his holy spirit into the long ears of his catechumens, into whom no fiery tongues were to be got. He had in hand a female dunce from a hermitage (a solitary house in the woods), and was trying to explain to her the distinction between the loosing-key and the binding-key. Nothing, however, could be done with her: the chaplain and the convert had already spent a half-hour over the school-time with the explanation; the dunce was constantly confounding the keys, as if she were a--_lady of the world_. The chaplain had set his head upon illuminating hers;--he set before her every consideration that might have moved iron-wood and iron-stone,--his birthday festival of to-day, the embittering of the general joy, the surplus half-hour,--in order to persuade her, that she must comprehend the difference,--she did not, she could not see it;--he condescended to entreaties and said: "Jewel, Lamb, Beast, daughter penitent, understand it, I beseech thee,--do thy spiritual shepherd the pleasure of repeating to him the extraordinary difference between binding- and loosing-keys. Am I not dealing fairly with thee?--But my office as parson requires of me not to let thee go like a cow, without knowing a key.--Only take courage and just say after me, word for word, dearly-bought christian beast."--She did so at last, and when she had done, he said joyfully, "Now thou pleasest thy teacher, and attend further."--Out of doors she recapitulated it all, and had comprehended it all very well, except that instead of "Bind- und Löse-Schlüssel" (keys) she always caught it "Bind- und Löse-_Schüssel_" (dishes).--

The three-twins had a miserable plan of not coming till after dinner.--The soul of the red Appel was exhaling for this very occasion a wild-game flavor, and smelt like burnt milk-porridge, and complained that she alone had all the labor on her shoulders, and when Agatha offered to fly to her assistance, she said: "I can do it, thank God! as well as thou!" The Regency-Councillor had arrived, but unfortunately had run out into the fields again till dinner-time,--Agatha's face had been crystallized into a rock-cellar by the coldness of her brother towards Victor,--only the parson's wife was the parson's wife; not merely one mother-country, but one breath of love linked her heart to his, and it was impossible for her to be angry with him. She loved a maiden, if he praised her; had she been without a husband, she would have been either his love-letter-writer or his letter-carrier.

--Thus do women love--without measure! often, too, they hate in the same way.--To this my correspondent adds further, that he could draw from the watering-village a whole protocol of depositions in evidence that the Parson's wife not merely always, but even on the present Ventose and Pluviose[80] day, was able to endure and live through it with the unvarnished composure of a Christian woman, if any one let anything fall, a cup or a word. For such a state of mind,--for apathy under the present, entire loss of a soup-tureen, or rinsing-bowl, or fruit-dish,--there is needed perhaps as much health as reason.

--At last in the evening, the Page came in and said, Flamin was still in the garden. Victor received it, as if it were said to him, and went out carrying his oppressed heart to meet another troubled one: Flamin he found in an embowered nook staring up with all his eyes at the wax-image of the rejected friend; Victor's heart moved heavily as if through tears in his overladen breast. Flamin's face was covered, not with the panoply of wrath, but with the funeral veil of sorrow. For here in the foreground of a bright, warm youth, as it were on the classic soil of a former, irreplaceable love, he became too warm and too tender,--in the village he revoked his hardness in the city,--and what was still more, only friends of his friend, only affectionate eulogies on the despised darling, overwhelmed and warmed his impoverished heart, and he could here still more easily excuse than spare him. Victor welcomed him with the soft voice of a subdued heart, but he only half spoke either his thoughts or his words. Victor gazed deep down into the soul which mourned for friendship; for only a heart sees a heart; so only the great man sees great men, as one sees mountains only from mountains. He held it therefore as no sign of resentment, when Flamin slowly walked away from him; but he must needs, left so alone there, turn away his eyes from the consecrated corner of the garden, where their friendship had once opened its blossoms, and from the sacrificial bower where he had interceded with his father for Flamin's and Clotilda's union, and from the high observatory, the Tabor of friendship's transfiguration, from all these burial-places of a fairer time he must needs avert his eyes, in order to endure the poorer present. But that which he would not look upon, he represented so much the more vividly to his mind.

Now the Vesper-bell extended its melancholy vibrations even to the hearts of men,--past times sent the tones, and the evening-lamentations sank like ardent entreaties into the souls of the sundered friends: "O be reconciled and walk together! Is then life so long that men may venture to be angry with each other? Are then good souls so numerous, that they can fly from each other? O these tones have floated around many a heap of the ashes of mortality, around many a stiffened heart full of love, around many closed lips full of fury,--O transitory creatures, love, love each other!"--Victor followed willingly (for he wept) after his friend, and found him standing by the bed whereon Eymann caused the F of his name to grow green on the cole-rape-plants, and he was silent, because he knew that for all _sympathetic_ cures _silence_ is needed. O, such an hour of deepening silence, when friends stand beside each other like strangers, and compare the silence with the old outpouring, has too many heart-stings, and a thousand smothered tears, and for words sighs!

Victor, so near to his friend, and as during the talking his better soul, like nightingales during concerts, grew louder and louder, would fain, from minute to minute, have fallen upon that noble face, on those lips rounded for the kiss of reconciliation,--but he started back at the thought of the recent repulse. He saw now how Flamin stepped farther and farther into the bed, and slowly trod down the heart leaves of the cole-rape, and crushed them asunder; at last he observed that this trampling out of the blooming name was merely the dumb language of disconsolateness, which wanted to say: "I hate my tormented self, and I could crush it as I do my name here: for whom should it stand here?"--This snatched blood from Victor's heart and from his eye tears which had been brushed away, and he took gently the long withdrawn hand, to lead him away from the suicide of his name. But Flamin turned his quivering face side-wise toward the waxen shadow of his friend and rigidly crooking his head away stared up at it.--"Best Flamin!" said Victor with the tone of the deepest emotion, and pressed the burning hand. Then Flamin tore it out of his, and with his two fists pressed back the tear-drops into his eyes, and breathed loud,--and said in a choked voice, "Victor!" and turned round with great tears and said in a still more muffled tone, "Love me again!"--And they rushed into each other's arms, and Victor answered, "For ever and ever do I love thee, thou hast indeed never offended me"; and Flamin, glowing and dying, stammered, "Only take my beloved, and remain my friend."--For a long time Victor could not speak, and their cheeks and their tears united burned on each other, till at last he was able to say: "O thou! O thou! thou noble man! But thou art in error somewhere!--Now will we forsake each other no more, now will we remain so forever.--Ah, how inexpressibly shall we _one day_ love each other, when my father comes!"

At this moment the Parson's wife, who was perhaps anxious about both, came to call them in, and Flamin in his softened mood honored her, which he seldom did, with a filial embrace; and from four eyes swollen with weeping she read with delight the renewal of their imperishable covenant.

Nothing moves man more than the spectacle of a reconciliation; our weaknesses are not too dearly purchased by the hours of their forgiveness, and the angel, who should never feel wrath, must envy the mortal who conquers it.--When thou forgivest, then is man who inflicts wounds on thy heart the sea-worm that drills through the shell of the mussel, which closes the openings with pearls.

This reconciliation drew after it one with fortune, as it were,--the _Brumaire_-evening became a _Floréal_[81] evening,--the three-twins ate of the remains of Appel's roasted glory,--the Parson had nothing to do any longer with any other keys than the loosing-keys, the spiritual music-keys,--and the birthday feast had bloomed out into a feast of the covenant, an opposition club, where all, but in a higher sense than that of Quakers and merchants, called each other _friend_. The three-twins delivered old-British speeches, which only freemen could understand. Victor wondered at the universal frankness before such a stinging gad-fly as Matthieu,--but the Englishmen cared for nothing. The Parson sent off heart-felt prayers, and said: "He, for his part, took little notice of what they did, and only begged them to harangue more softly, that he might not get the name of allowing pietistic conventicles in his parsonage; meanwhile he relied entirely upon Messrs. the Court-Physician and the Court-Page, who would certainly insure him against a fine; otherwise he would not let wife and son join in the conversation." The Parson's wife preferred reminiscences of her free native land to the best calumnies and fashions. Victor must needs to-day keep his promise of putting his Republican Orthodoxy beyond question; and as he gave the same in our hearing, we will also help see how he keeps it, and whether he is an old-Briton.

He imitated mostly the style which he had last read or--as to-day--heard; therefore he spoke in the sententious manner of the burning-cold Englishman of the three.

"No state is free but that which loves itself; the measure of patriotism is the measure of freedom. What, then, is now this Freedom! History is the _Place La-Morgue_[82] where every one seeks the dead kinsmen of his heart: ask the mighty dead of Sparta, Athens, and Rome, what freedom is! Their perpetual festival days, their games, their eternal wars, their constant sacrifices of property and life, their contempt of riches, of trade, and of mechanics, cannot make the fiscal prosperity of a country the goal of freedom. But the logical despot must assiduously promote the material well-being of his negro-plantation. The tyranny or the mildness, the injustice or the virtue of an individual, constitute so little the distinction between a servile and a free form of government, that Rome was a slave under the Antonines, and free under Sulla.[83]--Not every Union, but the object of the Union, not the uniting under common laws, but the import of those laws, give the soul the wings of patriotism; for otherwise every Hansa, every trade-league, were a Pythagorean Society and would create Spartans. That for which man gives blood and goods must be something higher than either;--not in defence of his own life and property has the good man so much valor as he has when he contends for another's;--the mother risks nothing for herself and everything for her child;--in short, only for what is nobler than self in himself, for virtue, does man open his veins and offer his spirit; only the Christian martyr names this virtue _Faith_, the Barbarian, _Honor_, the Republican, _Freedom_.

"--Take ten men, shut them up in ten different islands: neither of them (I have not selected cosmopolites) will love or defend either of the others, if he meets him in his canoe, but will merely, like an innocent uncultivated beast, let him pass unharmed. But throw them together on _one_ island,[84] then they will make mutual conditions of living together, of common defence, &c., i. e. laws; now they have more frequent enjoyment of use and right, consequently of their personality, which distinguishes them from mere tools, consequently of their freedom. Before, on their ten islands, they have been rather _unrestrained_ than _free_. The more the objects of their laws rise in dignity, the more they see that law concerns the inner man more than the rubbish heap it protects, right more than property, and that the noble man fights for his goods, his rights, his life, not on account of their importance, but on account of his own dignity.--I will look at the matter on another side, in order to defend the proposition with which I began the discourse. When a people hates its constitution, then the object of its constitution, i. e. of its union, is lost. Love of the constitution, and love for one's fellow-citizens as fellow-citizens, are one. I start with this principle: If all men were wise and good, then they would be all alike consequently friendly. As that is not so, accordingly Nature makes up for this goodness by similarity of motives, by community of object, by living together, &c., and by these bonds--of connubial, of brotherly and sisterly and of friendly affection--holds our smooth, slippery hearts together at different distances. Thus she educates our heart to the higher warmth. The State gives it a still greater, for the citizen loves the man even more in the citizen, than the brother loves him in the brother, the father in the son. The love of country is nothing but a restricted cosmopolitan love; and the higher philanthropy is the philosopher's enlarged patriotism for the whole earth. In my younger years the mass of men was often painful to me, because I felt myself incapable of loving 1000 millions at once; but the heart of man takes more into itself than his head, and the better man must needs despise himself, if his arms should reach only round a single planet...."

* * * * *

--Now, as in a drama, I set only the names of the players before their remarks. The coldly-philosophical _Balthazar_: "Then must the whole earth become one day a single state, a universal republic; Philosophy must approve wars, misanthropy, in short all possible contradictions to morality, so long as there are still two states. There must one day be a national convention of Humanity; the kingdoms are the municipalities."

_Matthieu_: "We are only just living now, then, in the 11th of October and a little in the 4th of August."[85]

_Victor_: "We see, like David, our Solomon's Temple only in dreams, and in our waking hours the tabernacles of the Covenant; but it were a sorrowful philosophy which should require nothing of men but what they had hitherto rendered without philosophy. We must fit reality to the ideal, not the reverse."

The ardently-philosophical _Melchior_: "Most modern movements are only the starts of one sleeping under the ear-wig[86] and grasping at his bloody scalp.--But the falling stalactite of regentship forms at last with its drops one column with the ascending stalagmite of the people."

_Flamin_: "But do not Spartans imply Helots, Romans and Germans Slaves, and Europeans Negroes?--Must not always the prosperity of the whole be based upon individual victims, just as one class must devote itself to tilling the soil, that another may apply itself to knowledge?"

_Cato_ the elder: "Then I spit on _the whole_ if I am the victim, and despise myself if I am the whole."

_Balthazar_: "It is better that the whole suffer voluntarily for the sake of a single member, than that he should against his just vote suffer for the whole."

_Matthieu_: "Fiat justitia et pereat mundus."

_Victor_: "In plain English: the greatest physical evil must be preferred to the least moral evil, the least unrighteousness."[87]--

_Melchior_: "The physical inequality of men produced by nature no more excuses any political inequality than pestilence does murder, or a failure of crops corn-monopoly. But inversely political equality must be the very compensation for the want of physical. In a despotic state enlightenment as well as prosperity may be greater in inward contents, but in the free state it is greater in outward contents, and is distributed among all; for freedom and enlightenment reciprocally beget each other."--

_Victor_: "As unbelief and tyranny do. Your assertion shows to nations two ways, one slower, but more just, and one which is neither. Wild clutchings at the _dial plate-wheel_ of Time, which is turned by a thousand little wheels, dislocate more than they expedite it; often they break off its teeth.[88] Hang thy own weight on the _weight_ of the clock-work, which drives all the wheels; i. e. be wise and virtuous, then wilt thou be, at the same time, great and innocent, and be building up the city of God, without the mortar of blood, and without the stone blocks of death's-heads."--

Here we strike the bell that closes this political sermon, during which Victor, despite his Socratic continence and moderation, made all these wild heads friends of his own. With Matthieu alone jest was the only object, to which he turned everything serious, instead of the reverse. He had in a characteristic degree that shamelessness of rank, at the same time to commit and to ridicule certain follies, to seek and to despise certain fools, and to avoid and praise at once certain philosophers. Wherever he could, he covered the good Prince of Flachsenfingen with satirical cockle-buttons[89] which he threw at him, and showed hostility to the husband, which is generally the sign of too great a friendship for the wife. Thus he said to-day in reference to Jenner's or January's _penchants_, which contrasted with those of the month and saint from which he derived his name: "For the St. Januarius in Puzzolo[90] a fish was the Dr. Culpepper."--

I confess, I have, during the whole session of the Club, again had the freakish thought, which, wild as it is, I have often before been unable to drive out of my head,--for it is, to be sure, a little confirmed by the fact that, like an atheist, I know not whence I am, and that with my French name, Jean Paul, I was impelled by the most wondrous accidents to a German writing-desk, on which I one day will copiously report them to the world,--as I was saying, I hold it myself to be a folly, my sometimes getting the conceit in my head, that it is possible since thousand-fold examples of the kind are extant in Oriental history--that I might be actually the unknown son of a Kniese[91] or Shah, or something of the sort, that was trained for the throne, and from whom they concealed his noble birth the better to educate him. The very entertaining of such an idea is of itself folly; but so much is nevertheless correct, that the examples are not to be erased from universal history, in which many a one, even to his twenty-eighth year,--I am two years older,--knew not a word of it, that an Asiatic or some other throne awaited him, wherefrom he afterward, when he came to it, wielded a magnificent sway. But let it be assumed I was changed from a Jean Lack-land to a John With-land,--I should go forthwith to the billiard-room, and tell everybody whom he had before him. Were one of my subjects there joining in the game, I should forthwith govern him on the spot; and if it were a female subject, without scruple. I should proceed with considerateness, and invest only subjects from my billiard-shire with the weightier offices, because the Regent must be acquainted with him whom he appoints, which, as is well known, he can best become at the gaming-tables. I would strictly command my vassals and all by a general _règlement_ for all times to be happy and well-off, and whoever was poor, him I would put as a punishment on half-pay; for I think, if I interdicted poverty so emphatically, it would come at last to be the same as if Saturn and I ruled together.--Like a Sultan in his harem, so I in my state, would desire no physical mutes or dwarfs, but, as occasion required, moral ones.--I confess, I should have a peculiar predilection for geniuses, and should appoint to all, even the wretchedest places, the greatest heads. I should fear nothing (enemies excepted) but dropsy on the brain, of which a crowned or mitred head must always be in an agony of dread, if, like me, it has read in Dr. Ludwig's, or else in Tissot's, treatises on the nerves, that it comes on at first with close bindings around the head, which I should fear still more from my crown, especially if the head which was forced into it was _thick_ and _it_ was _tight_....

We come back to the story. The next day Victor and Flamin, in the fair, newly assumed bonds of the covenant of friendship, returned to Flachsenfingen. Now could Victor enter through the heavenly gates of Maienthal, if Clotilda did not bolt them. All depended on Emanuel's answer. The May-airs breathed, the May-flowers exhaled, the May-trees rustled. O how this fanning kindled the longing to enjoy all these blisses in Maienthal, and to get from his friend the admission-ticket to the finest concert-hall of nature. None came; for it had already--come through the Bee-father Lind of Kussewitz, who as feudal-postilion had been sent by Count O. to Matthieu, and had taken the route through Maienthal. It was from Emanuel:--

"Horion!

"Come sooner, beloved! Hasten to our valley of Eden, which is a summer-house of nature, with green-growing walls between nothing but avenues running out of heaven into heaven. The light, flowery hours move by before the eye of man as the stars do before the optic tube of the astronomer. Blossom-snares of honeysuckle are laid for thee, and covered with fragrances; and when thou art caught in them, the up-welling incense envelops thee in a cloud, and unknown arms press through the cloud, and draw thee to three hearts full of love! I have already taken up lilies of the valley out of the wood, and planted them near me.--Thy city is indeed also a wood around thee, still lily of the valley! I have already transplanted two balsamines and five summer carnations; but my first transplanted Balsamine was Clotilda. Thou seest how spring, with its exuberant, swelling juices, penetrates through my budding soul also, and May splits open therein, as I am now doing on the carnations, all the buds.--Appear, appear, ere I become melancholy again, and then tell thy Julius who the angel was that handed him the letter for me.

"EMANUEL."

Julius had probably thought on this occasion of that other letter which a hitherto unknown angel had given him to unseal on this Whitsuntide.--But what have I to do here with angels and letters? Write by courier is what I will now do, that so I may have got through the 32d Chapter before the dog appears with his 33d Whitsuntide Chapter, which, not merely because it has thirty-two ancestral chapters, but on account of the probable effusion therein of a holy spirit of joy, or on account of a whole dove-flock of holy spirits, and on account of the historic pictures it will contain,--and by reason of my own exertions,--must be (it is believed) a chapter like which in each Dionysian[92] period hardly half a one, and in each Constantinopolitan hardly a whole one, can be written.--The Whitsuntide dog-day may turn out long, but it will be good and divine,--Philippine will shake her brother and say (she loves to flatter): "Paul! St. Paul was _also_ in the third heaven, but he never described it like this in his Epistle to the Romans!" I myself could wish that I might read my 33d dog-day before I had made it....