The Campaner thal, and other writings/The Campaner Thal
"Report also, we regret to say, is all that we know of the Campaner Thal, one of Richter's beloved topics, or rather the life of his whole philosophy, glimpses of which look forth on us from almost every one of his writings. He died while engaged, under recent and almost total blindness, in enlarging and remodelling this Campaner Thai. The unfinished manuscript was borne upon his coffin to the burial vault; and Klopstock's hymn, Anferstehen wirst du! 'Thou shalt arise, my soul!' can seldom have been sung with more appropriate application than over the grave of Jean Paul."—From Carlyle's Miscellanies.
INTRODUCTION.
N my distilling processes, I frequently precipitated the phlegma of our earthball—its polar deserts, its Russian forests, its icebergs—and from the sediments extracted a beautiful by-earth, a small satellite. If we extract and regulate the charms of this old world, we can form a delightful though minutely condensed world.
For the caves of this miniature or ditto-earth, we will take the caves of Antiparos and of Baumann, for its plains, the Rhine provinces—Hybla, Thabor, and Mont Blanc shall be its mountains—its islands, the Friendly, the Holy, and the Palm isles. Wentworth's park and Daphne's grotto, and some corner-pieces from the Paphian, we have for its forests—for a charming valley, the Seifer's-dorfer and that of Campan. Thus we possess, besides this dirty, weary world, the most beautiful by or after-world—an important dessert service—an Ante-Heaven between Ante-Hells.
I have purposely included this valley of Campan in my extract and decoction, as I know none other in which I would rather awake, or die, or love than in this one; if I had to command, I would not permit ray valley to be mixed up or placed beside the vale of Tempe or the Rose Valley, perhaps with Utopia. The reader must have known this valley in his geographical lessons, or in the works of Arthur Young, who praises it even more than I do.[1]
I must take for granted, that in July, 1796, the Goddess of Fortune descended from her throne to our earth, and placed in my hand—not mammon, nor garters, nor golden sheep—nothing but her own, and led me—by this I recognized the goddess—to the Campan vale. Truly, man needs but look into it, and he will have—as I had—more than the Devil offered to Christ and Louis XIV., and gave to the popes.
The test of enjoyment is memory. Only the paradises of the imagination willingly remain, and are never lost, but always conquered. Poetry alone reconciles the past to the future, and is the Orpheus's lyre which commands these two destroying rocks to rest.[2]
As stated, in the year 1796, I made a trip through France, with my friend H. Karlson. He is honorary master of horse in the * * * service. The wise public cares little for true names, it always treats them as fictitious ones, by way of literary taxation; and the existing characters, at least those of any importance, may prefer not to be torn over the wheel of criticism, and dragged piece-meal through libraries and reading-clubs. At almost every milestone, I despatched the best hourly bulletin to my friend Victor: when I had sent him the following valley-piece, he persecuted me until I promised to grant this illuminated portrait of nature, not alone to the letter, but also to the printing-press. Therefore I do it. I know already, my poor Victor sees, that in our days no green branch is left as a spinning-hut for the man-caterpillar, and that inimical divers try to cut our anchor-rope, sunk in the sea of death. Therefore he thinks more of the conversations on immortality, than of the valley in which they took place. I know this, because he calls me the counterpart of Claude Lorraine, who only drew the landscape, while another drew the human beings in it. Truly such a valley deserves that the mining and sabbath-lamp of truth should be lowered into the suffocating air of the grave, in place of our self, merely to see if that self can breathe at such a depth.
I have jokingly divided my letters into stations. I of course omit 500, and commence at the 501st, wherein I appear in the valley.
CAMPANER THAL.
501st STATION.
The Diversities of Life.—The Dirge as Billet-Doux. — The Cavern.—The Surprise.
ERE have I been since the day before yesterday. After descent into hell and purgatory, and passage through limbos infantum et patrum, man must at last reach heaven. But I owe you yet our exit from our inn on the 20th. Never can the head have a harder couch than when we hold it in our hands. The reason that this happened to Karlson and myself was, that in the rooms adjoining ours a wedding-dance was taking place, and that below, the youngest daughter of our maître d'hôtel, who had not only the name, but also the charms of Corday, with two white roses on her cheeks, and two red ones in her hair, was being interred, and that human beings with pale faces and heavy hearts waited on happy and blooming ones. When fate harnesses to Psyche's car, the merry and the mourning steed together, the mourning one ever takes the lead; i. e. if the muses of Mirth and Sorrow play on the same stage in the same hour, man does not, like Garrick,[3] follow the former; he does not even remain neuter, but takes the side of the mourning one. Thus we always paint, like Milton, our lost Paradise more glowing than the regained one,—like Dante, hell better than purgatory. In short, the silent corpse made us cold to the warm, joyful influence of the dancers. But is it not absurd, my dear Victor, that a man who, like myself, knows nothing better than that every hour unfolds at once morning bloom and evening clouds; that here an Ash"Wednesday and there a black Monday commence; that such a man, who grieves little that dancing music and funeral marches should sound at the same time on the broad national theatre of humanity, should yet hang his head and grow pale, when, in a side scene, this double music sounds in his ears? Is not this as absurd as all his other doings?
Into Karlson's eyes something of this cloud had fallen. It was to him the restirred ashes of a funeral urn. He can withstand all sorrows, but not their recollection. He has replaced his years by lands, and the space he has travelled over must be called his time. But the firm youth changed color when he came to tell that the lover of the pale Corday had torn her folded taper hands asunder, and, on his knees, had dragged them to his burning lips.
He perceived his paleness in the glass; and to explain it, he imparted the last and most secret leaf of his life's Robinsonade to me. You see what an opaque gem this youth is, who follows his friends through all France, without opening to his communicative friend and travelling companion, even a fold or a loophole in his relation to them. Now only from emotion on entering the Campan Vale, he draws the key from the keyhole, which shall become a prompter's hole for you.
That he had accompanied the Baron Wilhelmi and his betrothed Gione, with her sister Nadine, to Lausanne, in order to celebrate their Arcadian marriage in the Campan Vale, you know already; that he had left them suddenly at Lausanne, and returned to the Rhine fall at Shaffhausen, you know also, but not the reason, which will now be related to you by me and by him.
By daily contact Karlson had at bust penetrated the thickly-woven veil, magically colored by betrothed love, thrown over the strong, firm, and kindred mind of Gione. Probably others discovered him ere he had discovered himself. His heart became like the so-called world's eye[4] in water, first bright, then varying its colors, then dull and misty, and at last transparent. Not to cloud their beautiful intimacy, he addressed the suspicious part of his attentions to Nadine. He did not explain to me clearly whether he had led her into a beautiful error, without taking a beautiful truth from Gione.
The sword of death seemed likely to separate all these stage knots. Gione, the healthy and calm Gione, was suddenly attacked by a nervous disorder. One evening, Wilhelmi, with his usual poetic ardor, entered Karlson's chamber weeping, and, embracing him, could only sob forth the words, "She is no more."
Karlson said not a word, but in the tumult of his own and others' griefs, departed that night for Shaffhausen, and probably fled at the same time from a beloved and a loving one,—from Gione and from Nadine. By this eternal waterspout of the Rhine, this onward pressing, molten avalanche, this gleaming perpendicular milky-way, his soul was slowly healed; but he was long Imprisoned In the dark, cold, serpent's-nest of envenomed pains; they entwined and crawled over him, even to his heart. For he believed, as most world-men among whom he had grown up do,—perhaps, also, too much accustomed to analyzed ideas and opinions by his favorite study, chemistry,—that our last sleep is annihilation, as in the epopee the first man imagined the first sleep to be the first death.
To Wilhelmi he only sent the name of his retreat and a poem, entitled, "Grief without Hope," which declared his disbelief, for he had never broken the Ambrosia, whose delights a trust in immortality affords. But just that strengthened his enfeebled heart, that the muses led him to Hippocrene's spring of health.
Wilhelmi answered, that he had read his beautiful requiem to the deceased, or the immortal one. A long swoon had occasioned the painful mistake. Gione and he entreated him to follow speedily. Karlson replied: "Fate had separated him from their beautiful feast by the Alpine Wall, but as it would, like the Campan Vale, ever renew its springs, he hoped to lose nothing but time by his delay."
Now that the next world had cast its supernatural light on Gione's countenance, Karlson loved her too much to be capable of assisting at the ceremony of losing her forever. I will give you the opinion I formed of her by listening to his description.
Even by a love and a praise in a person's absence we may be won; how much more, then, if both are thrown to us as farewell kisses after the ascent to Heaven! Therefore the idea of the future funeral procession behind my gay, richly decorated dust, onion and relic box is only another incentive, not only to drug, but also to absolve myself, for when older we are less missed. And oven you, who so seldom hang us, or drive us all to the Devil, I mean, how seldom soever the tempest of anger sours the beer-barrel of your breast! Even you have no more efficacious morsel of white chalk, no better oleum tartari per deliquium,[5] with which you can sweeten your internal fluids, than the thought how we shall all turn pale round your death-bed, and be dumb at your grave-mound, and how none will forget you! I cannot possibly believe that there exists one being who, when death draws him into the diving-bell of the grave, will not leave one weeping eye, one bending head behind, and therefore each one can love the soul which will some time weep for him.
When I think now of the convalescent Gione, with her wounded heart, which had received a new sensitiveness in the hot electric atmosphere of the sinking thunderbolt of Death, I need not measure her emotion at Karlson's poem, by the dew and hygrometer, nor with the loadstone of her love. But not Willielmi's brilliant riches, nor his still more brilliant conduct, her first choice, her first promise, forbade her even to touch the diamond scales.
When Karlson told me all this, he turned Gione's ring-portrait upwards on his finger, and pressed the hard edge of the ring-finger with his tearful eyes, till the adorned hand was unconsciously touched by the lip's kiss. The bashfulness of his grief moved me so much, that I offered to take another route into the Vale, under the pretence that the dreams of it had lessened the desire for the reality, and that we should disturb the newly-affianced in their first rose-honey days, as they had probably waited for the mild late spring. He divined my intention; but his promise to come to-morrow dragged him by chains. Right gladly would I have missed the new spring-filled Eden, and drawn from my friend's feet the Jacob's ladder from which he might gaze on his former glad heaven, but could not ascend to it. On the other hand, I rejoiced at his firm, promise-keeping character, which opposed its strong nature to the thorns and boring-worms of sorrow; as with the increase of moonlight, tempests decrease. Unperceived, I now added Gione, not only Karlson, to the list of rare beings, who, like Raphael's and Plato's works, uncloud themselves only on earnest contemplation, and who, as both, resemble the Pleiades, which to the naked eye seems only to have seven suns, but with a telescope discloses more than forty.
On the 20th, we started towards the Yale. On the way, I looked too often into Karlson's faithful, heavenly, deep-blue eyes. I descended into his heart, and sought the scene of the day on which the holy church tie would tear the noble Gione forever from out his pure muse and goddess-warmed heart. I confess I can imagine no day on which I regard my friend with deeper emotion that on that never-to-be-forgotten one, on which Fate gives him the brother kiss, the hand-pressure, the land of love and Philadelphia and Vaucluse's spring, united in one female heart.
The day before yesterday, at ten in the evening, we arrived at Wilhelmi's Arcadian dwelling, which pressed its straw roof against a green marble wall. Karlson found it easily from its proximity to the famed Campan Cave, from which he had often broken stalactites. The sky waa clouded with colored shadows, and on the green cradle of slumbering children night thsrew her star-embroidered, fastened to the summits of the Pyranees. From out Wilhelmi's hermitage advanced some men in black attire, with torches in their hands, who seemed to be waiting for us, and told us the baron was in the Cave. By heaven, under such circumstances, it is easier to imagine the most circumscribed, than the largest and most beautiful Cave! The sable attendants carried the flame before them, and drew the flying smoke-picture from oak-top to oak-top, and led us, stooping, through the catacomb entrance. But how splendidly was arched the high and wide grotto,[6] with its crystal sides, shining like an illumined ice Louvre, a gleaming sub-terrestrial heaven vault. Wilhelmi threw away a handful of gathered spars, and joyfully hastened into his friend's arms. Gione, with her sister, advanced from behind a connected stalactite and stalagmite. The gleaming of the torches gave her an undecided outline, but at length Wilhelmi advanced to her, and said, "Here is our friend." Bending low, Karlson kissed the warm living hand, and was dumb with emotion. But the firm features of Clone's earnest face, which wanted but Nadine's juvenile bloom, changed into a shining joy, greater than he dared to return or reward. "We have long expected and missed you in this paradise," she said, with unshaken voice; and her clear, calm eye opened a view into a richly-gifted, steadfast soul. "Welcome to the infernal regions," said Nadine; "you believe in reunion and Elysium now?" Though she received him with an assemblage or Flora of wit, or was it grace? for they were difficult to distinguish, this cheerfulness of character and acquirement seemed not to be the cheerfuhiess of a contented or reposeful mind.
My friend introduced me properly, that no supermember or hors d'œuvre should remain in this corporation of friendship.
To all of us—even to me—for around me never before seen beings floated in silver reflections—it seemed as if the world had ceased, Elysium had opened, and the separated, covered, sub-terrestrial regions cradled only tranquil, but happy souls.
There was a certain heartfulness in the joyous interest which this affectionate trinity took in Karlson's appearance, which generally accompanies the last step before the disclosure of some hidden plan, but this plan was concealed. To speak something also to me, Nadine said, that there was a critical philosopher and arguer with them, who would rejoice to hear any one for or against his opinions,—namely, the house-chaplain. When we stepped from the illumined diamond and magic cave into the dark night, we saw the cloak of Erebus hang in thick cloudy folds over the earth, and pale lightning shot from the nightly mist, the flowers breathed from covered calysses, and under the fast approaching storm the nightingales raised their melodious voices behind their blooming hedges.
Suddenly Gione walked more slowly by Karlson's side, and said, with much warmth, but without hesitation: "I heartily love truth, even at the expense of stage-like effect: I must, in the name of the Baron, discover to you that he and I will to-morrow be forever united. You must forgive your friend that he would not celebrate this ceremony without his."
I think that now, in Karlson's heart, the cooled lava immediately became fluid and glowing. Suddenly lightning flashed from a cloud around the rising moon, and ilumined the rain-drops, intended for darkness, in Gione's and in Karlson's eyes. Wilhelmi asked, "Can you not forgive me?" Karlson pressed him warmly and lovingly to his grateful heart: this lofty confidence of friendship, and this affectionate proof of it, raised his strengthened soul above all desires, and another's virtue spread in his breast the calm tranquillity of his own. We took shelter for the night in three Thabor huts,—the ladies in the first, Wilhelmi with the critical philosopher in the second, Karlson and myself in the third,—which the Baron had hired for us. The fatigue of the journey, and even of our feelings, deferred our joys and confidences for another night. But I cannot tell you how nobly sorrow changed into exaltation in my friend's countenance, how grief fell like a cloud from his heaven, and discovered the serene blue beneath. The sacrifices and virtues of our beloved ones belong to the inexpressible joys which the soul at least can count and appreciate; which it can imitate.
His and my eyes overflowed with holy gladness from a singularly elysian mood of harmony in anticipation of the coming day. Ah, my Victor! nations and men are only the best when they are the gladdest, and deserve Heaven when they enjoy it. The tear of grief is but a diamond of the second water, but the tear of joy of the first. And therefore fatherly fate, thou spreadest the flowers of joy, as nurses do lilies in the nursery of life, that the awakening children may sleep the sounder! O, let philosophy, which grudges our pleasures, and blots them out from the plans of Providence, say by what right did torturing pain enter into our frail life? Have we not already an eternal right to a warm down bed? I think not now of the deepest mattress in the earth, because we are so pierced with stigmas of the past, so covered with its wounds.
You once said to me: "In your early years, you have been drawn and driven from the stoic philosophy by Sorites; for if the sensation of pleasure be as little as the stoics pretend, it were wiser to convert than to benefit your neighbor,—wiser to preach morality from pulpit and desk than to practise it in the work-rooms,—wiser to turn towards your neighbor the dirt-balls and soap-pills of moral philosophy, than the enlarged marble soap-bubbles of joy. Further, that it is a mistake to assert that virtue makes more worthy of happiness, if happiness possessed not an eternal, independent value in itself; for else it might be maintained that virtue would make the possessor of a straw, &c. worthy—"
You said this once. Do you believe it yet?—I do.
502d STATION.
The Thundering Morning.—The Short Trip after the Long One.—The Sofa-Cushions.
HROUGH the whole night, a half-lost thundering was heard, as though it murmured in its sleep. In the morning, before sunrise, Karlson and myself stepped out into the wide cloud-tapestried bridal-chamber of nature. The moon approached the double moment of its waning and its fulness. The sun, standing on America as on a burning altar, drove the cloudy incense of its feu de joie high and red into the air; but a morning tempest boiled angrily above it, and darted its fierce lightnings to meet his ascending rays. The oppressive heat of nature drew longer and louder plaints from the nightingales, and evanescent aroma from the long flower-meads. Heavy warm drops were pressed from the clouds, and beat loudly on the stream and on the foliage. Only the Mittagshorn, the pinnacle of the Pyrenees, stood brightly and clearly in the heavenly blue. Now a gust of wind from the waning moon dispersed the raging storm, and the sun stood victoriously under a triumphal arch of lightnings. The wind restored the heaven's blue, and dashed the rain behind the earth, and around the dazzling sun-diamond there lay only the silvered fringes of the once threatening clouds.
O my Victor, what a new-born day was now on earth, encamped in the glorious valley. The nightingales and the larks loudly sung its welcome, the rosechafers rustled round its lily garlands, and the eagle, riding on the highest cloud, surveyed it from mountain to mountain. How rurally all things surrounded the serpentine field-embracing Adour. The marble walls, not raised by human skill, surround its flower-beds like large vases, and the Pyrenees, with their high tops, watch over and protect the lowly scattered shepherd huts. Tranquil Tempe! May a storm never disturb thy gardens and thy murmuring Adour. May a stronger one never visit thee, than would gently rock the cradle of nature, or dash a bee from the honey-dew of the wheat-sheaf, or force but a single drop from the waterfall upon the flowers of thy shores.
You must not think that I am placing my paint-brushes at my side to copy the heavenly rounded valley by the measure of art for you; I will let you peep into this picture-book of nature as chance shall turn each succeeding page. My stations will lead you through its different chambers, in which the rich dowry of Spring, like that of a king's daughter, is placed for show. But truly it is a more glorious thing to see the whole dowry disposed over the person of the royal bride herself.
A servant seeking the chaplain, roused us both from our reverie. "We saw him advance towards a gentleman standing on the banks of the Adour, who slowly turned down his rolled-up shirt-sleeves. It was the chaplain, who had been catching crabs during the storm, and had subsequently fished. As I knew that his hairy hand had worked for the food of the critical, as well as his own philosophy, with trowel and mortar, with pen and ink, I boldly advanced towards him, and told him what I was writing. But the coarse, obstinate, yet timid free-mason, coldly welcomed me in a language as broad as his own frosty visage.
He despises biographers; for the windows of a philosophical audience are too high,—perhaps, as in ancient temples, in the roof,—so that they cannot see into the streets of real life, as, according to Winkelmann, the Roman windows were architecturally as high. Lord Rochester is said to have been continually drunk during a whole quintennium; but such a chaplain is capable of being sober for an entire decennium. A man like this bites the buds of all powerful truths, experiences, and fictions, as ants bite the buds from corn-seeds, that they may not fructify, but wither and die and form building materials.
When the Chaplain left me to join the Baron, as consecrator of the marriage sacrament, I found Karlson in the dustrain of a near cascade. Round him, almost close to our windows, the hermitages of the farmers waded in green foliage, with the fresh harvest wreath roofed by faded ones; and inside, there bloomed families, outside, elms. He showed me Gione's card, which, he said, she had given him before her marriage. But it was not so; he had found it on the moss near the cascade. It represented a Roman landscape, and beside the living fountain was the pictured one of Tivoli, and on a stone in the foreground Gione's name was written. Such a printed trifle, a beloved name shortly before its sublunar annihilation, moves the whole heart with a succession of pleasing reflections.
Karlson went to the ceremony. I remained alone under the splendid blue heaven, and rejoiced that all the inhabitants of Campan wore its livery, the blue, which we had yesterday mistaken for black.
I will not hide from you that during the coupling, softened by the many beauties of spring, I lost myself in Nadine's equally charming ones, which were an undiscovered Central Africa for me, while I wished she were as warm. After eight or ten dreams, I saw the beautiful couples cross my path. How earnestly glad and serene we all stood under the spring music of flutes and pipes, and harps and warbling, which were living around us, with and without wings. Gione and Karlson concealed an equal emotion, as at an almost equal fate. Wilhelmi, who is, as a comet, sometimes in the burning, sometimes in the freezing point of a sun, requires no joys than those of others to make him happy. But a tear stood in Nadine's bright eye, which could not be smiled or looked away. Her heart seemed to me to resemble the earth, whose exterior is cold, but which carries in its centre a latent heat. And yesterday her whole being seemed so mirthful and so gay!
We never make more erroneous conclusions in our opinions on any subject than on woman's cheerfulness. Oh! how many of these charming beings there are, who decay unvalued, who, while jesting, despair, and while joking, bleed to death; who hide their merry laughing eyes behind a wall, as behind a fan, to give glad vent to their long-restrained tears; who pay for a merry day by a tearful night, just as an unusually clear, transparent, and fogless air betokens rain. Remember the beautiful N. N., and also her youngest sister. In the mean time, the charming, sun-variegated dew-drop under Nadine's eye was balanced by a wart of half the size, the solitaire among her personal charms.
Wilhelmi's lyric and dithyrambic head was filled with projects for pleasure, and with the eagerness of delight, he demanded a hasty determination concerning the proper use and enjoyment of the day. "O yes," said I, quickly and impertinently, "life flies to-day on a minute-hand, like an alarum it winds off; but how shall we form a plan, a good plan?" Nadine, who had arranged everything beforehand with the bridegroom, replied: "I think we need none for such a delightful day, and such a charming valley. We will pilgrimize carelessly along the banks of the Adour, the length of the Vale, and rest at every new flower, and at every bud, and in the evening we will sail back by moonlight! That would be quite Arcadian and shepherd-like in this Arcadia. Will you all? You certainly will, dearest sister?" "O yes," said Gione, "for I think we are as yet all strangers to the charms of this paradise." The Baron seemed to hesitate before giving his consent, and said: "It depends whether the ladies can walk two and a quarter miles in one day."[7] I was mad with joy, and cried, "Charming!" Such a long horizontal heaven-journey, such a melodious Arpeggio through the chords of delight was an old innate wish of my youth. I imparted my delight to the Chaplain, to whose feelings this voyage pitturesque was as repugnant as a Good Friday procession, and to whom, instead of this heaven-way, that of Höfer[8] would have been more acceptable, because he would rather have remained at home to read, and because he did not enjoy the Epopee of nature as a man, nor scan it as a naturalist, but like an usher, separated and divided it, for practice in building up again. I said to him: "If we two will be shepherds, representing the old Myrtil and Phylax, it would be interesting. You know best that whims should be ten times less bold before ladies and refined ears than on print, and that for such people it has to be filtered through so many filtering-papers and strainers, that I would not give a proof-sheet for it after the process."
A hired country-house, at the end of the valley, was the architectural Eden with which Wilhelmi intended to surprise and delight his bride in this botanic one. But Nadine alone knew it.
In as many moments as a swan would take to spread his wings and rise, we were all ready. I do not blame man for making preparations for the examination for death, but for no (shorter) journey. The long hunt destroys the game of enjoyment. I, for my part, never think of starting until I am on the road.
Wilhelmi loaded himself with his bride's guitar; Karlson carried a portable ice-cellar. The ladies had their parasols; the Chaplain and I had nothing. I whispered to the shallow Phylax,—so I can now call him, and myself the old Myrtil,—"Sir Chaplain, we rebel against all good manners if we follow empty-handed." He immediately offered himself to Gione, as pack-horse, wagon, and carrier for her—parasol. But clever genius prompted me to return to Karlson's chamber, and bring two cushions from the sofa, and I returned with these twins in my arms; nothing could have been more appropriate, as the ladies sat down a thousand times on the way, and could not have dipped their silken elbows in the juicy paint of the flowers. To his vexation, Phylax was obliged to carry the soft block in his arms; I hung the other one, like a stick, to my thumb. At last we started.
We advanced towards the Pvrenees. Corn-fields, waterfalls, shepherd huts, marble blocks, woods and grottoes, animated by the vascular system of the many-branched Adour, passed beautifully before our eyes, and we were forced to leave them behind, like the bright years of youth changed into dreams by the stern hand of Time.
Ah, Victor, travelling alone is life, as life, on the contrary, is only a journey. And if, like certain shell-fish, I could only push myself on with one foot, or, like sea-nettles and women, I could only progress six lines in a quarter of an hour, or if I lived under Fritz II. or Fritz I. (Lycurgus), who both forbade a long journey, I would make a short one, that I might not perish like the loach, which languishes in every vessel, if not shaken.
How spirited, how poetical, how inventive can we not be while we run onwards. As Montaigne, Rousseau, and the sea-nettle only shine when they move on. By Heaven! it is no wonder that man rises and will go on; for does not the sun follow the pedestrian from tree to tree? does not its reflected likeness swim after him in the water? do not landscapes, mountains, hills, men, rapidly changing, come and go? and does not Freedom's breath blow on the ever-varying Eden, when, released from the neck and heart-breaking chains of narrow circumstances, we fly freely and gladly, as in dreams, over ever-new scenes.
For unfortunately the bell-glass over men and melons, which at first is covered by a broken bottle, must always be raised higher and higher, and at last removed entirely. At first, a man will go into the next town, then to the university, then to an important residency, then—if he has only written twenty lines—to Weimar, and finally, to Italy or to heaven. And if the planets were stringed together on a cord, and near each other, or if the rays of light were roads, and the atoms of light bridges, then surely would post-houses be erected in Uranus, and the insatiable inner man—for the outer one is so very satiable—would go longing and roaming from planet to planet. ——
Therefore, my Victor, nothing is confined in so many prison-walls as is this our human self. And our cages are enclosed, onion-like, one in the other. Your and my self are imprisoned not only on this earth, but in this King's Bench are the town walls; in these our four walls surround us; in the four walls, the arm-chair or the bed; in this again, the shirt or the coat, or both; and lastly, the body. And, to be minute (according to Sömmering), in the brain crevices, the duck's pond. —— —— Start at the fatal many-sided suite of houses of correction which surround thyself! —— ——
503d STATION.
Lampoon on the Chaplain.—Praise of Him.—The Diamond. — Opinions against Immortality.—Eden Jokes.
E two fellow-carriers formed the rear-guard. I wished to enter into discourse, but Phylax had a very poor opinion of me; at most he thought me a fickle sentimentalist who only portrays feelings. Yet feelings are the sponge of atmospheric air, which the poet, on his high Parnassus, as well as the philosophical diver in his depths, must hold in his mouth, and yet poetry has cast an earlier light on many obscure works of nature than philosophy, as the dark new moon borrows light from Venus.
But the philosopher sms against poets more than you sin against the followers of Kant, from whom you seem to expect that they shall write pleasingly. Your arguments are ideas, not reasonings, when you say that philosophy's attendants are like those of Turkish ladies, mute, black, and deformed; that the philosophical market-place is a forium morionum,[9] and that beauty is forbidden to philosophers, as it was to the Helots, who were killed for possessing it. Is it not evident that a certain barbarous, un-German, far-fetched language is more an ornament than a detriment to it. Oracles despise grace, vox dei solœcismus, i. e. a Kantist cannot be read,—he must be studied. Further, it is not beneath a philosopher to enrich the language instead of the science. For some other may seek the ideas for the terms, and find them, as animals were found for the Ammonites. Therefore the Greeks have the same term for word and knowledge, which combination was at last deified. The philosopher should always write over his door pour l'oudalgie,[10] instead of "here lives a dentist." This is the best reason, except a second one, why the philosopher, especially the Kantist, as I saw in Phylax, needs not books, nor men, nor experience, nor chemistry, botany, the fine arts, nor natural history. He can and must decipher the positive, the material, the given number, the unknown X. He creates the term, and sucks, as children often do,—it may suffocate them,—his own blistered tongue.
I must return to the company! As the Chaplain carried his walking-stick, or rather walking-tree of a cushion, with the greatest indifference towards me, I wished to prejudice him for me by a panegyric at the expense of Kant. I said to him: "It surprised me that the philosophers should have suffered Kant to have made so great a distinction between them and artists, and only allowed the merit of genius to the latter. He says, in § 47 of his 'Kritik der Urtheilkraft,' 'In sciences, the greatest inventor is only distinguished from the most labored imitator and apprentice by gradation; but from those whom nature has gifted for beautiful nature, he is specifically distinguished.' This is derogatory. Sir Chaplain, and besides, not true. Why can Kant, then, only make Kantists, but no Kants?[11] Are new systems discovered by syllogisms, yet they are proved and tried by them? Can, then, the connection of a new philosophical idea with the old one better explain or facilitate its comprehension than the same connection which each new poetic one must have with old ones, which are the means of its creation. Sir Chaplain, I know not whom Kant has most sinned against, Truth, himself, or his school. Leibnitz's 'Monadology,' harmonia præstabilita, &c., are as much pure, brilliant emanations of genius, as any beaming form in Shakespeare or Homer. Besides, Leibnitz is a genial almighty Demiurg in the philosophical world, its greatest and first circumnavigator, and who, happier than Archimedes, found in his genius the standing-point from which he might move the philosophical universa, and play with worlds. He was an extraordinary spirit, he threw new chains on the earth, but he himself bore none: I think you agree with me, Sir Chaplain!" He replied. He did not, that the critical philosophy knew what to make of Leibnitz's experiments, his immaterial world, the asserted approximation of the definite to the indefinite line, and how to honor genius. In short, I had rather angered than conquered him.
Karlson, whom even Amor's torch could not blind to the philosophical one, took as much interest in our war as could be taken with the ears. Fortunately we all stood still. A small diamond had fallen from Nadine's neck-lace, and she sought for the silver petrified spark in the grass. Strange that a man always hopes to find a thing on the spot where he perceives his loss. Nadine looked for her hardened dew-drop on the sparkling, spangled mead. As a bright diamond of the first water, it was so easily mistaken for a dew-drop, that I remarked, seeing one in Nadine's breast-rose, "Everything is covered with soft diamonds, and who will find the hard one? The dew in your rose sparkles as brightly as the lost stone." She looked down, and in the rose-cup lay the sought-for gem! It was thought I had been clever, and I was angry with myself for having been so stupid. But Nadine liked me no less for it, and that was reward enouqh.
As the Adour bent, not an arm, but a finger, around this gay moss-bank and bees' sugar-field, the whole company sat among the bees and the flowers, and the cushion-bearers laid down their burdens. Nadine said, playfully, "If flowers have souls, the bees, whose nurses they are, must seem to them like dear sucking children." "They have," said Karlson, "souls like frozen window flowers, or like the tree of Petit,[12] which I once showed to you, or like pyramids of alum." "O, you always destroy, sir," said Gione. "Nadine and I once painted to ourselves an elysium for the souls of faded flowers." "I believe in a middle path for flowers after their death," said Wilhelmi, seriously; "the souls of lilies probably go into woman's forehead; hyacinth and forget-me-not souls into woman's eyes, and rose souls into lips and cheeks." I added, "It is a fortunate coincidence for this hypothesis, that a girl has perceptibly more color from the departing soul at the moment when she breaks or kills a rose."
Joyfully and affectionately we continued our journey. Only into my carrier-companion the souls of thistles and sloes seemed to have entered. This play of ideas and this politeness in argument provoked him. Only Karlson pleased him.
At last the Chaplain said to me: "No immortality but that of moral beings can be discussed, and with them it is a postulate or apprenticeship of practical sense. For as a full conformity of the human will to the moral law, with which the just Creator never can dispense, is quite unattainable by a finite being, an eternally continuing progress, i. e. an unceasing duration, must contain and prove this conformity in God's eyes, who overlooks the everlasting course. Therefore our immortality is necessary."
Karlson stood still at Gione's side, that we might approach, and said: "Dear philosopher, pray take from this proof the boldness or the indistinctness which it has for laymen. How can we imagine the supervision, i. e. the termination, of an infinite, a never-ending course? or how will you make the eternity of time harmonize with the eternity of the moral requirements. How can a righteousness, scattered and dispersed over an interminable period of time, satisfy Divine Justice, which must require this righteousness in each portion of the period. And has the constant approximation of man towards this state of purity been proved? And will not the number, if not the grossness of faults, in this infinite space, increase with the number of virtues? And what comparison will the list of faults bear to that of the virtues at the examination? But let us leave that also. Will, in the sight of the Divine eye, the moral purity of two different beings—for instance, a seraph and a man, or of two different men, as Robespierre and Socrates—be equally contained in two equally long, i. e. eternal, courses of time? If on comparing the two, a difference appear, then one of them cannot have attained the so-called perfection, and must still be mortal."
The Chaplain answered: "But Kant does not intend to demonstrate immortality by this argument. He says even, that it has been left so uncertain in order that free, pure will, and no selfish views, shall prompt our aspirations to immortality." "Strange," said Karlson. "But as we have now discovered this intention, its object would be defeated. Philosophers ought then to imitate me,, and attack immortality to the advantage of virtue. It is a strange axiom to presuppose the truth of an opinion from its indemonstrability. Either immortality can be proved, then one half of your argument is right, or it cannot, then the whole of it is wrong. Besides, if the belief in immortality makes virtue selfish, the experience of it in the next world would make it more so. Does the belief in it deter the common man from doing what his confessor forbids, and forgives him? As little as the first stroke of apoplexy deters the drunkard from rushing to the second."
504th STATION.
Flower Toying.
ARLSON joined the others in conversation, and Phylax was enraged that he could not triumph,—not even dispute. I said to him, that my opinions agreed with his, though not on the same grounds, and that, uniting, we would subsequently together issue forth and attack Karlson,
I then went with my silken club to Nadine, and on a rose-bush showed her the flying light-magnets, the shining will-o'-the-wisps of night, the brown glowworms which she had never seen by day. I colonized a box with them for a living firework in the evening. Chance had romantically bent a bright rose-bush between graceful bluebells, on a green marble boundary stone; its foliage had the appearance of being seamed with black glowworms;[13] the lily-chafer hung like gold embroidery on the pale, ripe roses; long-legged, shining gnats ran glittering over the thorns; the flower-divers and nectary treasure-diggers, the bees, covered the rose-cups with new thorns; the butterflies, like moving tints, like Epicurean colors, gently floated round the branch's gay world. I cannot tell you how this glance, turned from the vast whole on to a beautiful small portion, gave a warmer glow to our hearts and to nature. Instead of the hand, we could only hold, like children, the fingers of the great mother of life, and reverently kiss them. By the creation, God became human for men, as therefore for angels an angel,—like the sun whose bright immensity the painter gently divides into the beauties of a human face.
Wilhelmi said, that, to rise into Eden or Arcadia, he would need no larger wings than the four of a butterfly. What a poetical, paradisaical existence, like the papilio, to roam without stomach or hunger, among buds and flowers, to suffer no long night, no winter, and no storm, to toy away one's life in a delightful chase for another papilio, or to nestle, like the flower-colored bird of paradise, among lemon-blossoms, to float round blooming honey-cups, and to be rocked in silken cradles!
Blissfully we proceeded on our way, and each new step drove an exciting blood-drop to our warmed hearts. I said to the Chaplain, that the temple of nature had been changed into a concert-hall for me, and every vocal into instrumental music. Victor! should not philosophy and the philosophers imitate electric bodies, which not only enlighten, but also attract? The soul's wine will indeed ever taste of the bodily barrel-hoops, but the soul is scarcely spirit-like enough only to serve as a body to another soul.
505th STATION.
The Ephemera.—Relative Conclusions.—Doubts of the Length of the Chain of Living Beings.—The Wart-Eaters.—The Cure.
HE sun and the valley surrounded us with their burning-glasses, and it was pleasant to sit down in a shady spot, and eat; and as just opposite to us was a marble-quarry, and close to the iron rock-wall a sap-green meadow, and beside us a group of elms and a little shining solitary white house, we asked at it for as much food as a roaming, contented quintet requires. The mistress of the house was alone, the husband was at work (as most Campanians are, in Spain), four children waited on us; our ice-cellar was opened, and with its contents the soul was warmed and the body cooled. The white glowing keystone of the heaven arch awoke with its flames the noonday wind, which slept on the cold summit of the Pyrenees.
Little or nothing would taste well to poor Phylax, to whom it was more important to prove that he would be eternal. Fortunately, the French wine armed him more with French customs, and he asked the Baron politely: "I believe I owe M. Karlson some proofs of our immortality. Might I be allowed to give them?" Wilhelmi sent him to Gione, saying, "Ask there." Gione willingly granted his request, and said, "Why should not recollections of immortality ornament our joys as much as monuments do English gardens?" Nadine threw in the question, "But if men quarrel about the hopes of humanity, what remains for women?" "Her heart and its hopes, Nadine," said Gione. Wilhelmi said, smiling: "The owl of Minerva, as all other owls, is said to forebode destruction to a household, by settling on its roof. But I hope it is not so." I added, "The lives of all our beloved ones are tied to the obelisk of immortality, as to that of Rameses,[14] that the danger may double our strength; for they will be destroyed if it rebound."
In the mean time, Karlson had taken an ephemeral fly from a neighboring elm, to which it had clung, in order to cast off its super body before death. The ephemera should not be an embodiment of our immortality,[15] but of our unfolding; for, unlike other insects, after all its transformations, and when already furnished with wings, it changes its shape once more before death. He held it before us, and said: "In my opinion, a philosophical ephemera would argue thus. What! I should have uselessly accomplished all my various changes, and the Creator had no other intention in calling me from the egg to the grub, then to a chrysalis, and at last to a flying being, whose wings must burst another covering before death, with this long range of spiritual and corporeal developments, he should have had no other aim than a six hours' existence, and the grave must be the only goal of so long a long a course?" The Chaplain opportunely answered, "Your argument proves against yourself, for it is petitio principii to presuppose mortality amongst ephemera."
I confess I am an enemy to these relative conclusions, because they take as much from truth as they give to eloquence, for contrary opinions can be proved by them. To one whose eyes are hurt by a grain of sand, I can prove that he is comparatively happy, as there are many in the world who suffer from sand-blisters and gravel; and also that he is unfortunate, as Sultanic eyes are never pressed by anything harder than Circassian eyelids—or two rosy lips. Thus I can make the world immense in comparison to bullets, grains of poison, or round puddings, or minute, if placed beside Jupiter, the sun, or the milkyway. If the ephemera on the ladder of existence would turn its back on the brilliant development of the beings above it, and only count the important ones on the steps beneath it, it would increase in its own importance. In short, our oratorical fantasy continually mistakes the distinction between more and less for that of something or nothing; but every relative conclusion must be based on something positive, which only eternal eyes, which can measure the whole range of innumerable degrees, can truly weigh. Indeed, there must be some bodily substance, and were it even the earth; for every comparison, every measurement, presupposes a fixed, unchanging standard. Therefore, the ephemeral development is a true one, and the conclusions on it are the same as on a seraphic one. The difference in the degrees can only bring forth relative, not opposite conclusions. And here, in this letter—for in print I would not dare to do it—I will acknowledge a doubt. No one has ever seen the steps of the ladder of beings above us,—no one has counted those beneath us. What if the former were less, the latter greater, than we have hitherto imagined. The eternal promotion of souls from angels to archangels, in short, the nine philosophical hierarchies have only been asserted, but not proved. The common opinion, that the immense difference between man and the Eternal must be filled up by a chain of spiritual giants, is false; as no chain can shorten the distance, much less fill it, for it will ever retain the same width; and the seraph, i. e. the highest finite being according to human thoughts, must imagine just as many, if not more, beings above him, as I do beneath me. Astronomy, this sawing machine of suns, this ship's wharf and laboratory of earths, would persuade us that the enlargement of worlds and beings is a sign of their improvement. But over the whole sky there hang only earth and fire-balls, and all things on them, from milk-way to milk-way, are less than the wishes and longings of our hearts. Then why should our earth alone, why not every other also, be progressing? why should they, rather than we, have the start in this inaugural eternity? In short, it may be disputed if in the whole universe there are other angels and archangels than Victor and Jean Paul. It seems scarcely credible to me. But truly the melodious progression to sublime beings has hitherto been merely taken for granted. I believe in a harmonious one, in an eternal ascension, but in no created culmination.
I presume Karlson intended to answer my argument, not on the seraphs, but on ephemera, when Nadine, who had borrowed the fly in order to examine it, held it too near her eyes, and thereby disturbed and extinguished our Mendelssohn-Platonic conversation. For Madame Berlier (such was the noble name of our temporary hostess) stepped up to Nadine, and said: "It is a pity for the pain. You must take the wart-locust, I have proofs," do you understand? It is this. The so-called wart-eater, a locust with light brown spots, takes away a wart in a very short time by a single bite. Dame Berlier, over whom, as over most Southrons, beauty had greater power than self-love and sex, had falsely imagined that Nadine wished to annihilate the only fault in her charming form with the fly. The Chaplain had scarcely heard the wart-eater mentioned, when he vanished among the green, and commenced a hunt for wart-locusts. I was vexed that I had known the remedy as well as Dame Berlier, and never thought of it. For a shabby simile I should have easily recollected it, but not for a useful cure. Fortune permitted him soon to return with the winged wart-operator; this excited my envy. When he gave it to Nadine, the officious Phylax had squeezed, with the letter and paper press of his hands, like in a good calendar-press, the brown spotted vegetable-eater to—death. The animal could bite no more; I immediately darted off in search of another, and soon returned, holding one by the tips of its wings, and said, I would myself hold it over the wart until he would operate on it. While performing the action I praised it. Every great deed, I said, is only accomplished in the soul, at the moment of determination; when it comes outward and is repeated by the body,—which holds the locust,—it disperses into insignificant movements and thirds; but when it is done, as now the operation, it becomes great again, and, ever increasing, flows onward through all time. Thus the Rhine rushes like a giant from its summit, disperses in the fog, falls as rain upon the plain, then it forms itself into clouds, and roams over the sands, and carries suns instead of rainbows.
It need not be concealed from you that it affected me to look into the retina of two such bright and warm, up-turned eyes, without mentioning the whole warlike array of curls and lips, and forehead, and the Waterloo landscapes of the cheeks. Nadine's terror at the teeth of the brown little doctor made her more charming, and the danger of my situation greater. After holding it for some time, when I thought the operation was finished, she told me the locust had not yet touched her, as I held it two or three Parisian feet too far from the wart. It is true, I had lost myself in her net skin; but I remarked that the cure could not be accomplished, if I did not rest the ball of my right hand slightly on her cheek, in order to hold the wart-eater more firmly over the wart. Now he bit the required wound, and propelled into it as much of his corrosive fluid as he carried with him. I artfully diverted Nadine's pain, which resembled that of a pin pricking, by philosophizing. Man, I said, finds the stoic theory true and forcible for all pain, only not for the present. And when he bleeds from cut wounds, he imagines bruises heal more easily. He therefore defers his practice of the stoic-school until his own schooling is over. O, but then he stands by a running stream, waiting until the waters shall have passed. True firmness bears the bite of a locust, and rejoices at the trial!
Now the operation was happily accomplished, which could easily excite an illness in me. It is true that her countenance had inflicted a deeper wound on me than the wart-eater upon it,—I should fear and examine whether mine, which was just as near to hers, had done as much damage; but Nadine is exceedingly—young. The hearts of young girls, like new waterbutts, at first let everything drop through, until in time, the vessels swell and thus retain their contents.
506th STATION.
Objections to Immortality.—The Second Childhood of the Outer and Inner Man.
E broke up and proceeded. On high, light feathers floated through the sky, like the loose-flowing hair of the sun, which could not veil it. The day became hotter and stiller. But our path lay beneath a green roof, and each branch spread over us a parasol of broad fresh leaves.
Gione asked, "Can we not continue our conversation in walking?" O, your Clotilde should know her; she has, excepting her charms, half her soul. No discord exists between her outer and inner harmony; her earnest, generous soul resembles the palm-tree, which has neither bark nor branches, but which bears broad foliage and buds on its summit. "Gione," said Nadine, "these arguments unsettle our minds, instead of removing our doubts." "No one," she replied, "has yet given his opinion; if we even have the firmest convictions, still by their beautiful conformity with another's convictions our own become more beautiful and firm." "Just as water-plants, surrounded by their water, are yet as much refreshed by rain as land plants are," said Myrtil (I am Myrtil).
Wilhelmi said, just as we were passing through the Midsummer's-day night of a grotto cooled by oakshade and cascades: "Our conversation would better suit a total eclipse of the sun. I would that I could see one, when the moon hangs beauteously before the midday sun, when the noisy day is suddenly hushed, when the nightingales sing, the flowers fade, and when nightly mists and shuddering cold and dew fall." Phylax had now let slip his sofa-cushion into a murmuring spring; Nadine saw it, and, not to confuse him in the act of drawing it out, she, with charming zeal, drove us back to our conversation. Her intercourse with the world had given her a playful, light, ever-joyous exterior. But Gione's style, like the highest Grecian, is, artistically speaking, somewhat meagre and spare,—and the ball-rooms had made her, as mahogany presses make dresses, more agreeable. But her exterior charms did not contradict or injure her interior beauty.
I said to Karlson, "Pray, prove to us the spiritual mortality, this soul's death." "M. Karlson needs not do that," answered the stupid Phylax, vexed at the wet cushion, "only the assertor must prove."
"Very well," I said, "I call proofs objections, but I shall certainly give you only two;—firstly, the proof or objection: the simultaneous decay and destruction of the body and of the soul; secondly, the absolute impossibility of ascertaining the mode of life of a future existence, or as the Chaplain would say, to see into the spiritual world from the sensuous one. Now, M. Karlson, throw your two bombs into the greatest possible angles, which, according to Hennert, is 40 degrees, but according to Bezout, 43 degrees."
He aimed well. He showed how the spiritual Dryad flowered, burst and dispersed with the corporeal bark, how the noblest impulses are chained to the lead—earth, revolving wheel of the body; how memory, imagination, and madness only feed on the egg-yolk of the brain,—how bravery and mildness stand in as opposite degree to blood as leeches and Jews;[16] how, in age, the inner and outer man together bend towards the grave, together petrify, together, like metal compositions, slowly cool, and at last together die!
He then asked why, with the continual experience that every bodily down-bending digs a spiritual wound, and with this unceasing parallel of body and soul, we give to the latter, after death, everything which we have seen annihilated in the former. He said, and I believe it, that neither Bonnet's underbody, nor the incorporated soul corsets of Plattner (the "second soul organ") can diminish the difficulty of the question, for as both soul's under-garments or night-gowns and pinafores, always share, in life, the good and bad fate of the coarse, corporeal coat and martyr-cloak, and as in us double-cased English watches, the works, and the first and second cases (Bonnet's and Plattner's) always suffered and gained 'together, it would be absurd to seek the Iliad of the future world in the narrow hazel-nut shell of the revived little body which has first stood and fallen with the coarse outward one.
I then asked him to aim his second ball in the angle of forty degrees also. I added, that "I would have begged leave to give a long parliamentary speech on it, but that long speeches have a life and reproducing power, as, according to Reaumur, long animals more easily re-form themselves, when cut, than short ones." Though certainly it occurs to me, that Unzer says, tall persons do not live as long as short ones. But Karlson needed little time or power to prove the uncertainty of the next world. The Sun-land behind the hillocks of the God's acre, behind the pest-cloud of Death, is covered by a complete, an impenetrable darkness of twelve inches, or of as many holy nights. He showed, and not badly, what an immense leap beyond all terrestrial analogies and experiences it is, to hope for, i. e. to create, a world, a transcendent Arcadia, a world of which we know neither copy nor original, which wants no less than a form and a name, map and globe, another Vespucius Americus, of which, neither chemistry nor astronomy can give us the compounds or the quarters; a universe of air, on which, from the leaf-stripped, faded soul, a new body will bud forth, i. e. a nothing on which nothing is to embody itself.
O, my good Karlson! how could your noble soul omit a second world which is already contained in this physical first one, like bright crystals in dark earth, namely, the sun-world of Virtue, Truth, and Beauty,[17] glowing in our souls, whose golden vein inexplicably extends its ramification through the dark, dirty clump of the sensuous world.
It was now my turn to answer: "I will lessen your two difficulties, and then I will give my innumerable proofs. You are no materialist,[18] you therefore take for granted that bodily and mental activity only accompany and mutually excite each other. Yes, the body represents the keys of the inner Harmonica through all its scales. Hitherto only the corporeal outward signs have been called feelings, as the swelling heart and the slowly-beating pulse—longing; the outpouring of gall, anger, and so on. But the net-like texture, the anastomy between the inner and outer man, is so life-full, so warm, that to every picture, every thought,—a nerve, a fibre must move. We should also observe, and put into the notes of speech all the bodily after sounds of poetic, algebraic, artistic, numismatic, and anatomic ideas. But the sounding-board of the body is neither the soul's scale nor its harmony. Grief has no resemblance to a tear,—shame, none to the cheek-imprisoned blood,—wit, none to champagne,—the idea of this valley, none to its portrait on the retina. The inner man, this God, hidden in the statue, is not of marble as it is, but in the stony limbs, the living ones grow and ripen in an unknown life. We do not sufficiently mark how the inner man even tames and forms the outer one; how, for example, the passionate body which, according to physiology, should ever increase in heat, is gradually cooled and extinguished by principles,—how terror, anger, holds the dividing texture of the body in a spiritual grasp. When the whole brain is paralyzed, every nerve rusty and exhausted, and the soul carrying leaden weights, man needs but to will (which he can do every moment), he needs only a letter, a striking idea, and the fibre-work of the soul's mechanism proceeds again without help from the body."
Wilhelmi said, "Then the soul is but a watch which winds itself." "There must always be some perpetuum mobile," I said, "for all things have moved for an eternity already. The question is, either the soul never winds off, or it is its own watchmaker. I return to the subject. If a ruptured life-vein in the fourth brain-chamber of a Socrates place the whole land of his ideas and moral tendencies in a blood-bath, these ideas and moral tendencies will surely be covered with blood-water, but not spoilt by it; because not the drowned brains were virtuous and wise, but his self was, and because the dependence of a watch on its case for protection from dust, &c. does not prove the identity of the two, or that the watch consists only of cases. As spiritual exertions are not bodily ones, but only precede or follow them; and as every spiritual activity leaves traces, not only in the soul, but also in the body; must, then, if apoplexy or age destroy corporeal activity,—must the soul's fire be therefore quenched? Is there no difference between the soul of a childish old man, and that of a child? Must the soul of Socrates, imprisoned in Borgia's body as in a mud-bath, lose its moral powers, and does it suddenly change its virtuous qualities for vicious ones? Or shall in left-handed wedlock (which has no common property of body and soul) the one conjugal half only share the gains, not also the losses of the other? Shall the ablactated soul feel only the blooming, not also the faded body? And if it does, the earth surrounding it must, as our earth does to the superior planets, give it the reflection of our advancing and retrograding. If we shall ever be disembodied, the slow hand of time, that is, ever encroaching age, must do it. If our course is not to be concluded in one world, the gulf between it and the second must always appear to us a grave. The short interruption to our progress by age, and the longer one by death, destroy this progress as little as the shortest interruption by sleep. We anxiously suppose—as the first man did—the total sun-eclipse of sleep to be the night of death, and this again the doomsday of the world."
"That must yet be proved, although I believe it," replied Phylax.
New beauties prevented my answering, and closed the 506th Station.
(P. S.—I have been told the Chaplain has declared that he had purposely not replied to several of my arguments, but he hoped he could see them in print, and then he would publish his opinions. But he will scarcely live until this letter is printed, and he will answer it.)
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507th STATION
The Theft of the Souvenir.—Answers to previous Stations.—On the Emigration of the Dead to the Planets.—The Threefold World in Man.—Grief without Hope.—The Seal of Immortality.—The Country-Seat.—The Balloons.—Ecstasy.
HEN it is three o'clock, and a wandering Arcadian council is very well but somewhat warm, when the narrowing Adour, which has its source at the end of the Valley, flows round a projecting tongue of land, and draws its silver gauze cover over the pale moon reposing on its breast,[19]
when round this slip of earth, this flowery anchoring place, half water scene, half bowling green, a broad-leaved oak arcade grows, beneath which trembles a sun-gilt shadow, gliding from between the branches of the trees, on to the grass, embroidered by the restless, roving, gay-colored sand, on the book of nature—its insects, when the hammering in the shining marble blocks, the living Alp-horns, the bleating pasture-sheep, and the murmuring of waves fill the heart to its topmost branches and up to the brim with life-balsam, and the head with life-spirit; and when so many beauties are heard and seen,—living beauties who walk are inclined to sit down on the slip of earth, after the cushion-carriers have placed their burdens as resting-places for their arms.
My dear Victor! all this came to pass.
While sitting, long speeches were not as practicable as while walking. Even before, when we, from some distance, were choosing this spot for a resting-place, they had suffered considerably. I remained on the shore near Nadine, whose cheeks, reflected in the shadow-painted waves, appeared a charming pale red, as though a cochineal had bled to death on them. The walk and her red parasol had been too great colorists.
My dear brother, I am preparing to fall in love. The operation on the wart was unimportant as a corner-piece of vexation, as negative electricity; but warts have their good points.
Nadine plucked roses and other flowers. I drew an empty jewel-box from my pocket,—it was empty, like the 9th Kurstuhl, the Elias chair,[20] or the limbus patrum,—and held it under them, begging her to shake the flowers, that I might catch the millipeds,[21] which, like tallow candles, are more suitable for the eye than the nose. I caught a whole germanic diet of these creatures from the fragrant flower-cups, and imprisoned them in the box.
During the flower-toying, which brought us nearer to each other, a small cockchafer fell on my skin. I looked round for the flowers and could find nothing till I saw, protruding from Nadine's left pocket, a souvenir, filled with sweet-smelling herbs. To steal from a beautiful woman is often nothing else than to give to her. I thought it fit, secretly to take the scented pocket-book in order to make a scent-bottle, and a joke of it in future. I so arranged the theft, that the Baron perceived my hand, holding the book, retreating from the pocket.
The souvenir, thought I, may occasion some scene; meanwhile I can smell at it. I indemnified her for the loss of the scent-bag by the millipeds, whose prison I immediately insinuated into her pocket. The Baron was witness.
Wilhelmi said, when we rose: "In the evening we shall be separated and deafened by the carriages. If something has yet to be decided—"
"Something?" replied Phylax,—"everything has to be decided. M. Jean Paul, you have yet to raise M. Karlson's second difficulty. "Raise?" I asked, "I am to raise the cover of the whole future world? I am but going towards it, not coming from it. But this dissimilarity between the present and the future world, its inconceivable magnitude, has made many apostates. Not the bursting of our bodily doll-skin in death, but the wide disparity between the present autumn and the future spring, raises such overwhelming doubts in our poor, timid breasts. This is shown by the savages, who consider the future life merely as the second volume, the new testament of the first, and make no greater distinction between the first and second life than between youth and age: they easily believe in all their hopes; your first difficulty, the bursting and fading of the bodily polish, does not deprive the savage of the hope to bud anew in another flower-vase. But your second difficulty daily increases itself, and its advocates, for by the increasing proofs and apparatus of chemistry and physiology, the future world is daily more effectually annihilated and dispersed, as it cannot be brought within play of a sun-microscope or of a chemical furnace. In fact, not only the reality, but also the theory of the body, not only the practised measurement of its longings, but also the pure moral philosophy of its spirit-world, must darken and make difficult the prospect on the inner world from the outer one. Only the moralist, the physiologist, the poet, and the artist more readily comprehend our inner world; but the chemist, the physician, and the mathematician want both seeing and hearing faculties for it, and in time, even eyes and ears.
"On the whole, I find fewer men than one would imagine who decidedly believe in, or deny, the existence of a future world. Few dare to deny it, as for them this life would then lose all unity, form, peace, and hope;—few dare to believe it, for they are startled at their own purification and at the destruction of the lessened earth. The majority, according to the promptness of alternating feelings, waver poetically between both beliefs.
"As we paint Devils more easily than Gods, Furies than Venus Urania, Hell than Heaven, we can more easily believe in the former than in the latter,—in the greatest misfortune than in the greatest happiness. Must not our spirit, used to misgivings and earth chains, be startled at a Utopia against which earth will be shipwrecked, that the lilies of it, like the Guernsey lilies,[22] may find the shore to bloom on, which saves and satisfies, elevates and makes blessed, our much tormented humanity.
"I now come to your difficulty. I imagine, if even we were to take the grave to be merely the moat of communication between allied globes, our ignorance concerning the second world should not terrify us, and we need not take for granted that the mountain ridge of humanity does not continue under the Dead Sea, merely because we cannot see through its waters, for do not all mountain ridges continue on the bottom of the ocean? What! man will guess at worlds, when he cannot even guess world-quarters! Would the Greenlander paint a Negro, a Dane, a Greek, in his mind's eye, without ever having seen one? Can the political genius divine the inner versifications of the poetic one, without experience? Can the Abderite imagine the architecture of the sage? Would we have guessed the existence of but one of the animal creations of Anthropomorphism which copy the human figure in all animals, and yet change it? Or could a bodiless self, placed in a vacuum, with all existing logic and metaphysic, ever have conceived but a single vein of its present embodification and humanification? "
"But what are you asserting or denying?" asked Wilhelmi.
"I only assert that a second life on another planet cannot be denied, merely because we are unable to map out the planet, and portray its inhabitants. But we need no other planet."
The Baron said: "O, I have often dreamed delicious dreams of this 'grande tour' through the stars! It seemed the progression of a student from one class to another,—the classes being worlds."
"But," replied Karlson, "to all these worlds, as upon our own, you will be refused admittance if you arrive without a body. By what miracle will you obtain one?"
"By a repeated one," I answered. "For by a miracle we have our present body. But we can say in favor of this planet wandering, that our eyes too widely separate the worlds of which each one is but an element of the infinite integral whole. The different worlds and their satellites above and around us, are only far removed world-quarters. The moon is but a smaller, more distant America, and space is the ocean."
Nadine said: "One day I so pictured the inhabitants of a lemon-tree to myself. The worm on the leaf may think it is on the green earth, the second worm on the white bud is on the moon, and the one on the lemon believes itself to be upon the sun."
"And yet this," said I, "is but a tree of immeasurable life. As around the earth-kernel cling wider and finer covers,—the earth, the seas, the air and space,—so the giant of one world is surrounded by increasingly large ones, with ever larger arms. The longest shell is the finest one, as light and the attractive power. The beauteous covering elongates and rarefies itself from iron bands to pearl ties, from flower-chains to rainbows and milky-ways."
"Will we not now descend from the milky-way," said Karlson, "for we cannot ascend it. It is precisely this uniformity of the universe which forbids the rambling of emigrants from the earth. Every planet already has its own crew; more dense ones, as for instance Mercury, may be peopled with real sailors."
"Precisely as Kant supposes!" said Phylax.
"Finer, less solid ones, as e. g. Uranus, only with the most tender beings, perhaps only with women and nuns who love not the sun. He who intends to rectify the so-called soul or spirit by distilling it from one planet to the other, may with as much justice assert, that the spirits of the slacked Mercury receive their dephlegmation in a distilling process through our earth,—in short, that the earth is the second world for Mercury and Venus. The dead of the arctic zones could even pass into the temperate ones (it would be distillatio per latus), for on all planets there can be no other than coarser or finer human beings[23] like ourselves."
Karlson waited for an answer and a contradiction, but I said his opinion was also mine. "I have still a stronger reason," I continued, "against emigration to, and voyage picturesque through, the planets, because we carry and lock up a heaven of starry light in our own breasts, for which no dirty earthball is clean or large enough. But on this subject I must have permission to speak uninterruptedly, at least until we have passed all these cornfields."
Our pleasure-trip now was an alley of magic gardens, our passage through a golden sea of corn-blades, was accompanied and surrounded on all sides by a promised land, in which solitary houses reposed beneath picturesquely grouped leaf groves, as in Italy sleepers take their siestas on shaded meads. I was permitted to speak.
"There is an inner, heart-contained spirit-world, which breaks through the dark clouds of the body-world as a warm sun. I mean the inner universe of virtue, beauty, and truth; three soul-worlds and heavens, which are neither parts, nor shoots, nor cuttings, nor copies of the outer one. We are less astonished at the inexplicable existence of these three transcendent heavens, because they are ever floating before us, and because we foolishly imagine we create them, while we merely recognize them. After which copy, with what plastic material, and of what, could we create and insert in ourselves[24] this same spirit-world? Let the atheist ask himself how he conceived the giant ideal of a God, which he either denies or embodies? An idea which has not been built upon comparative greatness and degrees, for it is the contrary of every measure and of every created greatness. In short, the atheist denies the great original of the copy.[25]
"As there are idealists of the outer world who believe that perception makes objects, instead of that objects cause perception, so there are idealists of the inner world, who deduct the being from the seeming, the sound from the echo, the fact from its appearance; instead of, on the contrary, the seeming from the being, our consciousness from the objects of it. We mistake our power of analyzing our inner world, for its preformation, i. e. the genealogist thinks himself both originator and founder.
"This inner universe, which is still more glorious and admirable than the outer one, needs another heaven than the one above us, and a higher world than one a sun now shines upon. Therefore we rightly say, not a second earth or globe, but a second world,—another beyond the universe."
Gione already interrupted me: "And every virtuous and wise being is in himself a proof of immortality." "And every one," added Nadine, quickly, "who suffers innocently."
"Yes, it is that," said I, with emotion, "which extends our line of life through countless ages. The chord of Virtue, Truth, and Beauty, taken from the music of the spheres, calls us from this dark oppressive earth, and announces to us the nearness of a more melodious existence. Why, and from whence were these super-earthly wants and longings created in us, if only, like swallowed diamonds, slowly to cut through our earthy shell. Why was a being endowed with wings of light chained to this dirty clump of earth, if it were to rot in its birth-clod, without ever being freed from it by means of its ethereal wings?"
Wilhelmi said, "I also like to dream the dream of a second life in the sleep of this first one. But may not our beautiful spiritual powers have been given to us for the enjoyment and preservation of the present life?"
"For its preservation?" I said. "Then an angel has been locked in the body to be the mute servant and fire-lighter, butler, cook, and porter of the stomach? Would not brutish souls have sufficed to drive man-bodies to the fruit-tree and the spring? Shall the pure ethereal flame only dry and bake the bodily patent stove with life-warmth, while it now slakes and dissolves it? For every tree of knowledge is the poison-tree of the body, and every mental refinement a slow-poison chalice. But, on the contrary, want is the iron key of freedom, the stomach is the manure-filled hot-house or manufactory of human blood, and the various animal instincts are but the earthy, soiled steps to the Grecian temple of our spiritual elevation.
"For enjoyment you said also. That means, we received the palate and appetite of a god, with the food for an animal. That portion of us which is of earth, and creeps on worm-folds, may and can, like the earthworm, be fed and fattened on earth. Exertion, bodily pain, the burning hunger of necessity, and the tumult of our senses exclude and choke the spiritual autumn bloom of humanity in nations and classes. All these conditions of terrestrial existence must be fulfilled ere the soul may claim its due. To the unhappy, therefore, who must be the business men and carriers of their bodily wants, the whole inner world seems but as an imaginary gilt cobweb, like the man who, breathing only the electrical atmosphere, instead of feeling the spark, thinks to grasp an invisible web. But when our necessary animal servitude is over, when the barking inner dog-kennel is fed, and the dog-fight finished, then the inner man demands his nectar and ambrosia, and if he is turned off with earth-food only, he changes to an angel of Death, and a Hellfiend, driving himself to suicide, or makes of him a poison-mixer who destroys all joy.[26] The eternal hunger in man, the insatiability of his heart, wants not a richer, but a different food, fruit, not grass. If our wants referred but to the degree, not to the quality, then the imagination, at least, might paint a degree of satiety. But imagination cannot make us happy, by showing us innumerable heaps of treasures, if they be other than Virtue, Truth, and Beauty."
"But the more beautiful soul?" asked Nadine. I answered, "This discrepancy between our wishes and our circumstances, the heart and the earth, will remain an enigma, if we are immortal, and would be a blasphemy if we decay. Ah! how could the beautiful soul be happy? Strangers, born on mountains and living in lowland places, pine in an incurable homesickness. We belong to a higher place, and therefore an eternal longing consumes us, and every music is our soul's Swiss ranz des vaches. In the morning of life, the joys which hearken to the anxious wishes of our hearts are seen blooming for us in later years. When we have attained these years, we turn on the deceitful spot, and see behind us, pleasure blooming in the strong hopeful youth, and we enjoy instead of our hopes, the recollections of our hopes. Joy in this also resembles the rainbow, which in the morning shines over evening, and in the evening arches over the east. The eye may reach the light, but the arm is short, and holds but the fruit of the soil."
"And this proves?" asked the Chaplain.
"Not that we are unhappy, but that we are immortal, and that the second world in us demands, and proves a second world beyond us. O, how much might not be said of this second life whose commencement is so clearly shown in the first one, and which so strangely doubles us! Why is Virtue too exalted to make us, and, what is more, others (sensually) happy? Why does the incapability of being useful on earth (as the expression is) increase with a certain higher purity of character, as, according to Herschel, there are suns which have no earth? Why is our heart tortured, dried, consumed, and at last broken by a slow burning fever of ceaseless love for an unattainable object, only alleviated by the hope that this consumption, like a physical one, must one day be sheltered and raised by the ice cover of death?"
"No," said Gione, with more emotion in her eye than in her voice, "it is not ice, but lightning. When our heart lies a sacrifice on the altar, fire from heaven consumes it as a proof that the offering is accepted."
I know not why her calm voice so painfully disturbed my whole soul (not only my argument). Even Nadine's eyes, which triumphed over her own sorrows, were suffused with tears by her sister's, and, although she is generally more timid and fastidious than Gione, in passing a little garden, she raised from a projecting hairy potato-stalk, a large moth, and showed it to us with a firm mouth, which should have been softened by a smile.
It was the so-called Death's-head. I stroked the flat, drooping wings, and said, "It come from Egypt, the land of mummies and graves; it bears a memento mori on its back, and a miserere in its plaintive voice." "In the mean time it is a butterfly, and visits the nectaries, which we day-birds will do also," appropriately observed Wilhelmi; but he took the words out of my mouth.
Gione's countenance again expressed thoughtful calmness, and to me she became immeasurably beautiful and grand by the stillness of her grief. You once said that the female soul, though it be pierced with burning shafts, must never beat its wings convulsively together, else, like other butterflies, it would destroy their beauty. How true is this!
Nadine's eyes seldom shone without at last overflowing, and every sorrowful emotion remained long in her heart, because she tried to guard against it. She resembled those springs which take a temperature opposed to the time of day, and which are warmest in the cool evening. She turned to me and said, putting her hand in her left pocket, "I will show you some poetry which will prove your prose." While she was seeking it, she stood still with her companion Wilhelmi. He guessed before I did, that she intended to give me something from the Souvenir, and when, in its stead, she took the milliped's prison from her pocket, he obligingly said, "If not with my hands yet with my eyes I assisted at the theft, and as accomplice I beg for mercy." The serious apology for this foolishness scarcely suited our earnest tone of mind. I said, "I wished to cause a more useless than pardonable joke, but I—" She did not allow me to conclude, but mildly and unchanged (except by a reproving and a forgiving smile) she showed me in the aromatic book the noble Karlson's requiem on the death of the exalted Gione. I willingly give you the prosaic echo of it, from my prosaic memory.
GRIEF WITHOUT HOPE.
WHAT cloud is that, which like the clouds of the tropics, passes from morn to eve, and then sets? It is humanity. Is that the magnet-mountain covered with the nails of wrecked ships? No, it is the great Earth, strewed with the bones of fallen men.
Ah! why did I love? I had not then lost so much!
Nadine, give me thy grief, for it contains hope. Thou standest by thy crushed sister, who dissolves even beneath the winding-sheet, and lookest upwards to the trembling stars, and thinkest: Above, O dearest one, thou dost reside, and on the suns we find again our hearts, and the small tears of life will be over.
But mine remain, and burn in the dim eye. My cypress alley is not open, and discloses no heaven. Human blood paints the fluid figure called man on the monument, as oil on marble forms forests; Death wipes away the man, and leaves the stone. Gione! I would have some consolation, if thou wert but far away from us all, on a clouded forest, in a cave of the Earth, or on the most distant world in space. But thou art gone, thy soul is dead, not only thy life and thy body.
See, Nadine, on the judgment-seat of Time lies the crushed angel, with the death color of the spirit-world. Gione has lost all her virtues, her love, her patience, her strength, her all-embracing heart, and her rich mind: the thunderbolt of Death has destroyed the diamond, and now the wax statue of the body slowly melts beneath the soil.
Serpent of Eternity, quickly take away the beautiful form, as the larger serpent first poisons and then devours man. But I, Gione, stand beside your ruins with unalleviated pain, with undestroyed soul; and grieving, think of you until I also dissolve. And my grief is noble and deep, for I have no hope! May thy invisible shadow-picture, like the new moon with the sun,[27] arise to heaven in my soul! And may the creative wheel of Time, which raises innumerable hearts, and fills them with blood, only to pour them again into the grave, and let them die, pour out my life slowly, for long time would I mourn for thee, thou lost one!
I cannot tell you, dearest Victor, how horrible and fearful the eternal snow of annihilating death seemed to me, placed beside the noble form it should have covered; how frightful the thought: if Karlson is right, the last day has torn this never happy, innocent soul from the prisons upon the earth to the closer ones beneath it: man too often carries his errors as his truths only as word arguments, not as feelings. But let the disbeliever of immortality imagine a life of sixty minutes instead of sixty years, and let him try if be can bear to see loved, noble, or wise men only aimless, hour-long air-phantoms, hollow thin shadows which fly towards the light and are consumed by it, and who, without path, trace, or aim, after a short flight, dissolve into their former night. No; even over him steals a supposition of immortality. Else a black cloud would forever hang over his soul, and the earth would quake beneath him when he trod on it, as if he were a Cain.
I continued, but all arguments were poetized into feelings. "Yes, if all forests of this earth were pleasure grottoes, all valleys Campan, all islands holy, all fields Elysian, and all eyes sparkling, yes, then—no, even then the Eternal One would have given to our souls the promise of a future life, even in the blessedness of the present one. But now, God! when so many houses are mourning ones, so many fields battle-fields, so many cheeks pale, and when we pass so many sunken, red, torn, closed eyes,—O, can death be but the last destroying whirlwind? And when at last, after thousand, thousand years, our earth is dried up by the sun's heat, and every living sound on its surface silenced, will an immortal spirit look down on the silent globe, and, gazing on the empty hearse moving slowly on, say: 'There the churchyard of humanity flies into the crater of the sun; on that burning heap many shadows, and dreamers, and wax-figures, have wept and bled, but now they are all melted and consumed: Fly into the sun, which will also dissolve thee, thou silent desert with thy swallowed tears, with thy dried-up blood!' No, the crushed worm dares raise himself to his Creator, and say: 'Thou canst not have made me only to suffer.'"
"And who gives the worm the right to this demand? " asked Karlson.
Gione answered, gently, "The Eternal One himself, who gives us charity and who speaks in all our souls to calm us, and who alone has created in us our demands to Him and our hope in Him."
This good sweet word could still not calm all the waves of my excited soul. From a distant house, turtle-doves sent after us trembling, soul-felt plaints. About my tear-filled inward eye assembled all those forms whose hearts were without guilt and without joy,[28] who attained no single wish here below, and who, sinking under the frost and snow-storm of fate, only longed, like persons freezing to death, to sleep; and all those forms who have loved too deeply, and lost too much, and whose wounds were never cured until death had widened them, like a cracked bell which retains its hollow sound until the crevice is made larger, and the beings nearest me, and many other female ones, whose exquisitely tender souls fate most consecrates to torture, as Narcissus is consecrated to the God of Hell. I also remembered your true remark, that you had never pronounced the words pain and the past before a woman, without hearing an almost inaudible sigh at the union of the two words, from the suffering heart; for woman on the narrower stage of her plans, with idealized wishes and desires built on others' worth, rather than on her own, has a thousand times more disappointments to suffer than we men.
The sun sank deeper behind the mountains, and giant shadows, like mighty birds of prey, came coldly down upon us from the eternal snow. I took Karlson's hand in mine, and looked with tearful eyes into his manly, beautiful countenance, and said, "O Karlson! on what a blooming, grand world you throw an immeasurable gravestone, which no time can lift! Are two difficulties,[29] based too on the necessary ignorance of man, sufficient to overthrow a belief, which explains thousand greater difficulties, without which our existence is without aim, our sufferings without explanation, and the holy Trinity in our breast three furies, and three terrible contradictions? A tending God's hand, leading and feeding the inner man (the child of the outer one), teaching him to go and to speak, educating, refining him, is shown in all things, from the shapeless earthworm to the brilliant human face, from the chaotic nations of the primitive ages to the present century, from the first faint pulsation of the invisible heart to its full, bold, throbbing pulse in manhood,—and why? That when man stands upright and exalted, a beautiful demi-god, even amid the ruins of his old body temple, the club of Death may annihilate the demi-god forever? And on the eternal sea, on which the least drop throws immeasurable rings, on this sea a life-long rising and a life-long falling of the soul should have the same termination, namely, the end of all things,—annihilation?[30] And as, from the same cause, the souls of all other worlds must fall and die with ours, and of this shroud and crape-veiled immeasurability nothing remain but the ever-sowing and never-reaping solitary world-spirit, who sees one eternity mourn for another, there can be no aim and no object in the whole spiritual universum, for the purpose of the development of succeeding or successive ephemera is no progress for the vanished ephemera, scarcely even for the last one which can never exist.[31] And you take for granted all these enigmas and contradictions by which all the strings of creation, not only its harmony, are torn, because two difficulties present themselves to you, which cannot any better explain mortality… Dearest Karlson, you would bring your eternally jarring discord into this harmony of the spheres! See how calmly the day goes, how grandly the night sets in; did you not think that our spirit will rise one day from its grave of ashes, when you saw the mild pale moon rise grandly from the crater of Vesuvius?" … The sun stood on the mountains, about to plunge into the sea and swim to the new world. Nadine embraced her sister with emotion, and said, "O, we love each other forever and immortally, dearest sister." Karlson accidentally touched the chords of the lyre which he carried: Gione took it from him with one hand, gave him the other, and said, "You are the only one among us who is tormented by this melancholy belief,—and you deserve to have one so beautiful!"
This word of concealed love overpowered his long-filled heart, and two burning drops fell from the blinded eyes, and the sun gilded the holy tears, and he said, looking towards the mountains: "I can bear no annihilation but my own,—my whole heart is of your opinion, and my head must slowly follow."
I will not again mention a man whom I have blamed so often.
We now stood before a mansion, the windows of which were silvered, and, when it was darker, gilt by girandoles. Aloft over its Italian balcony hung two balloons, one at its eastern, the other at its western extremity. Without those beautiful globes, the counterpart, as it were, of the two glorious ones in heaven, the sun and the moon, I should have scarcely paid heed to the scene on earth, in the splendor of the one on high.
Dearest friend, how beautiful was the place and the time. Around us, in their majesty, reposed the Pyrenees, half robed in night and half in day, not stooping, like man, beneath the load of years, but erect—forever; and I felt why the great ancients had thought the mountains were a breed of giants. On the mountain heads hung wreaths of roses cloud-woven; but each time that a star appeared upon the clear, deep sea of ether and sparkled on its azure waves, a rose from the mountain's chaplet faded and dropped away. The Mittaghorn, alone, like a higher spirit, gazed long after the sinking lonely sun, and glowed with ecstasy. Down beneath us an amphitheatre of lemon-trees, by its perfumes, brought us back to the veiled earth, and made a dusky paradise of it. And Gione, in calm rapture, struck the chords of her guitar, and softly did Nadine's voice accompany the gliding tones. The nightingale in the rose-hedges by the lake awoke, and the plaintive tones from its tiny heart pierced deep into the great heart of man; and shining glowworms flew from rose-bush to rose-bush, but in the mirror of the lake they were but as golden sparks, floating over pale yellow flowers. But when we looked again towards the heavens, lo! all its stars were gleaming, and in place of rose-woven wreaths, the mountains were clad in extinguished rainbows, and the giant of the Pyrenees was crowned with stars instead of roses. my beloved Victor! in this moment it was with each of our enraptured souls as if from its oppressed heart earth's load had dropped away; as if from her mother's arms, the earth were giving us, matured in the Father arms of the infinite Creator; as if our little life were over! To ourselves, we seemed the immortal, the exalted. We fancied that our speech of man's immortality had been the prophecy of our own, as with two great and noble men.[32] But though we entered the brilliant rooms, the storm of new joys could not destroy the old ones. We were not yet able to be without the great night around us, and we ascended the platform, that from this little throne we might better contemplate the higher throne of creation beneath the eternal canopy; although kneeling would have been a higher ascension for the moved soul.
There were night-violets in a glass box, which traced Gione's name in blooming colors. I remembered the glowworms and millipeds. I let the former fly down upon the rose-bushes in confused star-pictures; with the latter I fired Gione's beautiful flower namesake.
Gione looked longingly towards the eastern Mongolfière. Wilhelmi understood her. Her soul was as bold as it was calm, she had already visited many of the magic caves of earth, and had ascended to the summits of the highest Alps; she wished now to rise in the air, and to float in the heavens above this beautiful country, and on this beauteous night; but the enjoyment of the prospect was not her only motive. Wilhelmi asked who should be her companion. Solitude was her chief desire. The breadth and depth of the boat under the globe, a chair in it, and the cords by which she would be raised and lowered, secured the trip from all danger.
Like a celestial being she rose beneath the stars,—the night and the height threw a mist over her rising form. A slight zephyr rocked the blooming Aurora, and crowned the moving goddess with alternate constellations. Now her countenance appeared surrounded by pale supernatural rays. It seemed bright as an angel rising towards its kindred stars through the rich dark blue space. An unusual tremor seized on Wilhelmi and Karlson; it was as if they saw their beloved one again carried from them on the wings of the angel of Death.
When she returned to us her eyes were red with weeping; she had ascended, that she might in an unseen moment, shed her old heavy tears near the stars. O the Celestial one! She smiled strangely in the slumber of this life at higher joys than earthly ones, as sleeping children smile when they see Angels.
It was now impossible to repress my longing for the stars, and my petition to be allowed to ascend. Permission to use the western Mongolfière was willingly bestowed. Nadine, emboldened by the safe return of her sister, and by the companion in the danger, skipped into the boat, with her usual impulsive warmth, to refresh her thirsting soul with the majestic immeasurability of night.
And now the suns raised us. The heavy earth sank down as the past; wings such as man has in happy dreams bore us upwards.
The mighty vacancy and silence of space lay stretched before us even up into the stars;—as we rose higher, the dark forests seemed but clouds, and snow-girt mountain-tops like snow-flakes. The ascending globe bore us nearer to the harmless, silent lightning of the moon, in whose bright satellite we seemed cradled, and which stood as a calm Elysium beneath the heavens, and high above the thick fog air, the light heart beating more quickly, seemed to pant with ethereal gladness to have left the earth with out discarding its shell covering. Our ascent was suddenly arrested—we looked down into the valley, half concealed by distance and the darkness of the night. Only the lights from the mansion were visible to up,—a western cloud hung like a white fog before us, and a black eagle flew like an angel of death from the east through the cloud pillar, seeking its summit, and a cool breeze playfully drew us towards the mist-island. The evening red had already passed the earth at midnight, and wandered over charming France as its future Aurora. O, how the soul was raised towards the stars, and how lightly did our hearts beat above the earth!
But now from the bright mansion arose sweet harmony, and the subdued echo of the voices of our beloved ones calling upon us. And when Nadine looked down, her lonely heart broke with longing after those dear ones; and when she glanced into the silvered valley, over which the moon had risen, and where the trembling waterfalls danced beside the flowing archings of the stream and the green marble caves, and the white paths between poplars and wheat-ears, and the whole enchanting path of our day's journey lay silvered beneath her inconstant rays,—bright, shining tears flowed unrestrained from her mild eyes, and she looked imploringly to me, as if begging for consideration and secrecy, and said expressively, "We are yet so far from the cruel earth."
When our little globe was drawn back to the shining meadows and the merry music, she looked inquiringly at me, to ask if the traces of tears yet remained in her eyes. She dried them more quickly, but in vain. Silently we descended; I took her burning hand in mine, and looked into her weeping eyes, but could not speak. … —And how could I speak better now, dearest friend!
- ↑ I need not tell any one that the valley itself is situated in the departments of the Upper Pyrenees.
- ↑ It is well known that the Symplegadian rocks continually dashed against each other, and destroyed every passing ship, until Orpheus's lyre subdued and tranquillized them.
- ↑ Alluding to a painting by Reynolds, in which Garrick, invited by both Muses, follows Thalia.
- ↑ A kind of jelly-fish.
- ↑ Ten drops of this instantly sweeten half a pound of sour beer.
- ↑ The cave is twenty feet high, but the entrance only five feet.
- ↑ French miles. The valley is about two German miles—ten English miles—long.
- ↑ The Höfersche heaven-path, or how to learn the way to eternal salvation in twenty-four hours.
- ↑ A market-place in Rome where deformed beings were sold, and fetched a higher price the uglier they were.
- ↑ A Parisian dentist wrote this over his door.
- ↑ In the same § Kant says: "Everything that Newton has written in his immortal Principia, though such a large head was required to invent it, can be learned; but to compose spirited poems cannot be taught, however complete the instructions for learning the art may be. The reason is, that Newton can explain all the steps he had to take, from the first elements of geometry to his grandest and most profound inventions; he can explain them, not alone to himself, but to others, even to the remote descendants, while no Homer or Wieland can show how his ideally rich, and yet thoughtful characters, came forth from his brain; for he knows it not himself, and therefore cannot teach it others."
I had hoped that I could depend upon Kant, who has a million times more intelligence than I have, as upon a mental Chargé d' Affaires; but when I came to this passage (and to those upon repentance, music, the origin of evil, &c.), I saw I must myself follow him, and not only pray after him, as I had before done, but reflect. But to return! Certainly Newton's "Principles" can be learned, that is, the new ones may be repeated, but that also can happen to the invented poems; yet you can be taught to invent them as little as Newton's Principles. A new philosophic idea seems, after its birth, to lie more clearly in its former seed-vessels and organic molecules than a poetic one; but why was Newton the first to see it? He and Kant can discover, no better than Shakespeare or Leibnitz, how the beginning of a new idea suddenly bursts from the cloud of old ones; they can show their Nexus (else they would not be human ones) with the old ones, but not their conception from it; the same holds of the poetic. Let Kant teach us to invent systems and truths (not to prove them, though, strictly speaking, the one is closely allied to the other), then he shall be taught to invent epics, and I will be responsible for it. He seems to me to confound the difficulty of forming ideas with the less important one of forming new ones; the difficulty of transition with the inexplicability of the matter. I fear and wonder at the latent almightiness with which man orders, that is, creates his range of ideas. I know no better symbol of creation than the regularity and causality of the creation of ideas in us, which no will and no mind can regulate and create, for any such arrangement and intention would presuppose the unborn idea. And in this creation the grand enigma of our moral freedom is veiled.
- ↑ Gold dissolved in strong acid, mixed with a small quantity of quicksilver in a vial, forms a tree with foliage.
- ↑ The male glowworms are black.
- ↑ Rameses caused his son to be fastened to the topmost point of an obelisk, that they who had to raise it should risk a more valuable life than their own.
- ↑ It lives more than two years, though it does not long survive the period of its leaving the grub-state, just as other insects, to whom nature has given the rose period of youth, only after the thorny age of reproduction.
- ↑ It is well known that the sight of blood damps courage, and that the Jews are not permitted to eat blood.
- ↑ Beauty in this connection, I adopt in the same sense which Schiller gives to it in his æsthetic critique, a prize essay of his genius on Beauty, which here, like Longinus, is at once the subject and the delineator of the exalted.
- ↑ If he had been, I would have read page 224 in the third part of Hesperus to him.
- ↑ The sun reflected in the water.
- ↑ At a circumcision, the Jews place one chair for the operator, and another for the prophet Elias, who is supposed invisibly to occupy it.
- ↑ These animals shine by night. Care must be taken not to draw them into the brain from the flower calyxes with the perfume.
- ↑ The Guernsey lily from Japan has its name from the Island of Guernsey, on which some roots of it were cast by a wrecked vessel.
- ↑ For the climatic dissimilarity of the planets must produce, as the climatic difference between the zones, Negroes, Greeks, Indians, etc., but always human beings.
- ↑ One ought, therefore, not to say mundus intelligibilis, but mundus intellectus.
- ↑ It may be said, that in this manner every Utopia, which is also a copy, must be realized, for the original of all dreams and Utopias does indeed exist,—though partially and disconnectedly; but the Original of the Eternal cannot exist in pieces and by parcels.
- ↑ This applies chiefly to the higher and richer orders, with whom the saturation of the five camel stomachs, the senses, and the starving of Psyche or the soul, at last determines into a horrible horror of life, and into a repulsive mingling of high aspirations and grovelling desires. The savage, the beggar, and the provincialist far surpass the rich and high in spiritual enjoyment, for in these, as in the houses of the Jews, (in memory of the destruction of Jerusalem) there must always be something incomplete, and the poor have too many of their earthly wants assuaged to be overwhelmed and pained by the demands of their ethereal nature.
- ↑ The new moon always rises with the sun, although dark and invisible.
- ↑ There are three kinds of men. To some, a heaven is granted even on this earth; to others, a limbus patrum in which joy and sorrow reign equally; and, lastly, to some a hell in which grief predominates. Beings who have suffered for twenty years on the sick-bed of bodily pain, which is not, like mental sorrow, worn out by time, have certainly had more unhappiness than happiness, and, but for immortality, would be an eternal reproach to the highest moral being. And if there exists no such unhappy being, it is yet in the power of a tyrant to make one, on a clinical torture-bed, with the assistance of a physician and a philosopher. Such a one, at least, has a right to demand a future indemnity for his sufferings, because the Creator cannot have formed a creature to mourn more than it can rejoice.
Besides, though the object of our grief may seem but a deception in the eyes of the Eternal One, our grief itself cannot. Human suffering is also distinguished from brutish pain, because the animal only feels the wound, as we perhaps do in sleep, but it sees it not. Its pain is not trebled and increased by anticipation, recollection, and sensibility; it is an evanescent sting, and nothing more. Therefore tears were only given to human eyes.
- ↑ Ignorance concerning our connection with the body and our connection with the second world.
- ↑ The yearly destruction of the slowly developed, beautiful flower-world does not argue against this; for to the tangible world each condition of its parts is as indifferent and perfect as the other, and rose-ashes are as good as rose-buds (without, of course, considering the organic soul). Nothing is beautiful but our appreciation of the beautiful, not the object itself. If it should be said that nature destroys so many developments, for whose growth she had already provided, that she breaks many thousand eggs, tears so many buds, crushes men in all stages of life with her blind tread, I would reply that the interrupted development is yet a condition of the perfected one, and that every position of its parts is indifferent to material objects, and, as coverings of the spiritual being, they still testify to a compensating immortality of the latter.
- ↑ Methinks the folly of spiritual mortality has not been sufficiently considered from this point of view. The living or spiritual whole (for the lifeless one has no other object than to be a means for the living), as such, can attain no object which each portion of it does not attain, for each one is one whole, and every other whole can only exist as a collective idea, and not as a reality. To consider the untenability of a progress contained in a course of vanishing shadows more vividly, one might shorten the life of a soul so that he, e. g. could only read one page of Kant's Critic, and then die. For the second page another soul must be created, and so for the new edition 884 souls. The mistake will perhaps become perceptible to most people by the increasing moonlight of liberality which has gradually risen over the past centuries; but the necessity for compensation demands immortality.
- ↑ Raphael died when he had finished the painting of the resurrection, and Haman died while his essay on resurrection and disembodiment was being printed.