Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces Part 26

To Nathalie's questions as to whence these costly flowers came, the child answered, "Give me a kreuzer or two, and I'll tell you." This was done, and she added, "I got them from my G.o.dpapa, and he is a very, very grand gentleman;" then ran away among the bushes.

This bouquet was a veritable Turkish Selam-and-Flower riddle to them all. Leibgeber accounted with ease for the child's sudden marriage of Nathalie and Siebenkaes, by the circ.u.mstance that the advocate had been standing beside her at the water-side, and people, who had seen no one so constantly with her as himself, had been misled by the bodily likeness between them.

Siebenkaes's mind, however, ran more on the machine-master, Rosa (so fond of setting his patchwork life-scenes for every woman to play her part before), and the resemblance these silk flowers bare to those which the Venner had once redeemed from p.a.w.n for Lenette in Kuhschnappel struck him at once; yet how could he sadden this gladsome time, and spoil the pleasure of receiving these votive flowers, by giving words to his suspicions? Nathalie insisted upon a distribution of this floral inheritance, inasmuch as each of the three had taken part in the rescue, and Siebenkaes and Leibgeber had, at all events, rescued the rescuer. She kept the white silk roses for herself, allotted the red ones to Leibgeber (who would not have them, but asked for a proper, real, living rose instead, which he immediately put in his mouth); to Siebenkaes she gave the silken forget-me-nots, and one or two living, perfume-breathing ones as well (souls, as it were, of the artificial ones). He took them with rapture, and said the tender real ones should never wither for him. Nathalie here took a brief temporary leave of the pair, but Firmian could not find words to express all his grat.i.tude to his friend for the means he had adopted to prolong this little day of grace which orbed his whole life round with a new heaven and a new earth.

No King of Spain ever took as little out of some six, or so (at the outside), of the hundred dishes which, by the laws of the realm, are daily served at his table, than Siebenkaes did that day out of one.

Historians, worthy of credence, inform us, however, that he managed to drink a very little--a little wine it was--and that in a considerable hurry for he could not be happy enough that day to satisfy Leibgeber.

The latter, not apt to be easily swayed by heart and feeling, was all the more delighted that his beloved Firmian should at last have a pole star of happiness shining in the zenith point of the heavens above his head, beaming down genial warmth upon the blossoming time of his few scattered flowers.

The rapid rate at which his duplex enjoyment kept on moving enabled him to steal a march upon the sun, and he arrived once more at the villa, whose walls were now tinted red by his beams, while the glory of evening was gilding its windows into fire. Nathalie, on the balcony, was like some sunlit soul, just ready to take wing after the departing sun, hanging with her great eyes upon the shining, quivering world rotunda all full of church-music--and on the sun flying downward from this temple, like some angel--and at the holy, luminous tomb of night into which earth was sinking.

When they came under the balcony (Nathalie beckoning them to come up to her) Heinrich handed him his stick, saying, "Keep that for me. I have enough to carry without it--if you want me, blow the whistle." As regarded his _morale_ and physique, our good Henry had the kindest and softest of human hearts within his s.h.a.ggy, Bruin breast.

Ah! happy Firmian, happy in spite of all your troubles. When now you pa.s.s through the door of gla.s.s and on to the floor of iron, the sun confronts you, and sets for a second time. Earth closes her great eye, like some dying G.o.ddess! Then the hills smoke like altars--choruses call from the woods--shadows, the veils of day, float about the enkindled, translucent tree-tops and rest upon their many-tinted breast-pins (of flowers), and the gold-leaf of the evening sky throws a dead-gilt gleam towards the east, and touches with a rosy ray the vibrating breast of the hovering lark, far up evening bell of Nature.

Ah! happy Firmian, should some glorious spirit from realms afar wing its flight athwart earth and her spring tide, and, as he pa.s.ses, a thousand lovely evenings be concentrated into one burning one--it would not be more Elysian than this, whereof the glow is now dying out around you as the moments fly.

When the flames of the windows paled, and the moon was rising heavily behind the earth, they both went back into the twilight room, silent, and with full hearts. Firmian opened the pianoforte and, in music, went through his evening once more. The trembling strings were as tongues of fire to his full heart; the flower-ashes of his youth were blown away, and two or three youthful minutes bloomed back into life.

But as the music poured its warm life-balsam upon Nathalie's swollen heart in all its constraint (for its wounds were only closed, not healed), it melted and gave way, the heavy tears which had been burning within it flowed forth, and it grew weak and tender, but light.

Firmian, who saw she was pa.s.sing once more through the gate of sacrifice towards the sacrificial knife, stopped the sacrificial music, and tried to lead her away from the altar. Just then the first beam of the moon alighted, like a swan's wing, upon the waxen grapes. He asked her to come out into the silent, misty, after-summer of the day, the moonlit evening. She placed her arm in his without saying yes.

What a sparkling, gleaming world! Through the branches, through the fountains, over the hills and over the woodlands, the flashing molten silver was flowing, which the moon was fining from out the dross of night. Swiftly shot her glance of silver athwart the rippling wavelet, and the glossy, shining, gently-trembling apple-leaves, pausing to rest upon the marble pillars and birch-tree stems. Nathalie and Firmian paused upon the threshold of the magic valley (it gleamed like some enchanted cavern, where night and light were playing, and all the founts of being--which by day cast up sweet odour, melody of songs and voices, feathery wings, translucent pinions--seemed sunk in voiceless slumber deep into some silent chasm). They looked up to the mountain, the Sophienberg, with its summit flattened as by the weight of years; a great mist Colossus was veiling all its Alp-like peak; next at the pale-green world, lying asleep beneath the shimmering radiance of the far-off silent suns, gleaming depths of silver star-dust, flowing faint and far before the ever-brightening rising moon; and then at one another, with hearts full to the brim of holy friendship, such a gaze as only two blest angels, new created, free and gladsome, bend in rapture on each other. "Are you as happy as I?" he asked. "No," she answered, involuntarily pressing his arm, "that I am not; for, on a night like this should follow, not a day, but something far lovelier and richer--something that should satisfy the heart's thirst, and staunch its bleeding for ever." "And what should that be?" he asked.

"Death," was her answer. She lifted her streaming eyes to his and said, "You think so, too, do you not? Death for _me_." "No, no," he added quickly, "for _me_, if you will, not for _you_." To break the course of this overpowering moment, she added hurriedly, "Shall we go down to the place where we first met, and where, two days too soon, I became your friend;[68] and yet it was not too soon. Shall we?"

He obeyed her; but his soul was still a-swim among his precious thoughts, and as they went down the long, hollow, gravel-way, besprent with the shadows of the shrubs, and moonlight rippling over its white bed (flecked with shadows for stones), he said, "Yes, in an hour like this, when death and sleep send forth their brothers to us, a soul like yours may think of death.[69] But I have more cause than you, for I am happier. Oh! of all guests at Joy's festival-banquet, Death is the one whom she loves best to see; for he is himself a joy, the last and highest rapture upon earth. None but the common herd can a.s.sociate humanity's lofty flight of migration into the distant land of spring with ghosts and corpses here below on earth; as when they hear the owls' voices when they are going away to warmer countries they take them for the cries of goblins. But, oh! dear, dear, Nathalie, I cannot and will not bear to think of what you say as in any shape connected with _you_. No, no, so rich a soul must come into full bloom in a far nearer, earlier spring than that beyond this life! Oh, G.o.d! it _must_!"

They had reached a wall of rock over which a broad cascade of moonlight was falling; against it leant a trellis of roses, whence Natalie gathered a spray, all green and tender, with two young rose-buds just beginning to swell, and, saying "You will never blow," she placed it on her heart, and said (looking at him with a strange expression), "While they are young they scarcely p.r.i.c.k at all."

And when they got down to the stone water-basin--the sacred spot where they first met--and could as yet find no words to utter what was in their hearts, they saw some one come up out of the dry basin. Though they smiled, it was a smile full of emotion--in all three cases--for this was their Leibgeber, who had been lying in wait for them in hiding, with a bottle of wine, among the imaged water-G.o.ds. A certain something there had been in his troubled eyes, but it had been poured out by way of libation to this spring night from our cup of joy. "This port and haven of your first landing here," said he, "must be properly consecrated, and _you_ (to Nathalie) must join in the pledge. I swear by Heaven that there is more fruit hanging on its blue dome to-night within reach than ever hung on any green one." They took three gla.s.ses, pledged one another, and said (some of them, I imagine, in somewhat subdued tones). "To friendship! may it live for ever! may the spot where it commenced be always green! May every place blossom where it has grown, and, though all its flowers may fade, and its leaves fall and wither, may it live on for ever and for evermore!" Nathalie was obliged to turn her eyes away. Heinrich laid a hand upon the agate head of his stick (but only because his friend's hand which was holding it was over the top of it, that he might give the latter a warm and hearty pressure), and said, "Give it me; you shall have no clouds in your hand to-night;" for nature had graven cloud-streaks on the agate in her subterranean studio. Any heart--not Nathalie's only--must have been touched by this bashful cloaking of the warm token of friendship. "Are you not going to stay with us?" she asked somewhat faintly, as he was leaving them. "I'm going up to the landlord," he said, "to see if I can get hold of a flute or a horn, and if 1 do 1 shall come out and musicise over the valley, and play the springtime in."

When he was gone his friend felt as if his youth had gone with him. Suddenly he saw, high above the whirling may-beetles and the breeze-born night-b.u.t.terflies, and their arrow-swift pursuers, the bats, a great train of birds of pa.s.sage winging their way through the blue, like some broken cloud, coming back to our spring. Then flashed upon his open heart the memory of his lodgings in the market-town, and the time when he saw a similar flight of (earlier) birds of pa.s.sage, and thought that his life would soon be at an end. These recollections, with all their tears, brought back the belief that he was soon to die; and this he must tell Nathalie. He saw the wide expanse of night stretched over the world like some great corpse but her shadowy limbs quiver under the moonlit-branches at the first touches of the morning breeze awaking in the east. She rises towards the coming sun as a dissolving vapour, an all-embracing cloud, and man says "It is day."

Two c.r.a.pe-covered thoughts, like hideous spectres, fought within Firmian's soul. The one said, "He is going to die of apoplexy, so he never can see her more." And the other said, "He is going through the farce of a pretended death, and then he never _must_ see her more."

Overborne by the past as well as by the present, he took Nathalie's hand, and said, "You must pardon my being so deeply moved to-night. I shall never see you more. You are the n.o.blest of your s.e.x that I have ever met, but we shall never meet again. Very soon you must hear that I am dead, or that my _name_, from one cause or other has pa.s.sed away, but my _heart_ will still be yours, be _thine_. Oh! that the present, with its mountain-chains of grave-hillocks, but lay behind me, and the future were come, with all its open graves, and I stood on the brink of my own! For I would look once more on _thee_, then throw myself into it in bliss."

Nathalie answered not a word. She faltered suddenly in her walk, her arm trembled, her breath came thick and fast. She stopped, and, with a face as pale as death, said, in trembling accents, "Stay here on this spot; let me sit alone for a minute on that turf-bank. Ah! I am so headlong!" He saw her move trembling away. She sank, as if overwhelmed with some burden, down upon a bank of turf. She fixed her blinded eyes upon the moon (the blue sky around it seemed a night, the earth a vapour); her arm lay rigid on her lap; she did not move, except that a spasm, distantly resembling a smile, played about her lip; her eyes were tearless. But to her friend, life at that moment seemed a realm of shadows, whose outlines were floating and blending in endless changes of confusion; a tract all hollow, sunken mine-shafts full of mists in the likeness of mountain-spirits, with but _one_ single opening of outlet to the heavens, the free air, the spring, the light of day; and _that_ outlet so narrow, so remote, and far above his head.

There sat Nathalie in the white crystal shimmer, like some angel upon an infant's grave; and, suddenly, the tones of Heinrich's music broke in, like bells pealing in a storm, upon their souls as they paused, all stunned (like Nature before the thunder breaks), and the warm river of melody bore away their hearts, dissolving them the while. Nathalie made an affirmative sign with her head, as if she had come to some conclusion: she rose and came forward from the green, flowery grave like some enfranchised, glorified spirit; she opened her arms wide, and came towards him. Tear after tear came coursing down her blushing face, but as yet her heart could find no words; sinking under _the_ WORLD which was in her heart, she could totter no further, and he flew to meet her. She held him back that she might speak the first, her tears flowing faster and faster, but when she had cried, "My first _friend_, and my last--for the first and last time," she grew breathless and dumb, and, overburdened with sorrow, sank into his arms, upon his lips, upon his heart.

"No! no!" she murmured; "Oh! Heaven, give me but the power to speak.

Firmian! my Firmian! Take all my happiness away with you--all that I have on earth. But never, by all you hold most sacred, never see me more in this world. Now" (she added very softly), "you must _swear_ this to me." She drew her head back, and the tones of Heinrich's music flowed between and around them like the voice of sorrow. She gazed at him, and his pale care-worn face wrung her heart with agony; with eyes dim with tears, she implored him to swear that he would never see her more.

"Yes, n.o.ble, glorious soul," he answered, in trembling tones; "yes, then, I _swear_ to thee I will never see thee more." Mute and motionless, as if smitten by the hand of death, she sank with drooping head upon his breast; and once again, like one dying, he said, "I will never see thee more." Then, beaming like some angel, she raised her face, worn with emotion to him, saying, "All is over now; take the death kiss, and speak no more." He took it, and she gently disengaged herself from his arms. But as she turned away, she put back her hand and gave him the green rosebuds with the tender thorns, and saying, "Think of to-night," went resolutely away (trembling, nevertheless), and was soon lost in the dark-green alleys, where but few beams of light struck through.

And the end of this night every soul that has loved can picture for itself without the aid of any words of mine.

FIRST FRUIT PIECE.

LETTER OF DR. VICTOR TO CATO THE ELDER, ON THE CONVERSION OF _I_ INTO _THOU_, _HE_, _SHE_, _YE_, AND _THEY_; OR, THE FEAST OF KINDNESS OF THE 20TH MARCH.

Flachsenfingen, 1st April, 1795.

MY DEAR CATO THE ELDER,

A breaker of his word like you--who made such a solemn promise to come to my feast, and yet did not come--will have to be punished by having his mouth--not st.i.tched up (which is what savages do to word-breakers,) for that would be a loss only to your hearers--but _made to water_. When I shall have painted a full and faithful picture of our peace-festival of the soul for you, I shall stop both my ears against the curses which you will pour out on your evil genius. At this feast we all philosophised, and we were all converted, except me, who could not be reckoned a convert, inasmuch as I was myself the converter of the heathen.

Our flotilla of three boats--(the third we were obliged to take in deference to the timidity of the ladies)--got under way about one o'clock in the afternoon of the 20th of March, ran into the stream, gained the open water, and soon after one we were well in sight of the very anther-filaments and spider's-webs on the island. At a quarter-past two we landed--the professor, his wife, and a girl and boy--Melchior--Jean Paul--the Government Counsellor,--Flamin--the lovely Luna--(off goes the first of your curses here!)--the undersigned, and his wife.

Some Burgundy was then disembarked. At the commencement of spring (which was to take place that day at 38 minutes past 3 o'clock) we meant to enter upon a "stream of life," coloured and sweetened after a most superlative sort. With the island, Cato, many of us were quite enraptured, and nearly all of us wished we had paid a visit to this beautiful bowling-green in the Rhine--thin pleasure camp amid the waves--long before. Luna, elder Cato--if I mistake not thou hast seen, certainly once at the very least, that tender soul, which ought to dwell in (and heighten the tint of) a white rose in place of a body--Luna shed tears, half of delight (for they were half of sorrow for _everybody_ who was not there), half of delight not so much at the families of alders upon the rounded bank, or the Lombardy poplars lying trembling in intoxication of bliss in the gentle air which breathed about them, or the sunny green paths, as at _all this_ together (in the first place), and at the spring sky and the Rhine (which was showing that sky a picture, as it were, of its antipodean sky somewhere over America), and at the peace and gladness of her soul--but (above all) at the Alp in the centre of the island.

The Alp will be sketched, if an opportunity offers, in this letter. I at once asked Luna where _you_ were. She said, "At the Frankfort Fair."

Was she right?

When a party arrives at a place it is not, like the _Anguis Fragilis_, to be broken into ten twitching fragments by every touch of chance.

Even the ladies kept with us, for I had deprived them of all opportunity of doing anything in the shape of household labour, by the arrangements I had made for the dinner. This Barataria Island was going to be an intellectual _Place d'Armes_ and theatre of war that day. I love disputation. Intellectual bickerings further and heighten the happiness of congenial society, just as lovers' quarrels are a renewal of love, and fisticuffs a necessity of Marionette operas. Certain people are like the Moravians, among whom the confessor and penitent change places, each laying a picture of his soul before the other, his own police-notice of an absconded criminal--his own advertis.e.m.e.nt in the "Hue and Cry"; and I am like them. Any blemish or shortcoming which I discover in myself or other people I immediately publish over half the town in a universal German gazette, as ladies do the witnesses'

depositions of evidence concerning strangers. For the last three weeks, dear Cato, my soul has been glowing in the brightest sunlight of peace and love, cast upon me by the deceased chief _Piqueur_ (a man who had not a trace of either the one or the other about him)--and now I cannot rest till I entail this precious legacy upon all of you.

As _Lieutenant de Police_ of the island, I possessed the power of issuing police regulations with respect to the conversation permissible thereon, and I directed the thread of _our_ talk towards the _Piqueur_ in question. But the wasps came buzzing out of their nests; the first of them being your brother, Melchior, who drove his sting into the _Piqueur's_ avarice, saying that people who didn't bestow their plunder upon the poor till they were in their own coffins, were like pikes who eject their (swallowed) prey when caught themselves; they should rather do as Judas Iscariot did--cast their pieces of silver into the church _before_ their hanging. The next wasp was your second brother, Jean Paul, who said, "Misers are the only people who haven't had enough of life when they die. Even when they are in the very grip of Death's hand, they would fain grasp hold of money with their own. Like cap-mushrooms, when they are broken off, they cling terribly to the earth's surface with, their bleeding moiety."

"Ah!" said I, "_everyone_ is a thorough miser as regards something or other, I am sorry to say. I cannot now be so hard upon a man who confines himself to mortifying and chastening _himself_ as I used to be. Where is the extraordinary difference between one of your learned antiquary mint-a.s.sayers who distils, evaporates, and injects all the pleasures of his life into the rust of a collection of coins--and a miser who counts and weighs the specimens in _his_ cabinet like so many votes at an election? Not, in reality, so great a difference as there is between _our opinions_ of the two." I thought I had a fine chance of turning deftly to the subject of the _Piqueur_ at this point, but the entire company called out to me to tell them what o'clock it was. In my capacity of Viceroy, I had disarmed all the islanders of their watches at the landing-place (as if they had been so many swords), that they might pa.s.s their day in a blissful eternity, where time was not. The only one allowed to keep his was Paul--and this was because it was one of the new Geneva sort, whose hands always point to 12 o'clock, only telling the real time when one touches a spring.

It was now past three. In thirty-eight minutes, spring, that pre-heaven upon earth--that _second_ paradise--would make her grand processional progress over the ruins of the _first_. Already the clouds were all cleared away from the sky, spring breezes played coolingly about the sun, burning in the blue; on a vine-clad hill by the Rhine sh.o.r.e, a solo-singer from the great choir of spring--a nightingale--sent on in advance of her--was pouring out her song in a smooth-grown thicket of pruned cherry-trees; through the open trellis-work of the boughs we could see the notes vibrate in the feathers of her throat.

We climbed up the artificial Mount St. Gothard. It was set round with turf-banks and leafy niches; an oak stood on its summit by way of crown. Man (day-fly, as he is, playing above a ripple of time) cannot do without watches and date-indicators on the banks of the time-stream.

Although every day is a birthday and a new year's day, he must have one of his own into the bargain. Thirty-eight minutes struck in us. And down from the waves of throbbing blue above us came floating a broad breath of breeze, rocking the swelling grapes and the bare grafts, the delicate young branchlets, and the strong, sharp-pointed winter-corn, and lifting the soaring pigeons higher in their flight. The sun, above Switzerland, looked, in blissful intoxication, at his own face reflected in the sublime glittering ice-mirror of Mont Blanc, parting (unaware) day and night into equal halves, as if with two arms of fate, and throwing down equal portions to every land and every eye. We sang Goethe's "Hymn to the Spring." The sun sent us down (like dew) from the hill-top to the valley--the earth swelling loose fell rustling at our feet; and wine (Lethe of life) hid from our sight the misty bunks within which it rolled its way--mirroring only heaven and flowers.

Clotilda said (not to us, but to her Luna)--(and here, dear Cato, I am drank with remembering; and I beg, accordingly, to invite you, at once, for the 10th of April), "Ah! dearest, how beautiful the world is sometimes. We ought not to think so poorly of it. Are we not like Orestes in the 'Iphigenia'--fancying we are in exile, though we really are in our own native land."

With every downward step from the hill we sank back into the workaday marsh-meadow of life. "What the better are we," cried Melchior, quite angrily, "for all this splendour in and around us, when to-morrow a single pa.s.sionate earthquake may hurl down an avalanche of snow-ma.s.ses upon all that is warm and blooming in us? it is the April of the human heart--not the April of the universe--that causes me such vexation. We are always at our hardest just after an _attendriss.e.m.e.nt_--and moved to tears just after some murderous rage--as earthquakes set warm springs flowing. Now I know quite well that, to-morrow, at the sitting of the council, I shall attack and oppose everybody and everything. Pitiable!

pitiable! And you are not a whit better, Flamin."

"Not a whit," said Flamin, with touching candour. Luna and my wife took the Professor's wife between them (each taking one of her children in her lap), and sat down upon the green nether slope of the hill, on the sunny side of the nightingale. We, however, were too restless to sit down. "Alas!" (said Jean Paul, walking up and down, with his hands folded and hanging, and his hat thrown away, so that his _eyes_, at all events, might be higher and freer). "Alas! is _any_ one a whit better?

We take a vow of universal love to our fellow men whenever we are deeply touched--when we have buried some one, or have been thoroughly happy, or have committed some grand transgression, or looked long and closely at Nature, or are intoxicated with love, or some earthly form of intoxication: but we are really only perjurers, not philanthropists, as we fancy ourselves. We long and thirst for the love of others--but it is like mercury, it feels and looks like fountain water, and flows and glitters like it--but it _is_ cold, dry, and heavy in reality. It is just those very people upon whom Nature has bestowed most gifts (and who, consequently, should not covet other people's, but be content with distributing their own), who, like princes, demand the more from their fellow men the more they _have_ to give them, and the less they _do_ give them. Dissensions are the more bitterly painful, the more alike the souls are between whom they take place, just as discords are harsher the nearer they approach the unison. We forgive without reason because we have found fault without reason, for a rightful and righteous anger must, of necessity, be everlasting. Nothing is a stronger evidence of the miserable subordination of our reason to our ruling pa.s.sion than the fact that we place such a flat every-day matter as _time_ among the cures for hate, grief, love, &c.; our impulses are to _forget_ to conquer, or to grow _tired_ of doing so--our wounds are to be sanded over with the Margrave's sympathetic powder of drift-sand out of Time's sand-gla.s.s! Too miserable a business altogether! But can anything make a better of it? Certainly, least of all my complaints of it!"

"The fact is," said the serene, gentle, Professor (who only uses a _very_ few pedantic tints in his style of painting), "_feelings_ of love to our fellow men[70] are useless without _reasons_." "So are reasons without feelings," said Paul.

"Consequently," continued the Professor (for I could _not_ manage to get my _Piqueur_ brought to bear anyhow, but had to keep him idly in reserve), "the two have to be combined like _genius_ and _criticism_--of which the former can produce only master-pieces and scholar-pieces, the latter only something of an everyday sort between the two. What I think is, that our lack of love arises, not from our coldness, but from a conviction that others do not deserve it. The coldest of men would acquire a greater warmth of feeling for their fellows if they acquired a higher opinion of them."

"But," asked Clotilda, "must we not forgive even the _wrong_ done by our enemies? The _right_ is not matter for forgiveness."

"Of course it is not," he answered, but would let himself be no further diverted from his point. "The only ugliness and hatefulness which we can truly experience hatred for is that of a _moral_ sort."

"In opposition to that view of the question," said Jean Paul, "I might adduce the fierce combats of animals, and nurseries in a state of war; for in neither of these cases is there any idea of _immorality_ of the enemy, although _hatred_ of him exists. But were I to adduce these cases, I could answer myself--at least, so so. If we directed our hatred against things other than the immoral, we should be just as angry with the hanging branch which strikes us in the face as with the person who broke it so that it should be so placed as to do so. The rage of a chastised child is quite a different thing from the alarmed instinct of self-conservancy--the feeling of avoidance of nitric acid, or of bodily hurt. The former has in it a duplex sense of dislike, the two components of which are most dissimilar--the one referring to the cause, the other to the effect. We must distinguish between beings which are capable of morality, and such as are not, in _kind_--not in _degree_; those _incapable_ of morality can never be made capable of it by the mere lapse of time, or step by step. Whence, if children at any period of their age were _utterly_ non-moral beings, it would follow that they could never, at _any_ period, _begin_ to _become_ moral beings. In brief, their anger is nothing other than a dim sense of other people's injustice. As to the animals, 1 don't know what else to say than that there _must_ be in them something a.n.a.logous to our moral sense. Those who (like us) believe them to have immortal souls, must, as a matter of course, concede them _some_ beginnings some pre-existent germs of morality--although these may be overpowered and kept in the background by their animal natures even to a greater extent than (for instance) conscience is in sleep, drunkenness, or insanity.

But alas! all this is night within night! And I hope this obscurity will be considered some excuse, Professor, for the manner in which I have obstructed and built out _your_ light."

"Now," he went on, "since hatred only concerns itself with _moral_ defects, how strange it is that we never hate _ourselves_, even for the gravest moral defects."

"_I_ think," said Flamin, "that one _does_ sometimes feel the _deadliest_ hatred of one's self, for over-haste."

"And then," said Jean Paul, "your argument would apply just as well to love--at least it would half apply. Come, let's hear what you've got to say to that?"