Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces Part 28

As I looked up to the sky, the Milky Way struck me as being the beam of the balance of hidden destiny, in whose weighing-pans (which are worlds) the broken, shattered, bleeding nations are weighed out for eternity. These destiny scales waver up and down as yet, because it was only a century or two ago that the weights were put into them.

We drew closer together, and (inspired by the night and the music) said, "Thou, poor country! may thy sun and thy day rise higher ere long, and cast away the blood-shirt of its morning red. May the higher genius wipe away the blood from thy hands, and the tears from thine eyes! Oh! may that genius build, support, and guard for ever the Grand Freedom Temple which is vaulted over thee like a second heaven: but also comfort every mother and every father, every child and every wife--and dry all eyes which weep for the beloved, crushed hearts which have bled and fallen, and now lie under that temple as bas.e.m.e.nt stones."

What I am going to say now can only be said to my brother, for n.o.body else would pardon it. Victor and I got into a boat, which was made fast with a rope to the bank, and which was drifting about with the current.

We worked ourselves back to the bank, and then let the boat drift northwards again upon the ripples. In our souls (as in the world without us) sadness and exaltation were strangely blent: the music on the bank came and went--tones and stars rose and fell. The vault of heaven showed in the Rhine like some shattered bell, and up above us the dome of the temple wherein dwelleth Eternity lay in calm and motionless rest, with all its unchanging suns. From the eastward the spring breathed upon us, and the tree skeletons in the churchyard of the winter felt the presage of a near resurrection. Of a sudden Victor said--"It feels to me as though the river here were the stream of Time--our fluctuating life is carried along upon the waves of both towards the midnight." Here my brother called to me from the island, "Brother, come into harbour and sleep; it is between one and two o'clock."

This fraternal voice, coming to me athwart the music of the wavelets, suddenly brought a new world--perhaps the under-world--into my open soul. For a lightning flash of memory gleamed in a moment over all my dim being, reminding me that it was on this very night two-and-thirty years ago that I had made my entry upon this overclouded earth, shrouded with daily nights--and that this hour, between one and two o'clock, in which my brother was calling me into haven and to sleep, was the hour of my birth (which so often deprives man of both).

There come to us moments of twilight in which it seems as though day and night were in the act of dividing--as if we were in the very process of being created or annihilated; the stage of life and the spectators fly back out of view, our part is played out, we stand far off, in darkness and alone, but we have still got on our theatre dress, and we look at ourselves in it, and ask, "What is it that thou art, _now_, my _me_!" When we thus ask ourselves this, there is, beyond ourselves, nothing of great or of firm--everything has turned to an endless cloud of night (with rare and feeble gleams within it), which keeps falling lower and lower, and heavier with drops. Only high up above the cloud shines a resplendence--and that is G.o.d; and far beneath it a minute speck of light--and that is a human "Me"!

The heart is made of heavy earth, and therefore it cannot long endure such moments. I pa.s.sed on to those sweeter seasons in which the full, tear-intoxicated heart neither can, nor will, do aught but simply weep.

I had not the courage to drag my dear Victor down from the sublime region in which he was to my trifling pettinesses--but I asked him to remain beside me for a little time in this stillness which lay so silently upon the dark stream as it went flowing toward midnight and the south. Then I leant and pressed myself fondly to his side--and my little tears fell unseen into the great river--as though it had been the great stream of Time itself, into which all eyes drop their tears, and so many thousand hearts their blood-drops--for all which it neither swells nor flows the faster.

I thought as I gazed at the Rhine, "And thus, too, the dancing, billowy current of Life goes flowing on its course from out its source--hidden like the Nile's. How little, as yet, have I done, or enjoyed! Our deserts, and our enjoyments, what petty things they are! Our _metamorphoses_ are greater; our heads and our hearts go into the ground irrecognisable--altered a thousandfold--like the head of the man with the iron mask.[76] Ay! and _did_ we but change! but we change so little in the earth, or even in ourselves. Every moment is to us the goal of all that have come before it. We take the seed of life for the harvest of it--the honey-dew on the ears for the sweet fruit--and we chew the flowers, like cattle! Ah! thou great G.o.d! what a night lieth around our sleep! we _fall_ and _rise_ with closed eyelids, and fly about blind, and in a deep slumber."[77]

My hand was hanging into the water, and the cool ripples buoyed it up and down. I thought, "How straight and immovable the little light within us burns, amid the blasts of Nature's storm! Everything around me contends and clashes together with gigantic might. The stream seizes upon the islands and the cliffs--the night-wind comes upon the river, and stalks across it, thrusting its wavelets back, and wages its strife with the forests--even up there in the tranquil blue, worlds are working against worlds--the eternal, endless mights flowing and rushing, like rivers, one against another, they come together in whirl and roar--and on the face of that eternal whirl the little worlds float eddying round the sun-vortex; nay, those shimmering constellations themselves rising zenithwards with that grand and gentle peace and calm--what are they but mountain ranges of raging sun-volcanoes, stretching into infinity beyond the reach of mind to follow. And yet the human spirit lies at rest amid this storm, peaceful as a quiet moon above a windy night. In me, at this moment, all is gentle peace. I see my own little life-brook running by me, falling, with all the rest, into the river of Time. The clear-eyed soul looks through the raging blood-rivers which are flowing round it, and through the storms which darken and obscure it, and sees, beyond them all, quiet meadows, gentle, peaceful waters, moon-shimmer, and a lovely, beautiful, tranquil, placid, peaceful angel slowly wandering there." Yes, yes; within my soul there was a quiet Good Friday--wind-still, rain-free, and mild--neither cold nor over-warm--though shrouded in a tender cloud.

But a clear consciousness of rest is speedily the undoing thereof. I saw, floating near the island, three hyacinths which Clotilda had dropped into the wavelets as she went away. "Now, in this, thy birth-hour," I said to myself, "the ocean of eternity is washing thousands of little hearts on to the stony sh.o.r.e of this world; how will it be with them one day when their birthday feast comes round? And what are your countless brothers who, with you, came thirty-two years ago into this vapour-ball, thinking now? Perhaps some terrible sorrow makes them think with bitterness of their first hour. Perhaps they sleep now--as I have slept--and must again--only deeper, deeper." And then all my younger and older friends, now sleeping that deeper sleep, fell heavy upon my broken breast.

"I know, I think," my Victor said, "what you are reflecting on so silently, and regretting so mutely." I answered "No," and then I told him all.

Then we went quickly back, and I put my arms about my other brother, and my heart went out in longing towards thee. At length we took our departure from this building-place of a more peaceful system of doctrine for our hearts--this quiet island; and the lofty hill--grand pedestal of the vases of our joy-flowers, chancel of the great temple, light-house tower in our haven of rest--seemed to gaze long after us, the hanging garden of our souls lying upon it in starry light.

And as we came to the sh.o.r.e, Hesperus, as star of the morning (spark which springs and shines so near the sun), rose up above the morning mists, and earlier than even the Aurora of morning, proclaimed his sire's approach. And as we thought that he shines, too, as the star of evening upon our nights here below, and yet adorns the east, and the after-midnight hours with the first of the glittering pearls of dew, each said to his gladsome heart, "And so shall all the evening stars of this our life shine upon us as stars of morning at a future day."

Think thou, too, of morning, my brother, when thou art looking upon the even; and when a sun is setting for thee, turn thee about and thou mayest see a moon rising in the east. The moon gives warrant that the sun is shining still--as Hope says, there still is happiness. But come now soon to thy Victor--and to

Thy Brother,

J. P.

END OF BOOK III.

BOOK IV.

CHAPTER XV.

ROSA VON MEYERN--TONE-ECHOES AND AFTER BREEZES FROM THE LOVELIEST OF ALL NIGHTS--LETTERS OF NATHALIE AND FIRMIAN--TABLE-TALK BY LEIBGEBER.

If on some dewy, warm and starry night of spring the miners in some salt mine were to have their great penthouse-roof of earth lifted away from over their heads, and find themselves thus, of a sudden, brought out from their confined, candle-lit cellar into the wide, dim, sleeping-hall of nature--out of their subterranean stillness in among the breezes, the perfumes, the whisperings of the spring--these miners would be exactly in Firmian's case, whose heretofore prisoned, silent, and serene soul the night just past had driven out of its prison with might, darkening it with new sorrows and joys, and a whole new world.

Heinrich maintained a most speaking silence concerning the night in question, and, on the other hand, Firmian betrayed a mute hunting after speech. Strive as he might to fold those wings of his (which had been stretched all moist from under their wing-covers on that foregoing night for a first time), they _would not_ fold quite short enough to go back under them again. Matters got to feel very oppressive and sultry for Leibgeber after a time. On that previous night they had come back in perfect silence to Bayreuth and to bed, and he wearied at the thought of all the demi-shades and demi-tints which would have to be got ready on the palette before so much as four bold touches could be given to the picture of the night.

Perhaps there is nothing more regrettable than that we do not all have the hooping-cough at one and the same time--or are not all suffering the sorrows of Werther--or are not all twenty-one, or sixty-one--or have not all hypochondria--or are not all spending our honeymoons--or indulging in games of banter. How charming it would be (were we all choristers singing in the same coughing-tutti) to find everybody else in just the same condition as ourselves--and put up with them therefore, and forgive in them that in which they were just like _us_!

But as things really are--now when the one coughs to-day, and the other not till to-morrow (the simultaneous company-coughing in church always excepted); when one has to be taking dancing-lessons while another is saying his prayers in the conventicle; when one father's daughter is being held up at the font while the other's son is being lowered into his little grave;--_now_, when destiny is always striking on the hearts about us chords quite unrelated to the key of our own, or, at any rate, superfluous sixths, major sevenths, minor seconds;--now, as things are, in this universal lack of unison and harmony, what can be expected but a screeching cat-charivari--and, if we can't have a little melody, we must be content with a little _arpeggio-ing_ up and down.

By way of a fever for conversation, or pump-handle wherewith to force a drop or two up from the heart, Leibgeber caught hold of Firmian's hand, and embraced it softly and warmly with all his fingers. He put one or two unimportant questions concerning what walks and expeditions they should think of for the day. But he had not foreseen that this hand-clasp would be the means of landing him in deeper difficulties of embarra.s.sment,--for he found that it was now inc.u.mbent on him to keep a control on his _hand_ as well as on his tongue--and he couldn't let Firmian's hand drop all in a moment, like a hot potato, but found it necessary to let it out of his clasp by a gradual _diminuendo_. This species of careful watch over his feelings was a process which made Leibgeber blush with shame, and drove him nearly frantic; and, indeed, he would have thrown even this description of mine of it into the fire.

I am given to understand that he never could bring himself to utter the word "heart" even to women--who always have their _heart_ (namely the word) on their tongues, like a kind of _globus hystericus_. He said, "It is the bullet-screw of their real hearts,--the b.u.t.ton on their fanfoil; and, to _me_, it is a poison _bolus_, a pitch-ball for the Bel of Babel."

So his hand escaped, on a sudden, from its close arrest; he seized his hat and stick, and cried: "I see you are just as great a goose as I am myself: _instanter_, _instantius_, _instantissime_, in three words, did you talk to her about the Widows' Fund? Yes or no--not another syllable. I go Out at that door this instant!" Siebenkaes brought out all his items of news on this subject as rapidly as possible, so as to be quit of each and all of them for ever. "She is certain to agree to it. I said nothing to her about it. I _can_ NOT. But _you_ can quite easily. And you must. I am going no more to Fantasie. And we shall have a grand time of it this afternoon, Heinrich! The music of our lives shall be of a sounding sort. The pedals of the joy-notes are all ready on our harps to be pressed down; and we'll press them!" Heinrich, partly recovering his equanimity, said, as he went out, "The Cremona strings of the human instrument are made of living membrane, the breast is only the sounding board--and the head is the damper."

Solitude lay around our friend like some beautiful country--all the echoes, driven away from him, and wandering, lost and astray, could find their way back to him now athwart it. And on the c.r.a.pe-veil, woven of the twelve past hours, which had laid itself over his life's loveliest historical picture, he could tremblingly trace that picture's lines with crayon-pencil, and trace, and trace them over again, a thousand and a thousand times! But a visit to the beautiful Fantasie--blooming richer and fairer as the hours went by--this he must deny himself; for he must not be a _living_ hedge, to fence and bar Nathalie from that Valley of Blossom. He must pay for bliss with privation. The charms of the town and neighbourhood had still their bright, many-tinted skins--but their sweet kernels were gone.

Everything was to him as some dessert dish which had, in the older time, had coloured sugar sprinkled over it, which was now, somehow, turned to coloured sand. All his hopes--all the flowers and fruit of his life (as is the case with our higher ones)--now grew and matured beneath the ground, like those of the subterranean vetch;[78] I mean, in the sham grave into which he was going. How little he had--and yet, how much! His feet were upon p.r.i.c.kly rose branches, and all round the Elysian fields of his future he saw th.o.r.n.y bushes, bristly undergrowth, and a wall built, beginning at his grave. His Leipzig rose valley was dwindled into the one green rosebud-twig, which had been transplanted, unblown, from Nathalie's heart to his. And yet, how much he _had_. A forget-me-not, from Nathalie, for all his life to come (the silken ones she gave him were but the hulls of that whose blossom was immortal and eternal); a springtime in his soul at last, at last after all these many springs--to be _so_ beloved, for the first time by a woman as an hundred dreams and poets had pictured to him that men _might_ be beloved. To pa.s.s, in an instant, at a single step, from his dingy lumber room of old law papers and books into the fresh, green, flowery, golden age of love,--for the first time, not only to gain a rare and priceless love like this, but to take away with him _such_ a parting kiss, like a sun into all his coming life, to light and warm it through and through for ever! _This_ was bliss for one who had had his cross to bear in former days. But, more than this, he was free to let himself be borne along upon the beauteous waves of this river of Eden without care or constraint, inasmuch as Nathalie never could be his, nor should he ever see her more. In Lenette he had loved no Nathalie as in the latter no Lenette. His wedded love was a prosaic summer day of sultry hay-making, but _this_ was a poetic spring night of starlight and flowers, and his new world was like the name of the spot where it was created--Fantaisie. He did not deceive himself as to the fact that, as he was going to die before Nathalie, he was loving, in her, merely a departed spirit, and that _as_ a departed spirit--nay, while yet in this life, of a truth, for _him_, a pure and glorified risen soul; and he freely put the question to himself whether there were any reason why he should not love this Nathalie (thus departed into the past, for _him_) as truly and fondly as any other, departed long since into a yet remoter past--the Heloise of an Abelard or St. Preux, or a poet's Laura, or a Werther's Lotte for whom his dying was not even to be as real as Werther's.

With all his efforts, he could not manage to say more to Leibgeber than, "She must have been very, very fond of _you_, this rare, exceptional soul--for it is only to my resemblance to you that I can ascribe her heavenly kindness to _me_--who am so little like other men--and have never been cared for by women." Leibgeber--and he himself as soon as he said it--laughed at this almost idiotic statement; but what is any and every lover, during his May month, but a dear, genuine, simple sheep?

Leibgeber soon came back to the hotel with the news that he had seen the English lady on her way to Fantaisie. Firmian was very glad of it.

She rendered his resolve to shut himself out of the entire circle of delight easier to execute. For she was the Count von Vaduz's daughter, and consequently must not see him (Siebenkaes) at present, having to believe him hereafter to be Leibgeber. Heinrich botanised, however, the whole day on the flowery slope of Fantaisie, with the view of discovering and observing the flower _G.o.ddess_, rather than the flowers, with his botanical gla.s.ses (to wit, his eyes). But no G.o.ddess appeared. Alas! our poor wounded Nathalie had _so many_ reasons for keeping aloof from the ruins of her loveliest hours--for fleeing the scene of conflagration (now overgrown with flowers) where she might encounter him whom she meant to meet no more.

A few days after this, the Venner Rosa von Meyern honoured the company at the _table d'hote_ in the 'Sun' with _his_.... If the author's calculations as to dates do not wholly mislead him, he was at dinner there on that occasion himself. But I have only an indistinct recollection of the two advocates, and none at all of the Venner--because c.o.xcombs of his description are an uninteresting species of animals, and there are whole game-preserves and zoological gardens full of them to be met with at all times. I have more than once met with characters, in the body, whom I have subsequently taken careful wax casts of from the crowns of their heads to the soles of their boots, and then exhibited them about the country in my collection of wax-work figures. But I wish I always knew beforehand exactly _which_ of the people whom I happen to be dining or travelling with chances to be the one who is going to have his portrait painted in this way. I should note down, and store up a thousand trifling, minute peculiarities, and lay them down in my epistolary cellars. As it is, I sometimes find myself obliged (and I confess it freely) to set to work and _coolly lie_ a number of matters of minor importance--for instance, that a thing takes place about six o'clock, or about seven--if I happen to be wholly without doc.u.mentary evidence on the point. Wherefore if is a moral certainty that if three other authors had sat down, on the same morning with me, to give the world an account of Siebenkaes's wedded life derived from the same historical sources as mine, that we four, however great our devotion to truth, would have produced family histories containing much the same amount and description of inaccuracy as we find in those which the four Evangelists have given us; so that our tetrachord would have stood in need of a good tuning with a tuning-pipe in the shape of a "Harmony" of our Gospels.

Meyern dined at the 'Sun,' as we have said. He told Siebenkaes with a triumph, which was not without a dash of menace, that he was going back to Kuhschnappel next day. He was vainer than ever--probably he had offered his hand to some fifty of the fair s.e.x of Bayreuth, as though he had been the giant Briareus, with fifty wedding-rings on his hundred hands. He was as greedy of the fair s.e.x as cats are of _marum verum_; which is why both are surrounded with _metallic_ guards by their possessors. When the clergy rivet poachers of this description, alive, to one particular animal of their chase by means of a strong wedding-ring, and the animal of the chase in question drags them through every thicket till they are scratched and bled to death, philanthropic weekly-papers would say that it is too severe a punishment; and it is so, no doubt, for the poor animal of the chase.

On the following day Rosa really did send to ask whether Siebenkaes had any message to send to his wife, as he was going back to see her.

Nathalie was invisible still. All that Firmian saw of her was a letter for her which he saw shaken out of the post-bag when he went (as he did every day) to see if there was one from his wife. Lenette did not require more hours to write a letter than Isocrates did years for a panegyric on the Athenians--no more, but just the same number, namely about ten. Judging by the handwriting and the seal, the letter for Nathalie was from the (step) father of his country, Herr von Blaise.

"Thou darling girl," thought Firmian, "with what deliberation he will pa.s.s the burning focus of his burning-gla.s.s (formed of the ice of his heart) over every wound of thy soul! How many secret, tears wilt thou weep--and no one to count them; and thou hast no hand now to dry them and hide them, except thine own!"

One exquisite, blue afternoon he went alone to the only pleasure garden which was not barred against him--the Hermitage. Memories met him every where--all painfully sweet memories. At every spot he had lost, or renounced, something of life or heart--had become a hermit, in accordance with the place's name. Could he forget the great, dim glade where, beside his kneeling friend, and before the setting sun, he had sworn to die, and part from his wife and from all the world he knew?

He left the joy-place, turned his face to the setting sun (which almost hid, in its brightness, the prospect from his sight), and strolled in circles round the town. With a deeply moved heart he gazed after the gently radiant luminary as it sank, amid the glowing cloud-embers, towards that distant spot where his widowed Lenette would be standing in her silent room, with her face lighted up by the evening red. "Ah!

dear, good Lenette," the voice within him cried, "why can I not press thee to this full, tender heart, here in this paradise, in bliss? I should love thee better here, and forgive thee easier."

Yes, of a truth, it is thou, kind Nature--never ending Love, who changest, in us, distance of body into nearness of soul. It is thou who, when we are utterly happy in some distant spot, bringest to us from afar, in fancy, the beloved forms of those whom we have had to leave--they come like beautiful music, or like happy years--and we stretch out our arms to the clouds that go soaring over the hills beyond which lie the dwellings of those whom we love the best. Our severed hearts open to those distant ones as the flowers which open to the sun unfold their petals even on days when there are clouds between them.

The splendour died away, leaving the blood-like track of the sunken sun in the blue; the earth with her gardens seemed to stand out brighter and clearer. Then suddenly Firmian came on the green Tempe Vale of Fantaisie, lying before him all loveliness of sight and of sound, tinted with the red of the evening clouds and with the white of blossoming boughs. But over it stood an angel with a gleaming cloud streak for sword, saying, "Here enter thou not! Knowest thou not the Eden from whence thou hast gone out?"

Firmian turned him about, and there, in the gloaming of spring, leaned upon the wall of the first of the Bayreuth houses he reached on his homeward way; so that the wounds of his eyes might have a chance to grow whole--that he might not meet his friend bearing scars which would have to be "explained." Leibgeber was not in, however, but there was something there of a very unexpected kind--a letter from Nathalie to him.

Ye who have keenly felt--or deeply regretted--that there is a Moses-veil, an altar-railing, a prison-grating, made both of body and earth--stretched out for ever and aye, between one soul and another--_ye_ cannot well blame this poor, deep-touched, solitary FRIEND, that he took up the cold paper unseen, and pressed it to his burning lips, and to his trembling heart. For of a truth, every _body_--even the human body, is, from the soul's point of view, merely the sacred _reliquiae_ of an invisible spirit; and not only the letter, which you kiss, but the hand which wrote it, too, is, like the lips, whose kiss _you think_, a.s.sures you--(but it is a deceptive a.s.surance)--of the _closeness_ of your union, your _flowing_ or _fusing_ into one, only the sacred outward and visible sign of a something higher and dearer; and these deceptions differ only in their sweetness.

Leibgeber came in, opened the letter, and read it aloud:

"To-morrow morning at five o'clock, I shall be turning my back upon your beautiful town. I am going to Schraplau. But I cannot leave this lovely valley, oh dear friend, without once again giving you the a.s.surance of my unchanging friendship, and conveying to you my thanks and wishes for yours. I should so have liked to say good-bye to you in a more living manner; but my long leave-taking from my English friend is not yet over, and I have now _her_ wishes to combat (as I had my _own_ before) before I can bury myself in, or rather, wing my flight to my village solitude. This beautiful spring has sorely wounded me, and that with joys as well as with sorrows. But (if I may go so far afield for a comparison), my heart, like Cranmer's, is left for those I love, unconsumed amid the ashes of my funereal pyre. May all go well! well!

with you--better than can ever be the case with me, a woman. Fate cannot take much from you, nay, nor give you much either. There are smiling eternal rainbows playing around _all_ the waterfalls for you; but the rain-clouds of a woman's heart must drop for many a long day ere they are brightened by the sad, yet cheering tints of the Iris which memory casts upon them at length. _Your_ friend is with you still, no doubt. Press him warmly to your heart, and tell him, all that _yours_ wishes, and _gives_ him, mine _wishes_ him; and never will he, or you, whom he loves, be forgotten by me. Always

"Your NATHALIE."