Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume I Part 22

Horion trembled alone, without seeing his loved ones, in a gloomy arbor, upon which a single withered twig let in the light of the moon and of its pursuing clouds. Nothing ever stirred him more during music than to look at the chase of the clouds. When he accompanied with his eyes and with the tones these nebulous streams in their everlasting flight around our shadowy globe, and when he imparted to them all his joys and his wishes, then he thought, as in all his joys and sorrows, on other clouds, of another flight, of other shadows, than those above him,--then did his whole soul pine and languish; but the strings stilled the panting bosom, as the cold leaden bullet in, the mouth allays thirst, and the tones discharged the heavy tears from the full soul.

Dear Victor! there is in man a mighty wish which was never fulfilled: it has no name, it seeks its object, though all that thou namest it and all joys are not its reality; but it recurs, when in a summer night thou lookest to the north or towards distant mountains, or when moonlight is on the earth, or the heavens are studded with stars, or when thou art very happy. This great, vast wish lifts our soul aloft, but with sorrow: ah! here below we are thrown upward in a prostrate position like epileptics. But this wish, to which nothing can give a name,--our strings and tones name it to the human spirit; the yearning soul then weeps more profusely and can no longer comprehend itself, and calls inward in rapture of lamentation between the tones: "Ay, all that ye name to me is what I want!" ...

Mortal man, the enigmatical creature, has also a nameless, monstrous dread, which has no object, which awakes at hearing of spiritual apparitions, and which one sometimes feels when one only speaks of it....

Horion yielded up his bruised heart, with quiet tears which no one saw flow, to the high adagios which laid themselves with warm wings of eider-down over all his wounds. All that he loved entered now into his shady arbor,--his oldest friend and his youngest; he hears the thunder-storm-bells of life toll, but the hands of friendship stretch forth to meet each other, and they clasp each other, and even in the second life they hold each other fast in withering grasp. All tones seemed the unearthly echoes of his dream, sent back by beings whom one neither saw nor heard....

He could not possibly stay longer in this dark inclosure with his burning fancies, at this too great distance from the Pianissimo. He went--almost too boldly and too closely--through a leafy avenue up to the tones, and pressed his face far through the leaves, in order at last to see Clotilda in the dim and distant green glimmer....

Ah, and he saw her! But in too angelic, too paradisiacal a form! He saw not the thinking eye, the cold mouth, the calm person, that forbade so much and desired so little; but he saw for the first time her mouth encircled by a sweet harmonious sorrow, with an inexpressibly touching smile,--for the first time her eye weighed down under a br.i.m.m.i.n.g tear, as a forget-me-not bows itself beneath a tear-drop of rain. O, this good soul surely concealed her fairest feelings most of all! But the first tear in a beloved eye is too mighty for a soft heart.... Victor knelt down, overpowered by reverence and rapture, before the n.o.ble soul, and lost himself in the darkling, weeping form, and in the weeping tones. And when he saw at length her features turned to paleness, because the green foliage overspread her lips and cheeks with a deathly hue from the reflection of the lamps,--and when his dream came back to him, with Clotilda sunk under the flowery hill,--and when his soul, dissolved into dreams, into sorrows, into joys, and into wishes for her who consecrated her birthday festival with devout tears,--oh, was there then any need, for the completion of his euthanasia, that the violin should die away, and that the second harmonica, the _viole d'amour_, should send its music-of-the-spheres to his naked, enkindled, palpitating heart? O, the pang of bliss quieted him, and he thanked the Creator of this melodious Eden, that He, with the _highest_ tones of His harmonica, which with unknown forces shiver the heart of man to tears, as high tones shatter gla.s.ses, had at last exhausted his bosom, his sighs, and his tears: amidst these tones, after these tones, there were no more sounds; the full soul was wrapped up in foliage and night and tears; the speechless swelling heart drank the tones into itself, and took the outer ones for inner ones; and at last the tones played like zephyrs around the head that was drowsy with bliss, and only in the innermost part of the dying soul still stammered the too happy wish: "Ah, Clotilda, could I surrender to thee to-day this mute, glowing heart!--ah, that I might on this imperishable heavenly evening, with this trembling soul, sink dying at thy feet, and say the words, 'I love thee!'"

And as he thought of her festive anniversary, and of her letter to Maienthal, which had given him the greatest praise, that of being a scholar of Emanuel, and of little tokens of her regard for him, and of the sweet fraternization of his heart with hers,--ay, then did the heavenly hope of winning this enn.o.bled heart for the first time draw near to him amidst the music, and that hope caused the sounds of the harmonica, like dying echoes, to float far and wide over the whole future of his life....

"Victor!' said some one, in a slowly lengthened tone. He sprang up and turned his exalted features toward the--brother of his Clotilda, and embraced him with joy. Flamin, into whom all music flung war-flames and more open sincerity, looked at him wonderingly, inquiringly, and with an imperceptible suspicion, and with that friendliness which resembled scorn, but which was never anything but the smarting of injuries received.

"Why didst thou not take me, too, with thee to-day?" said Flamin, in a friendly tone.

Victor pressed his hand, and was silent.

"No! speak!" said he.

"Let it be for to-day, my Flamin; I'll tell thee some time," replied Victor.

"I will tell it to thee myself," Flamin began, more quickly and warmly.

"Thou thinkest, perhaps, I shall be jealous. And look thou, did I not know thee, I should be so: truly, another would be so, if he had thus lighted upon thee here, and put all things together,--thy late retreat from our summer-house out into the foliage, thy writing without a light, and thy singing of love"----

"To Emanuel," said Victor, softly.

"Thy sending off that leaf to her"----

"It was another from her alb.u.m," said he.

"Still worse; _that_ I did not even know. Thy lingering in St. Luna, and a thousand other signs, which do not immediately occur to me,--thy going off alone today"----

"O my Flamin, this is going too far! thou seest with other eyes than those of friendship."--

Here Flamin, who never could dissemble without immediately becoming what he a.s.sumed, and who could never recount an offence without falling into the old anger, grew warmer, and said, in a less friendly manner,--

"And others, too, see it,--even the Chamberlain, and the Chamberlain's wife."

This tore Victor's heart.

"Thou dear old friend of my youth! so, then, we are to be drawn and torn asunder, bleed we ever so much; so, then, this Matthieu is to succeed (for all comes from him, not from thee, thou good soul!) in getting thee to torment thyself, and me to torment thee. No, he shall not succeed; thou shalt not be taken from me. See, by Heaven!" (and here the feeling of his innocence stood in Victor erect and sublime,) "and though thou shouldst for years misunderstand me, still the time will come when thou shalt start back, and say to me, 'I have done thee wrong!'--But I shall gladly forgive thee."

This touched the jealous one, who to-day, indeed, (for a special reason,) was more composed.

"See," said he, "I believe thee always: say, dost thou never do anything against me?"

"Never, never, my dear fellow!" answered Victor.

"Now, then, forgive my heat," the other continued. "Thus have I already, with my cursed jealousy, once tormented Clotilda herself in Maienthal. But wrong not Matthieu; it is he, rather, who tranquillized me. He told me, to be sure, what Clotilda's parents thought they observed; nay, still more,--see, I tell thee everything,--he said they had even, on account of thy presumed liking and thy present influence, which the Chamberlain would fain avail himself of for his reinstatement, spoken of a possible betrothal to their daughter, and had even spoken to her and sounded her on the subject; but (to thee, however, this is a matter of indifference) my beloved remained true to me, and said, No."

Now was the hitherto so happy heart of our friend broken: that hard No had never yet been uttered to him. With an inexpressible, crushing, but meek woe, he said, softly, to Flamin,--

"Be thou, too, always true to me, for I have very little; and never torment me more as thou hast to-day."

He could say no more; the stifled tears stormed surging up over his heart, and painfully collected themselves under the pupil; he must needs now have a still, dark place, where he could weep to his heart's content; and in his lacerated and smarting bosom there remained only one soft and balmy thought: "Now, in the night, I can weep as much as I will, and no one can see my shattered face, my shattered soul, my shattered fortune."

And when he thought, "Ah, Emanuel, if thou shouldst see me as I am to-day!" he could hardly any longer contain himself.

He fled, with suppressed tears, unconcerned who saw it or did not see it, out of the garden, over which a dark angel let float a great funereal banner and the music of a dirge. He bruised himself against a stone garden-roller which was used to crush the _sprinkled_ gra.s.s-blades and _flowerets_,--he wept not yet, but on the observatory there would he satisfy himself and steep himself in abundant sorrow,--he kept repeating, "But she remained true, and said, No, no, no!"--the concert-tones glided after, like fire after the conjurer,--he waded through moist, slumbering lawns, which concealed their flowers, and, swifter than he, swept over the earth the shadowy outlines of the clouds overhead chased by the wind,--he stood at the foot of the observatory, still held back every tear, and hurried up,--he threw himself on the bench where he had seen Clotilda for the first time afar off, in a white dress,--"Rest thou, too, Horion!" she had called to him out of his dream from under the flowery hill, and he heard it again.----

Here he tore open joyfully all his wounds, and let them bleed out freely in tears; they overspread with mournful streams the face which once had often smiled, but always good-naturedly, and which from other eyes had never wrung any, but only wiped them away; every flood was a load taken off, but the heart grew heavy again upon it, and poured out a fresh one.--At last he could hear the tones again; most of them sank and were lost before they were wafted to the tower; little ones arrived dying, and expired in his darkling heart; every tone was a falling tear, and made him lighter, and expressed his anguish. The garden seemed to consist of softly resounding, dark-green waves of shadow, veiled under a broken twilight. Stung by memory, he tore his eye away from it: "What does it concern me any longer?" he thought. But at last from this shadowy Eden and from the _viole d'amour_ came up the song, "Forget me not," to his weary heart, and gave him back the softer pang and the past love. "No," said he, "I never will forget thee, though thou hast not loved me! thy form will a.s.suredly forever move me, and remind me of my dreams! ah, thou heavenly one, it is, indeed, now, the only thing that does not pain me, to think I forget thee not!"

All was silent and extinguished; he was alone in the presence of night.

At length, after remaining a long time in silence, he went down and back to Flachsenfingen, exhausted with weeping, and a poor man. And as, on the way, he cast a hurried glance up at the dark-blue heaven, in which floating clouds lay flung around the moon like _scoriae_, and a hurried glance again over the half-annihilated shadowy landscape, over the shadow-hills and shadow-villages, all appeared to him dead, empty, and vain, and it seemed to him as if, in some brighter world, there were a magic-lantern, and through the lantern gla.s.ses moved on which earth and springs and human groups were painted, and we called the descending, dancing images of these gla.s.ses _us_ and an earth and a life; and _after all that was bright and many-colored, a great shadow followed on_.----

Ah, I stir up, perhaps, once more, in many a breast, long-forgotten troubles! But it is good for us--since sorrows occupy so large a place in our memory--that this bitter winter-fruit should grow mild by lying, and that there is but a small difference between a past sorrow and a present bliss.

Poor Victor arrived after midnight, with a pale face and burning eyes, at the house of the Apothecary. He asked for nothing, that he might not betray his broken voice. When he saw his every-day overcoat hanging in the moonbeams, and when he imagined himself a strange person to whom the coat belonged, and who took it off so joyfully in the morning and now would put it on again so sorrowfully, then did a certain compa.s.sion which he had for himself seize again with too strong an impression his exhausted heart. Marie came, and he turned not away from her even the signs of this compa.s.sion. She stood surprised; he said to her with the softest voice, woven of sighs, that he wanted nothing; and the good soul went slowly out without courage to console or to weep, but all night long she shed invisible tears for those of another, and for a woe which had not been whispered in her ear.

Why did Fate to-day, of all days, open all the veins of his heart? Why must the Senior Pastor's silver wedding and the first marriage of his daughter to the preacher of the Orphan-House fall just on this day?

Why, if indeed the two nuptial feasts had to coincide on this day, must they last till after midnight, when they gave poor Victor occasion to gaze into all the mouldering scenes of his burnt-up hopes, when he could see from his dark chamber, in a brilliantly lighted room, the love which linked hand in hand, pressed lips to lips, and mingled eyes and souls? At another time he would have smiled at the Orphan-House preacher and at two catechists of the poor; but tonight he could only sigh over them,--and it is a soft line of beauty on his inner man, that he did not grudge, but felicitated, the poor people's possession of what he was deprived of himself. "Ah, you are happy!" said he. "O, love each other truly, press your throbbing, transitory hearts ardently to each other, ere the wing of Time shatters them, and glow on each other's bosoms during the short minute of life, and exchange your tears and kisses ere eyes and lips freeze in the grave! Ye are happier than I,--I, who can give my heart full of love to no one but the worms of the grave, and on whose coffin a joiner shall paint the inscription, which like myself shall be buried in the earth: 'Ye good children of men, you loved me not, and yet I loved you so well!'"

Every happy smile, every fleeting touch of the violin, every thought, became now, to his soft tear-bathed heart, a hard, sharp corner,--just as a hand which dips itself under the water feels everything hard to the touch.

His unbounded sincerity, his unbounded tenderness, he could now satisfy in no other way than by a letter to Emanuel, into which he let his whole soul overflow.

"O Dearly Loved Friend!

"Ought I to hide it from thee, when griefs or follies unman me? Ought I to show thee the faults I have repented of, and never my present ones?

No, come hither, dear one, to my wounded breast! I will lay open to thee the heart therein, let it bleed and beat under the exposure as it will. Thou wilt, perhaps, still cover it up again with thy fatherly love, and say, 'I love thee still.'

"Thou, my Emanuel, reposest in thy lofty solitude, on the Ararat of the saved soul, on the Tabor of the shining One: there thou gazest, softly dazzled, into the sun of Deity, and seest calmly the cloud of death swim in over the sun; it veils the orb: thou growest blind under the cloud; it melts away, and again thou standest before G.o.d. Thou lovest men as children who cannot offend,--thou lovest earthly enjoyments as fruits, which one plucks for refreshment, but without hungering for them; the storms and earthquakes of life pa.s.s by thee unheard, because thou liest in a life-dream full of tones, full of songs, full of meadows,--and when death awakes thee, thou art still smiling over the bright dream.

"But, ah! more than one tempest thunders into the life's-dream of the rest of us, and makes it distressful. If a higher being could enter into the hurly-burly of ideas which encompa.s.ses our spirit, and from which it must draw its breath, as we breathe in an air composed of all kinds of gases poured together,--if he were to see what kinds of nutriment pa.s.s through our inner man, from which it has to extract its chyle: that medley of comic operas,--Bayle's Dictionaries,--concerts of Mozart,--Messiahs,--military operations,--Goethe's poems,--Kant's writings,--table-talks,--lunar observations,--vices and virtues,--men and sicknesses and sciences of all sorts:--if the Being should examine this _olla-podrida_ of life, would he not be curious to know what heterogeneous and mutually repulsive juices thereby run together in the poor soul, and would he not wonder that anything settled and uniform is left as a residuum in man? Ah, Emanuel! if thy friend is now in a fine banquet-hall, now in a garden, now in an opera-box, now under the great night-heavens, now in the presence of a coquette, and now before thee,--surely, this ambiguous alternation of scenes must bring him sorrows, and perhaps leave stains....

"No, I will not deceive my Emanuel----O, are, then, the trifles and the pebbles of this life worth our choosing crooked paths to avoid them, as the sapping-caterpillar submits to winding courses through the twig-work of its leaf? No, all that I have said is true; but I should not have said it, had not other sorrows led me to speak of these also; and yet, thou innocently, simple-heartedly, sublimely trusting teacher, thou wouldst have believed me! Ah, thou hast too good an opinion of me!... O, it is a long and weary step from admiration to imitation! But now look into my open heart!

"Since I have, here in the charnel-house of my childish joys, in the beds where my childhood's years bloomed and faded, been conversing with perhaps too many dreams of the past,--and, still more, from the day when thou gavest my heart the provocative to the fever-stroke which has shaken my whole life,--since thou disclosedst to me the life wherein man exfoliates, and the thin, sharp moment whereon he so painfully stands,--since that farewell-night when my soul was great and my tears inexhaustible,--an eternal wound has been running within me, and the sigh of a longing which nothing can name but dreams and tears and love has lain like a stagnant vein, oppressive and consuming in my breast.----Ah! I still smile as ever, I still philosophize as ever, but my innermost heart only the beloved friend sees to whom I now lay it bare.

"O Fate, why dost thou strike in man the spark of a love which must be smothered in his own heart's blood? Have we not all, abiding within us, the sweet image of a beloved, of a friend, before whom we weep, after whom we seek, for whom we hope,--ah, and so vainly, so vainly? Does not man stand before a human bosom, as the turtle-dove before a mirror, and, like her, coo himself hoa.r.s.e before a dead, flat image therein, which he takes for the sister of his complaining soul? Why is it, then, that every fair spring-evening, every melting lay, every overflowing rapture, asks us, 'Where dost thou find the beloved soul to which thou wilt tell and impart thy bliss?' Why does music give the tempest-stricken heart, instead of peace, only greater waves,--as the tolling of bells, instead of dispelling, draws down the thunder-storms?

And why is it, that out of doors, on a fair, still, bright day, when thou lookest over the whole unrolled picture of a landscape, over the seas of flowers that tremble upon it, over the shadows flung down by the clouds which fly from one hill to another, and over the mountains which stretch like sh.o.r.es and walls round our flowery circle,--why does then a voice within thee cry incessantly, 'Ah! behind the smoking[224]

mountains, beyond the clouds that repose upon them, there rests a fairer land, there dwells the soul thou seekest, there heaven lies nearer to the earth'? But behind the mountain and behind the cloud there sighs also an unappreciated heart, that looks over towards this thy horizon, and thinks, 'Ah, in that far region I should doubtless be happier!'

"Are we _not_, then, all happy?----Do not a.s.sert it, nor say to me, Emanuel, that, in the winter of this life, the few warm sunbeams that interrupt it burst and destroy the better man like a vegetable; say not that every year steals away something from our heart, and that, like ice, it grows less and less, the farther it drifts down the stream of Time; only say not that the wandering Psyche, though she hears her second self in her prison, yet can never get into its arms.----But thou hast already somewhere said: 'All loving souls on earth dwell apart from each other in two bodies, as on two hills; a waste lies between them, as between solar systems; they see each other, speak across by distant signs; at last they hear each other's voices from hill to hill; but they never touch each other, and each embraces only its thought.

And yet this poor love crumbles like an old corpse, when it is exhibited; and its flame flickers like a burial-lamp, when it is uncovered.'