Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume II Part 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flamin interrupted him, and his icy face, like a Hecla, was cloven with flames: "So! so!--at Whitsuntide? Thou dost not go with _us_ to Kussewitz!--Let me once for all speak right out, Victor!"--Then they stopped. Flamin stripped the blossoms and leaves from the branch of a wild plum-tree with b.l.o.o.d.y hand, and looked not at his gentle friend, lest he should be softened himself. "A year ago to-day, sayest thou?

Yes, that very evening I went with thee up to the watch-tower, and we promised each other either truth or death. Thou sworest to me to throw thyself headlong with me, whenever thou shouldst have taken all from me, all,--or, say, _her_ love; for in thy presence she hardly looks at me any more.--By the Devil, am I then blind? Do I not see, then, that the machinery of her journey and thine has been all planned out?--What hast thou to do just now with the Maienthal landscapes? To whom does the _hat_ belong?--And what am I to infer from all this?--To whom, whom? say, say!--O G.o.d, if it were true!--Help me, Victor!"--In the eyes of the misused, to-day exhausted Victor stood the bitterest tears, which Flamin, however, who exasperated himself by his own talking, could now bear. Never did the latter in a rage accept remonstrances: nevertheless he expected them, and was astounded at his being in the right, and at the other party's silence, and desired to be contradicted. He crushed in his bleeding hand the sloe-thorns. His eye burned into the weeping one. Victor bewailed his firm oath to his father, and looked on the trembling balance wherein the oath and indulgent friendship hung in equipoise. He collected once more all his love into his breast, and spread his arms wide open, and fain would draw with them the struggling one to himself, and yet could say nothing but "I and thou are innocent; but till my father comes, before that I cannot justify myself."--Flamin repelled him from him: "What is this for?--So it was at the garden-concert, too, and thou hast since that been daily with her, and at Easter-b.a.l.l.s and in sleighs, without me.

Say rather outright, wilt thou marry _her_?--Swear that thou wilt not?--O G.o.d, hesitate not,--swear, swear!--Ay, ay, Matthieu!--Canst thou not yet!--Well, then, lie at least!"

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

32. DOG-POST-DAY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I cannot say, The reader can easily imagine how Victor lived or grieved through the first May-days; for he hardly can imagine it. Perhaps we all held the bands which bound him to Flamin to be a few thin fibres or unsensitive cords of custom; in fact, however, delicate nerves and firm muscles form the lattice-work[74] of their souls. He himself knew not how much he loved him, until he was compelled to cease doing so. Into this common error we all fall, hero, reader, and writer, on the same ground: when one has not been able for a long time to give a friend, whom one has long loved, any proof of that love, for want of opportunity, then one torments one's self with the self-accusation of growing cold towards him. But this accusation is itself the finest proof of love. With Victor yet more things conspired to persuade him that he was becoming a colder friend. The vesper-tilts about Clotilda, those disputations _pro loco_, did, besides, their part; but he was always afflicting himself with the self-criticism that he had sometimes refused his friend little sacrifices; e. g. the neglecting of a pleasure-party on his account, the staying away from certain too distinguished houses which Flamin hated. But in friendship great sacrifices are easier than small ones,--one would often rather sacrifice to it life than an hour, a piece of property than the gratification of some petty bad habit, just as many people would rather present you a bill of exchange than a piece of _blank_ paper of the same size. The secret is, great sacrifices inspiration makes, but little ones, reason. Flamin, who himself never made little ones, demanded them of others with heat, because he took them for great ones.

Victor had less to reproach himself with on this point; but Clotilda shamed him, for her longest and shortest days, as is the case with most of her s.e.x, were nothing but sacrificial days.--Then, too, his natural delicacy, which had now gained by his court-life the addition of the conventional kind, was wounded more deeply than ever by his friend's sharp corners.--The fine people give to their inner man (as to their outer) by bran of almonds and night-gloves soft hands, merely for the sake of feeling better the under side of the cards, and for the sake of giving neat ladylike half-boxes-in-the-ear, but not in order, like the surgeons, to handle wounds with them.

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

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

Victor was sure beforehand of Flamin's placability; he even saw him very often standing at his window, and glancing across toward the balcony, from which a friendly eye, untroubled by all the misconstructions of the point of honor, looked freely and directly toward the Senior's;--this, however, did not take away his tender yearning, but it was increased by the first returning sight of the face, so fair, so lamented, and so loved. Flamin had a tall, manly form; his compact and receding narrow forehead was the eyrie of spirit; his transparent blue eyes--which his sister Clotilda also had, and which harmonize very well with a fiery soul, as, indeed, the old Germans also and the country people have both--were kindled by a thinking intellect; his compressed, and for that very reason the more darkly red, over-full lips, were settled into the kindly elevation for a kiss; only the nose was not refined enough, but was juristically or Germanly built. The nose of great jurists looks sometimes, in my opinion, as wretchedly as the nose of Justice herself when its flexible material is drawn out and twisted and tweaked under too long fingers.

It is not to be explained, by the way, why the faces of great theologians--unless, indeed, they are something else great--have about them somewhat of the typographic magnificence of the Kanstein Bibles.

Victor's face, on the contrary, had, less than any other, either these Bursch-like trivial features of many jurists, or the dead-gold of many theologians; his nose--its edge and the indentation of the nasal bridge deducted--descended in Grecian straightness; the angle of the thin, closed lips was (in case he did not happen to be laughing) an acute angle of 1^{_um_}, and formed with the sharp nose the order-sign and order-cross, which satirical people often wear;--his broad forehead arched itself to a radiant and roomy choir of a spiritual rotunda, wherein a _Socratic_ equally, illuminated soul dwells, though neither this brightness nor that brow consort with _inborn_ wild tenacity, though they do with that which is acquired;--his fancy, that great prize, had, as often happens, no lottery-device on his face;--his eyes, colored like Neapolitan agate, spoke and sought a loving heart; his soft, white face contrasted, like court with war, against Flamin's brown, elastic countenance, which served as the ground for the two glowing cheeks.--For the rest, Flamin's soul was a mirror which flamed under the sun from only a single point; but on Victor's several powers were ground out into flashing facettes. Clotilda had all this tinder-box and these sulphuric mines of temperament in common with her brother; but her reason covered all up. The rushing blood-stream, which with him dashed from rock to rock, glided along with her still and smooth through flowery meadows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victor, so near to his friend, and as during the talking his better soul, like nightingales during concerts, grew louder and louder, would fain, from minute to minute, have fallen upon that n.o.ble face, on those lips rounded for the kiss of reconciliation,--but he started back at the thought of the recent repulse. He saw now how Flamin stepped farther and farther into the bed, and slowly trod down the heart leaves of the cole-rape, and crushed them asunder; at last he observed that this trampling out of the blooming name was merely the dumb language of disconsolateness, which wanted to say: "I hate my tormented self, and I could crush it as I do my name here: for whom should it stand here?"--This s.n.a.t.c.hed blood from Victor's heart and from his eye tears which had been brushed away, and he took gently the long withdrawn hand, to lead him away from the suicide of his name. But Flamin turned his quivering face side-wise toward the waxen shadow of his friend and rigidly crooking his head away stared up at it.--"Best Flamin!" said Victor with the tone of the deepest emotion, and pressed the burning hand. Then Flamin tore it out of his, and with his two fists pressed back the tear-drops into his eyes, and breathed loud,--and said in a choked voice, "Victor!" and turned round with great tears and said in a still more m.u.f.fled tone, "Love me again!"--And they rushed into each other's arms, and Victor answered, "For ever and ever do I love thee, thou hast indeed never offended me"; and Flamin, glowing and dying, stammered, "Only take my beloved, and remain my friend."--For a long time Victor could not speak, and their cheeks and their tears united burned on each other, till at last he was able to say: "O thou! O thou!

thou n.o.ble man! But thou art in error somewhere!--Now will we forsake each other no more, now will we remain so forever.--Ah, how inexpressibly shall we _one day_ love each other, when my father comes!"

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

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

This reconciliation drew after it one with fortune, as it were,--the _Brumaire_-evening became a _Floreal_[81] evening,--the three-twins ate of the remains of Appel's roasted glory,--the Parson had nothing to do any longer with any other keys than the loosing-keys, the spiritual music-keys,--and the birthday feast had bloomed out into a feast of the covenant, an opposition club, where all, but in a higher sense than that of Quakers and merchants, called each other _friend_. The three-twins delivered old-British speeches, which only freemen could understand. Victor wondered at the universal frankness before such a stinging gad-fly as Matthieu,--but the Englishmen cared for nothing.

The Parson sent off heart-felt prayers, and said: "He, for his part, took little notice of what they did, and only begged them to harangue more softly, that he might not get the name of allowing pietistic conventicles in his parsonage; meanwhile he relied entirely upon Messrs. the Court-Physician and the Court-Page, who would certainly insure him against a fine; otherwise he would not let wife and son join in the conversation." The Parson's wife preferred reminiscences of her free native land to the best calumnies and fashions. Victor must needs to-day keep his promise of putting his Republican Orthodoxy beyond question; and as he gave the same in our hearing, we will also help see how he keeps it, and whether he is an old-Briton.

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

"No state is free but that which loves itself; the measure of patriotism is the measure of freedom. What, then, is now this Freedom!

History is the _Place La-Morgue_[82] where every one seeks the dead kinsmen of his heart: ask the mighty dead of Sparta, Athens, and Rome, what freedom is! Their perpetual festival days, their games, their eternal wars, their constant sacrifices of property and life, their contempt of riches, of trade, and of mechanics, cannot make the fiscal prosperity of a country the goal of freedom. But the logical despot must a.s.siduously promote the material well-being of his negro-plantation. The tyranny or the mildness, the injustice or the virtue of an individual, const.i.tute so little the distinction between a servile and a free form of government, that Rome was a slave under the Antonines, and free under Sulla.[83]--Not every Union, but the object of the Union, not the uniting under common laws, but the import of those laws, give the soul the wings of patriotism; for otherwise every Hansa, every trade-league, were a Pythagorean Society and would create Spartans. That for which man gives blood and goods must be something higher than either;--not in defence of his own life and property has the good man so much valor as he has when he contends for another's;--the mother risks nothing for herself and everything for her child;--in short, only for what is n.o.bler than self in himself, for virtue, does man open his veins and offer his spirit; only the Christian martyr names this virtue _Faith_, the Barbarian, _Honor_, the Republican, _Freedom_.

"--Take ten men, shut them up in ten different islands: neither of them (I have not selected cosmopolites) will love or defend either of the others, if he meets him in his canoe, but will merely, like an innocent uncultivated beast, let him pa.s.s unharmed. But throw them together on _one_ island,[84] then they will make mutual conditions of living together, of common defence, &c., i. e. laws; now they have more--frequent enjoyment of use and right, consequently of their personality, which distinguishes them from mere tools, consequently of their freedom. Before, on their ten islands, they have been rather _unrestrained_ than _free_. The more the objects of their laws rise in dignity, the more they see that law concerns the inner man more than the rubbish heap it protects, right more than property, and that the n.o.ble man fights for his goods, his rights, his life, not on account of their importance, but on account of his own dignity.--I will look at the matter on another side, in order to defend the proposition with which I began the discourse. When a people hates its const.i.tution, then the object of its const.i.tution, i. e. of its union, is lost.

Love of the const.i.tution, and love for one's fellow-citizens as fellow-citizens, are one. I start with this principle: If all men were wise and good, then they would be all alike consequently friendly. As that is not so, accordingly Nature makes up for this goodness by similarity of motives, by community of object, by living together, &c., and by these bonds--of connubial, of brotherly and sisterly and of friendly affection--holds our smooth, slippery hearts together at different distances. Thus she educates our heart to the higher warmth.

The State gives it a still greater, for the citizen loves the man even more in the citizen, than the brother loves him in the brother, the father in the son. The love of country is nothing but a restricted cosmopolitan love; and the higher philanthropy is the philosopher's enlarged patriotism for the whole earth. In my younger years the ma.s.s of men was often painful to me, because I felt myself incapable of loving 1000 millions at once; but the heart of man takes more into itself than his head, and the better man must needs despise himself, if his arms should reach only round a single planet...."

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

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