The Campaner Thal and Other Writings Part 1

The Campaner Thal and Other Writings.

by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter.

INTRODUCTION.

In my distilling processes, I frequently precipitated the phlegma of our earthball--its polar deserts, its Russian forests, its icebergs--and from the sediments extracted a beautiful by-earth, a small satellite. If we extract and regulate the charms of this old world, we can form a delightful though minutely condensed world.

For the caves of this miniature or ditto-earth, we will take the caves of Antiparos and of Baumann, for its plains, the Rhine provinces--Hybla, Thabor, and Mont Blanc shall be its mountains--its islands, the Friendly, the Holy, and the Palm isles. Wentworth's park and Daphne's grotto, and some corner-pieces from the Paphian, we have for its forests--for a charming valley, the Seifer's-dorfer and that of Campan. Thus we possess, besides this dirty, weary world, the most beautiful by or after-world--an important dessert service--an Ante-Heaven between Ante-h.e.l.ls.

I have purposely included this valley of Campan in my extract and decoction, as I know none other in which I would rather awake, or die, or love than in this one; if I had to command, I would not permit my valley to be mixed up or placed beside the vale of Tempe or the Rose Valley, perhaps with Utopia. The reader must have known this valley in his geographical lessons, or in the works of Arthur Young, who praises it even more than I do.[1]

I must take for granted, that in July, 1796, the G.o.ddess of Fortune descended from her throne to our earth, and placed in my hand--not mammon, nor garters, nor golden sheep--nothing but her own, and led me--by this I recognized the G.o.ddess--to the Campan vale. Truly, man needs but look into it, and he will have--as I had--more than the Devil _offered_ to Christ and Louis XIV., and _gave_ to the popes.

The test of enjoyment is memory. Only the paradises of the imagination willingly remain, and are never lost, but always conquered. Poetry alone reconciles the past to the future, and is the Orpheus's lyre which commands these two destroying rocks to rest.[2]

As stated, in the year 1796, I made a trip through France, with my friend H. Karlson. He is honorary master of horse in the * * * service.

The wise public cares little for true names, it always treats them as fict.i.tious ones, by way of literary taxation; and the existing characters, at least those of any importance, may prefer not to be torn over the wheel of criticism, and dragged piecemeal through libraries and reading-clubs. At almost every milestone, I despatched the best hourly bulletin to my friend Victor: when I had sent him the following valley-piece, he persecuted me until I promised to grant this illuminated portrait of nature, not alone to the letter, but also to the printing-press. Therefore I do it. I know already, my poor Victor sees, that in our days no green branch is left as a spinning-hut for the man-caterpillar, and that inimical divers try to cut our anchor-rope, sunk in the sea of death. Therefore he thinks more of the conversations on immortality, than of the valley in which they took place. I know this, because he calls me the counterpart of Claude Lorraine, who only drew the landscape, while another drew the human beings in it. Truly such a valley deserves that the mining and sabbath-lamp of truth should be lowered into the suffocating air of the grave, in place of our _self_, merely to see if that _self_ can breathe at such a depth.

I have jokingly divided my letters into stations. I of course omit 500, and commence at the 501st, wherein I appear in the valley.

CAMPANER THAL.

501st STATION.

The Diversities of Life.--The Dirge as Billet-Doux.--The Cavern.--The Surprise.

_Campan, 23d July_.

Here have I been since the day before yesterday. After descent into h.e.l.l and purgatory, and pa.s.sage through _limbos infantum et patrum_, man must at last reach heaven. But I owe you yet our exit from our inn on the 20th. Never can the head have a harder couch than when we hold it in our hands. The reason that this happened to Karlson and myself was, that in the rooms adjoining ours a wedding-dance was taking place, and that below, the youngest daughter of our _maitre d'hotel_, who had not only the name, but also the charms of _Corday_, with two white roses on her cheeks, and two red ones in her hair, was being interred, and that human beings with pale faces and heavy hearts waited on happy and blooming ones. When fate harnesses to Psyche's car, the merry and the mourning steed together, the mourning one ever takes the lead; i. e. if the muses of Mirth and Sorrow play on the same stage in the same hour, man does not, like Garrick,[3] follow the former; he does not even remain neuter, but takes the side of the mourning one. Thus we always paint, like Milton, our lost Paradise more glowing than the regained one,--like Dante, h.e.l.l better than purgatory. In short, the silent corpse made us cold to the warm, joyful influence of the dancers. But is it not absurd, my dear Victor, that a man who, like myself, knows nothing better than that every hour unfolds at once morning bloom and evening clouds; that here an Ash Wednesday and there a black Monday commence; that such a man, who grieves little that dancing music and funeral marches should sound at the same time on the broad national theatre of humanity, should yet hang his head and grow pale, when, in a side scene, this double music sounds in his ears? Is not this as absurd as all his other doings?

Into Karlson's eyes something of this cloud had fallen. It was to him the restirred ashes of a funeral urn. He can withstand all sorrows, but not their recollection. He has replaced his years by lands, and the s.p.a.ce he has travelled over must be called his time. But the firm youth changed color when he came to tell that the lover of the pale Corday had torn her folded taper hands asunder, and, on his knees, had dragged them to his burning lips.

He perceived his paleness in the gla.s.s; and to explain it, he imparted the last and most secret leaf of his life's Robinsonade to me. You see what an opaque gem this youth is, who follows his friends through all France, without opening to his communicative friend and travelling companion, even a fold or a loophole in his relation to them. Now only from emotion on entering the Campan Vale, he draws the key from the keyhole, which shall become a prompter's hole for you.

That he had accompanied the Baron Wilhelmi and his betrothed Gione, with her sister Nadine, to Lausanne, in order to celebrate their Arcadian marriage in the Campan Vale, you know already; that he had left them suddenly at Lausanne, and returned to the Rhine fall at Shaffhausen, you know also, but not the reason, which will now be related to you by me and by him.

By daily contact Karlson had at last penetrated the thickly-woven veil, magically colored by betrothed love, thrown over the strong, firm, and kindred mind of Gione. Probably others discovered him ere he had discovered himself. His heart became like the so-called world's eye[4]

in water, first bright, then varying its colors, then dull and misty, and at last transparent. Not to cloud their beautiful intimacy, he addressed the suspicious part of his attentions to Nadine. He did not explain to me clearly whether he had led her into a beautiful error, without taking a beautiful truth from Gione.

The sword of death seemed likely to separate all these stage knots.

Gione, the healthy and calm Gione, was suddenly attacked by a nervous disorder. One evening, Wilhelmi, with his usual poetic ardor, entered Karlson's chamber weeping, and, embracing him, could only sob forth the words, "She is no more."

Karlson said not a word, but in the tumult of his own and others'

griefs, departed that night for Shaffhausen, and probably fled at the same time from a beloved and a loving one,--from Gione and from Nadine.

By this eternal waterspout of the Rhine, this onward pressing, molten avalanche, this gleaming perpendicular milky-way, his soul was slowly healed; but he was long imprisoned in the dark, cold, serpent's-nest of envenomed pains; they entwined and crawled over him, even to his heart. For he believed, as most world-men among whom he had grown up do,--perhaps, also, too much accustomed to a.n.a.lyzed ideas and opinions by his favorite study, chemistry,--that our last sleep is annihilation, as in the epopee the first man imagined the first sleep to be the first death.

To Wilhelmi he only sent the name of his retreat and a poem, ent.i.tled, "Grief-without Hope," which declared his disbelief, for he had never broken the Ambrosia, whose delights a trust in immortality affords. But just that strengthened his enfeebled heart, that the muses led him to Hippocrene's spring of health.

Wilhelmi answered, that he had read his beautiful requiem to the deceased, or the immortal one. A long swoon had occasioned the painful mistake. Gione and he entreated him to follow speedily. Karlson replied: "Fate had separated him from their beautiful feast by the Alpine Wall, but as it would, like the Campan Vale, ever renew its springs, he hoped to lose nothing but time by his delay."

Now that the next world had cast its supernatural light on Gione's countenance, Karlson loved her too much to be capable of a.s.sisting at the ceremony of losing her forever. I will give you the opinion I formed of her by listening to his description.

Even by a love and a praise in a person's absence we may be won; how much more, then, if both are thrown to us as farewell kisses after the ascent to Heaven! Therefore the idea of the future funeral procession behind my gay, richly decorated dust, onion and relic box is only another incentive, not only to drug, but also to absolve myself, for when older we are less missed. And even you, who so seldom hang us, or drive us all to the Devil, I mean, how seldom soever the tempest of anger sours the beer-barrel of your breast! Even you have no more efficacious morsel of white chalk, no better _oleum tartari per deliquium_,[5] with which you can sweeten your internal fluids, than the thought how we shall all turn pale round your death-bed, and be dumb at your grave-mound, and how none will forget you! I cannot possibly believe that there exists one being who, when death draws him into the diving-bell of the grave, will not leave _one_ weeping eye, _one_ bending head behind, and therefore each one can love the soul which will some time weep for him.

When I think now of the convalescent Gione, with her wounded heart, which had received a new sensitiveness in the hot electric atmosphere of the sinking thunderbolt of Death, I need not measure her emotion at Karlson's poem, by the dew and hygrometer, nor with the loadstone of her love. But not Wilhelmi's brilliant riches, nor his still more brilliant conduct, her first choice, her first promise, forbade her even to touch the diamond scales.

When Karlson told me all this, he turned Gione's ring-portrait upwards on his finger, and pressed the hard edge of the ring-finger with his tearful eyes, till the adorned hand was unconsciously touched by the lip's kiss. The bashfulness of his grief moved me so much, that I offered to take another route into the Vale, under the pretence that the dreams of it had lessened the desire for the reality, and that we should disturb the newly-affianced in their first rose-honey days, as they had probably waited for the mild late spring. He divined my intention; but his promise to come to-morrow dragged him by chains.

Right gladly would I have missed the new spring-filled Eden, and drawn from my friend's feet the Jacob's ladder from which he might gaze on his former glad heaven, but could not ascend to it. On the other hand, I rejoiced at his firm, promise-keeping character, which opposed its strong nature to the thorns and boring-worms of sorrow; as with the increase of moonlight, tempests decrease. Unperceived, I now added Gione, not only Karlson, to the list of rare beings, who, like Raphael's and Plato's works, uncloud themselves only on earnest contemplation, and who, as both, resemble the Pleiades, which to the naked eye seems only to have seven suns, but with a telescope discloses more than forty.

On the 20th, we started towards the Vale. On the way, I looked too often into Karlson's faithful, heavenly, deep-blue eyes. I descended into his heart, and sought the scene of the day on which the holy church tie would tear the n.o.ble Gione forever from out his pure muse and G.o.ddess-warmed heart. I confess I can imagine no day on which I regard my friend with deeper emotion that on that never-to-be-forgotten one, on which Fate gives him the brother kiss, the hand-pressure, the land of love and Philadelphia and Vaucluse's spring, united in one female heart.

The day before yesterday, at ten in the evening, we arrived at Wilhelmi's Arcadian dwelling, which pressed its straw roof against a green marble wall. Karlson found it easily from its proximity to the famed Campan Cave, from which he had often broken stalact.i.tes. The sky was clouded with colored shadows, and on the green cradle of slumbering children night threw her star-embroidered cradle-cover, fastened to the summits of the Pyrenees. From out Wilhelmi's hermitage advanced some men in _black_ attire, with torches in their hands, who seemed to be waiting for us, and told us the baron was in the Cave. By heaven, under such circ.u.mstances, it is easier to imagine the most circ.u.mscribed, than the _largest_ and most _beautiful_ Cave! The sable attendants carried the flame before them, and drew the flying smoke-picture from oak-top to oak-top, and led us, stooping, through the catacomb entrance. But how splendidly was arched the high and wide grotto,[6]

with its crystal sides, shining like an illumined ice Louvre, a gleaming sub-terrestrial heaven vault. Wilhelmi threw away a handful of gathered spars, and joyfully hastened into his friend's arms. Gione, with her sister, advanced from behind a connected stalact.i.te and stalagmite. The gleaming of the torches gave her an undecided outline, but at length Wilhelmi advanced to her, and said, "Here is our friend."

Bending low, Karlson kissed the warm living hand, and was dumb with emotion. But the firm features of Gione's earnest face, which wanted but Nadine's juvenile bloom, changed into a shining joy, greater than he dared to return or reward. "We have long expected and missed you in this paradise," she said, with unshaken voice; and her clear, calm eye opened a view into a richly-gifted, steadfast soul. "Welcome to the infernal regions," said Nadine; "you believe in reunion and Elysium now?" Though she received him with an a.s.semblage or Flora of wit, or was it grace? for they were difficult to distinguish, this cheerfulness of character and acquirement seemed not to be the cheerfulness of a contented or reposeful mind.

My friend introduced me properly, that no supermember or _hors d'[oe]uvre_ should remain in this corporation of friendship.

To all of us--even to me--for around me never before seen beings floated in silver reflections--it seemed as if the world had ceased, Elysium had opened, and the separated, covered, sub-terrestrial regions cradled only tranquil, but happy souls.

There was a certain heartfulness in the joyous interest which this affectionate trinity took in Karlson's appearance, which generally accompanies the last step before the disclosure of some hidden plan, but this plan was concealed. To speak something also to me, Nadine said, that there was a critical philosopher and arguer with them, who would rejoice to hear any one _for_ or _against_ his opinions,--namely, the house-chaplain. When we stepped from the illumined diamond and magic cave into the dark night, we saw the cloak of Erebus hang in thick cloudy folds over the earth, and pale lightning shot from the nightly mist, the flowers breathed from covered calysses, and under the fast approaching storm the nightingales raised their melodious voices behind their blooming hedges.

Suddenly Gione walked more slowly by Karlson's side, and said, with much warmth, but without hesitation: "I heartily love truth, even at the expense of stage-like effect: I must, in the name of the Baron, discover to you that he and I will to-morrow be forever united. You must forgive _your_ friend that he would not celebrate this ceremony without _his_."

I think that now, in Karlson's heart, the cooled lava immediately became fluid and glowing. Suddenly lightning flashed from a cloud around the rising moon, and illumined the rain-drops, intended for darkness, in Gione's and in Karlson's eyes. Wilhelmi asked, "Can you not forgive me?" Karlson pressed him warmly and lovingly to his grateful heart: this lofty confidence of friendship, and this affectionate proof of it, raised his strengthened soul above all desires, and another's virtue spread in his breast the calm tranquillity of his own. We took shelter for the night in three Thabor huts,--the ladies in the first, Wilhelmi with the critical philosopher in the second, Karlson and myself in the third,--which the Baron had hired for us. The fatigue of the journey, and even of our feelings, deferred our joys and confidences for another night. But I cannot tell you how n.o.bly sorrow changed into exaltation in my friend's countenance, how grief fell like a cloud from his heaven, and discovered the serene blue beneath. The sacrifices and virtues of our beloved ones belong to the inexpressible joys which the soul at least can count and appreciate; which it can imitate.

His and my eyes overflowed with holy gladness from a singularly elysian mood of harmony in antic.i.p.ation of the coming day. Ah, my Victor!

nations and men are only the _best_ when they are the gladdest, and deserve Heaven when they enjoy it. The tear of grief is but a diamond of the second water, but the tear of joy of the first. And therefore fatherly fate, thou spreadest the flowers of joy, as nurses do lilies in the nursery of life, that the awakening children may sleep the sounder! O, let philosophy, which grudges our _pleasures_, and blots them out from the plans of Providence, say by what right did torturing _pain_ enter into our frail life? Have we not already an eternal right to a warm down bed? I think not now of the deepest mattress in the earth, because we are so pierced with stigmas of the past, so covered with its wounds.

You once said to me: "In your early years, you have been drawn and driven from the stoic philosophy by Sorites; for if the sensation of pleasure be as little as the stoics pretend, it were wiser to convert than to benefit your neighbor,--wiser to preach morality from pulpit and desk than to practise it in the work-rooms,--wiser to turn towards your neighbor the dirt-b.a.l.l.s and _soap-pills_ of moral philosophy, than the enlarged marble _soap-bubbles_ of joy. Further, that it is a mistake to a.s.sert that virtue makes more worthy of happiness, if happiness possessed not an eternal, independent value in itself; for else it might be maintained that virtue would make the possessor of a straw, &c. worthy--"

You said this once. Do you believe it yet?--I do.

502d STATION.

The Thundering Morning.--The Short Trip after the Long One.--The Sofa-cushions.

Through the whole night, a half-lost thundering was heard, as though it murmured in its sleep. In the morning, before sunrise, Karlson and myself stepped out into the wide cloud-tapestried bridal-chamber of nature. The moon approached the double moment of its waning and its fulness. The sun, standing on America as on a burning altar, drove the cloudy incense of its _feu de joie_ high and red into the air; but a morning tempest boiled angrily above it, and darted its fierce lightnings to meet his ascending rays. The oppressive heat of nature drew longer and louder plaints from the nightingales, and evanescent aroma from the long flower-meads. Heavy warm drops were pressed from the clouds, and beat loudly on the stream and on the foliage. Only the Mittagshorn, the pinnacle of the Pyrenees, stood brightly and clearly in the heavenly blue. Now a gust of wind from the waning moon dispersed the raging storm, and the sun stood victoriously under a triumphal arch of lightnings. The wind restored the heaven's blue, and dashed the rain behind the earth, and around the dazzling sun-diamond there lay only the silvered fringes of the once threatening clouds.