The Campaner Thal and Other Writings Part 3

"Will we not now descend from the milky-way," said Karlson, "for we cannot ascend it. It is precisely this uniformity of the universe which forbids the rambling of emigrants from the earth. Every planet already has its own crew; more dense ones, as for instance Mercury, may be peopled with real sailors."

"Precisely as Kant supposes!" said Phylax.

"Finer, less solid ones, as e. g. Ura.n.u.s, only with the most tender beings, perhaps only with women and nuns who love not the sun. He who intends to rectify the so-called soul or spirit by distilling it from one planet to the other, may with as much justice a.s.sert, that the spirits of the slacked Mercury receive their dephlegmation in a distilling process through our earth,--in short, that the earth is the second world for Mercury and Venus. The dead of the arctic zones could even pa.s.s into the temperate ones (it would be _distillatio per latus_), for on all planets there can be no other than coa.r.s.er or finer _human beings_[23] like ourselves."

Karlson waited for an answer and a contradiction, but I said his opinion was also mine. "I have still a stronger reason," I continued, "against emigration to, and voyage picturesque through, the planets, because we carry and lock up a heaven of starry light in our own b.r.e.a.s.t.s, for which no dirty earth-ball is clean or large enough. But on this subject I must have permission to speak uninterruptedly, at least until we have pa.s.sed all these cornfields."

Our pleasure-trip now was an alley of magic gardens, our pa.s.sage through a golden sea of corn-blades, was accompanied and surrounded on all sides by a promised land, in which solitary houses reposed beneath picturesquely grouped leaf groves, as in Italy sleepers take their siestas on shaded meads. I was permitted to speak.

"There is an inner, heart-contained spirit-world, which breaks through the dark clouds of the body-world as a warm sun. I mean the inner universe of _virtue_, _beauty_, and _truth_; three soul-worlds and heavens, which are neither parts, nor shoots, nor cuttings, nor copies of the outer one. We are less astonished at the inexplicable existence of these three transcendent heavens, because they are ever floating before us, and because we foolishly imagine we _create_ them, while we merely _recognize_ them. After which copy, with what plastic material, and of what, could we create and insert in ourselves[24] this same spirit-world? Let the atheist ask himself how he conceived the giant ideal of a G.o.d, which he either denies or embodies? An idea which has not been built upon comparative greatness and degrees, for it is the contrary of every measure and of every created greatness. In short, the atheist denies the great _original_ of the _copy_.[25]

"As there are idealists of the outer world who believe that perception makes objects, instead of that objects cause perception, so there are idealists of the inner world, who deduct the _being_ from the _seeming_, the _sound_ from the _echo_, the _fact_ from its _appearance_; instead of, on the contrary, the seeming from the being, our consciousness from the objects of it. We mistake our power of a.n.a.lyzing our inner world, for its preformation, i. e. the genealogist thinks himself both originator and founder.

"This inner universe, which is still more glorious and admirable than the outer one, needs another heaven than the one above us, and a higher world than one a sun now shines upon. Therefore we rightly say, not a second earth or globe, but a second _world_,--another beyond the universe."

Gione already interrupted me: "And every virtuous and wise being is in himself a proof of immortality." "And every one," added Nadine, quickly, "who suffers innocently."

"Yes, it is that," said I, with emotion, "which extends our line of life through countless ages. The chord of _Virtue_, _Truth_, and _Beauty_, taken from the music of the spheres, calls us from this dark oppressive earth, and announces to us the nearness of a more melodious existence. _Why_, and _from whence_ were these _super-earthly_ wants and longings created in us, if only, like swallowed diamonds, slowly to cut through our earthy sh.e.l.l. Why was a being endowed with wings of light chained to this dirty clump of earth, if it were to rot in its birth-clod, without ever being freed from it by means of its ethereal wings?"

Wilhelmi said, "I also like to dream the dream of a second life in the sleep of this first one. But may not our beautiful spiritual powers have been given to us for the _enjoyment_ and _preservation_ of the present life?"

"For its preservation?" I said. "Then an angel has been locked in the body to be the mute servant and fire-lighter, butler, cook, and porter of the stomach? Would not brutish souls have sufficed to drive man-bodies to the fruit-tree and the spring? Shall the pure ethereal flame only dry and bake the bodily patent stove with life-warmth, while it now slakes and dissolves it? For every tree of knowledge is the poison-tree of the body, and every mental refinement a slow-poison chalice. But, on the contrary, want is the iron key of freedom, the stomach is the manure-filled hot-house or manufactory of human blood, and the various animal instincts are but the earthy, soiled steps to the Grecian temple of our spiritual elevation.

"For _enjoyment_ you said also. That means, we received the palate and appet.i.te of a G.o.d, with the food for an animal. That portion of us which is of earth, and creeps on worm-folds, may and can, like the earthworm, be fed and fattened on earth. Exertion, bodily pain, the burning hunger of necessity, and the tumult of our senses exclude and choke the spiritual autumn bloom of humanity in nations and cla.s.ses.

All these conditions of terrestrial existence must be fulfilled ere the soul may claim its due. To the unhappy, therefore, who must be the business men and carriers of their bodily wants, the whole inner world seems but as an imaginary gilt cobweb, like the man who, breathing only the electrical _atmosphere_, instead of feeling the spark, thinks to grasp an invisible web. But when our necessary _animal servitude_ is over, when the barking inner dog-kennel is fed, and the dog-fight finished, then the inner man demands his nectar and ambrosia, and if he is turned off with earth-food only, he changes to an angel of Death, and a h.e.l.lfiend, driving himself to suicide, or makes of him a poison-mixer who destroys all joy.[26] The eternal hunger _in_ man, the insatiability of his heart, wants not a _richer_, but a _different_ food, fruit, not gra.s.s. If our wants referred but to the degree, not to the quality, then the imagination, at least, might paint a _degree of satiety_. But imagination cannot make us happy, by showing us innumerable heaps of treasures, if they be other than _Virtue_, _Truth_, and _Beauty_."

"But the more beautiful soul?" asked Nadine. I answered, "This discrepancy between our wishes and our circ.u.mstances, the heart and the earth, will remain, an _enigma_, if we are immortal, and would be a blasphemy if we decay. Ah! how could the beautiful soul be happy?

Strangers, born on mountains and living in lowland places, pine in an incurable homesickness. We belong to a higher place, and therefore an eternal longing consumes us, and every music is our soul's Swiss _ranz des vaches_. In the morning of life, the joys which hearken to the anxious wishes of our hearts are seen blooming for us in later years.

When we have attained these years, we turn on the deceitful spot, and see behind us, pleasure blooming in the strong hopeful youth, and we enjoy instead of our _hopes_, the _recollections of our hopes_. Joy in this also resembles the rainbow, which in the morning shines over evening, and in the evening arches over the east. The _eye_ may reach the _light_, but the arm is short, and holds but the fruit of the soil."

"And this proves?" asked the Chaplain.

"Not that we are unhappy, but that we are immortal, and that the second world in us demands, and proves a second world beyond us. O, how much might not be said of this second life whose commencement is so clearly shown in the first one, and which so strangely doubles us! Why is Virtue too exalted to make us, and, what is more, others (sensually) happy? Why does the incapability of being useful on earth (as the expression is) increase with a certain higher purity of character, as, according to Herschel, there are suns which have no earth? Why is our heart tortured, dried, consumed, and at last broken by a slow burning fever of ceaseless love for an unattainable object, only alleviated by the hope that this _consumption_, like a physical one, must one day be sheltered and raised by the _ice cover_ of death?"

"No," said Gione, with more emotion in her eye than in her voice, "it is not ice, but lightning. When our heart lies a sacrifice on the altar, fire from heaven consumes it as a proof that the offering is accepted."

I know not why her calm voice so painfully disturbed my whole soul (not only my argument). Even Nadine's eyes, which triumphed over her own sorrows, were suffused with tears by her sister's, and, although she is generally more timid and fastidious than Gione, in pa.s.sing a little garden, she raised from a projecting hairy potato-stalk, a large moth, and showed it to us with a firm mouth, which should have been softened by a smile.

It was the so-called Death's-head. I stroked the flat, drooping wings, and said, "It come? from Egypt, the land of mummies and graves; it bears a _memento mori_ on its back, and a _miserere_ in its plaintive voice." "In the mean time it is a b.u.t.terfly, and visits the nectaries, which we day-birds will do also," appropriately observed Wilhelmi; but he took the words out of my mouth.

Gione's countenance again expressed thoughtful calmness, and to me she became immeasurably beautiful and grand by the stillness of her grief.

You once said that the female soul, though it be pierced with burning shafts, must never beat its wings convulsively together, else, like other b.u.t.terflies, it would destroy their beauty. How true is this!

Nadine's eyes seldom shone without at last overflowing, and every sorrowful emotion remained long in her heart, because she tried to guard against it. She resembled those springs which take a temperature opposed to the time of day, and which are warmest in the cool evening.

She turned to me and said, putting her hand in her left pocket, "I will show you some poetry which will prove your prose." While she was seeking it, she stood still with her companion Wilhelmi. He guessed before I did, that she intended to give me something from the Souvenir, and when, in its stead, she took the milliped's prison from her pocket, he obligingly said, "If not with my hands yet with my eyes I a.s.sisted at the theft, and as accomplice I beg for mercy." The serious apology for this foolishness scarcely suited our earnest tone of mind. I said, "I wished to cause a more useless, than pardonable joke, but I--" She did not allow me to conclude, but mildly and unchanged (except by a reproving and a forgiving smile) she showed me in the aromatic book the n.o.ble Karlson's requiem on the death of the exalted Gione. I willingly give you the prosaic echo of it, from my prosaic memory.

GRIEF WITHOUT HOPE.

What cloud is that, which like the clouds of the tropics, pa.s.ses from morn to eve, and then sets? It is humanity. Is that the magnet-mountain covered with the nails of wrecked ships? No, it is the great Earth, strewed with the bones of fallen men.

Ah! why did I love? I had not then lost so much!

Nadine, give me thy grief, for it contains hope. Thou standest by thy crushed sister, who dissolves even beneath the winding-sheet, and lookest upwards to the trembling stars, and thinkest: Above, O dearest one, thou dost reside, and on the suns we find again our hearts, and the small tears of life will be over.

But mine remain, and burn in the dim eye. My cypress alley is not open, and discloses no heaven. Human blood paints the fluid figure called man on the monument, as oil on marble forms forests; Death wipes away the man, and leaves the stone. O Gione! I would have some consolation, if thou wert but far away from us all, on a clouded forest, in a cave of the Earth, or on the most distant world in s.p.a.ce. But thou art gone, thy soul is dead, not only thy life and thy body.

See, Nadine, on the judgment-seat of Time lies the crushed angel, with the death color of the spirit-world. Gione has lost all her virtues, her love, her patience, her strength, her all-embracing heart, and her rich mind: the thunderbolt of Death has destroyed the diamond, and now the wax statue of the body slowly melts beneath the soil.

Serpent of Eternity, quickly take away the beautiful form, as the larger serpent first poisons and then devours man. But I, Gione, stand beside your ruins with unalleviated pain, with undestroyed soul; and grieving, think of you until I also dissolve. And my grief is n.o.ble and deep, for I have no hope! May thy invisible shadow-picture, like the new moon with the sun,[27] arise to heaven in my soul! And may the creative wheel of Time, which raises innumerable hearts, and fills them with blood, only to pour them again into the grave, and let them die, pour out my life slowly, for long time would I mourn for thee, thou lost one!

I cannot tell you, dearest Victor, how horrible and fearful the eternal snow of annihilating death seemed to me, placed beside the n.o.ble form it should have covered; how frightful the thought: if Karlson is right, the last day has torn this never happy, innocent soul from the prisons upon the earth to the closer ones beneath it: man too often carries his errors as his truths only as word arguments, not as feelings. But let the disbeliever of immortality imagine a life of sixty minutes instead of sixty years, and let him try if he can bear to see loved, n.o.ble, or wise men only aimless, hour-long air-phantoms, hollow thin shadows which fly towards the light and are consumed by it, and who, without path, trace, or aim, after a short flight, dissolve into their former night. No; even over him steals a supposition of immortality. Else a black cloud would forever hang over his soul, and the earth would quake beneath him when he trod on it, as if he were a Cain.

I continued, but all arguments were poetized into feelings. "Yes, if all forests of this earth were pleasure grottoes, all valleys Campan, all islands holy, all fields Elysian, and all eyes sparkling, yes, then--no, even then the Eternal One would have given to our souls the promise of a future life, even in the blessedness of the present one.

But now, O G.o.d! when so many houses are mourning ones, so many fields battle-fields, so many cheeks pale, and when we pa.s.s so many sunken, red, torn, closed eyes,--O, can death be but the last destroying whirlwind? And when at last, after thousand, thousand years, our earth is dried up by the sun's heat, and every living sound on its surface silenced, will an immortal spirit look down on the silent globe, and, gazing on the empty hea.r.s.e moving slowly on, say: 'There the churchyard of humanity flies into the crater of the sun; on that burning heap many shadows, and dreamers, and wax-figures, have wept and bled, but now they are all melted and consumed: Fly into the sun, which will also dissolve thee, thou silent desert with thy swallowed tears, with thy dried-up blood!' No, the crushed worm dares raise himself to his Creator, and say: 'Thou canst not have made me only to suffer.'"

"And who gives the worm the right to this demand?" asked Karlson.

Gione answered, gently, "The Eternal One himself, who gives us charity and who speaks in all our souls to calm us, and who alone has created in us our demands to Him and our hope in Him."

This good sweet word could still not calm all the waves of my excited soul. From a distant house, turtle-doves sent after us trembling, soul-felt plaints. About my tear-filled inward eye a.s.sembled all those forms whose hearts were without guilt and without joy,[28] who attained no single wish here below, and who, sinking under the frost and snow-storm of fate, only longed, like persons freezing to death, to sleep; and all those forms who have loved too deeply, and lost too much, and whose wounds were never cured until death had widened them, like a cracked bell which retains its hollow sound until the crevice is made larger, and the beings nearest me, and many other female ones, whose exquisitely tender souls fate most consecrates to torture, as Narcissus is consecrated to the G.o.d of h.e.l.l. I also remembered your true remark, that you had never p.r.o.nounced the words _pain_ and _the past_ before a woman, without hearing an almost inaudible sigh at the union of the two words, from the suffering heart; for woman on the narrower stage of her plans, with idealized wishes and desires built on others' worth, rather than on her own, has a thousand times more disappointments to suffer than we men.

The sun sank deeper behind the mountains, and giant shadows, like mighty birds of prey, came coldly down upon us from the eternal snow. I took Karlson's hand in mine, and looked with tearful eyes into his manly, beautiful countenance, and said, "O Karlson! on what a blooming, grand world you throw an immeasurable gravestone, which no time can lift! Are two difficulties,[29] based too on the _necessary ignorance_ of man, sufficient to overthrow a belief, which explains thousand greater difficulties, without which our existence is without aim, our sufferings without explanation, and the holy Trinity in our breast three furies, and three terrible contradictions? A tending G.o.d's hand, leading and feeding the inner man (the child of the outer one), teaching him to go and to speak, educating, refining him, is shown in all things, from the shapeless earthworm to the brilliant human face, from the chaotic nations of the primitive ages to the present century, from the first faint pulsation of the invisible heart to its full, bold, throbbing pulse in manhood,--and why? That when man stands upright and exalted, a beautiful demi-G.o.d, even amid the ruins of his old body temple, the club of Death may annihilate the demi-G.o.d forever?

And on the eternal sea, on which the least drop throws immeasurable rings, on this sea a life-long rising and a life-long falling of the soul should have the same termination, namely, the end of all things,--annihilation?[30] And as, from the same cause, the souls of all other worlds must fall and die with ours, and of this shroud and c.r.a.pe-veiled immeasurability nothing remain but the ever-sowing and never-reaping solitary world-spirit, who sees one eternity mourn for another, there can be no aim and no object in the whole spiritual universum, for the purpose of the development of succeeding or successive ephemera is no progress for the vanished ephemera, scarcely even for the last one which can never exist.[31] And you take for granted all these enigmas and contradictions by which all the strings of creation, not only its harmony, are torn, because two difficulties present themselves to you, which _cannot any better_ explain mortality ... Dearest Karlson, you would bring your eternally jarring discord into this harmony of the spheres! See how calmly the day goes, how grandly the night sets in; did you not think that our spirit will rise one day from its grave of ashes, when you saw the mild pale moon rise grandly from the crater of Vesuvius?" ... The sun stood on the mountains, about to plunge into the sea and swim to the new world.

Nadine embraced her sister with emotion, and said, "O, we love each other forever and immortally, dearest sister." Karlson accidentally touched the chords of the lyre which he carried: Gione took it from him with one hand, gave him the other, and said, "You are the only one among us who is tormented by this melancholy belief,--and you deserve to have one so beautiful!"

This word of concealed love overpowered his long-filled heart, and two burning drops fell from the blinded eyes, and the sun gilded the holy tears, and he said, looking towards the mountains: "I can bear no annihilation but my own,--my whole heart is of your opinion, and my head must slowly follow."

I will not again mention a man whom I have blamed so often.

We now stood before a mansion, the windows of which were silvered, and, when it was darker, gilt by girandoles. Aloft over its Italian balcony hung two balloons, one at its eastern, the other at its western extremity. Without those beautiful globes, the counterpart, as it were, of the two glorious ones in heaven, the sun and the moon, I should have scarcely paid heed to the scene on earth, in the splendor of the one on high.

Dearest friend, how beautiful was the place and the time. Around us, in their majesty, reposed the Pyrenees, half robed in night and half in day, not stooping, like man, beneath the load of years, but erect--forever; and I felt why the great ancients had thought the mountains were a breed of giants. On the mountain heads hung wreaths of roses cloud-woven; but each time that a star appeared upon the clear, deep sea of ether and sparkled on its azure waves, a rose from the mountain's chaplet faded and dropped away. The Mittaghorn, alone, like a higher spirit, gazed long after the sinking lonely sun, and glowed with ecstasy. Down beneath us an amphitheatre of lemon-trees, by its perfumes, brought us back to the veiled earth, and made a dusky paradise of it. And Gione, in calm rapture, struck the chords of her guitar, and softly did Nadine's voice accompany the gliding tones. The nightingale in the rose-hedges by the lake awoke, and the plaintive tones from its tiny heart pierced deep into the great heart of man; and shining glowworms flew from rose-bush to rose-bush, but in the mirror of the lake they were but as golden sparks, floating over pale yellow flowers. But when we looked again towards the heavens, lo! all its stars were gleaming, and in place of rose-woven wreaths, the mountains were clad in extinguished rainbows, and the giant of the Pyrenees was crowned with stars instead of roses. O my beloved Victor! in this moment it was with each of our enraptured souls as if from its oppressed heart earth's load had dropped away; as if from her mother's arms, the earth were giving us, matured in the Father arms of the infinite Creator; as if our little life were over! To ourselves, we seemed the immortal, the exalted. We fancied that our speech of man's immortality had been the prophecy of our own, as with two great and n.o.ble men.[32] But though we entered the brilliant rooms, the storm of new joys could not destroy the old ones. We were not yet able to be without the great night around us, and we ascended the platform, that from this little throne we might better contemplate the higher throne of creation beneath the eternal canopy; although kneeling would have been a higher ascension for the moved soul.

There were night-violets in a gla.s.s box, which traced Gione's name in blooming colors. I remembered the glowworms and millipeds. I let the former fly down upon the rose-bushes in confused star-pictures; with the latter I fired Gione's beautiful flower namesake.

Gione looked longingly towards the eastern Mongolfiere. Wilhelmi understood her. Her soul was as bold as it was calm, she had already visited many of the magic caves of earth, and had ascended to the summits of the highest Alps; she wished now to rise in the air, and to float in the heavens above this beautiful country, and on this beauteous night; but the enjoyment of the prospect was not her only motive. Wilhelmi asked who should be her companion. Solitude was her chief desire. The breadth and depth of the boat under the globe, a chair in it, and the cords by which she would be raised and lowered, secured the trip from all danger.

Like a celestial being she rose beneath the stars,--the night and the height threw a mist over her rising form. A slight zephyr rocked the blooming Aurora, and crowned the moving G.o.ddess with alternate constellations. Now her countenance appeared surrounded by pale supernatural rays. It seemed bright as an angel rising towards its kindred stars through the rich dark blue s.p.a.ce. An unusual tremor seized on Wilhelmi and Karlson; it was as if they saw their beloved one again carried from them on the wings of the angel of Death.

When she returned to us her eyes were red with weeping; she had ascended, that she might in an unseen moment, shed her old heavy tears near the stars. O the Celestial one! She smiled strangely in the slumber of this life at higher joys than earthly ones, as sleeping children smile when they see Angels.

It was now impossible to repress my longing for the stars, and my pet.i.tion to be allowed to ascend. Permission to use the western Mongolfiere was willingly bestowed. Nadine, emboldened by the safe return of her sister, and by the companion in the danger, skipped into the boat, with her usual impulsive warmth, to refresh her thirsting soul with the majestic immeasurability of night.

And now the suns raised us. The heavy earth sank down as the past; wings such as man has in happy dreams bore us upwards.

The mighty vacancy and silence of s.p.a.ce lay stretched before us even up into the stars;--as we rose higher, the dark forests seemed but clouds, and snow-girt mountaintops like snow-flakes. The ascending globe bore us nearer to the harmless, silent lightning of the moon, in whose bright satellite we seemed cradled, and which stood as a calm Elysium beneath the heavens, and high above the thick fog air, the light heart beating more quickly, seemed to pant with ethereal gladness to have left the earth with out discarding its sh.e.l.l covering. Our ascent was suddenly arrested--we looked down into the valley, half concealed by distance and the darkness of the night. Only the lights from the mansion were visible to us,--a western cloud hung like a white fog before us, and a black eagle flew like an angel of death from the east through the cloud pillar, seeking its summit, and a cool breeze playfully drew us towards the mist-island. The evening red had already pa.s.sed the earth at midnight, and wandered over charming France as its future Aurora. O, how the soul was raised towards the stars, and how lightly did our hearts beat above the earth!