The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Iv Part 11

I often worry about your health. You dress yourself too lightly and are fond of the evening air; those are dangerous habits and are not the only ones which you must break. Remember that a new order of things is beginning for you. Hitherto I have praised your frivolity, because it was opportune and in keeping with the rest of your nature.

I thought it feminine for you to play with Fortune, to flout caution, to destroy whole ma.s.ses of your life and environment. Now, however, there is something that you must always bear in mind, and regard above everything else. You must gradually train yourself--in the allegorical sense, of course.

In this letter everything is all mixed up in a motley confusion, just as praying and eating and rascality and ecstasy are mixed up in life.

Well, good night. Oh, why is it that I cannot at least be with you in my dreams--be really with you and dream in you. For when I merely dream of you, I am always alone. You wonder why you do not dream of me, since you think of me so much. Dearest, do you not also have your long spells of silence about me?

Amalia's letter gave me great pleasure. To be sure, I see from its flattering tone that she does not consider me as an exception to the men who need flattery. I do not like that at all. It would not be fair to ask her to recognize my worth in our way. It is enough that there is one who understands me. In her way she appreciates my worth so beautifully. I wonder if she knows what adoration is? I doubt it, and am sorry for her if she does not. Aren't you?

Today in a French book about two lovers I came across the expression: "They were the universe to each other." It struck me as at once pathetic and comical, how that thoughtless phrase, put there merely as a hyperbolical figure of speech, in our case was so literally true.

Still it is also literally true for a French pa.s.sion of that kind.

They are the universe to each other, because they lose sense for everything else. Not so with us. Everything we once loved we still love all the more ardently. The world's meaning has now dawned upon us. Through me you have learned to know the infinitude of the human mind, and through you I have come to understand marriage and life, and the gloriousness of all things.

Everything is animate for me, speaks to me, and everything is holy.

When people love each other as we do, human nature reverts to its original G.o.dliness. The pleasure of the lover's embrace becomes again--what it is in general--the holiest marvel of Nature. And that which for others is only something to be rightly ashamed of, becomes for us, what in and of itself it is, the pure fire of the n.o.blest potency of life.

There are three things which our child shall certainly have--a great deal of wanton spirit, a serious face, and a certain amount of predisposition for art. Everything else I await with quiet resignation. Son or daughter, as for that I have no special preference. But about the child's bringing-up I have thought a great, great deal. We must carefully avoid, I think, what is called "education;" try harder to avoid it than, say, three sensible fathers try, by anxious thought, to lace up their progeny from the very cradle in the bands of narrow morality.

I have made some plans which I think will please you. In doing so I have carefully considered your ideas. But you must not neglect the Art! For your daughter, if it should be a daughter, would you prefer portrait-or landscape-painting?

You foolish girl, with your external things! You want to know what is going on around me, and where and when and how I live and amuse myself? Just look around you, on the chair beside you, in your arms, close to your heart--that is where I am. Does not a ray of longing strike you, creep up with sweet warmth to your heart, until it reaches your mouth, where it would fain overflow in kisses?

And now you actually boast because you write me such warm letters, while I only write to you often, you pedantic creature. At first I always think of you as you describe it--that I am walking with you, looking at you, listening to you, talking with you. Then again it is sometimes quite different, especially when I wake up at night.

How can you have any doubt about the worthiness and divineness of your letters? The last one sparkles and beams as if it had bright eyes. It is not mere writing--it is music. I believe that if I were to stay away from you a few more months, your style would become absolutely perfect. Meanwhile I think it advisable for us to forget about writing and style, and no longer to postpone the highest and loveliest of studies. I have practically decided to set out in eight days.

II

It is a remarkable thing that man does not stand in great awe of himself. The children are justified, when they peep so curiously and timidly at a company of unknown faces. Each individual atom of everlasting time is capable of comprising a world of joy, and at the same time of opening up a fathomless abyss of pain and suffering. I understand now the old fairy-tale about the man whom the sorcerer allowed to live a great many years in a few moments. For I know by my own experience the terrible omnipotence of the fantasy.

Since the last letter from your sister--it is three days now--I have undergone the sufferings of an entire life, from the bright sunlight of glowing youth to the pale moonlight of sagacious old age. Every little detail she wrote about your sickness, taken with what I had already gleaned from the doctor and had observed myself, confirmed my suspicion that it was far more dangerous than you thought; indeed no longer dangerous, but decided, past hope. Lost in this thought and my strength entirely exhausted on account of the impossibility of hurrying to your side, my state of mind was really very disconsolate.

Now for the first time I understand what it really was, being new-born by the joyful news that you are well again. For you are well again now, as good as entirely well--that I infer from all the reports, with the same confidence with which a few days ago I p.r.o.nounced our death-sentence.

I did not think of it as about to happen in the future, or even in the present. Everything was already past. For a long time you had been wrapt in the bosom of the cold earth; flowers had started to grow on the beloved grave, and my tears had already begun to flow more gently.

Mute and alone I stood, and saw nothing but the features I had loved and the sweet glances of the expressive eyes. The picture remained motionless before me; now and then the pale face smiled and seemed asleep, just as it had looked the last time I saw it. Then of a sudden the different memories all became confused; with unbelievable rapidity the outlines changed, rea.s.sumed their first form, and transformed themselves again and again, until the wild vision vanished. Only your holy eyes remained in the empty s.p.a.ce and hung there motionless, even as the friendly stars shine eternally over our poverty. I gazed fixedly at the black lights, which shone with a well-known smile in the night of my grief. Now a piercing pain from dark suns burned me with an insupportable glare, now a beautiful radiance hovered about as if to entice me. Then I seemed to feel a fresh breath of morning air fan me; I held my head up and cried aloud: "Why should you torment yourself? In a few minutes you can be with her!"

I was already hastening to you, when suddenly a new thought held me back and I said to my spirit: "Unworthy man, you cannot even endure the trifling dissonances of this ordinary life, and yet you regard yourself as ready for and worthy of a higher life? Go away and do and suffer as your calling is, and then present yourself again when your orders have been executed."

Is it not to you also remarkable how everything on this earth moves toward the centre, how orderly everything is, how insignificant and trivial? So it has always seemed to me. And for that reason I suspect--if I am not mistaken, I have already imparted my suspicion to you--that the next life will be larger, and in the good as well as in the bad, stronger, wilder, bolder and more tremendous.

The duty of living had conquered, and I found myself again amid the tumult of human life, and of my and its weak efforts and faulty deeds.

A feeling of horror came over me, as when a person suddenly finds himself alone in the midst of immeasurable mountains of ice.

Everything about me and in me was cold and strange, and even my tears froze.

Wonderful worlds appeared and vanished before me in my uneasy dream. I was sick and suffered great pain, but I loved my sickness and welcomed the suffering. I hated everything earthly and was glad to see it all punished and destroyed. I felt so alone and so strangely. And as a delicate spirit often grows melancholy in the very lap of happiness over its own joy, and at the very acme of its existence becomes conscious of the futility of it all, so did I regard my suffering with mysterious pleasure. I regarded it as the symbol of life in general; I believed that I was seeing and feeling the everlasting discord by means of which all things come into being and exist, and the lovely forms of refined culture seemed dead and trivial to me in comparison with this monstrous world of infinite strength and of unending struggle and warfare, even into the most hidden depths of existence.

On account of this remarkable feeling sickness acquired the character of a peculiar world complete in itself. I felt that its mysterious life was richer and deeper than the vulgar health of the dreaming sleep-walkers all around me. And with the sickliness, which was not at all unpleasant, this feeling also clung to me and completely separated me from other men, just as I was sundered from the earth by the thought that your nature and my love had been too sacred not to take speedy flight from earth and its coa.r.s.e ties. It seemed to me that all was right so, and that your unavoidable death was nothing more than a gentle awakening after a light sleep.

I too thought that I was awake when I saw your picture, which evermore transfigured itself into a cheerful diffused purity. Serious and yet charming, quite you and yet no longer you, the divine form irradiated by a wonderful light! Now it was like the terrible gleam of visible omnipotence, now like a soft ray of golden childhood. With long, still drafts my spirit drank from the cool spring of pure pa.s.sion and became secretly intoxicated with it. And in this blissful drunkenness I felt a spiritual worthiness of a peculiar kind, because every earthly sentiment was entirely strange to me, and the feeling never left me that I was consecrated to death.

The years pa.s.sed slowly by, and deeds and works advanced laboriously to their goal, one after the other--a goal that seemed as little mine as the deeds and works seemed to be what they are called. To me they were merely holy symbols, and everything brought me back to my one Beloved, who was the mediatrix between my dismembered ego and the one eternal and indivisible humanity; all existence was an uninterrupted divine service of solitary love.

Finally I became conscious that it was now nearly over. The brow was no longer smooth and the locks were becoming gray. My career was ended, but not completed. The best strength of life was gone, and still Art and Virtue stood ever unattainable before me. I should have despaired, had I not perceived and idolized both in you, gracious Madonna, and you and your gentle G.o.dliness in myself.

Then you appeared to me, beckoning with the summons of Death. An earnest longing for you and for freedom seized me; I yearned for my dear old fatherland, and was about to shake off the dust of travel, when I was suddenly called back to life by the promise and rea.s.surance of your recovery.

Then I became conscious that I had been dreaming; I shuddered at all the significant suggestions and similarities, and stood anxiously by the boundless deep of this inward truth.

Do you know what has become most obvious to me as a result of it all? First, that I idolize you, and that it is a good thing that I do so. We two are one, and only in that way does a human being become one and a complete ent.i.ty, that is, by regarding and poetically conceiving himself as the centre of everything and the spirit of the world. But why poetically conceive, since we find the germ of everything in ourselves, and yet remain forever only a fragment of ourselves?

And then I now know that death can also be felt as beautiful and sweet. I understand how the free creature can quietly long in the bloom of all its strength for dissolution and freedom, and can joyfully entertain the thought of return as a morning sun of hope.

A REFLECTION

It has often struck my mind how extraordinary it is that sensible and dignified people can keep on, with such great seriousness and such never-tiring industry, forever playing the little game in perpetual rotation--a game which is of no use whatever and has no definite object, although it is perhaps the earliest of all games. Then my spirit inquired what Nature, who everywhere thinks so profoundly and employs her cunning in such a large way, and who, instead of talking wittily, behaves wittily, may think of those nave intimations which refined speakers designate only by their namelessness.

And this namelessness itself has an equivocal significance. The more modest and modern one is, the more fashionable does it become to put an immodest interpretation upon it. For the old G.o.ds, on the contrary, all life had a certain cla.s.sic dignity whereby even the immodest heroic art is rendered lifelike. The ma.s.s of such works and the great inventive power displayed in them settles the question of rank and n.o.bility in the realm of mythology.

This number and this power are all right, but they are not the highest. Where does the longed-for ideal lie concealed? Or does the aspiring heart evermore find in the highest of all plastic arts only new manners and never a perfected style?

Thinking has a peculiarity of its own in that, next to itself, it loves to think about something which it can think about forever. For that reason the life of the cultured and thinking man is a constant study and meditation on the beautiful riddle of his destiny. He is always defining it in a new way, for just that is his entire destiny, to be defined and to define. Only in the search itself does the human mind discover the secret that it seeks.

But what, then, is it that defines or is defined? Among men it is the nameless. And what is the nameless among women?--The Indefinite.

The Indefinite is more mysterious, but the Definite has greater magic power. The charming confusion of the Indefinite is more romantic, but the n.o.ble refinement of the Definite has more of genius. The beauty of the Indefinite is perishable, like the life of the flowers and the everlasting youth of mortal feelings; the energy of the Definite is transitory, like a genuine storm and genuine inspiration.

Who can measure and compare two things which have endless worth, when both are held together in the real Definiteness, which is intended to fill all gaps and to act as mediator between the male and female individual and infinite humanity?

The Definite and the Indefinite and the entire abundance of their definite and indefinite relations--that is the one and all, the most wonderful and yet the simplest, the simplest and yet the highest. The universe itself is only a toy of the Definite and the Indefinite; and the real definition of the definable is an allegorical miniature of the life and activity of ever-flowing creation.

With everlasting immutable symmetry both strive in different ways to get near to the Infinite and to escape from it. With light but sure advances the Indefinite expands its native wish from the beautiful centre of Finiteness into the boundless. Complete Definiteness, on the other hand, throws itself with a bold leap out of the blissful dream of the infinite will into the limits of the finite deed, and by self-refinement ever increases in magnanimous self-restraint and beautiful self-sufficiency.

In this symmetry is also revealed the incredible humor with which consistent Nature accomplishes her most universal and her most simple ant.i.thesis. Even in the most delicate and most artistic organization these comical points of the great All reveal themselves, like a miniature, with roguish significance, and give to all individuality, which exists only by them and by the seriousness of their play, its final rounding and perfection.

Through this individuality and that allegory the bright ideal of witty sensuality blooms forth from the striving after the Unconditioned.

Now everything is clear! Hence the omnipresence of the nameless, unknown divinity. Nature herself wills the everlasting succession of constantly repeated efforts; and she wills, too, that every individual shall be complete, unique and new in himself--a true image of the supreme, indivisible Individuality. Sinking deeper into this Individuality, my Reflection took such an individual turn that it presently began to cease and to forget itself.

"What point have all these allusions, which with senseless sense on the outward boundaries of sensuality, or rather in the middle of it, I will not say play, but contend with, each other?"