Villa Eden Part 168

Eric looked at his mother; he did not know what answer to give, and the Mother said:--

"According to the ordinary conception of the word 'looking,' we cannot conceive its being done without eyes. We have no conception how a spirit exists, but there is not a day nor an hour that I do not live in communion with my departed husband; he has come with me here, he will remain with me wherever I go, till my last breath. But let me see--what is it, Eric?"

"It has an odd t.i.tle," answered the latter; "it treats of these things, which I cannot explain, and which perhaps no one can explain."

"Read, I beg of you," entreated Manna.

Eric began to read:--

"Two things there are which stand firm, while the heart of man is kept vacillating between defiance and despondency, haughtiness and faint-heartedness; they are _nature_ and the _ideal within us_. The church is also a strong-hold of the ideal, firm and secure; although for me and many like me, it is not the only one.

"You say, nature does not help us. What help is she to me, when the crushing conviction of imperfection, of perdition, of guilt comes upon me and takes me captive? Well, nature does not speak; she simply permits herself to be explained, understood; she gives back the echo of what we call out to her. The church, on the contrary, speaks to us in our individual griefs, she takes us up into the universal; that is the great lesson of the expiatory suffering. We lay our grief aside when we think of the great grief which the greatest of hearts took unto itself.

"And what is the third? you ask.

"A third is, nature and the ideal combined, which together elevate and sustain us.

"What is the third? We call it art, we can also call it love, heroism.

In this view of mine, all philosophy also belongs to art. What the genius of a man has created and fashioned out of himself as the evidence of his existence, insight, and will, appears in art as visible forms, looks down upon us in marble and in color, makes itself heard by us in word and in melody, allows us to be conscious and to feel sure that our fractional, half-expressed being has fullness and completion.

"These are the images, these are the deeds of genius, wrought in consecrated moments.

"Art does not console sorrow, it does not heal directly, but it brings before the eyes, it sounds in the ear, saying, 'Attend! there is a life, pure and perfect, that we carry within us. Art is an image of strength, of joy, of content, of courage; it does not reach out its hand to us, it simply enables us to compose ourselves in the knowledge, in the consciousness, in the perception of an existence reposing in itself outside of us; this we comprehend.'"

Eric interrupted himself, saying:--

"Here the remark is made: 'I knew a woman once, who would neither make nor listen to music during her period of mourning, showing what art was to her.'"

A pause followed.

Eric continued his reading:--

"In the hours of deepest tribulation I have found consolation, peace, restoration, solely in wandering among ancient works of art; others may derive the same benefit from music that I have from viewing these forms of antiquity. It was not the thought of the grand world which had here become bronze and marble; it was not the remembrance of the soul speaking out of these forms that held me fast, but something far different from either. Behold here, they seemed to say to me, a blissful repose, which has nothing in common with thee, and yet is with thee. A breath of the Eternal was wafted over me, a peaceful rest flowed into my troubled heart, filled my gaze, and calmed my emotions.

In listening to music I could always dwell dreamily upon my own life and thought, but never here.

"If I were only able to unfold whither this led me, how I wandered in the infinite, and then how I went abroad into the tumultuous whirl of life, feeling that I was attended by these steadfast, peaceful, G.o.dlike forms; that I was----"

Eric broke off abruptly.

Manna begged:--

"Do read on."

"There is nothing further. My beloved father, alas! left only fragments behind him."

"This is no fragment, it is complete and perfect. No man could say or write anything further," said Manna; "nothing else is needed but to allow it to have its inward work. Ah, I have one request--give me the sheet."

Eric looked towards his mother, who said that she had never yet parted with a single line of her husband's.

"But you, my child," she said, "you shall have it. Eric shall copy it for us so that we may not lose it."

She gave the ma.n.u.script to Manna, who pressed it to her heaving breast.

"Oh, I never imagined," she cried, "that there was such a world in the world."

Every drop of blood seemed to have retreated from her face; she begged the Mother to be allowed to go into the house; she would like to be alone, she was so weary.

The Mother accompanied her. Manna reclined upon the sofa, and the curtains were drawn; she fell asleep with the ma.n.u.script in her hand.

The Mother and Eric sat together, and Eric determined to make use of this first opportunity, when there was no immediate duty binding him, to publish the incomplete and fragmentary writings left by his father, as there would be found many to make them into a whole within their own souls.

He now felt all at once free and full of life; now there was something for him to do; and he could fulfil at the same time a pious, filial duty, and his duty as a man. He could make essential additions from his own knowledge, and from his father's verbal statements.

He went back to the library, and was deeply engaged in the writings, when Manna entered.

"You here?" she said. "I wanted to take one look at the outside of all the books on which your father's eye has rested. I must now go home, but I have to day received a great deal more than I can tell."

"May I accompany you?"

Manna a.s.sented.

They went together across the meadow to the Villa.

CHAPTER XV.

EVERYTHING IN FLAMES.

With lingering step they walked by each other's side, Manna often looking aside to survey the landscape, and yet conscious all the time that Eric was observing her. And then Eric would turn away, still feeling that her eye rested upon him.

"You are happy in possessing the thoughts of such a father," said Manna, feelingly.

Eric could make no reply, for the feeling oppressed him, how the poor rich child would be overwhelmed, if she knew what he did concerning her own father; he had no conception that Manna's words were wrung out by this very tribulation.

"I cannot become the heir of my father's thoughts," he said, after an interval. "Each child must live out his own life."

They continued to walk side by side, and it seemed to them, at every step, that they must stop and hold each other in a loving embrace.

"Roland and my father are now on their way home," said Manna.

"And Herr von Pranken also," Eric was about to add, but refrained from doing it.

Manna perhaps felt that he might think strangely of her omitting to mention Pranken's name, and she asked:--

"Were not you and Baron von Pranken formerly intimate friends?"