The Campaner Thal, and Other Writings. Jean Paul
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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 passing 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 butterfly, 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 butterflies, 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 assisted 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 noble 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, passes 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 space. 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 noble 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 noble 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, noble, 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 God! when so many houses are mourning ones, so many fields battle-fields, so many cheeks pale, and when we pass 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 hearse 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 assembled 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 God of Hell. I also remembered your true remark, that you had never pronounced the words pain and the past before a woman, without hearing an almost inaudible sigh at