FIRST FRUIT PIECE.

FIRST FRUIT PIECE.LETTER OF DR. VICTOR TO CATO THE ELDER, ON THE CONVERSION OFIINTOTHOU,HE,SHE,YE, ANDTHEY; OR, THE FEAST OF KINDNESS OF THE 20TH MARCH.Flachsenfingen, 1st April, 1795.My dear Cato the Elder,A breaker of his word like you—who made such a solemn promise to come to my feast, and yet did not come—will have to be punished by having his mouth—not stitched up (which is what savages do to word-breakers,) for that would be a loss only to your hearers—butmade to water. When I shall have painted a full and faithful picture of our peace-festival of the soul for you, I shall stop both my ears against the curses which you will pour out on your evil genius. At this feast we all philosophised, and we were all converted, except me, who could not be reckoned a convert, inasmuch as I was myself the converter of the heathen.Our flotilla of three boats—(the third we were obliged to take in deference to the timidity of the ladies)—got under way about one o’clock in the afternoon of the 20th of March, ran into the stream, gained the open water, and soon after one we were well in sight of the very anther-filaments and spider’s-webs on the island. At a quarter-past two we landed—the professor, his wife, and a girl and boy—Melchior—Jean Paul—the Government Counsellor,—Flamin—the lovely Luna—(off goes the first of your curses here!)—the undersigned, and his wife.Some Burgundy was then disembarked. At the commencement of spring (which was to take place that day at 38 minutes past 3 o’clock) we meant to enter upon a “stream of life,” coloured and sweetened after a most superlative sort. With the island, Cato, many of us were quite enraptured, and nearly all of us wished we had paid a visit to this beautiful bowling-green in the Rhine—thin pleasure camp amid the waves—long before. Luna, elder Cato—if I mistake not thou hast seen, certainly once at the very least, that tender soul, which ought to dwell in (and heighten the tint of) a white rose in place of a body—Luna shed tears, half of delight (for they were half of sorrow foreverybodywho was not there), half of delight not so much at the families of alders upon the rounded bank, or the Lombardy poplars lying trembling in intoxication of bliss in the gentle air which breathed about them, or the sunny green paths, as atall thistogether (in the first place), and at the spring sky and the Rhine (which was showing that sky a picture, as it were, of its antipodean sky somewhere over America), and at the peace and gladness of her soul—but (above all) at the Alp in the centre of the island.The Alp will be sketched, if an opportunity offers, in this letter. I at once asked Luna whereyouwere. She said, “At the Frankfort Fair.” Was she right?When a party arrives at a place it is not, like theAnguis Fragilis, to be broken into ten twitching fragments by every touch of chance. Even the ladies kept with us, for I had deprived them of all opportunity of doing anything in the shape of household labour, by the arrangements I had made for the dinner. This Barataria Island was going to be an intellectualPlace d’Armesand theatre of war that day. I love disputation. Intellectual bickerings further and heighten the happiness of congenial society, just as lovers’ quarrels are a renewal of love, and fisticuffs a necessity of Marionette operas. Certain people are like the Moravians, among whom the confessor and penitent change places, each laying a picture of his soul before the other, his own police-notice of an absconded criminal—his own advertisement in the “Hue and Cry”; and I am like them. Any blemish or shortcoming which I discover in myself or other people I immediately publish over half the town in a universal German gazette, as ladies do the witnesses’ depositions of evidence concerning strangers. For the last three weeks, dear Cato, my soul has been glowing in the brightest sunlight of peace and love, cast upon me by the deceased chiefPiqueur(a man who had not a trace of either the one or the other about him)—and now I cannot rest till I entail this precious legacy upon all of you.AsLieutenant de Policeof the island, I possessed the power of issuing police regulations with respect to the conversation permissible thereon, and I directed the thread ofourtalk towards thePiqueurin question. But the wasps came buzzing out of their nests; the first of them being your brother, Melchior, who drove his sting into thePiqueur’savarice, saying that people who didn’t bestow their plunder upon the poor till they were in their own coffins, were like pikes who eject their (swallowed) prey when caught themselves; they should rather do as Judas Iscariot did—cast their pieces of silver into the churchbeforetheir hanging. The next wasp was your second brother, Jean Paul, who said, “Misers are the only people who haven’t had enough of life when they die. Even when they are in the very grip of Death’s hand, they would fain grasp hold of money with their own. Like cap-mushrooms, when they are broken off, they cling terribly to the earth’s surface with, their bleeding moiety.”“Ah!” said I, “everyoneis a thorough miser as regards something or other, I am sorry to say. I cannot now be so hard upon a man who confines himself to mortifying and chasteninghimselfas I used to be. Where is the extraordinary difference between one of your learned antiquary mint-assayers who distils, evaporates, and injects all the pleasures of his life into the rust of a collection of coins—and a miser who counts and weighs the specimens inhiscabinet like so many votes at an election? Not, in reality, so great a difference as there is betweenour opinionsof the two.” I thought I had a fine chance of turning deftly to the subject of thePiqueurat this point, but the entire company called out to me to tell them what o’clock it was. In my capacity of Viceroy, I had disarmed all the islanders of their watches at the landing-place (as if they had been so many swords), that they might pass their day in a blissful eternity, where time was not. The only one allowed to keep his was Paul—and this was because it was one of the new Geneva sort, whose hands always point to 12 o’clock, only telling the real time when one touches a spring.It was now past three. In thirty-eight minutes, spring, that pre-heaven upon earth—thatsecondparadise—would make her grand processional progress over the ruins of thefirst. Already the clouds were all cleared away from the sky, spring breezes played coolingly about the sun, burning in the blue; on a vine-clad hill by the Rhine shore, a solo-singer from the great choir of spring—a nightingale—sent on in advance of her—was pouring out her song in a smooth-grown thicket of pruned cherry-trees; through the open trellis-work of the boughs we could see the notes vibrate in the feathers of her throat.We climbed up the artificial Mount St. Gothard. It was set round with turf-banks and leafy niches; an oak stood on its summit by way of crown. Man (day-fly, as he is, playing above a ripple of time) cannot do without watches and date-indicators on the banks of the time-stream. Although every day is a birthday and a new year’s day, he must have one of his own into the bargain. Thirty-eight minutes struck in us. And down from the waves of throbbing blue above us came floating a broad breath of breeze, rocking the swelling grapes and the bare grafts, the delicate young branchlets, and the strong, sharp-pointed winter-corn, and lifting the soaring pigeons higher in their flight. The sun, above Switzerland, looked, in blissful intoxication, at his own face reflected in the sublime glittering ice-mirror of Mont Blanc, parting (unaware) day and night into equal halves, as if with two arms of fate, and throwing down equal portions to every land and every eye. We sang Goethe’s “Hymn to the Spring.” The sun sent us down (like dew) from the hill-top to the valley—the earth swelling loose fell rustling at our feet; and wine (Lethe of life) hid from our sight the misty bunks within which it rolled its way—mirroring only heaven and flowers. Clotilda said (not to us, but to her Luna)—(and here, dear Cato, I am drank with remembering; and I beg, accordingly, to invite you, at once, for the 10th of April), “Ah! dearest, how beautiful the world is sometimes. We ought not to think so poorly of it. Are we not like Orestes in the ‘Iphigenia’—fancying we are in exile, though we really are in our own native land.”With every downward step from the hill we sank back into the workaday marsh-meadow of life. “What the better are we,” cried Melchior, quite angrily, “for all this splendour in and around us, when to-morrow a single passionate earthquake may hurl down an avalanche of snow-masses upon all that is warm and blooming in us? it is the April of the human heart—not the April of the universe—that causes me such vexation. We are always at our hardest just after anattendrissement—and moved to tears just after some murderous rage—as earthquakes set warm springs flowing. Now I know quite well that, to-morrow, at the sitting of the council, I shall attack and oppose everybody and everything. Pitiable! pitiable! And you are not a whit better, Flamin.”“Not a whit,” said Flamin, with touching candour. Luna and my wife took the Professor’s wife between them (each taking one of her children in her lap), and sat down upon the green nether slope of the hill, on the sunny side of the nightingale. We, however, were too restless to sit down. “Alas!” (said Jean Paul, walking up and down, with his hands folded and hanging, and his hat thrown away, so that hiseyes, at all events, might be higher and freer). “Alas! isanyone a whit better? We take a vow of universal love to our fellow men whenever we are deeply touched—when we have buried some one, or have been thoroughly happy, or have committed some grand transgression, or looked long and closely at Nature, or are intoxicated with love, or some earthly form of intoxication: but we are really only perjurers, not philanthropists, as we fancy ourselves. We long and thirst for the love of others—but it is like mercury, it feels and looks like fountain water, and flows and glitters like it—but itiscold, dry, and heavy in reality. It is just those very people upon whom Nature has bestowed most gifts (and who, consequently, should not covet other people’s, but be content with distributing their own), who, like princes, demand the more from their fellow men the more theyhaveto give them, and the less theydogive them. Dissensions are the more bitterly painful, the more alike the souls are between whom they take place, just as discords are harsher the nearer they approach the unison. We forgive without reason because we have found fault without reason, for a rightful and righteous anger must, of necessity, be everlasting. Nothing is a stronger evidence of the miserable subordination of our reason to our ruling passion than the fact that we place such a flat every-day matter astimeamong the cures for hate, grief, love, &c.; our impulses are toforgetto conquer, or to growtiredof doing so—our wounds are to be sanded over with the Margrave’s sympathetic powder of drift-sand out of Time’s sand-glass! Too miserable a business altogether! But can anything make a better of it? Certainly, least of all my complaints of it!”“The fact is,” said the serene, gentle, Professor (who only uses averyfew pedantic tints in his style of painting), “feelingsof love to our fellow men[70]are useless withoutreasons.” “So are reasons without feelings,” said Paul.“Consequently,” continued the Professor (for I couldnotmanage to get myPiqueurbrought to bear anyhow, but had to keep him idly in reserve), “the two have to be combined likegeniusandcriticism—of which the former can produce only master-pieces and scholar-pieces, the latter only something of an everyday sort between the two. What I think is, that our lack of love arises, not from our coldness, but from a conviction that others do not deserve it. The coldest of men would acquire a greater warmth of feeling for their fellows if they acquired a higher opinion of them.”“But,” asked Clotilda, “must we not forgive even thewrongdone by our enemies? Therightis not matter for forgiveness.”“Of course it is not,” he answered, but would let himself be no further diverted from his point. “The only ugliness and hatefulness which we can truly experience hatred for is that of amoralsort.”“In opposition to that view of the question,” said Jean Paul, “I might adduce the fierce combats of animals, and nurseries in a state of war; for in neither of these cases is there any idea ofimmoralityof the enemy, althoughhatredof him exists. But were I to adduce these cases, I could answer myself—at least, so so. If we directed our hatred against things other than the immoral, we should be just as angry with the hanging branch which strikes us in the face as with the person who broke it so that it should be so placed as to do so. The rage of a chastised child is quite a different thing from the alarmed instinct of self-conservancy—the feeling of avoidance of nitric acid, or of bodily hurt. The former has in it a duplex sense of dislike, the two components of which are most dissimilar—the one referring to the cause, the other to the effect. We must distinguish between beings which are capable of morality, and such as are not, inkind—not indegree; thoseincapableof morality can never be made capable of it by the mere lapse of time, or step by step. Whence, if children at any period of their age wereutterlynon-moral beings, it would follow that they could never, atanyperiod,begintobecomemoral beings. In brief, their anger is nothing other than a dim sense of other people’s injustice. As to the animals, I don’t know what else to say than that theremustbe in them something analogous to our moral sense. Those who (like us) believe them to have immortal souls, must, as a matter of course, concede themsomebeginnings some pre-existent germs of morality—although these may be overpowered and kept in the background by their animal natures even to a greater extent than (for instance) conscience is in sleep, drunkenness, or insanity. But alas! all this is night within night! And I hope this obscurity will be considered some excuse, Professor, for the manner in which I have obstructed and built outyourlight.”“Now,” he went on, “since hatred only concerns itself withmoraldefects, how strange it is that we never hateourselves, even for the gravest moral defects.”“Ithink,” said Flamin, “that onedoessometimes feel thedeadliesthatred of one’s self, for over-haste.”“And then,” said Jean Paul, “your argument would apply just as well to love—at least it would half apply. Come, let’s hear what you’ve got to say to that?”“We neverhateourselves,” I said. “Wedespiseandpityourselves, when we have done wrong. Although—Imustadd this—we hate all men, our ownselves excepted, for vices. Can this be right?” “Self-hatred,” went on the Professor, “is not possible, for hatred is nothing but the wishing of evil to the object of it—i. e., a desire to punish, not forbettering’ssake, but forpunishing’s. But the most repentant of sinners never can wish himself made the subject of a chastening of this kind; and even if he could, such a wish would be merely adisguiseddesire forbettering—i. e., for greater happiness. But to a transgressor other than ourselves we hardly can concederapidityof conversion, not, at all events, until he has gone through a proper expiation. What distinguishes our feeling concerning other people’s errors from our feeling concerning our own is a sham self-love. The very minutest particle of hatred desires the unhappiness of its object; that is what I have got to prove now.”His own wife here interrupted him with the words, “My heart tells me, as plainly as possible, that I could never wish any serious misfortune to happen to my bitterest enemy—such as money troubles, or anything about her children. I could not bear even the idea of a tear being brought to her eyes on my account.”“No, I suppose not,” he went on. “The better nature within us never wishes its antipode a broken leg, would not leave him without a strip of lint, or a wish for his recovery. But I know that that same ‘better nature’ does take a delight in his minor skin-wounds—his being put to confusion, his sleigh slipping down hill backwards, his losing his hair. The gentlest of souls hides, at the back of its tender sympathy with great troubles, itsuntendersatisfaction with small ones, such as call for condolence (a smaller thing than sympathy). The tenderest of people, people incapable of indicting the smallest wound imaginable on their enemy’sskin, are delighted to make a thousand deep ones in hisheart.” “Ah!” said Luna, “how can that be possible?” “I don’t think itwouldbe possible,” Clotilda answered her, “if the pain of the soul had as definite a physiognomy, and as real tears, as that of the body.”“Exactly,” said the Professor; “that is just where it is. To make ourselves feel more gently towards the wicked we have only to think of them as delivered wholly over into our hands. For what harm would one do them then? The moment theyacknowledgedtheir fault we would stay the rack, and bid the torture cease. What redoubles our indignation, and renders it everlasting, is the very impossibility of inflicting any punishment.”“Yes, that is quite true,” said Melchior. “The oftener I read of these two live guillotines of their age, Alba and Philip (whose lips were shears of the Parcæ), or of those two other mowers of mankind, Marat and Robespierre, the deeper does the aquafortis of anger etch their condemnation into my heart, although death has drawn up their Acts of Amnesty.”“And yet, after all,” I put in (leaving the Piqueur in the rear for the present), “if anybody would deliver over the King and the Duke to you and me here this afternoon, and a couple of caldrons of boiling oil into the bargain,Ifeel quite certain I couldn’t throw one of them in—at any rate till the oil had stood a long time in the cold. I should let them off with a good flogging—say 100 lashes, or so. Ah! what a cast-iron sort of fellow were he who should not soothe, and comfort with cooling, healing touch (had he the power) a heart breaking with anguish, a face whereon the worm of suffering was ploughing its tortuous track! At the same time (I continued, rapidly; for I was determined to bring in my Piqueur somehow or other), where emotion is concerned, the memory of past errors is not the smallest safeguard against new ones.”“You see, you won’t allow me to speak,” the Professor broke in. “I still owe you a tremendous number of proofs, and I am most anxious to acquit the debt. Ourhatred, being an emotion, always turns everyactioninto awhole life; everyattributeinto apersonality(or, to speak more accurately, because our only mode ofseeingany personality is by its reflection in the mirror of its attributes) convertsoneattribute into the sum of them. It is only in the case of liking—of friendship—that we find it easy to separate the attribute from the personality. Hatred can not do it. Nay, in the case of liking, theconversetransformation takes place—that of the personality into the attribute. We hate as if the object of our hatred had never possessed any virtues, or inclination to them—neither pity nor truthfulness, love of the young, one single good hour, anything whatever. In brief, since it is with theindividualityof the person whose punishment we are decreeing that we are angry (not with its characteristic of the moment), we make him out to be awhollywicked being. Yet such a being is not conceivable. The voice of conscience speaking in that being would be of itselfonegoodness in him, even though it spoke in vain; the pain of that conscience would be another; each joy and each impulse of his life another.”“Ah! how delightful,” said Luna, “that there is nobody so utterly bad; nobody whom one would have to hate altogether.”“You see,” he continued, “it cannot be themeof a person that we hate; for themeis still the samemewhen it improves, and wins our regard.”In the warmth of our discussion we were losing sight altogether of one of the two concave mirrors which distort other people’s moral distortions for us even more wildly than they are distorted to begin with—I mean, our own egotism. Often, when I have seen and heard women squabbling in the market-place (women of whom one was just as good as the other, and with just as good an opinion of herself), and one hurling her invectives with delight, like a red-hot stone, at the other’s head, which seethed and swelled in waves of anger around that stone, while a third woman kept calm and cool in the midway-path between, I have been ashamed of the human race—ashamed that the self-same reproach, or immorality, whichoughtto produce exactly the same effect upon all the three, should maketoostrong an impression on the one, too weak a one on the other, none whatever on the third.Paul pointed to thesecondof these distorting mirrors—our bodily senses. For these render the vinegar of hatred doubly bitter by throwing into its fermenting-vat these parts of the enemy whichtheytake cognizance of—his clothes, movements, gestures, tones, &c.Here we reached the Gordian knot which only I could cut with the Piqueur. “Who is to save us from these bodily senses?” I inquired (with a certain amount of hopeful expectancy). Melchior answered, “I do not allow them to influence my philanthropy, at all events. They are the straw which feeds the flame under that ascending windbag balloon, the heart.”Jean Paul thrust me back from the Gordian knot. “I,” he said, “have an admirable sweetener at all times in readiness to apply when a sinner embitters my senses. I take him, and (like a victorious enemy) strip all the clothes off him, not leaving him so much as his hat or his wig. When once I’ve got him standing there before me, cold and wretched as any corpse (I mean, of course, in imagination), I begin to feel sorry for the scoundrel. But this is not enough. I have got to sweeten myself a good deal more than this; so I proceed to slit him up with a long, slicing cut from top to bottom into three cavities (as if he were a carp), so that I can see his heart and brain pulsating. The mere sight of a red human heart (Danaid’s bucket for happiness—safe storehouse of so many a sorrow) makes my own soft and heavy; and I have often not forgiven a street robber till the Professor has been shewing us his heart and brain in the anatomical theatre. ‘Thou unhappy, sorrowful heart,’ I have always found myself thinking, with deep, sympathetic emotion, ‘how many a blood-billow has gone surging through thee, glowing and freezing in the same moment.’ But if all this process failed to have its effect, I should proceed to extremities, and smite my enemy dead; then take the naked, fluttering, trembling soul—like an evening moth—out of its brain-chamber chrysalis, and, holding up the quivering night-creature between my forefinger and thumb, gaze at it without a trace of rancour left in me.”“To picture one’s enemy to one’s self as unclothed, or disembodied,” said I, “so as to be able to put up with him, as though he were dead (perhaps that is the chief reason why we love the dead), is just the operationIperform too. I often try to soften the unpleasant effect which some repulsive physiognomy produces upon me by thinking of it as scalped, and with its skin folded back.”And now I determined, seriously and in earnest, that the sceptre and throne insignia of the conversation, should no more depart from my hands. Wherefore I commenced as follows: “But who is to provide us with the time and the power, not only to remember, but to act upon, this precious and reliable principle, or rule of conduct, right in the thick of this world’s Pyrrhic war-dance, and the rapid evolutions of our emotions? Who is to stoke the æther-flame of philanthropy with a sufficient supply of combustible matter, seeing that there are such hosts of people continually drowning it out, smothering it up, and building it in! Who is to make up to us for the lack of a gentle, quiet temperament? Who, or what?”Just as I was going to fix the Piqueur on to this lance-shaft by way of point, the cold dinner was brought, and the Professor’s wife went to fetch her children. For the dinner had to be over before sunset; because, like a fresh supply of green firewood, it would drown out the flame of enthusiasm for a time, and break the unity of its vertical, purple fire pyramid. The company, therefore, waited in vain for me to go on with what I had to say. I shook my head, expressing, by nods, that I should do so when we were all together again, and sitting down.While we were at dinner I was able to set up my speaking machine, and set it a-going at my ease.“I asked you once or twice before dinner,” I commenced, “whocan invigorate and quicken our principles of love to our fellows, and set them fully to work? I answer, the chief Piqueur can; only I’m afraid I’ve made so many false starts, and baulked in so many of my runs before making this grand jump of mine, that I have led you to entertain far greater expectations concerning it than it (or I) may be able to fulfil. A day or two before the stump-end of the chief Piqueur’s life-candle fell down and went guttering out in its candlestick-socket, he sent for me to the side of his bed of suffering and begged me—not to prescribe for him, but—to make a thorough inspection of his house. He drew my head down close to his wretched pillow, and said, ‘You see, doctor, Death has got his hunting-knife at my throat. But I’m not sorry to go, and what little I leave behind me in the shape of worldly gear goes all to the poor. It’s but little that I have ever thought of scraping together formyself, and that is a comfort to think on now. It’s for thepoorthat I have screwed and saved, pinched and pared; and when a man has done that it’s a pleasure to him to make his will; he knows it will be paid back againelsewhere. But there’s one hard stone at my heart still. You see I have neither chick nor child belonging to me, and when the breath is out of my body, the old woman who keeps my room in order will be in the house by herself. She’s an honest body enough, but as poor as a church mouse, and pretty sure to help herself to something before the seals are put on my effects. Now, doctor, you are a man who are just as good to the poor as I am myself; you often prescribe for them gratis; I want to askyouto go through the house with the notary (I don’t trusthima bit more than I do the old woman), take an inventory of what there is, and have a regular notarial instrument drawn up concerning my property. I’ve left the whole of it to the Poor-house and the Institution for Destitute Gamekeepers. The notary must begin with my breeches under the pillow here, because my purse is there.’“A man whose stubble Death is in the very act of turning up with his plough, has, upon me, a more powerful claim than that of thefirstrequest—that of thelast. I came the next day, bringing with me the notary, and also my dislike to the dying man and his distrustful suspicions. With gay indifference I helped to protocol the effects in the sick-room—his shooting-jacket, worn into shining patches by his old game-bag—his old guns and knives—even such matters as a leather over-shoe for his thumb, and a long mummy bandage for his nose, which he had worn on occasions when he had hurt himself in these members with his gun.“As we went through the other silent chambers—empty snail-shells of his shrivelled, dried-up life—my frozen blood began to thaw within me, and to move in warm, light mercury-globules. But when I came to the lumber-room, with the notary, and tuned over the rag-fair of his old night-shirts—(caterpillar cases and blood-shirts of his feverish nights, in which I seemed still to see him groaning and thirsting)—and hisPathebrief,[71]and his name copied from thence with all its flourishes on to his pointer’s collar—and the picture of his pretty mother with him as a smiling infant in her lap—and his wife’s bridal garland of wire, covered with green silk—(Oh! for goodness’ sake donotinterrupt me with talk—I’ve had enough of that, Heaven knows). When I took in my hands these opera-costumes, these theatrical properties, in which the sick player down-stairs had performed hisprobe-rolle[72]of a Harpaxus for the benefit of the poor—not only did the poor fellow’smoralemptiness of treasury, and miserable rate of monthly salary, strike me with pain, but, moreover, I wished himno heavier suffering, no severer punishment, than he would wish for himself, were he really to repent in good earnest before his plunge into the depths of the soil. No, not so much, for the matter of that. Therefore, my dislike to him was gone. For I put myself in his place—notoutwardlyonly, as people generally do, fancying themselves in another person’s physical place withtheirown souls,theirown wishes, habitudes, &c.—butinwardly—inhismind, his youth, wishes, sufferings, thoughts.“‘PoorPiqueur,’ I said, as I went down-stairs; ‘I have no more satiric pleasure now over your gnawing suspicion, your errors, your self-shooting covetousness, your hungry avarice. You have got to live through a long eternity with that self, that “me” of yours, the best way you can, just as I have with mine. You have got to rise with that self of yours at the Resurrection, and go about with it, and look after it, and care for its welfare. And, of course, you can’t but befondofyourself, just asI amofmyself, and put up with all that self’s defects and shortcomings whether you will or not. Go in peace then into the other world, where the broken glasses of your harmonica of life will be replaced with fresh-tuned ones—in the great home of all the spirits!’“The old woman met us on the stairs crying out that the man was dying. I went to his bed-side, looked upon his cold, yellow, senseless form, and saw that he would very soon throw off his last stage-dress, his body. Next day the tolling bell announced that, he had returned to the dust—gone back into the ground—that, stage dressing-room of souls and flowers. (And we arerungoff and on to that stage, as well as others.)“Meanwhile I made an experiment with my modified and mildened system of treatment, upon the poor notary devil; the day after I tried it on the jurists who came from the college. (Jean Paul! communicate your idea to us by-and-bye—donotinterrupt me just now)—I did this, I say, and found that I was able to establish a heart-peace even with the plebeians among them—who dishonour their calling—the only reallyfreeone in all the body politic. For in the cases of these lawyers, and those of my own medical colleagues from whose breasts I have been so often in such a hurry to cut off, and melt down, the medals of honour which they have cast for themselves, I have had merely to take away the roof from over their heads, lift the rafters from their walls, and bare their houses to the four winds of heaven. Then I could look in and see everything there—their housekeeping, their unoffending wives, their sleep (i. e., mock-death), sicknesses, sorrows, birth-days, and funeral-days, and this reconciled me to them! Of a truth, to love a man, I have only to think of his children, his parents—the love he feels and inspires. One can easily perform this philanthropic transmigration of soul at any moment, without help of the balloon of phantasy, or the diving-bell of profound reflection. Good heavens! itdoesseem hard (and a shame and disgrace into the bargain) that it should have taken me thirty years of my life to understand properly what it is that self-love is really driving at—my own and everybody else’s—what it wants is, to be surrounded with mere repetitions of its own ‘me.’ It insists upon every infant on earth being a parson’s son (as I am)—that everybody shall have lost, and gained, noble friends—that everybody shall be an M.D., and have studied at Göttingen—that his name shall be Sebastian, and that he shall be an overseer of mines, and write his life in forty-five dog-post-days—in brief, that this world shall contain a thousand million Victors instead of one. I beg that everybody may send spies into his soul, to look carefully about them and see whether it be not the case that there are thousands of instances in which what we hate a man for is, either that he is as fat as a prize pig, or as lean as a stick of vermicelli—or that he is a district secretary, or a Roman Catholic watchman in Augspurg, and wears a coat white on the one side, and green on the other—or that he eats his veal with melted butter;[73](or, at all events, hate themmorefor these reasons; for when we areindifferentto people, all their external characteristics, beautiful or ugly, merely increase our indifference). People are so deep sunk in their dear selves that everybody yawns at themenuof everybody else’s favourite dishes, but expectsthemto be interested whenhereads outhistothem.”That feathered echo, the nightingale, was singing to us phrases of the music of the spheres, to us inaudible until thus repeated to us by her. But I had my rapid descent from my Mont Cenis to finish, and could but give utterance to my applause (of the bird and her music) by a hasty nod. “Heavenly! Elysian! I’ve been hearing it every now and then. But, one thing more. Since my sentimental journey in other people’s souls, I have been happier and fatter than I used to be, in ball-rooms, anterooms, and large assemblages (hot lark-spits which roasted all the fat out of a Swift). This enduring of transgressors includes a greater enduring still of fools and dunces, although the great world makes war on these three tolerated sects in just the contrary ratio.“The amnesty thus granted to humanity makes the duty of loving more easy to perform; moreover, it renders the deep blissfulness of friendship and love more justifiable; for the glow, the fire of the latter often vitrifies and calcines the heart towards the rest of mankind. And this is the reason why the last and best fruit....”Clotilda looked inquiringly here, as if begging to be allowed one word of remonstrance with me for forgetting to put myself in the place of those whose transformation I was thus extolling. I reddened, and paused. “This,” observed Jean Paul, “is the reason why a concert-room audience cries out the loudest against noise or disturbance just during the loveliest adagios—when people are most deeply touched—and swear and weep at the same time.”“I cannot help being ashamed of an experience of my own,” said Clotilda. “The other day I cried so at reading Silly’s letters (in Allwill’s Papers) that I was obliged to put the book down. Then I went to the casino with my head full of what I had been reading—and I dare not tell you what hard opinions I entertained, several times that very evening, of several people of my acquaintance. I expected ofthemthat they should all be in exactly the same mood of mind as myself—although, of course, they had not just come from reading Silly’s letters.”“That is exactly what I was coming to,” concluded I. “The last and best fruit, which ripens late in a soul ever warm, is tenderness towards the hard—patience with the impatient—kindly feeling for the selfish—and philanthropy towards the misanthropic.”It is a very odd thing, beloved Cato, but Jean Paul has just come and told me a murder-tale of human iniquity, which goes hissing through my heart like a red-hot iron. All mytheoriesstand bright and clear as stars around my soul, but I can do nothing save look inactively down upon the billows in which my blood is foaming, heated by this subterranean earth-fire, and wait until they cool down and subside. Alas! we poor, poor mortals! Jean Paul, who knew the story the day before yesterday, and had consequently all that time to put the cooling process in practice in advance of me, is going to take charge of the picture exhibition of our insular flower-pieces in my stead, and add a postscript to this. Which is well, for to-day I really could not do it. By the 10th of April the air will have cooled; thenyouare sure to be coming, as the French election meetings begin then. We must keep the “settling weeks” of your great feast and fairtide here. Alas! in what a disquiet condition have I to stop writing to you.Youwill go on reading, but notYourVictor.POSTSCRIPT BY JEAN PAUL.DEAR BROTHER.Our Victor’s virtuous indignation will soon be over and past. The reason why he, and I too, now, have made a written confession of the cure of our disposition to censure our fellows, is, that we may be compelled to be excessively ashamed of ourselves if ever we chide for more than a minute, or hate for more than a moment. This all embracing love demands a sacrifice, which is made with greater hesitation than one would expect—the sacrifice of the pleasure of being satisfied with one’s self—which anger adds to the contemplation of other people’s faults (and satire to the contemplation of other people’s follies)—by way of a sweetening ingredient, and whose place is taken by a pure and unalloyed regret at the frequency with which the disease shifts its seat, and at the chronicity of the bleeding of the wounds and scars of helpless man.However, for the present, what I would fain do is to steer our floating island, and its blessed twilight, close up to your view.The sun was sinking towards the cloud Alps, and glowing white over France in the west as if it should shortly drop down on its plains as a gleaming shield of freedom, or fall into its billowy ocean as a wedding-ring between heaven and earth. The shades of evening were already overflowing the first two steps of the hill, and the darkening Rhine seemed to be passing an arm of night around the earth. We ascended our little steps as the sun descended his great ones, seeming, as we ascended, to rise from his burning grave with the face of a saint at the Resurrection. The hill lifted up our eyes and our souls. Remembering my shortcomings I took Victor’s hand, and said, “Ah! dear Victor! could it but come to pass that one could make a treaty of peace with all mankind, and with one’s own self—if one’s shattered heart could absorb and retain, from out the leaven of the hating and hated world, nothing but the sweet, mild, life-sap of love—as the oyster, amid mud and slime, takes nothing save bright pure water into his house. Ah! if one but knew that such an event were about to come to pass of a truth, an evening of happiness such as this would refresh and fill one’s thirsting breast, (allcrackedwith thirst and dryness)—would still the everlasting sigh.” Victor answered (not looking round, but keeping his glowing and beglowed face—which his loving heart suffused with a brighter tint—turned to the sun, now burning half sunk in the earth), “Perhaps,” he said, “that time may come; a time when we shall all be happy when a human being smiles—even should he not deserve it—when we shall speak kindly to every one—not by way of a mere sacrifice to the laws of polite society, but for very love—and there will be no difficulties, no complications, for hearts which will no longer have any inward annoyance to conceal. To-day the spring sun rests upon the world like the eye of a mother, and shines warm upon every heart, the wicked as well as the good. Yes, thou Eternal One, we here now give our hands and our hearts to thy whole creation, and no longer hate anything which thou hast made.” We were overpowered, and we embraced with tears, and no words, in the first darkening of the night. Over the sun’s burial place stood the zodiacal light, a red grave pyramid, flaming unmoved up into the silent deep of blue.The City of God which hangs displayed on high above our earth, built on the arch of the Milky Way, appeared from out the endless distances with all its shining sun-lights.We came down from the hill—each spot of earth was a hill just then; an unseen hand lifted our souls on high above the dark vapour-circle, and they looked down as if from alps, seeing nothing save gleaming peaks of other mountain ranges—for all the mean, all that was not the high, all graves, petty goals, and life careers of humanity, were veiled in heavy mist.We lost each other amongst the paths, but in our hearts we were all together. We met again, but the silence in our souls was not broken, for each heart beat just as did all the others, and there was no difference, save the being alone, between a prayer and an embrace.The scattered flames of our emotion had gradually merged into one glowing sun sphere, as the ancients believed that the fluttering after-midnight fires thickened ere morning into a sun.[74]But I, a stranger, alas! in this paradise stood beneath the leafless branches, sad, and alone, beside the dark-blue Rhine stream where the stars were mirrored—it glided, with gently heaving wavelets, over the German soil, binding two great republics[75]together, like some heavenly band; and to me it seemed as though the thirst, the fire, of a breast no broader even than mine could be quenched with nothing less than the waters of this great river. Alas! we are all like this. In the transient clasp of our little grandeurs and blisses, we long to rest, anddie, upon somethinggreat. We long to cast ourselves into the depths of the heavens when we see them glitter and sparkle above us—or down upon the many-tinted earth, when her flowers and grasses wave—or into the endless river, flowing as if from out the past onwards into the future.Our ladies and the children had gone away—departing in silence from this anchorage of hours so happy—I saw them as they floated over the wavelets, singing like swans, and dropping spring flowers into the ripples, that they might float back as souvenirs to us upon our island shore. The children were sleeping softly in their arms, between the glories of the heaven and of the earth, lulled by the arms, the songs, and the ripples.When it was 12 o’clock, and the first morning of spring was come, Victor summoned us all to the hill, we knew not wherefore. All around and beneath us was the music of the rush of the Rhine, and through it, came gliding clear the bright spring-melody of the nightingale; the stars of the twelfth hour sank, drop by drop, into the darkened grave of the sun, and went paling out among the grey ashes of the western clouds. Suddenly a straight, beautiful flame shot up in the west, and music came palpitating through the darkness.“Do you not think of your France,” said Victor, “the first hour of day is breaking forherthis 21st of March—the day when the six thousand primary assemblies form themselves, like stars, into one constellation, that one law may burst into being from out a million hearts.”As I looked up to the sky, the Milky Way struck me as being the beam of the balance of hidden destiny, in whose weighing-pans (which are worlds) the broken, shattered, bleeding nations are weighed out for eternity. These destiny scales waver up and down as yet, because it was only a century or two ago that the weights were put into them.We drew closer together, and (inspired by the night and the music) said, “Thou, poor country! may thy sun and thy day rise higher ere long, and cast away the blood-shirt of its morning red. May the higher genius wipe away the blood from thy hands, and the tears from thine eyes! Oh! may that genius build, support, and guard for ever the Grand Freedom Temple which is vaulted over thee like a second heaven: but also comfort every mother and every father, every child and every wife—and dry all eyes which weep for the beloved, crushed hearts which have bled and fallen, and now lie under that temple as basement stones.”What I am going to say now can only be said to my brother, for nobody else would pardon it. Victor and I got into a boat, which was made fast with a rope to the bank, and which was drifting about with the current. We worked ourselves back to the bank, and then let the boat drift northwards again upon the ripples. In our souls (as in the world without us) sadness and exaltation were strangely blent: the music on the bank came and went—tones and stars rose and fell. The vault of heaven showed in the Rhine like some shattered bell, and up above us the dome of the temple wherein dwelleth Eternity lay in calm and motionless rest, with all its unchanging suns. From the eastward the spring breathed upon us, and the tree skeletons in the churchyard of the winter felt the presage of a near resurrection. Of a sudden Victor said—“It feels to me as though the river here were the stream of Time—our fluctuating life is carried along upon the waves of both towards the midnight.” Here my brother called to me from the island, “Brother, come into harbour and sleep; it is between one and two o’clock.”This fraternal voice, coming to me athwart the music of the wavelets, suddenly brought a new world—perhaps the under-world—into my open soul. For a lightning flash of memory gleamed in a moment over all my dim being, reminding me that it was on this very night two-and-thirty years ago that I had made my entry upon this overclouded earth, shrouded with daily nights—and that this hour, between one and two o’clock, in which my brother was calling me into haven and to sleep, was the hour of my birth (which so often deprives man of both).There come to us moments of twilight in which it seems as though day and night were in the act of dividing—as if we were in the very process of being created or annihilated; the stage of life and the spectators fly back out of view, our part is played out, we stand far off, in darkness and alone, but we have still got on our theatre dress, and we look at ourselves in it, and ask, “What is it that thou art,now, myme!” When we thus ask ourselves this, there is, beyond ourselves, nothing of great or of firm—everything has turned to an endless cloud of night (with rare and feeble gleams within it), which keeps falling lower and lower, and heavier with drops. Only high up above the cloud shines a resplendence—and that is God; and far beneath it a minute speck of light—and that is a human “Me”!The heart is made of heavy earth, and therefore it cannot long endure such moments. I passed on to those sweeter seasons in which the full, tear-intoxicated heart neither can, nor will, do aught but simply weep. I had not the courage to drag my dear Victor down from the sublime region in which he was to my trifling pettinesses—but I asked him to remain beside me for a little time in this stillness which lay so silently upon the dark stream as it went flowing toward midnight and the south. Then I leant and pressed myself fondly to his side—and my little tears fell unseen into the great river—as though it had been the great stream of Time itself, into which all eyes drop their tears, and so many thousand hearts their blood-drops—for all which it neither swells nor flows the faster.I thought as I gazed at the Rhine, “And thus, too, the dancing, billowy current of Life goes flowing on its course from out its source—hidden like the Nile’s. How little, as yet, have I done, or enjoyed! Our deserts, and our enjoyments, what petty things they are! Ourmetamorphosesare greater; our heads and our hearts go into the ground irrecognisable—altered a thousandfold—like the head of the man with the iron mask.[76]Ay! anddidwe but change! but we change so little in the earth, or even in ourselves. Every moment is to us the goal of all that have come before it. We take the seed of life for the harvest of it—the honey-dew on the ears for the sweet fruit—and we chew the flowers, like cattle! Ah! thou great GOD! what a night lieth around our sleep! wefallandrisewith closed eyelids, and fly about blind, and in a deep slumber.”[77]My hand was hanging into the water, and the cool ripples buoyed it up and down. I thought, “How straight and immovable the little light within us burns, amid the blasts of Nature’s storm! Everything around me contends and clashes together with gigantic might. The stream seizes upon the islands and the cliffs—the night-wind comes upon the river, and stalks across it, thrusting its wavelets back, and wages its strife with the forests—even up there in the tranquil blue, worlds are working against worlds—the eternal, endless mights flowing and rushing, like rivers, one against another, they come together in whirl and roar—and on the face of that eternal whirl the little worlds float eddying round the sun-vortex; nay, those shimmering constellations themselves rising zenithwards with that grand and gentle peace and calm—what are they but mountain ranges of raging sun-volcanoes, stretching into infinity beyond the reach of mind to follow. And yet the human spirit lies at rest amid this storm, peaceful as a quiet moon above a windy night. In me, at this moment, all is gentle peace. I see my own little life-brook running by me, falling, with all the rest, into the river of Time. The clear-eyed soul looks through the raging blood-rivers which are flowing round it, and through the storms which darken and obscure it, and sees, beyond them all, quiet meadows, gentle, peaceful waters, moon-shimmer, and a lovely, beautiful, tranquil, placid, peaceful angel slowly wandering there.” Yes, yes; within my soul there was a quiet Good Friday—wind-still, rain-free, and mild—neither cold nor over-warm—though shrouded in a tender cloud.But a clear consciousness of rest is speedily the undoing thereof. I saw, floating near the island, three hyacinths which Clotilda had dropped into the wavelets as she went away. “Now, in this, thy birth-hour,” I said to myself, “the ocean of eternity is washing thousands of little hearts on to the stony shore of this world; how will it be with them one day when their birthday feast comes round? And what are your countless brothers who, with you, came thirty-two years ago into this vapour-ball, thinking now? Perhaps some terrible sorrow makes them think with bitterness of their first hour. Perhaps they sleep now—as I have slept—and must again—only deeper, deeper.” And then all my younger and older friends, now sleeping that deeper sleep, fell heavy upon my broken breast.“I know, I think,” my Victor said, “what you are reflecting on so silently, and regretting so mutely.” I answered “No,” and then I told him all.Then we went quickly back, and I put my arms about my other brother, and my heart went out in longing towards thee. At length we took our departure from this building-place of a more peaceful system of doctrine for our hearts—this quiet island; and the lofty hill—grand pedestal of the vases of our joy-flowers, chancel of the great temple, light-house tower in our haven of rest—seemed to gaze long after us, the hanging garden of our souls lying upon it in starry light.And as we came to the shore, Hesperus, as star of the morning (spark which springs and shines so near the sun), rose up above the morning mists, and earlier than even the Aurora of morning, proclaimed his sire’s approach. And as we thought that he shines, too, as the star of evening upon our nights here below, and yet adorns the east, and the after-midnight hours with the first of the glittering pearls of dew, each said to his gladsome heart, “And so shall all the evening stars of this our life shine upon us as stars of morning at a future day.”Think thou, too, of morning, my brother, when thou art looking upon the even; and when a sun is setting for thee, turn thee about and thou mayest see a moon rising in the east. The moon gives warrant that the sun is shining still—as Hope says, there still is happiness. But come now soon to thy Victor—and toThy Brother,J. P.END OF BOOK III.

LETTER OF DR. VICTOR TO CATO THE ELDER, ON THE CONVERSION OFIINTOTHOU,HE,SHE,YE, ANDTHEY; OR, THE FEAST OF KINDNESS OF THE 20TH MARCH.

Flachsenfingen, 1st April, 1795.

My dear Cato the Elder,

A breaker of his word like you—who made such a solemn promise to come to my feast, and yet did not come—will have to be punished by having his mouth—not stitched up (which is what savages do to word-breakers,) for that would be a loss only to your hearers—butmade to water. When I shall have painted a full and faithful picture of our peace-festival of the soul for you, I shall stop both my ears against the curses which you will pour out on your evil genius. At this feast we all philosophised, and we were all converted, except me, who could not be reckoned a convert, inasmuch as I was myself the converter of the heathen.

Our flotilla of three boats—(the third we were obliged to take in deference to the timidity of the ladies)—got under way about one o’clock in the afternoon of the 20th of March, ran into the stream, gained the open water, and soon after one we were well in sight of the very anther-filaments and spider’s-webs on the island. At a quarter-past two we landed—the professor, his wife, and a girl and boy—Melchior—Jean Paul—the Government Counsellor,—Flamin—the lovely Luna—(off goes the first of your curses here!)—the undersigned, and his wife.

Some Burgundy was then disembarked. At the commencement of spring (which was to take place that day at 38 minutes past 3 o’clock) we meant to enter upon a “stream of life,” coloured and sweetened after a most superlative sort. With the island, Cato, many of us were quite enraptured, and nearly all of us wished we had paid a visit to this beautiful bowling-green in the Rhine—thin pleasure camp amid the waves—long before. Luna, elder Cato—if I mistake not thou hast seen, certainly once at the very least, that tender soul, which ought to dwell in (and heighten the tint of) a white rose in place of a body—Luna shed tears, half of delight (for they were half of sorrow foreverybodywho was not there), half of delight not so much at the families of alders upon the rounded bank, or the Lombardy poplars lying trembling in intoxication of bliss in the gentle air which breathed about them, or the sunny green paths, as atall thistogether (in the first place), and at the spring sky and the Rhine (which was showing that sky a picture, as it were, of its antipodean sky somewhere over America), and at the peace and gladness of her soul—but (above all) at the Alp in the centre of the island.

The Alp will be sketched, if an opportunity offers, in this letter. I at once asked Luna whereyouwere. She said, “At the Frankfort Fair.” Was she right?

When a party arrives at a place it is not, like theAnguis Fragilis, to be broken into ten twitching fragments by every touch of chance. Even the ladies kept with us, for I had deprived them of all opportunity of doing anything in the shape of household labour, by the arrangements I had made for the dinner. This Barataria Island was going to be an intellectualPlace d’Armesand theatre of war that day. I love disputation. Intellectual bickerings further and heighten the happiness of congenial society, just as lovers’ quarrels are a renewal of love, and fisticuffs a necessity of Marionette operas. Certain people are like the Moravians, among whom the confessor and penitent change places, each laying a picture of his soul before the other, his own police-notice of an absconded criminal—his own advertisement in the “Hue and Cry”; and I am like them. Any blemish or shortcoming which I discover in myself or other people I immediately publish over half the town in a universal German gazette, as ladies do the witnesses’ depositions of evidence concerning strangers. For the last three weeks, dear Cato, my soul has been glowing in the brightest sunlight of peace and love, cast upon me by the deceased chiefPiqueur(a man who had not a trace of either the one or the other about him)—and now I cannot rest till I entail this precious legacy upon all of you.

AsLieutenant de Policeof the island, I possessed the power of issuing police regulations with respect to the conversation permissible thereon, and I directed the thread ofourtalk towards thePiqueurin question. But the wasps came buzzing out of their nests; the first of them being your brother, Melchior, who drove his sting into thePiqueur’savarice, saying that people who didn’t bestow their plunder upon the poor till they were in their own coffins, were like pikes who eject their (swallowed) prey when caught themselves; they should rather do as Judas Iscariot did—cast their pieces of silver into the churchbeforetheir hanging. The next wasp was your second brother, Jean Paul, who said, “Misers are the only people who haven’t had enough of life when they die. Even when they are in the very grip of Death’s hand, they would fain grasp hold of money with their own. Like cap-mushrooms, when they are broken off, they cling terribly to the earth’s surface with, their bleeding moiety.”

“Ah!” said I, “everyoneis a thorough miser as regards something or other, I am sorry to say. I cannot now be so hard upon a man who confines himself to mortifying and chasteninghimselfas I used to be. Where is the extraordinary difference between one of your learned antiquary mint-assayers who distils, evaporates, and injects all the pleasures of his life into the rust of a collection of coins—and a miser who counts and weighs the specimens inhiscabinet like so many votes at an election? Not, in reality, so great a difference as there is betweenour opinionsof the two.” I thought I had a fine chance of turning deftly to the subject of thePiqueurat this point, but the entire company called out to me to tell them what o’clock it was. In my capacity of Viceroy, I had disarmed all the islanders of their watches at the landing-place (as if they had been so many swords), that they might pass their day in a blissful eternity, where time was not. The only one allowed to keep his was Paul—and this was because it was one of the new Geneva sort, whose hands always point to 12 o’clock, only telling the real time when one touches a spring.

It was now past three. In thirty-eight minutes, spring, that pre-heaven upon earth—thatsecondparadise—would make her grand processional progress over the ruins of thefirst. Already the clouds were all cleared away from the sky, spring breezes played coolingly about the sun, burning in the blue; on a vine-clad hill by the Rhine shore, a solo-singer from the great choir of spring—a nightingale—sent on in advance of her—was pouring out her song in a smooth-grown thicket of pruned cherry-trees; through the open trellis-work of the boughs we could see the notes vibrate in the feathers of her throat.

We climbed up the artificial Mount St. Gothard. It was set round with turf-banks and leafy niches; an oak stood on its summit by way of crown. Man (day-fly, as he is, playing above a ripple of time) cannot do without watches and date-indicators on the banks of the time-stream. Although every day is a birthday and a new year’s day, he must have one of his own into the bargain. Thirty-eight minutes struck in us. And down from the waves of throbbing blue above us came floating a broad breath of breeze, rocking the swelling grapes and the bare grafts, the delicate young branchlets, and the strong, sharp-pointed winter-corn, and lifting the soaring pigeons higher in their flight. The sun, above Switzerland, looked, in blissful intoxication, at his own face reflected in the sublime glittering ice-mirror of Mont Blanc, parting (unaware) day and night into equal halves, as if with two arms of fate, and throwing down equal portions to every land and every eye. We sang Goethe’s “Hymn to the Spring.” The sun sent us down (like dew) from the hill-top to the valley—the earth swelling loose fell rustling at our feet; and wine (Lethe of life) hid from our sight the misty bunks within which it rolled its way—mirroring only heaven and flowers. Clotilda said (not to us, but to her Luna)—(and here, dear Cato, I am drank with remembering; and I beg, accordingly, to invite you, at once, for the 10th of April), “Ah! dearest, how beautiful the world is sometimes. We ought not to think so poorly of it. Are we not like Orestes in the ‘Iphigenia’—fancying we are in exile, though we really are in our own native land.”

With every downward step from the hill we sank back into the workaday marsh-meadow of life. “What the better are we,” cried Melchior, quite angrily, “for all this splendour in and around us, when to-morrow a single passionate earthquake may hurl down an avalanche of snow-masses upon all that is warm and blooming in us? it is the April of the human heart—not the April of the universe—that causes me such vexation. We are always at our hardest just after anattendrissement—and moved to tears just after some murderous rage—as earthquakes set warm springs flowing. Now I know quite well that, to-morrow, at the sitting of the council, I shall attack and oppose everybody and everything. Pitiable! pitiable! And you are not a whit better, Flamin.”

“Not a whit,” said Flamin, with touching candour. Luna and my wife took the Professor’s wife between them (each taking one of her children in her lap), and sat down upon the green nether slope of the hill, on the sunny side of the nightingale. We, however, were too restless to sit down. “Alas!” (said Jean Paul, walking up and down, with his hands folded and hanging, and his hat thrown away, so that hiseyes, at all events, might be higher and freer). “Alas! isanyone a whit better? We take a vow of universal love to our fellow men whenever we are deeply touched—when we have buried some one, or have been thoroughly happy, or have committed some grand transgression, or looked long and closely at Nature, or are intoxicated with love, or some earthly form of intoxication: but we are really only perjurers, not philanthropists, as we fancy ourselves. We long and thirst for the love of others—but it is like mercury, it feels and looks like fountain water, and flows and glitters like it—but itiscold, dry, and heavy in reality. It is just those very people upon whom Nature has bestowed most gifts (and who, consequently, should not covet other people’s, but be content with distributing their own), who, like princes, demand the more from their fellow men the more theyhaveto give them, and the less theydogive them. Dissensions are the more bitterly painful, the more alike the souls are between whom they take place, just as discords are harsher the nearer they approach the unison. We forgive without reason because we have found fault without reason, for a rightful and righteous anger must, of necessity, be everlasting. Nothing is a stronger evidence of the miserable subordination of our reason to our ruling passion than the fact that we place such a flat every-day matter astimeamong the cures for hate, grief, love, &c.; our impulses are toforgetto conquer, or to growtiredof doing so—our wounds are to be sanded over with the Margrave’s sympathetic powder of drift-sand out of Time’s sand-glass! Too miserable a business altogether! But can anything make a better of it? Certainly, least of all my complaints of it!”

“The fact is,” said the serene, gentle, Professor (who only uses averyfew pedantic tints in his style of painting), “feelingsof love to our fellow men[70]are useless withoutreasons.” “So are reasons without feelings,” said Paul.

“Consequently,” continued the Professor (for I couldnotmanage to get myPiqueurbrought to bear anyhow, but had to keep him idly in reserve), “the two have to be combined likegeniusandcriticism—of which the former can produce only master-pieces and scholar-pieces, the latter only something of an everyday sort between the two. What I think is, that our lack of love arises, not from our coldness, but from a conviction that others do not deserve it. The coldest of men would acquire a greater warmth of feeling for their fellows if they acquired a higher opinion of them.”

“But,” asked Clotilda, “must we not forgive even thewrongdone by our enemies? Therightis not matter for forgiveness.”

“Of course it is not,” he answered, but would let himself be no further diverted from his point. “The only ugliness and hatefulness which we can truly experience hatred for is that of amoralsort.”

“In opposition to that view of the question,” said Jean Paul, “I might adduce the fierce combats of animals, and nurseries in a state of war; for in neither of these cases is there any idea ofimmoralityof the enemy, althoughhatredof him exists. But were I to adduce these cases, I could answer myself—at least, so so. If we directed our hatred against things other than the immoral, we should be just as angry with the hanging branch which strikes us in the face as with the person who broke it so that it should be so placed as to do so. The rage of a chastised child is quite a different thing from the alarmed instinct of self-conservancy—the feeling of avoidance of nitric acid, or of bodily hurt. The former has in it a duplex sense of dislike, the two components of which are most dissimilar—the one referring to the cause, the other to the effect. We must distinguish between beings which are capable of morality, and such as are not, inkind—not indegree; thoseincapableof morality can never be made capable of it by the mere lapse of time, or step by step. Whence, if children at any period of their age wereutterlynon-moral beings, it would follow that they could never, atanyperiod,begintobecomemoral beings. In brief, their anger is nothing other than a dim sense of other people’s injustice. As to the animals, I don’t know what else to say than that theremustbe in them something analogous to our moral sense. Those who (like us) believe them to have immortal souls, must, as a matter of course, concede themsomebeginnings some pre-existent germs of morality—although these may be overpowered and kept in the background by their animal natures even to a greater extent than (for instance) conscience is in sleep, drunkenness, or insanity. But alas! all this is night within night! And I hope this obscurity will be considered some excuse, Professor, for the manner in which I have obstructed and built outyourlight.”

“Now,” he went on, “since hatred only concerns itself withmoraldefects, how strange it is that we never hateourselves, even for the gravest moral defects.”

“Ithink,” said Flamin, “that onedoessometimes feel thedeadliesthatred of one’s self, for over-haste.”

“And then,” said Jean Paul, “your argument would apply just as well to love—at least it would half apply. Come, let’s hear what you’ve got to say to that?”

“We neverhateourselves,” I said. “Wedespiseandpityourselves, when we have done wrong. Although—Imustadd this—we hate all men, our ownselves excepted, for vices. Can this be right?” “Self-hatred,” went on the Professor, “is not possible, for hatred is nothing but the wishing of evil to the object of it—i. e., a desire to punish, not forbettering’ssake, but forpunishing’s. But the most repentant of sinners never can wish himself made the subject of a chastening of this kind; and even if he could, such a wish would be merely adisguiseddesire forbettering—i. e., for greater happiness. But to a transgressor other than ourselves we hardly can concederapidityof conversion, not, at all events, until he has gone through a proper expiation. What distinguishes our feeling concerning other people’s errors from our feeling concerning our own is a sham self-love. The very minutest particle of hatred desires the unhappiness of its object; that is what I have got to prove now.”

His own wife here interrupted him with the words, “My heart tells me, as plainly as possible, that I could never wish any serious misfortune to happen to my bitterest enemy—such as money troubles, or anything about her children. I could not bear even the idea of a tear being brought to her eyes on my account.”

“No, I suppose not,” he went on. “The better nature within us never wishes its antipode a broken leg, would not leave him without a strip of lint, or a wish for his recovery. But I know that that same ‘better nature’ does take a delight in his minor skin-wounds—his being put to confusion, his sleigh slipping down hill backwards, his losing his hair. The gentlest of souls hides, at the back of its tender sympathy with great troubles, itsuntendersatisfaction with small ones, such as call for condolence (a smaller thing than sympathy). The tenderest of people, people incapable of indicting the smallest wound imaginable on their enemy’sskin, are delighted to make a thousand deep ones in hisheart.” “Ah!” said Luna, “how can that be possible?” “I don’t think itwouldbe possible,” Clotilda answered her, “if the pain of the soul had as definite a physiognomy, and as real tears, as that of the body.”

“Exactly,” said the Professor; “that is just where it is. To make ourselves feel more gently towards the wicked we have only to think of them as delivered wholly over into our hands. For what harm would one do them then? The moment theyacknowledgedtheir fault we would stay the rack, and bid the torture cease. What redoubles our indignation, and renders it everlasting, is the very impossibility of inflicting any punishment.”

“Yes, that is quite true,” said Melchior. “The oftener I read of these two live guillotines of their age, Alba and Philip (whose lips were shears of the Parcæ), or of those two other mowers of mankind, Marat and Robespierre, the deeper does the aquafortis of anger etch their condemnation into my heart, although death has drawn up their Acts of Amnesty.”

“And yet, after all,” I put in (leaving the Piqueur in the rear for the present), “if anybody would deliver over the King and the Duke to you and me here this afternoon, and a couple of caldrons of boiling oil into the bargain,Ifeel quite certain I couldn’t throw one of them in—at any rate till the oil had stood a long time in the cold. I should let them off with a good flogging—say 100 lashes, or so. Ah! what a cast-iron sort of fellow were he who should not soothe, and comfort with cooling, healing touch (had he the power) a heart breaking with anguish, a face whereon the worm of suffering was ploughing its tortuous track! At the same time (I continued, rapidly; for I was determined to bring in my Piqueur somehow or other), where emotion is concerned, the memory of past errors is not the smallest safeguard against new ones.”

“You see, you won’t allow me to speak,” the Professor broke in. “I still owe you a tremendous number of proofs, and I am most anxious to acquit the debt. Ourhatred, being an emotion, always turns everyactioninto awhole life; everyattributeinto apersonality(or, to speak more accurately, because our only mode ofseeingany personality is by its reflection in the mirror of its attributes) convertsoneattribute into the sum of them. It is only in the case of liking—of friendship—that we find it easy to separate the attribute from the personality. Hatred can not do it. Nay, in the case of liking, theconversetransformation takes place—that of the personality into the attribute. We hate as if the object of our hatred had never possessed any virtues, or inclination to them—neither pity nor truthfulness, love of the young, one single good hour, anything whatever. In brief, since it is with theindividualityof the person whose punishment we are decreeing that we are angry (not with its characteristic of the moment), we make him out to be awhollywicked being. Yet such a being is not conceivable. The voice of conscience speaking in that being would be of itselfonegoodness in him, even though it spoke in vain; the pain of that conscience would be another; each joy and each impulse of his life another.”

“Ah! how delightful,” said Luna, “that there is nobody so utterly bad; nobody whom one would have to hate altogether.”

“You see,” he continued, “it cannot be themeof a person that we hate; for themeis still the samemewhen it improves, and wins our regard.”

In the warmth of our discussion we were losing sight altogether of one of the two concave mirrors which distort other people’s moral distortions for us even more wildly than they are distorted to begin with—I mean, our own egotism. Often, when I have seen and heard women squabbling in the market-place (women of whom one was just as good as the other, and with just as good an opinion of herself), and one hurling her invectives with delight, like a red-hot stone, at the other’s head, which seethed and swelled in waves of anger around that stone, while a third woman kept calm and cool in the midway-path between, I have been ashamed of the human race—ashamed that the self-same reproach, or immorality, whichoughtto produce exactly the same effect upon all the three, should maketoostrong an impression on the one, too weak a one on the other, none whatever on the third.

Paul pointed to thesecondof these distorting mirrors—our bodily senses. For these render the vinegar of hatred doubly bitter by throwing into its fermenting-vat these parts of the enemy whichtheytake cognizance of—his clothes, movements, gestures, tones, &c.

Here we reached the Gordian knot which only I could cut with the Piqueur. “Who is to save us from these bodily senses?” I inquired (with a certain amount of hopeful expectancy). Melchior answered, “I do not allow them to influence my philanthropy, at all events. They are the straw which feeds the flame under that ascending windbag balloon, the heart.”

Jean Paul thrust me back from the Gordian knot. “I,” he said, “have an admirable sweetener at all times in readiness to apply when a sinner embitters my senses. I take him, and (like a victorious enemy) strip all the clothes off him, not leaving him so much as his hat or his wig. When once I’ve got him standing there before me, cold and wretched as any corpse (I mean, of course, in imagination), I begin to feel sorry for the scoundrel. But this is not enough. I have got to sweeten myself a good deal more than this; so I proceed to slit him up with a long, slicing cut from top to bottom into three cavities (as if he were a carp), so that I can see his heart and brain pulsating. The mere sight of a red human heart (Danaid’s bucket for happiness—safe storehouse of so many a sorrow) makes my own soft and heavy; and I have often not forgiven a street robber till the Professor has been shewing us his heart and brain in the anatomical theatre. ‘Thou unhappy, sorrowful heart,’ I have always found myself thinking, with deep, sympathetic emotion, ‘how many a blood-billow has gone surging through thee, glowing and freezing in the same moment.’ But if all this process failed to have its effect, I should proceed to extremities, and smite my enemy dead; then take the naked, fluttering, trembling soul—like an evening moth—out of its brain-chamber chrysalis, and, holding up the quivering night-creature between my forefinger and thumb, gaze at it without a trace of rancour left in me.”

“To picture one’s enemy to one’s self as unclothed, or disembodied,” said I, “so as to be able to put up with him, as though he were dead (perhaps that is the chief reason why we love the dead), is just the operationIperform too. I often try to soften the unpleasant effect which some repulsive physiognomy produces upon me by thinking of it as scalped, and with its skin folded back.”

And now I determined, seriously and in earnest, that the sceptre and throne insignia of the conversation, should no more depart from my hands. Wherefore I commenced as follows: “But who is to provide us with the time and the power, not only to remember, but to act upon, this precious and reliable principle, or rule of conduct, right in the thick of this world’s Pyrrhic war-dance, and the rapid evolutions of our emotions? Who is to stoke the æther-flame of philanthropy with a sufficient supply of combustible matter, seeing that there are such hosts of people continually drowning it out, smothering it up, and building it in! Who is to make up to us for the lack of a gentle, quiet temperament? Who, or what?”

Just as I was going to fix the Piqueur on to this lance-shaft by way of point, the cold dinner was brought, and the Professor’s wife went to fetch her children. For the dinner had to be over before sunset; because, like a fresh supply of green firewood, it would drown out the flame of enthusiasm for a time, and break the unity of its vertical, purple fire pyramid. The company, therefore, waited in vain for me to go on with what I had to say. I shook my head, expressing, by nods, that I should do so when we were all together again, and sitting down.

While we were at dinner I was able to set up my speaking machine, and set it a-going at my ease.

“I asked you once or twice before dinner,” I commenced, “whocan invigorate and quicken our principles of love to our fellows, and set them fully to work? I answer, the chief Piqueur can; only I’m afraid I’ve made so many false starts, and baulked in so many of my runs before making this grand jump of mine, that I have led you to entertain far greater expectations concerning it than it (or I) may be able to fulfil. A day or two before the stump-end of the chief Piqueur’s life-candle fell down and went guttering out in its candlestick-socket, he sent for me to the side of his bed of suffering and begged me—not to prescribe for him, but—to make a thorough inspection of his house. He drew my head down close to his wretched pillow, and said, ‘You see, doctor, Death has got his hunting-knife at my throat. But I’m not sorry to go, and what little I leave behind me in the shape of worldly gear goes all to the poor. It’s but little that I have ever thought of scraping together formyself, and that is a comfort to think on now. It’s for thepoorthat I have screwed and saved, pinched and pared; and when a man has done that it’s a pleasure to him to make his will; he knows it will be paid back againelsewhere. But there’s one hard stone at my heart still. You see I have neither chick nor child belonging to me, and when the breath is out of my body, the old woman who keeps my room in order will be in the house by herself. She’s an honest body enough, but as poor as a church mouse, and pretty sure to help herself to something before the seals are put on my effects. Now, doctor, you are a man who are just as good to the poor as I am myself; you often prescribe for them gratis; I want to askyouto go through the house with the notary (I don’t trusthima bit more than I do the old woman), take an inventory of what there is, and have a regular notarial instrument drawn up concerning my property. I’ve left the whole of it to the Poor-house and the Institution for Destitute Gamekeepers. The notary must begin with my breeches under the pillow here, because my purse is there.’

“A man whose stubble Death is in the very act of turning up with his plough, has, upon me, a more powerful claim than that of thefirstrequest—that of thelast. I came the next day, bringing with me the notary, and also my dislike to the dying man and his distrustful suspicions. With gay indifference I helped to protocol the effects in the sick-room—his shooting-jacket, worn into shining patches by his old game-bag—his old guns and knives—even such matters as a leather over-shoe for his thumb, and a long mummy bandage for his nose, which he had worn on occasions when he had hurt himself in these members with his gun.

“As we went through the other silent chambers—empty snail-shells of his shrivelled, dried-up life—my frozen blood began to thaw within me, and to move in warm, light mercury-globules. But when I came to the lumber-room, with the notary, and tuned over the rag-fair of his old night-shirts—(caterpillar cases and blood-shirts of his feverish nights, in which I seemed still to see him groaning and thirsting)—and hisPathebrief,[71]and his name copied from thence with all its flourishes on to his pointer’s collar—and the picture of his pretty mother with him as a smiling infant in her lap—and his wife’s bridal garland of wire, covered with green silk—(Oh! for goodness’ sake donotinterrupt me with talk—I’ve had enough of that, Heaven knows). When I took in my hands these opera-costumes, these theatrical properties, in which the sick player down-stairs had performed hisprobe-rolle[72]of a Harpaxus for the benefit of the poor—not only did the poor fellow’smoralemptiness of treasury, and miserable rate of monthly salary, strike me with pain, but, moreover, I wished himno heavier suffering, no severer punishment, than he would wish for himself, were he really to repent in good earnest before his plunge into the depths of the soil. No, not so much, for the matter of that. Therefore, my dislike to him was gone. For I put myself in his place—notoutwardlyonly, as people generally do, fancying themselves in another person’s physical place withtheirown souls,theirown wishes, habitudes, &c.—butinwardly—inhismind, his youth, wishes, sufferings, thoughts.

“‘PoorPiqueur,’ I said, as I went down-stairs; ‘I have no more satiric pleasure now over your gnawing suspicion, your errors, your self-shooting covetousness, your hungry avarice. You have got to live through a long eternity with that self, that “me” of yours, the best way you can, just as I have with mine. You have got to rise with that self of yours at the Resurrection, and go about with it, and look after it, and care for its welfare. And, of course, you can’t but befondofyourself, just asI amofmyself, and put up with all that self’s defects and shortcomings whether you will or not. Go in peace then into the other world, where the broken glasses of your harmonica of life will be replaced with fresh-tuned ones—in the great home of all the spirits!’

“The old woman met us on the stairs crying out that the man was dying. I went to his bed-side, looked upon his cold, yellow, senseless form, and saw that he would very soon throw off his last stage-dress, his body. Next day the tolling bell announced that, he had returned to the dust—gone back into the ground—that, stage dressing-room of souls and flowers. (And we arerungoff and on to that stage, as well as others.)

“Meanwhile I made an experiment with my modified and mildened system of treatment, upon the poor notary devil; the day after I tried it on the jurists who came from the college. (Jean Paul! communicate your idea to us by-and-bye—donotinterrupt me just now)—I did this, I say, and found that I was able to establish a heart-peace even with the plebeians among them—who dishonour their calling—the only reallyfreeone in all the body politic. For in the cases of these lawyers, and those of my own medical colleagues from whose breasts I have been so often in such a hurry to cut off, and melt down, the medals of honour which they have cast for themselves, I have had merely to take away the roof from over their heads, lift the rafters from their walls, and bare their houses to the four winds of heaven. Then I could look in and see everything there—their housekeeping, their unoffending wives, their sleep (i. e., mock-death), sicknesses, sorrows, birth-days, and funeral-days, and this reconciled me to them! Of a truth, to love a man, I have only to think of his children, his parents—the love he feels and inspires. One can easily perform this philanthropic transmigration of soul at any moment, without help of the balloon of phantasy, or the diving-bell of profound reflection. Good heavens! itdoesseem hard (and a shame and disgrace into the bargain) that it should have taken me thirty years of my life to understand properly what it is that self-love is really driving at—my own and everybody else’s—what it wants is, to be surrounded with mere repetitions of its own ‘me.’ It insists upon every infant on earth being a parson’s son (as I am)—that everybody shall have lost, and gained, noble friends—that everybody shall be an M.D., and have studied at Göttingen—that his name shall be Sebastian, and that he shall be an overseer of mines, and write his life in forty-five dog-post-days—in brief, that this world shall contain a thousand million Victors instead of one. I beg that everybody may send spies into his soul, to look carefully about them and see whether it be not the case that there are thousands of instances in which what we hate a man for is, either that he is as fat as a prize pig, or as lean as a stick of vermicelli—or that he is a district secretary, or a Roman Catholic watchman in Augspurg, and wears a coat white on the one side, and green on the other—or that he eats his veal with melted butter;[73](or, at all events, hate themmorefor these reasons; for when we areindifferentto people, all their external characteristics, beautiful or ugly, merely increase our indifference). People are so deep sunk in their dear selves that everybody yawns at themenuof everybody else’s favourite dishes, but expectsthemto be interested whenhereads outhistothem.”

That feathered echo, the nightingale, was singing to us phrases of the music of the spheres, to us inaudible until thus repeated to us by her. But I had my rapid descent from my Mont Cenis to finish, and could but give utterance to my applause (of the bird and her music) by a hasty nod. “Heavenly! Elysian! I’ve been hearing it every now and then. But, one thing more. Since my sentimental journey in other people’s souls, I have been happier and fatter than I used to be, in ball-rooms, anterooms, and large assemblages (hot lark-spits which roasted all the fat out of a Swift). This enduring of transgressors includes a greater enduring still of fools and dunces, although the great world makes war on these three tolerated sects in just the contrary ratio.

“The amnesty thus granted to humanity makes the duty of loving more easy to perform; moreover, it renders the deep blissfulness of friendship and love more justifiable; for the glow, the fire of the latter often vitrifies and calcines the heart towards the rest of mankind. And this is the reason why the last and best fruit....”

Clotilda looked inquiringly here, as if begging to be allowed one word of remonstrance with me for forgetting to put myself in the place of those whose transformation I was thus extolling. I reddened, and paused. “This,” observed Jean Paul, “is the reason why a concert-room audience cries out the loudest against noise or disturbance just during the loveliest adagios—when people are most deeply touched—and swear and weep at the same time.”

“I cannot help being ashamed of an experience of my own,” said Clotilda. “The other day I cried so at reading Silly’s letters (in Allwill’s Papers) that I was obliged to put the book down. Then I went to the casino with my head full of what I had been reading—and I dare not tell you what hard opinions I entertained, several times that very evening, of several people of my acquaintance. I expected ofthemthat they should all be in exactly the same mood of mind as myself—although, of course, they had not just come from reading Silly’s letters.”

“That is exactly what I was coming to,” concluded I. “The last and best fruit, which ripens late in a soul ever warm, is tenderness towards the hard—patience with the impatient—kindly feeling for the selfish—and philanthropy towards the misanthropic.”

It is a very odd thing, beloved Cato, but Jean Paul has just come and told me a murder-tale of human iniquity, which goes hissing through my heart like a red-hot iron. All mytheoriesstand bright and clear as stars around my soul, but I can do nothing save look inactively down upon the billows in which my blood is foaming, heated by this subterranean earth-fire, and wait until they cool down and subside. Alas! we poor, poor mortals! Jean Paul, who knew the story the day before yesterday, and had consequently all that time to put the cooling process in practice in advance of me, is going to take charge of the picture exhibition of our insular flower-pieces in my stead, and add a postscript to this. Which is well, for to-day I really could not do it. By the 10th of April the air will have cooled; thenyouare sure to be coming, as the French election meetings begin then. We must keep the “settling weeks” of your great feast and fairtide here. Alas! in what a disquiet condition have I to stop writing to you.Youwill go on reading, but not

Your

Victor.

DEAR BROTHER.

Our Victor’s virtuous indignation will soon be over and past. The reason why he, and I too, now, have made a written confession of the cure of our disposition to censure our fellows, is, that we may be compelled to be excessively ashamed of ourselves if ever we chide for more than a minute, or hate for more than a moment. This all embracing love demands a sacrifice, which is made with greater hesitation than one would expect—the sacrifice of the pleasure of being satisfied with one’s self—which anger adds to the contemplation of other people’s faults (and satire to the contemplation of other people’s follies)—by way of a sweetening ingredient, and whose place is taken by a pure and unalloyed regret at the frequency with which the disease shifts its seat, and at the chronicity of the bleeding of the wounds and scars of helpless man.

However, for the present, what I would fain do is to steer our floating island, and its blessed twilight, close up to your view.

The sun was sinking towards the cloud Alps, and glowing white over France in the west as if it should shortly drop down on its plains as a gleaming shield of freedom, or fall into its billowy ocean as a wedding-ring between heaven and earth. The shades of evening were already overflowing the first two steps of the hill, and the darkening Rhine seemed to be passing an arm of night around the earth. We ascended our little steps as the sun descended his great ones, seeming, as we ascended, to rise from his burning grave with the face of a saint at the Resurrection. The hill lifted up our eyes and our souls. Remembering my shortcomings I took Victor’s hand, and said, “Ah! dear Victor! could it but come to pass that one could make a treaty of peace with all mankind, and with one’s own self—if one’s shattered heart could absorb and retain, from out the leaven of the hating and hated world, nothing but the sweet, mild, life-sap of love—as the oyster, amid mud and slime, takes nothing save bright pure water into his house. Ah! if one but knew that such an event were about to come to pass of a truth, an evening of happiness such as this would refresh and fill one’s thirsting breast, (allcrackedwith thirst and dryness)—would still the everlasting sigh.” Victor answered (not looking round, but keeping his glowing and beglowed face—which his loving heart suffused with a brighter tint—turned to the sun, now burning half sunk in the earth), “Perhaps,” he said, “that time may come; a time when we shall all be happy when a human being smiles—even should he not deserve it—when we shall speak kindly to every one—not by way of a mere sacrifice to the laws of polite society, but for very love—and there will be no difficulties, no complications, for hearts which will no longer have any inward annoyance to conceal. To-day the spring sun rests upon the world like the eye of a mother, and shines warm upon every heart, the wicked as well as the good. Yes, thou Eternal One, we here now give our hands and our hearts to thy whole creation, and no longer hate anything which thou hast made.” We were overpowered, and we embraced with tears, and no words, in the first darkening of the night. Over the sun’s burial place stood the zodiacal light, a red grave pyramid, flaming unmoved up into the silent deep of blue.

The City of God which hangs displayed on high above our earth, built on the arch of the Milky Way, appeared from out the endless distances with all its shining sun-lights.

We came down from the hill—each spot of earth was a hill just then; an unseen hand lifted our souls on high above the dark vapour-circle, and they looked down as if from alps, seeing nothing save gleaming peaks of other mountain ranges—for all the mean, all that was not the high, all graves, petty goals, and life careers of humanity, were veiled in heavy mist.

We lost each other amongst the paths, but in our hearts we were all together. We met again, but the silence in our souls was not broken, for each heart beat just as did all the others, and there was no difference, save the being alone, between a prayer and an embrace.

The scattered flames of our emotion had gradually merged into one glowing sun sphere, as the ancients believed that the fluttering after-midnight fires thickened ere morning into a sun.[74]

But I, a stranger, alas! in this paradise stood beneath the leafless branches, sad, and alone, beside the dark-blue Rhine stream where the stars were mirrored—it glided, with gently heaving wavelets, over the German soil, binding two great republics[75]together, like some heavenly band; and to me it seemed as though the thirst, the fire, of a breast no broader even than mine could be quenched with nothing less than the waters of this great river. Alas! we are all like this. In the transient clasp of our little grandeurs and blisses, we long to rest, anddie, upon somethinggreat. We long to cast ourselves into the depths of the heavens when we see them glitter and sparkle above us—or down upon the many-tinted earth, when her flowers and grasses wave—or into the endless river, flowing as if from out the past onwards into the future.

Our ladies and the children had gone away—departing in silence from this anchorage of hours so happy—I saw them as they floated over the wavelets, singing like swans, and dropping spring flowers into the ripples, that they might float back as souvenirs to us upon our island shore. The children were sleeping softly in their arms, between the glories of the heaven and of the earth, lulled by the arms, the songs, and the ripples.

When it was 12 o’clock, and the first morning of spring was come, Victor summoned us all to the hill, we knew not wherefore. All around and beneath us was the music of the rush of the Rhine, and through it, came gliding clear the bright spring-melody of the nightingale; the stars of the twelfth hour sank, drop by drop, into the darkened grave of the sun, and went paling out among the grey ashes of the western clouds. Suddenly a straight, beautiful flame shot up in the west, and music came palpitating through the darkness.

“Do you not think of your France,” said Victor, “the first hour of day is breaking forherthis 21st of March—the day when the six thousand primary assemblies form themselves, like stars, into one constellation, that one law may burst into being from out a million hearts.”

As I looked up to the sky, the Milky Way struck me as being the beam of the balance of hidden destiny, in whose weighing-pans (which are worlds) the broken, shattered, bleeding nations are weighed out for eternity. These destiny scales waver up and down as yet, because it was only a century or two ago that the weights were put into them.

We drew closer together, and (inspired by the night and the music) said, “Thou, poor country! may thy sun and thy day rise higher ere long, and cast away the blood-shirt of its morning red. May the higher genius wipe away the blood from thy hands, and the tears from thine eyes! Oh! may that genius build, support, and guard for ever the Grand Freedom Temple which is vaulted over thee like a second heaven: but also comfort every mother and every father, every child and every wife—and dry all eyes which weep for the beloved, crushed hearts which have bled and fallen, and now lie under that temple as basement stones.”

What I am going to say now can only be said to my brother, for nobody else would pardon it. Victor and I got into a boat, which was made fast with a rope to the bank, and which was drifting about with the current. We worked ourselves back to the bank, and then let the boat drift northwards again upon the ripples. In our souls (as in the world without us) sadness and exaltation were strangely blent: the music on the bank came and went—tones and stars rose and fell. The vault of heaven showed in the Rhine like some shattered bell, and up above us the dome of the temple wherein dwelleth Eternity lay in calm and motionless rest, with all its unchanging suns. From the eastward the spring breathed upon us, and the tree skeletons in the churchyard of the winter felt the presage of a near resurrection. Of a sudden Victor said—“It feels to me as though the river here were the stream of Time—our fluctuating life is carried along upon the waves of both towards the midnight.” Here my brother called to me from the island, “Brother, come into harbour and sleep; it is between one and two o’clock.”

This fraternal voice, coming to me athwart the music of the wavelets, suddenly brought a new world—perhaps the under-world—into my open soul. For a lightning flash of memory gleamed in a moment over all my dim being, reminding me that it was on this very night two-and-thirty years ago that I had made my entry upon this overclouded earth, shrouded with daily nights—and that this hour, between one and two o’clock, in which my brother was calling me into haven and to sleep, was the hour of my birth (which so often deprives man of both).

There come to us moments of twilight in which it seems as though day and night were in the act of dividing—as if we were in the very process of being created or annihilated; the stage of life and the spectators fly back out of view, our part is played out, we stand far off, in darkness and alone, but we have still got on our theatre dress, and we look at ourselves in it, and ask, “What is it that thou art,now, myme!” When we thus ask ourselves this, there is, beyond ourselves, nothing of great or of firm—everything has turned to an endless cloud of night (with rare and feeble gleams within it), which keeps falling lower and lower, and heavier with drops. Only high up above the cloud shines a resplendence—and that is God; and far beneath it a minute speck of light—and that is a human “Me”!

The heart is made of heavy earth, and therefore it cannot long endure such moments. I passed on to those sweeter seasons in which the full, tear-intoxicated heart neither can, nor will, do aught but simply weep. I had not the courage to drag my dear Victor down from the sublime region in which he was to my trifling pettinesses—but I asked him to remain beside me for a little time in this stillness which lay so silently upon the dark stream as it went flowing toward midnight and the south. Then I leant and pressed myself fondly to his side—and my little tears fell unseen into the great river—as though it had been the great stream of Time itself, into which all eyes drop their tears, and so many thousand hearts their blood-drops—for all which it neither swells nor flows the faster.

I thought as I gazed at the Rhine, “And thus, too, the dancing, billowy current of Life goes flowing on its course from out its source—hidden like the Nile’s. How little, as yet, have I done, or enjoyed! Our deserts, and our enjoyments, what petty things they are! Ourmetamorphosesare greater; our heads and our hearts go into the ground irrecognisable—altered a thousandfold—like the head of the man with the iron mask.[76]Ay! anddidwe but change! but we change so little in the earth, or even in ourselves. Every moment is to us the goal of all that have come before it. We take the seed of life for the harvest of it—the honey-dew on the ears for the sweet fruit—and we chew the flowers, like cattle! Ah! thou great GOD! what a night lieth around our sleep! wefallandrisewith closed eyelids, and fly about blind, and in a deep slumber.”[77]

My hand was hanging into the water, and the cool ripples buoyed it up and down. I thought, “How straight and immovable the little light within us burns, amid the blasts of Nature’s storm! Everything around me contends and clashes together with gigantic might. The stream seizes upon the islands and the cliffs—the night-wind comes upon the river, and stalks across it, thrusting its wavelets back, and wages its strife with the forests—even up there in the tranquil blue, worlds are working against worlds—the eternal, endless mights flowing and rushing, like rivers, one against another, they come together in whirl and roar—and on the face of that eternal whirl the little worlds float eddying round the sun-vortex; nay, those shimmering constellations themselves rising zenithwards with that grand and gentle peace and calm—what are they but mountain ranges of raging sun-volcanoes, stretching into infinity beyond the reach of mind to follow. And yet the human spirit lies at rest amid this storm, peaceful as a quiet moon above a windy night. In me, at this moment, all is gentle peace. I see my own little life-brook running by me, falling, with all the rest, into the river of Time. The clear-eyed soul looks through the raging blood-rivers which are flowing round it, and through the storms which darken and obscure it, and sees, beyond them all, quiet meadows, gentle, peaceful waters, moon-shimmer, and a lovely, beautiful, tranquil, placid, peaceful angel slowly wandering there.” Yes, yes; within my soul there was a quiet Good Friday—wind-still, rain-free, and mild—neither cold nor over-warm—though shrouded in a tender cloud.

But a clear consciousness of rest is speedily the undoing thereof. I saw, floating near the island, three hyacinths which Clotilda had dropped into the wavelets as she went away. “Now, in this, thy birth-hour,” I said to myself, “the ocean of eternity is washing thousands of little hearts on to the stony shore of this world; how will it be with them one day when their birthday feast comes round? And what are your countless brothers who, with you, came thirty-two years ago into this vapour-ball, thinking now? Perhaps some terrible sorrow makes them think with bitterness of their first hour. Perhaps they sleep now—as I have slept—and must again—only deeper, deeper.” And then all my younger and older friends, now sleeping that deeper sleep, fell heavy upon my broken breast.

“I know, I think,” my Victor said, “what you are reflecting on so silently, and regretting so mutely.” I answered “No,” and then I told him all.

Then we went quickly back, and I put my arms about my other brother, and my heart went out in longing towards thee. At length we took our departure from this building-place of a more peaceful system of doctrine for our hearts—this quiet island; and the lofty hill—grand pedestal of the vases of our joy-flowers, chancel of the great temple, light-house tower in our haven of rest—seemed to gaze long after us, the hanging garden of our souls lying upon it in starry light.

And as we came to the shore, Hesperus, as star of the morning (spark which springs and shines so near the sun), rose up above the morning mists, and earlier than even the Aurora of morning, proclaimed his sire’s approach. And as we thought that he shines, too, as the star of evening upon our nights here below, and yet adorns the east, and the after-midnight hours with the first of the glittering pearls of dew, each said to his gladsome heart, “And so shall all the evening stars of this our life shine upon us as stars of morning at a future day.”

Think thou, too, of morning, my brother, when thou art looking upon the even; and when a sun is setting for thee, turn thee about and thou mayest see a moon rising in the east. The moon gives warrant that the sun is shining still—as Hope says, there still is happiness. But come now soon to thy Victor—and to

Thy Brother,

J. P.

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