CHAPTER XIV.
FROM SIBYLLINE BOOKS.
On the way Manna said:—
"Do you know that I had an aversion for you, when I came here?"
"Yes indeed, I knew it."
"And why didn't you try to convert me from it?"
Eric was silent, and Manna asked him once more:—
"Is it then a matter of so much indifference to you what people think of you?"
"No, but I am a servant of your house, and have no right to seek for any special consideration in your sight."
"You are very proud."
"I do not deny it."
"Don't you know that pride is a fault?"
"To be sure, when one makes pretensions and detracts from the worth of others. But I keep my pride for myself alone, or rather, I say with St. Simon:—'If I consider myself I feel dejected, if I consider my fellow-men I feel proud.'"
"You are too: clever for me," said Manna, banteringly.
"I don't like to hear you say so, for those are only empty words. No man is too clever for another, if each one says to himself: 'I have something in my own way too. You should not make use of such expressions. My respect for you rests upon the very fact that I never before heard from you an empty phrase. What you say is not always logically true, but it is true for you."
"I thank you." Said Manna quickly, resting the tips of her fingers upon his hand; and, as if recollecting herself, she added hastily once more:—
"I thank you."
"I know not why it is; I have been delivered from an oppressive melancholy, and I feel as if it was a whole year since I was so sad. We have the good fortune to understand each other in the highest, thoughts, and thought in the highest strain admits no measurement of time."
"Ah yes," rejoined Manna, "in the very midst of all my sorrows the thought has been present to me all day: 'Something is coming that will give you joy.' Now I know what it was. You were the friend and instructor of Roland; take me instead of him; be my friend and instructor. Will you?"
She stretched out her hand to him, and both gazed at each other with a look of joy.
"Ah, there sits your mother," cried Manna all at once; with a swift step she hastened to the Professorin, and kissed her passionately.
The Professorin was astonished to see her. Is this the same maiden at whose bedside she had sat the evening before, whose chilled hands she had warmed, to whom she had spoken the words of encouragement? Youth is an everlasting riddle.
Manna held her hand to her eyes for some time, and as she opened them once more, she said:—
"Ah, if I only were the bird up there in the air!"
The mother made no answer, and Manna continued:—
"I see everything to-day for the first time; there is the Rhine, there are the mountains, there the houses, there the men; a bird of passage,—yes, one that has been hatched in Asia.—is coming towards us, towards you. I am really so sorrowful, so sad; and still there is something within me singing lustily and singing always; 'Thou art merry, do not seek to be otherwise.' Ah, mother, it is dreadfully sinful to be as I am."
"No, my child, you are still a child, and a child, they say, has smiles and tears in the same bag. Rejoice that you are so young; perhaps something of childhood has been repressed in you, and now it is coming out. No one can say when, and no one can say where. We take things too hard altogether; things are not quite so frightful as we women imagine. I am quite cheerful since the Doctor was here. We may become accustomed to look at everything in a gloomy way; then it is well if some one comes and says: 'But just see the world is neither so wicked not so good as we persuade ourselves it! is, and things run on either well or ill, and not in their logical course.' My blessed husband said that many and many a time."
Manna seemed not to have heard what the Mother said; she exclaimed in a merry tone:—
"At this moment we are all ennobled, and still I do not perceive anything of the nobility in me, and yet one ought to be able to perceive something."
There was an unusually light-hearted tone in everything she said, and she continued:—
"Tell me now, how did you feel on the day you laid aside your nobility?"
"No trace of sorrow; it only pained me when my lady friends assured me strongly that they would always remain the same to me; and in this very assurance lay the conviction that it was otherwise; and they were all the time telling me how they had loved me, as if I were no longer living, and indeed to many I was already dead, for to them a human being that has lost the rank of noble, is, as it were, sunk into the realm of the departed spirits."
The Mother and Manna sat trustfully beside each other; for a time every sorrow was forgotten, every care, every anxiety.
Eric had left the Mother and Manna alone; he was standing near a rose-bush and observing how the rose leaves were falling off, so softly, so quietly, as if plucked by a spirit-hand. He gazed at the leaves on the ground, he knew not his thoughts. Roland, Manna, his mother, the terrible past of Sonnenkamp, all was confusion in his mind; he believed that he no longer saw the world as it is. If he only had some one to call him to himself. He felt how his cheeks were glowing, and how he was trembling.
You love and are beloved by this maiden, by the daughter of this man.
What is a daughter?
Every one exists for himself alone.
On the ground floor was his father's library; the windows were open; he went in.
It entered into his mind that there must be something in the manuscripts left by his father that would give him consolation and support; perhaps the spirit of his father would speak to his joyful and sorrowful perplexity. He began to search amongst the papers; everything seemed to be ready for his hand that was not wanted. He untied a bundle of pieces, the superscription of which bore the title, "Sibylline Books;" he took up a leaf.
"That's the thing!" he exclaimed.
He was standing with his back leaned against the open window; he heard his mother advising Manna to adhere right steadfastly and faithfully to her religious convictions. There were, it is true, forms and observances in it which she did not recognize as her own, but there was also in it the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, which alone gives us strength to bear misfortune and sustain joy.
"Mother," he called out, suddenly turning round.
The women started.
"Mother, I bring you something that carries on your idea."
He went out, showed them his father's writing, and said that he would read to them.
"Ah yes," exclaimed Manna; "it is good and kind of you to bring your father here; how I would have liked to know him. Do you not believe that he is now looking down upon us?"
Eric looked at his mother; he did not know what answer to give, and the Mother said:—
"According to the ordinary conception of the word 'looking,' we cannot conceive its being done without eyes. We have no conception how a spirit exists, but there is not a day nor an hour that I do not live in communion with my departed husband; he has come with me here, he will remain with me wherever I go, till my last breath. But let me see—what is it, Eric?"
"It has an odd title," answered the latter; "it treats of these things, which I cannot explain, and which perhaps no one can explain."
"Read, I beg of you," entreated Manna.
Eric began to read:—
"Two things there are which stand firm, while the heart of man is kept vacillating between defiance and despondency, haughtiness and faint-heartedness; they are nature and the ideal within us. The church is also a strong-hold of the ideal, firm and secure; although for me and many like me, it is not the only one.
"You say, nature does not help us. What help is she to me, when the crushing conviction of imperfection, of perdition, of guilt comes upon me and takes me captive? Well, nature does not speak; she simply permits herself to be explained, understood; she gives back the echo of what we call out to her. The church, on the contrary, speaks to us in our individual griefs, she takes us up into the universal; that is the great lesson of the expiatory suffering. We lay our grief aside when we think of the great grief which the greatest of hearts took unto itself.
"And what is the third? you ask.
"A third is, nature and the ideal combined, which together elevate and sustain us.
"What is the third? We call it art, we can also call it love, heroism. In this view of mine, all philosophy also belongs to art. What the genius of a man has created and fashioned out of himself as the evidence of his existence, insight, and will, appears in art as visible forms, looks down upon us in marble and in color, makes itself heard by us in word and in melody, allows us to be conscious and to feel sure that our fractional, half-expressed being has fullness and completion.
"These are the images, these are the deeds of genius, wrought in consecrated moments.
"Art does not console sorrow, it does not heal directly, but it brings before the eyes, it sounds in the ear, saying, 'Attend! there is a life, pure and perfect, that we carry within us. Art is an image of strength, of joy, of content, of courage; it does not reach out its hand to us, it simply enables us to compose ourselves in the knowledge, in the consciousness, in the perception of an existence reposing in itself outside of us; this we comprehend.'"
Eric interrupted himself, saying:—
"Here the remark is made: 'I knew a woman once, who would neither make nor listen to music during her period of mourning, showing what art was to her.'"
A pause followed.
Eric continued his reading:—
"In the hours of deepest tribulation I have found consolation, peace, restoration, solely in wandering among ancient works of art; others may derive the same benefit from music that I have from viewing these forms of antiquity. It was not the thought of the grand world which had here become bronze and marble; it was not the remembrance of the soul speaking out of these forms that held me fast, but something far different from either. Behold here, they seemed to say to me, a blissful repose, which has nothing in common with thee, and yet is with thee. A breath of the Eternal was wafted over me, a peaceful rest flowed into my troubled heart, filled my gaze, and calmed my emotions. In listening to music I could always dwell dreamily upon my own life and thought, but never here.
"If I were only able to unfold whither this led me, how I wandered in the infinite, and then how I went abroad into the tumultuous whirl of life, feeling that I was attended by these steadfast, peaceful, godlike forms; that I was-—-"
Eric broke off abruptly.
Manna begged:—
"Do read on."
"There is nothing further. My beloved father, alas! left only fragments behind him."
"This is no fragment, it is complete and perfect. No man could say or write anything further," said Manna; "nothing else is needed but to allow it to have its inward work. Ah, I have one request—give me the sheet."
Eric looked towards his mother, who said that she had never yet parted with a single line of her husband's.
"But you, my child," she said, "you shall have it. Eric shall copy it for us so that we may not lose it."
She gave the manuscript to Manna, who pressed it to her heaving breast.
"Oh, I never imagined," she cried, "that there was such a world in the world."
Every drop of blood seemed to have retreated from her face; she begged the Mother to be allowed to go into the house; she would like to be alone, she was so weary.
The Mother accompanied her. Manna reclined upon the sofa, and the curtains were drawn; she fell asleep with the manuscript in her hand.
The Mother and Eric sat together, and Eric determined to make use of this first opportunity, when there was no immediate duty binding him, to publish the incomplete and fragmentary writings left by his father, as there would be found many to make them into a whole within their own souls.
He now felt all at once free and full of life; now there was something for him to do; and he could fulfil at the same time a pious, filial duty, and his duty as a man. He could make essential additions from his own knowledge, and from his father's verbal statements.
He went back to the library, and was deeply engaged in the writings, when Manna entered.
"You here?" she said. "I wanted to take one look at the outside of all the books on which your father's eye has rested. I must now go home, but I have to day received a great deal more than I can tell."
"May I accompany you?"
Manna assented.
They went together across the meadow to the Villa.