Ottomar's Letter.
When we have read Ottomar's letter, we will take our places at Gustavus's new theatre and look at him. In the following letter a spirit reigns and riots, which, like an Alp, oppresses and often possesses all men of the higher and nobler quality, and which--much as it outweighs even Holland spirits--a higher spirit only can overpower and crowd out. Many men live in the Perigee, some in the Apogee, few in the Perihelion.--Fenk so often yearned for his Ottomar, especially since his complete silence of some years' standing, and spoke of him so often to Gustavus, that it was well the address of the letter was from a strange hand and to Doctor Zoppo in Pavia: else the Doctor had sinned at once against the first line of the letter.
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"Name not my name, oh eternal friend, to the bearer: I must do it. On the last year of my life there lies a great black seal; break it not, count the past as the future--I make it for thee the present, only not just yet--and if I should die I would appear before and tell thee my last mystery of earth.
"I write to thee, simply that thou mayst know that I am living and am coming in autumn. My thirst for traveling is quenched with Alpine ice and sea-water; I repair home now to my resting-place, and if there, at my street-door, a tempting voice of secret desire should call me again to cross the mountains, I should say to myself: the same panting and pining human heart gazes down into the waters of the Gaudiana and the Volga, which sighs in thee beside the Rhine stream, and that which climbs the Alps and Caucasus, is what thou art, and turns a longing eye over toward thy street-door.[[62]] But if I sit here, and every morning go to the close-stool, and am glad to be hungry, and afterward that my appetite is satisfied, and if I daily put on and pull out breeches and hair pins, ah! what in the end does all amount to? What was it then I wanted, when in my childhood I sat upon the stone in my gateway, and gazed yearningly in the direction of the long road and thought how it ran on and on, shot over the mountains, still onward and onward ... and at last?... Ah, all roads lead to nothing, and where they break off, there stands another looking longingly back over the hills to where we sit. What was it then I would have, when my little eye swam along with the waves of the Rhine, that it might waft me to a promised land, whither all streams, I thought, were flowing, not knowing, meanwhile, that the same river, which bore in its bosom many a heavy heart, murmured along by many a crushed form, which it alone could release from its anguish, that then, like man, it frittered and crumbled itself away, and filtered itself at last into Holland sands?--Orient land! morning land! toward thy fields also did my soul once lean as trees do toward the East:--'Ah! how must it be there, where the sun rises!' I thought; and when I traveled with my mother to Poland, and at last into the land lying toward morning, and came among its nobles, Jews and slaves--.... But there is no other sunny land of the morning to be found on this optical ball, than that one which all our steps can neither remove nor reach. Ah, ye joys of earth, none of you can do more than satisfy the breast with sighs and the eye with water, and into the poor heart, which opens under your heaven, ye only pour one more wave of blood! And yet these two or three wretched pleasures lame us as poisonous flowers do children who play with them, in arm and limb. Only let there be no music, that mocker of our wishes; do not, at her call, all the fibres of my heart fly asunder and stretch themselves out like so many sucking polypus's-arms and tremble with longing and seek to embrace--whom? what?... An unseen something waiting in other worlds. I often think, perhaps it is, after all, nothing; perhaps, after death, all goes on just as now, and thy longings will reach forward out of one heaven toward another[[63]]--and then I crush under this fantastic nonsense the strings of my harpsichord, as if I would bring a fountain out of them, as if it were not enough that the pressure of this yearning untunes and snaps the thin strings of my inner musical system.
"In Rome there lived opposite the Church of St. Adrian a painter, who during a rain always placed himself under the spouts, and laughed till he was crazy, and who often said to me: 'There is no dog's death, but only a dog's life.' Fenk! take at least what man is or does: so very, very little! What power, then, is wholly developed in us, or in harmony with the other powers? Is it not a piece of good fortune, if so much as one faculty gets drawn in like a branch into the hot-house of a lecture-room or library and is forced by partial warmth to bloom, while the whole tree stands outside in the snow with hard black twigs? Heaven snows two or three flakes together to make one inner snow-man, which we call our education; the earth melts or muddies a quarter of it, the tepid wind loosens the snow man's head off--that is our cultured inner man, such an abominable patch-work in all our knowings and willings! From individuals to universal humanity I have no desire to pass; I care not to think, how a century is ploughed and harrowed under to manure the next--how nothing will round itself to anything--how the eternal writing in books and stratifying of the Scibile has no aim, no end, and all dig and drive in opposite directions! What does man do? Even less than he knows and becomes. Tell me, what then does thy penetration, thy heart, thy swiftness effect before the princely portrait over the President's chair, or in fact before an emasculated reigning face? The crooked twigs pressed back into each other are squeezed against the window of the winter-house, the Regent causes their fruit to pass by his dish in the compotière, the blue sky is denied them, the cleverest thing at last is, that they rot! What, then, do the noblest faculties avail in thee, when weeks and months glide away, which do not use, do not call out, do not exercise them? When I have thus contemplated, as I often do, the impossibility, in all our monarchical offices, of being a whole, a really active, a universally useful man--even the monarch cannot, with those innumerable black subaltern claws and hands which he must first fasten to his own hands as fingers or pincers, do anything completely good--as often as I have contemplated this, I have wished I were hanged with my robbers, but were first their captain, and with them ran down the old constitution!... Beloved Fenk! Thy heart no one can tear out of my breast, it propels my best blood and never canst thou misunderstand me, let me be as unknowable as I will! But, oh friend, the times are coming on, when for thee this misunderstanding may after all grow easier!
"Veiled Genius of our overshadowed globe! ah, had I only been something, had the globe of my brain and had my heart, like Luther's, only earned by some lasting and far-rooting deed the blood which reddens and feeds them; then would my hungry pride become satisfied lowliness, four humble walls would be large enough for me, I should no longer sigh for anything great except death, and first for the autumn of life and age, in which man, when the birds of youth are dumb, when over the earth lies haze and flying gossamer-summer, when the heavens hang bright, but not blazing, over all, lays himself down to sleep upon the withered leaves.----Farewell, my friend, upon an earth where one can no further do any good except to lie down in it; next autumn we shall be with one another!"
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To this letter, which takes possession of my whole soul and renews my errors as well as my wishes, I can add nothing more, than that to-day the first man in this history has been buried on a mountain. When, after four or five sections, I come to speak of his evening-euthanasy, then will the outlines of his form already have grown paler and fainter, as well in the coffin as in the hearts of his friends!