It was now past three. In thirty-eight minutes, spring, that pre-heaven upon earth—that second paradise—would make her grand processional progress over the ruins of the first. 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 an attendrissement—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 his eyes, at all events, might be higher and freer). “Alas! is any one 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 it is cold, 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 they have to give them, and the less they do give 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 as time among the cures for hate, grief, love, &c.; our impulses are to forget to conquer, or to grow tired of 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 a very few pedantic tints in his style of painting), “feelings of love to our fellow men[[70]] are useless without reasons.” “So are reasons without feelings,” said Paul.
“Consequently,” continued the Professor (for I could not manage to get my Piqueur brought to bear anyhow, but had to keep him idly in reserve), “the two have to be combined like genius and criticism—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 the wrong done by our enemies? The right is 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 a moral sort.”
“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 of immorality of the enemy, although hatred of 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, in kind—not in degree; those incapable of 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 were utterly non-moral beings, it would follow that they could never, at any period, begin to become moral 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 there must be 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 them some beginnings 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 out your light.”
“Now,” he went on, “since hatred only concerns itself with moral defects, how strange it is that we never hate ourselves, even for the gravest moral defects.”