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 my theories stand 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; then you are 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. You will go on reading, but not
Your
Victor.
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, (all cracked with 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.