[33. DOG-POST-DAY.]
FIRST WHITSUNTIDE-DAY.
Police-Regulations of Pleasure.—Church.—The Evening.—The Blooming-Cavern.
Hardly had Victor waked from his sleep, though not from his dreams, when the low talking of all his thoughts, the Elysian stillness that pervaded his whole heart, told him that to-day his Sabbatical weeks came on. Without reproach or design of a misstep, without a sigh of his conscience, he went guilelessly to meet joy and love. The tenderer and more delicate a flower of joy is, so much the clearer must be the hand that plucks it, and only cattle pasture can bear filth; just as those who pick Imperial tea deny themselves beforehand all gross fare, that they may pluck the fragrant leaf unsoiled.—Victor had, out of doors, hardly dawn enough to see on his broad hour-watch of Bee-father Lind's the first hour of his Sabbath; but this watch, the step-marker on the so beautiful road of the Bee-father's life, and the morning-service of nature, which consists in stillness, fortified his purpose of prefixing his present life to the second life after death as a still, cool, starry spring-morning.
"By you I swear,"—said he, as, by degrees, more and more larks soared up singing out of their dew into the morning-hora,[[97]]—"I will even in joy remain composed for thirty whole years together, at least for three whole Whitsuntide days,—I will be a university-friend and house-friend, but not a Wertherish lover of enjoyment.—Does not man act as if his path of life must be a bridge of connected honey-combs, through which he has, moth-like, to chew his way, as if his hands were only sugar-tongs of pleasure?—I will again apply the sportive faculty as a bridle to my pleasures and my pains. The warm tears of melancholy, especially those of rapture, a sort of hot vapor which propels and decomposes more mightily than gunpowder and Papin's[[98]] machines, I will indeed shed, but cool them a little beforehand.—And if I do not get sight of Clotilda every forenoon, I will simply say, A man cannot be always in the third heaven, he must also sometimes stay over night in the first."—He has, perhaps, more reason than power; but, it is true, health of heart is equally removed from hysteric spasms and from phlegmatic torpor, and rapture borders more nearly on pain than on tranquillity. But no tranquillity or coolness is worth aught but that which is attained,—man must have at once the capacity and the mastery of passion. The freshets of the will resemble those of rivers, which for a time muddy all the springs; but take away the rivers, and the springs are gone too.—
The increasing dawn veiled one distant sun, after another; and when at last the near one had risen, or rather nature, then could Victor see and read and take my work (the well-known Mumien) out of his pocket. A book was for him, in the midst of free, stimulative nature, a pair of garden-shears to his wantonly up-shooting dreams and joys. This morning sparkling with a whole spring, this flashing on all brooks, this humming out of blossoms into blossoms,—this blue hanging sea, over which the sun sailed like a Bucentaur,[[99]] in order to throw on the bottom of that sea, the earth, the marriage-ring,—such a Present beside such a Future would even now at the third hour have deprived him of the strength, in obedience to his new constitution, to rule over his ecstasy, and to preserve steadily so much repose as is needed for a mezzotint between a rapturous and a dull day,—I say he would not have had that power without his biographer, I mean, if he had not had my book before him, in the second part of which he had still the schoolmaster Wutz[[100]] to read. But this learned work—I venture without self-conceit to flatter myself—set the proper limits to his rapture. For thus,—as he walked along reading,—(as others, e. g. Rousseau and I, read while eating, and take a bite now from the plate and now from the book,)—as he contemplated the life of the schoolmaster till a new valley or a new wood opened,—as he listened now to this printed chorister, and now to a living one before whose Whitsuntide songs he passed by: in this way he could keep his ideas, with all their rondos and knights'-jumps, in such a fine ball-room-order and church-discipline, that he was as happy as the Wutz he was reading of. Besides, I was still crying to him on the stretch out of my Mumien, to be discreet, and to give heed to my little schoolmaster as a file-leader in the arts of happiness, and to get the kernel out of every day, every hour. "Besides, I am a reprobate," said he, "if I do not do it; good God, is not then the very sense of existence,[[101]] and the first sweet breakfast after every waking, a standing enjoyment?"—He reflected, to be sure, that culture gives us spectacles, and takes away in return the papillæ of the tongue, and compensates to us for our pleasures by the better definitions of them (just as the silk-worm, as caterpillar, has taste, but no eyes, and, as butterfly, has eyes without taste), he confessed to himself, indeed, that he had too much understanding to have so much contentment as the Auenthal schoolman Wutz, and that he philosophized too deeply besides; but he also insisted upon this: that "a higher wisdom must nevertheless (because otherwise the all-wise would be necessarily the all-unhappy) find a way again out of the sweltry parterre of the lecture-room into a parterre of flowers. Lofty men produce, like mountains, the sweetest honey." ...
Although, even while he was in the last village, the suburbs as it were of Maienthal, he heard the last tolling, still he was not provoked at the belated arrival. Nay, to show himself that he was the philosopher Socrates, he passed on with a diligent increase of slowness, and did not, like the Athenian, make a libation of the cup of joy, but did not, in fact, yet fill it up. "Float on," he said to a little cloud formed of collected lily-pollen, "and be wafted before me in advance over the good hearts, thou pillar of cloud at the entrance of the promised land!—And may thy little shadow silhouette for them the more fixed one, which follows more lazily, and which is absorbed later by the blue of heaven!"—And ere the winding footpath placed him before the flower-curtained gate of the valley, wherein stood the beloved cradle and nursery-garden of his fair three-days future, he was arrested by a closed thistle, around whose sealed honey-cups a white butterfly was drawing his third parallel,—and the mosaic thistles on Le Baut's floor started into life before him, and showed him the stings of the past; then he felt it incomprehensible how he had been able to endure his sorrows, and easier to bear the heaven of joy....
He took out Lind's watch, in order to know the birth-hour of his honeymoon or honey-week,—precisely at 11 o'clock he came out before the neat village, before the green-house of his heaven, before the colony of his hope, before Eden.... Ah, the murmuring little village buried in foliage seemed to throw all its blooming twigs, like arms, around, and knit himself to itself; it was green and white and red,—not painted, but overspread with leaves and blossoms. And when, as the ringing died away,—in order avariciously to hoard up for himself the embrace of his Emanuel, and in order to come upon the Maienthal church music with a heart opened by Nature,—he stole into the long, clean village, and ran Friendship's toll for a few minutes at Emanuel's house, it seemed to him as if his peacefully glad heart in the still lanes rocked with the birds on the cherry-twigs that latticed the window-panes, and hovered with the bees in the cherry blossoms. "Come right in," all seemed to say, "thou good man, we are all happy, and thou shalt be so too."—He approached the shining church, whose dazzling stucco flung by contrast upon the blue of the sky a sublime darkness, and his beating heart trembled blissfully with the waves of the organ within, and with the rustling birch-tree fixed in the ground before the church-door, and with the dry May-pole, in the middle of the village, bowed by the morning-wind....
"But," says my reader, "could then his eye so long deny itself the fairer prospects, and his heart the more beloved beauty, and, instead of the Abbey, seek out only the church?"—Oh, he looked after that the very first thing of all, and his eye ran trembling around all the windows of his sun-temple; but as he found all of them open and empty, and all the curtains drawn up, he guessed that its fair conclave of sisters, and among them the conclave-sister of his heart, were there where he sought—and found them,—in the temple. He went up unheard, during the tramping down of the church-goers, into the front-stall of the nobility, which from without appeared empty, that flower-stand of the convent-nuns. There was nothing there but dropped birch-leaves; for the body of nuns and the Abbess and Clotilda stood—below in the Church, and encircled the altar with a choir of singing angels, and took the sacrament there.—With a thrill of joy he beheld the queen of his heaven, the so dearly loved and undeserved, the shining angel, melting her vestment of earthly snow with heavenly warmth to tears, in order soon to become invisible.—His spirit bowed itself as she knelt: "Drink heaven's peace," he said, "out of the sacred chalice of the great man, among whose thoughts was never a cloud nor a sigh,—and may the thought which thou now contemplatest with such steadfast devotion be destined to become more and more luminous and immovable, like a sun, and always to throw a warm evening-light over the weary soul!"—This angel in mourning-attire called forth in his inner being by an awakening of the dead all the virtues of his life and all its faults, and gave those a heaven and these a hell; he was, therefore, now too holy to disturb a saint by making his appearance, even supposing her tranquil eye, absorbed in pious emotions, which did not so much as fall on the nearer devout beauties to the height of the waist, had been able to lift itself to him. The birch at the first window of the loft he kept before him as a leafy fan;—this green veil playing on his cheeks covered his attentiveness and his tears of joy from the whole church. The place where he was so happy seemed, to judge from an inscription on the glass, to have been once the usual stand of Clotilda; for Giulia's was near by, as I know for certain, because on the stall-window a G and C, enclosed by a wreath, had been cut in with the words by Giulia: "Thus are we united by the flowers of life and the circle of eternity." ...