"The truest friend,
"Cl."
O thou good soul!—
How hard, after this, sounds the singular leaf of his Lordship, which seems to be no letter, but a cold apology for his future conduct. "Life is a petty; empty game. If my many years have not refuted me, then a refutation by my few remaining ones is neither necessary nor possible. A single unhappy man outweighs all drunken ones. For us insignificant things, insignificant things are good enough; for sleepers, dreams. Therefore, neither in us nor out of us is there anything worthy of wonder. The sun near to is a ball of earth; an earthly globe is merely the more frequent repetition of an earthly clod.—What is not sublime in itself and for itself can no more be made so by repetition than the flea by the microscope; at most, smaller. Why should the tempest be sublimer than an electric experiment, a rainbow greater than a soap-bubble? If I resolve a great Swiss landscape into its constituent parts, I get fir-needles, icicles, grasses, drops, and gravel.—Time resolves itself into moments, peoples into individuals, genius into thoughts, immensity into points; there is nothing great.—A trigonometrical proposition, often thought over, becomes a tautological one; an oft-read conceit, stale; an old truth, indifferent.—Again I assert, what becomes great by steps remains little. If the poetic power, which paints either images or passions, is not already admirable in the invention of the most commonplace image, then it is nowhere so. Every one can, like the poet, put himself into the place of another, at least in some degree.—I hate inspiration, because it is raised as well by liquors as by fancies, and because, during and after it, one is most inclined to intolerance and sensual pleasure.—The greatness of a sublime deed consists not in the execution, which amounts to mere corporeal pitiablenesses, going and staying; not in the simple resolve, because the opposite one, e. g., that of murdering, requires just as much energy as that of dying; not in its rarity, because we all are conscious in ourselves of the same capacity for the act, but have not the motive;—not in any of these, but in our boasting.—We hold our very last error for truth, and only the last but one as none at all; our today as holy, and every future moment as the crown and heaven of its predecessors. In old age, after so many labors, after so many appeasings, the spirit has the same thirst, the same torment. As in a higher eye everything is diminished, a spirit or a world, in order to be great, should be so even before a so-called Divine eye; but then the one or the other would have to be greater than God, for one never admires his own image.—In my youth, I composed a tragedy, and put all the above principles into the mouth of my hero, and made him, shortly before he plunged the dagger into his own heart, add these further words: But perhaps death is sublime; for I do not comprehend it. And so, then, will I lead aside the columns of blood which leap up out of the heart and so sportively keep up the human head and the human individuality at such an elevation, as a fountain bears the hollow ball balanced on its flickering stream,—this fountain will I draw off with the dagger, so that the I may be precipitated.—I shuddered at this character at the time; but afterward, I reflected upon it, and it became my own!"
* * * * *
Frightful man! Thy blood-stream and the I on the top of it have perhaps already collapsed, or will soon fall through.—And precisely this dark presentiment is also in the hearts of Victor and Clotilda—O that thou, thou other bowed man, whom I dare not name here before the public, mightest guess that I mean thee, that thou, just as well as the unhappy Lord, art eating away thy own self like blood-sucking corpses, and that, in the starry night of life, thou still bearest a deadly mist of thine own around thee! O the spectacle of a magnanimous heart, which merely through ideas makes itself helpless, and which lies inaccessible and benumbed in its arbor of philosophical poison-trees, often dyes our days black!—Believe, not that his Lordship is anywhere right! How can he find anything to be small, without holding it over against something great? Without reverence there could be no contempt; without the feeling of disinterestedness, no perception of selfishness; without greatness, no littleness. When thou canst explain the tears of the adagio by the vibration of the strings, or by the blood-globules and threefold skins of a beautiful face thy regard for the same; then and as well canst thou think to justify thy rapture for the spiritual in Nature by means of its corporeal filaments, which are nothing but the flute-pieces and flat and sharp valves of the unplayed harmony. The sublime resides only in thoughts, whether those of the Eternal One, who expresses them by letters made of worlds, or those of man, who reads them and spells them out!—
I postpone the refutation of his Lordship to another book, although this, too, is a refutation.—
[42. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Self-Sacrifice.—Farewell Addresses to the Earth.—Memento Mori.—Walk.—Heart of Wax.