The Campaner Thal, and Other Writings

by Jean Paul

It marks a strange perversity in human nature, that we are wont to offer nothing but images of terror--no stars of cheering light--to those who lie imprisoned in the darkness of a sick-bed, when the glitter of the dew of life is waxing gray and dim before them. It is indeed hard that lamentations and emotions are frequently vented upon the dying, which would be withheld from the living in all their vigor; as if the sick patient was to console those in health. There stands no spirit in the closeness of a sick-chamber to awaken a cheering smile on that nerveless, colorless countenance; but only confessors, lawyers, and doctors, who order everything, and relatives who lament at everything. There stands no lofty spirit, elevated above the circumstance of sorrow, to conduct the prostrate soul of the sufferer, thirsty for the refreshment of joy, back to the old springtide waters of pious recollection; and so to mingle these with the last ecstasies of life, as to give the dying man a foreboding of his transition to another state. On the contrary, the death-bed is narrowed into a coffin without a lid. The value of life is enhanced to the departing one by lies which promise cure, or words which proffer consolation; the bier is represented as a scaffold, the harsh discord of life is trumpeted into the ears which survive long after the eyes are dead, instead of letting life ebb away like an echo in sounds ever deeper, though fainter. Nevertheless, man has this of good in him, that he recalls the slightest joy which he has shared with a dying person, far rather than a thousand greater pleasures given to a person in health; perhaps because, in the latter case, we hope to repeat and redouble our attentions,--so little do mortals reflect that every pleasure they give or they receive may be the last.

Our exit from life would therefore be greatly more painful than our entrance into it, were it not that our good mother Nature had previously mitigated its sufferings, by gently bearing her children from one world into another when they are already heavy with sleep. For in the hour before the last she allows a breastplate of indifference toward the survivors to freeze about the heart of the lamented one; and in the hour immediately preceding dissolution (as we learn from those who have recovered from apparent death, and from the demeanor of many dying persons), the brain is, as it were, inundated and watered by faint eddies of bliss, comparable to nothing upon earth better than to the ineffable sensations felt by a patient under magnetic treatment.

We can by no means know how high these sensations of dying may reach, as we have accounts of them from none but those in whom the process has been interrupted; nor can we ascertain whether it is not these ecstatical transports which exhaust life more than the convulsions of pain, and which loosen the tie of this terrestrial state in some unknown heaven.

The history of the dying is a serious and prodigious history, but on earth its leaves will never be unrolled.

In the little village of Heim, Gottreich Hartmann resided with his old father, who was a curate; and although the old man had wellnigh outlived all those whom he had loved, he was made happy by his son. Gottreich discharged his duties for him in the parish, not so much in aid of his parent's unflinching vigor, as to satisfy his own energy, and to give his father the exquisite gratification of being edified by his child and companion.

In Gottreich there thrilled a spirit of true poetry; he was not, like the greater number of poetical young men, a bulbous plant, which, when it has sent forth its own flower, fattens its unseemly fruit underground; but he was a tree which crowned its variegated blossoms with sweet and beautiful fruits; and these buds were as yet coiled up from the warmth of the earliest springtide of a poet's life.

His father had had in his youth a poet's ardor of like intensity, but it was not favored by the times; for in the last century many a spirit which might have soared was engaged to the pulpit or the law-court, because the old-fashioned middle classes were convinced that their offspring would find richer pasture on the meadow and in the valley than on the peaks of the mountain of the Muses.

Nevertheless, the repressed spirit of a poet, when it cannot exhale itself in creation, recoils but the more closely into the depths of his heart. His unuttered feelings speak in his motions as with a voice, and his actions express his imagery, and in this manner the poet may live as long as the man; just as the short-lived butterfly may last out the long, hard winter in its chrysalis state, if it has not burst its prison in the preceding summer.

Such had been the life of the elder Hartmann; and yet more beautiful was it, because the virginal soul of the poet lives in the offices of religion, as in a nun's cell; and the twin sisters Piety and Poetry are wont to dwell together and stand by one another.

How beautiful and how pure is the position of God's ministers! All that is good dwells around them,--religion, poetry, and the life of a shepherd of souls; whilst other professions oft serve only to choke up this goodly neighborhood. Son and father seemed to live in one another, and on the site of filial and paternal love there arose the structure of a rare and singular friendship. Gottreich not only cheered his father by the new birth of his lost poet's youth, but by the still more beautiful similarity of their faith. In days gone by, a minister who sent his son to the public theological schools might expect him to return the sworn antagonist of all that he had himself daily prayed to at the altar in the discharge of his office: the son returned to his father's roof as a missionary sent to convert the heathen, or as an antichrist. There may have been sorrows of a father, which, though all unspoken, were deeper than a mother's sorrows. But times are perhaps better now.