"And here"--(romance manufacturers say)--"here ensued a scene, which the reader may imagine, but which I cannot describe." This appears to me too stupid. Nor can I describe it, nevertheless. Have then authors so little honesty, that, when it comes to a scene for which the readers have been long turning over the leaves ahead, e. g., a death, for which all, parents and children, have been waiting and watching as for a feudal vacancy or a hanging-day, they should then jump up from their chairs and say: do that yourselves? It is just as if Schikaneder's[[76]] troop, before the most heart-rending scenes of Lear, should come to the foot-lights and beseech the audience to imagine Lear's countenance, for they on their part could not imitate it. Surely what the reader can imagine, the author can also--in the full pulse of all his powers--and still more easily imagine and consequently depict; moreover the reader's fancy, into whose spokes the previous scenes have once caught and set them in motion, will easily be impelled to the swiftest by my description of the last scene--only not by the miserable one, that it is not to be described.
As to myself, on the contrary, one may be assured that I make myself equal to all emergencies. I have therefore negotiated already with my publisher at the Easter fair, to have ready several pounds extra of dashes, a pound of interrogation and exclamation points, for the setting up of the most intense scenes, because I should not in the least worry myself in this case about my apoplectic head.
THIRTY-FOURTH, OR FIRST ADVENT, SECTION.
Ottomar.--Church.--Organ.
The next morning there was an alarm in the palace about a matter which Dr. Fenk learned a week later in a letter from--Ottomar.
Never have I begun a section or a Sunday so sadly as to-day; my declining body and the following letter to Fenk hang on me like a mourning hat-band. I could wish I did not understand the letter.--Ah in that case never would there have entered into my life a never-to-be-forgotten November hour, which, after so many others have passed away from me, still stands before me and gazes upon me forevermore. Gloomy hour! thou stretchest out thy shadow over whole years! Thou so picturest thyself before me, that I cannot see the phosphorescing nimbus of the earth glimmer and smoke behind thee! The eighty years of man look in thy shadow like the movement of the second-hand--ah take not so much away from me!... Ottomar had this same hour after his burial and describes it to the Doctor thus:
"I have since that been buried alive. I have talked with death and he has assured me, there is nothing else than he. When I was out of my coffin, he laid in the whole earth in my place and my little mite of joy on the top of it.... Ah, good Fenk! how am I altered! since that moment all hours have stretched on before me like empty graves, that are to catch me or my friends! I heard who it was that pressed my hand once more in the coffin.... Come right soon, dear man!
"Hast thou forgotten how I always dreaded a living burial? In the midst of going to sleep I often started up, because it occurred to me I might sink into a swoon and so be buried and then the lid of the coffin would hold down my upward-struggling arms. On journeys I always threatened, when I fell sick, that if they laid me away within eight days I would appear to them and haunt them as a ghost. This fear was my fortune; else had my coffin killed me.
"Weeks ago my old malady returned upon me: the burning fever. I hastened with it to my chamber and my first word to my housekeeper--as I could not have thee--was, so soon as I was lifeless to inter me, because the air of the vault more easily awakens one, but not to fasten either coffin or tomb--besides, the solitary church in the park stands always open. I also told him in any case to let my dog who never leaves me, go with me. That very night the fever came to its crisis; but my memory breaks off at the blood-letting. All I further remember is that I shuddered a little as I saw the blood curl round my arm and that I thought: 'That is the human blood, which we hold so sacred, which cements the card-house and frame-work of our personality, and in which the invisible wheels of life and our impulses move.' This blood sprinkled after that over all the fancies of my feverish nights; the immersed universe came up out of it blood-red and all human beings together seemed to me to shed a stream of blood upon a long shore, which leaped out over the earth down into a roaring deep--thoughts, odious thoughts passed along grinning before me, such as no healthy man knows, none can represent, none can endure and which bark only at souls prostrate with sickness. Were there no Creator, I must needs have quaked before the hidden chords of agony which are stretched in man and at which a malignant being might storm. But no! thou all gracious Being! Thou holdest thy hand upon our capacity for anguish and dissolvest the earthly heart over which these chords are stretched, when they tremble too violently!...
"The conflict of my nature passed over at last into a trance, out of which so many awake only to die under the ground. In that state I was carried to the solitary church. The Prince and my dog were with me there; but the former, only, went away again. I lay, it may have been half the night, before life thrilled through me. My first thought almost rent my soul asunder. By chance the dog stepped on my face; suddenly there came in upon me a sense of suffocation as if a giant hand bent my breast, and a coffin lid seemed to stand like an upheaved wheel above me.... The very description is painful, because the possibility of recovery distresses me.... I rose out of the hexagonal brooding-cell of the next life; death lay stretched far out before me with his thousand limbs, heads and bones. I seemed to myself to be standing in a chaotic abyss and far above me the earth moved on with its living men. Life and death alike disgusted me. Upon what lay near me, even on my mother, I looked coldly and rigidly as the eye of death, when he looks a life to atoms. A round iron grating in the church wall cut out of the whole heaven nothing but the glimmering, broken disk of the moon, which hung down like a heavenly coffin-lamp upon the coffin which is called the earth. The deserted church, that former market-place of a buzzing throng, stood there, dead and undermined with dead men--the tall church windows stretched their long shadows, projected by the moon, over the latticed pews--in the sacristy stood erect the black funeral crucifix, the cross of the order of death--the swords and spears of the knights reminded one of the crumbled limbs which no longer nerved them or themselves, and the death dance of the suckling with false flowers had accompanied hither the poor suckling, whose hand death had broken off, ere it could pluck any more--stone monks and knights imitated the long silenced prayer on the wall with their weatherwasted hands--no living thing spoke in the church save the iron movement of the pendulum of the clock in the tower, and it seemed to me as if I heard how Time with heavy step strode over the world and left graves as his foot-prints.... I sat down on a step of the altar; around me lay the moonlight with fleeting, saddening cloud-shadows; my spirit stood on high: I addressed the personality which I still was: 'What art thou? what is it that sits here and recollects itself and suffers torment?--Thou, I, something--whither, then, is it gone, the colored cloud, which for thirty years has swept by over this I and which I called childhood, youth, life?' Myself drifted along through this painted mist--but I could not overtake it,--at a distance from me it seemed something solid; close upon me drizzling mist-drops or so called moments--to live them, means to drop from one moment (that mist-globule of time) into another.... If, now, I had remained dead, then would all that which I now am have been the object on account of which I was created for this luminous earth and it for me? That were the end of the scenes?--and beyond the end----? Joy is perhaps yonder--here is none, because a past joy is none, and our moments thin out that present into thousand past ones--virtue, rather, is here; it is above time. Below me all sleeps; but I shall, also; and if I still make believe thirty years longer that I am living, still they will lay me here again--this night will return again, but I shall remain in my coffin: and then?... If now I had three minutes, one for birth, one for life, one for death, for what purpose then would I have them--this is what I would say?--But all that stands between the past and the future, is a moment--we, none of us, have but three.... Great Being of beings--I began and was about to pray--Thou hast eternity.... but before the thought of Him who is nothing but present, no human soul can stand erect, but bows itself down to the earth again. 'Oh ye departed loves,' I thought, 'you could not be too great for me; appear to me! lift oft the sense of nothingness from my heart, and show me the eternal breast which I can love, which can warm me.' Just then I happened to see my poor dog who was gazing at me; and this creature so moved me with his still briefer, still duller life, that I was softened even to tears and yearned for something with which I might increase and allay them.