The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

THIRTY-EIGHTH, OR NEW YEAR'S, SECTION.

Night Music.--Farewell Letter.--My Groans and Grievances.

I had planned for to-day to play the joke of calling my biography a printed New Year's Wish to the reader, and then, instead of wishes, send out in sport New Year's curses and more of the like. But I cannot do it, and on the whole shall soon be absolutely unable to do it any more. What a heavy, burnt-out heart must those people have, who in the face of the first day which ushers them into the procession of 364 other lowly, serious, wailing and weeping ones, can prefer the noisy, riotous pleasure of beasts to the still, tender and almost tearful joy of man! You cannot know what the words first and last say, if in their presence, whether they refer to a day, a book, or a person, you do not draw a deeper breath; still less can you know what preëminence man has over the beast, if within you the interval is so great between joy and longing, and if both are not within you blended in one tear! Thou Heaven and thou Earth, your present form is an image (as if a mother) of such a union; that world of light looking so consolingly into our freezing eyes--the Sun,--transforms the blue ether around it into a blue night, which casts a still deeper shadow of itself over the glittering sun-face of the snow-clad earth, and man sees with yearning eyes a night sweep across his heaven and one fissure of light, the deep opening and street stretching away toward brighter worlds....

The past night still leads my pen. It is, namely, in Auenthal, as in many other places, the custom, that in the last solemn night of the year there shall be sounded out from the mouths of bugles, as it were an echo of days that have departed, or a funeral music of the buried year. When I heard my good Wutz with some assistants in the room below me making some stir and a few experimental tones, I arose and went with my sister, who had been long awake, to the narrow window. In the still night one could hear the steps of the people going up. Above our window lay that beam under which one must listen and look out in prophetic night, in order to see and hear the cloudy forms of futurity. And in fact I saw, in a literal sense, what superstition is fain to see. I saw, as it does, coffins on roofs, and funeral trains at one door and wedding-guests and bridal wreath at another, and a human year passed through the village and held on its right maternal breast the little joys which play with man, and on its left the sorrows which bark at him; fain would it nourish both, but they fell off dying, and as often as a sorrow or a joy withered and dropped, so often did one of the two clappers strike its signal on the bells of the steeple.... I looked over toward the white wood behind which lay the dwellings of my friends, O young year, I said, repair to my friends and lay in their arms the joys thou hast in thine, and take with thee the lingering and tenacious sorrows of the old year, which will not die! Go into all the four quarters of the world and distribute the sucklings of thy right breast, and leave me only one--health!

The tones of the steeple welled out into the far moonless night, which was a great summit sprinkled over with starry blossoms. Art thou happy or unhappy, little Schoolmaster Wutz, that thou standest on thy tower opposite the White Wall and a white stone of the Auenthal churchyard and yet thinkest not whom wall and stone enclose, the same namely, who once, in thy place, in just so still a night greeted like thee the new year: thy father, who in his turn, just as calmly as thou blew his bugle-blast out over the deaf and dead ears of his mouldering kinsfolk?... More tranquil, indeed, art thou, that on this New Year's eve thinkest on no other diminution than that of the nights; but dearer to me is my Philippina, who here beside me lives her life over anew and sure more seriously than the first time, and in whose bosom the heart is not merely doing lady's work, but sometimes also rises on the swell of emotion to feel how little man is, how much he comes to be, and how truly the earth is a church-yard wall and man the detonizing saltpetre which crystallizes upon it! Good, weeping sister, at this moment thy brother cares not that thou to-morrow--wilt care very little about this; at this moment he pardons it in thee and in thy whole sex, that your hearts so often resemble precious stones, in which the fairest colors are often found side by side with--a fly or a bit of moss; for what can man, as he surveys and sighs over this wasting life and its decaying possessions--what can he do better in the midst of this feeling than love them right heartily, and cherish a true patience with them, a true.... Let me embrace thee, Philippina, and if I should ever fail to forgive thee, remind me of this embrace!...

My biography should now move on again; but I cannot possibly lend my head and my hand to the work, unless I would on the spot write myself out of the learned world into the world to come. It is better for me to make myself merely the compositor of this history and copy off the painful letter which Gustavus sent to his forfeited friend.

* * * * *

"Faithful, virtuous soul! Let the present dark moment, which I only have deserved, but not thou, not torment thee long, but soon be veiled from sight! O! fortunate, indeed, it is, that thou canst not see my eye, nor my lips quivering with anguish, nor my shattered heart, wherewith I now make an end to all my fair days. If thou shouldst see me here as I sit writing, then would the tenderest soul that ever administered solace on the earth, place itself between me and my heaving sorrow and seek to cover and comfort me; she would cast upon me a healing look and ask what ailed me.... Ah, good, true heart! ask it not of me; I should have to answer: my anguish, my deathless rack, my viper-wound is lost innocence.... Theefn would thy eternal innocence turn away affrighted and give me no consolation; I should be left lying alone, and the sorrow would stand erect beside me with the scourge in its hand. Ah! I could not once raise my head, to cast a forlorn look back upon all the good hours which had departed from me in thy person.--Ah, it is indeed so, and thou art already gone!--Amandus! does heaven cut me off entirely from thee, and canst thou, who gavest me the lily-hand of Beata, not see my polluted one, which belongs no more to that purest?--All, hadst thou been still living, then should I, indeed, have lost thee also.... O, that there can be hours here below, which are suffered to bear the full beaker of a whole life's joy, and with one fall to shatter it to pieces and spill the refreshing draught of all, all years!

"Beata! now we part; thou deservest a more faithful heart than mine has been; I deserved not thine--I have nothing left that thou couldst love--my image in thy heart must be broken in pieces--thine abides forever immovable in my own; but it looks upon me no longer with the eye of love, but with a downcast eye that weeps over the place where it resides.... Ah, Beata, I can hardly end my letter; so soon as its last line is written, we are torn from one another, and never more hear or know each other.--Oh, God! how little avail penitence and tears! No one restores the hot heart of man, when there is nothing left therein, save the great, hard sorrow, which it strives, as a volcano laboring with a mass of rock, to cast up and out of itself, and which forever plunges back again into the blazing kettle; nothing can heal us, nothing can give back again to leafless man his fallen foliage; Ottomar, after all, is right in saying that the life of man passes, like a full moon, over nothing but nights....

"Ah well, it must needs be! Farewell, friend! Gustavus was not worthy of the hour which thou wilt have. Thy holy heart, which he has wounded, may an angel bind up, and bear thou it silently in the bond of friendship! My last, joyful letter, wherein I could not content myself with my overflowing happiness, lay in this inconsolable one, in which I have nothing more left me, and burn them both together. Let no officious person tell thee in future after many years, that I am still living, that I have pressed the long grief, with which I expiate my sunken happiness, like thorns into my forlorn bosom, and that in my sad day of life the night comes the sooner which lies between two worlds! When one day thy brother falls with a fairer heart upon thy breast, tell him not, tell it not to thyself, who looked like him--and when one day thy tearful eye rests upon the white pyramid, turn it away and forget that I was there so happy. Ah! but I forget not, I turn not my eyes away, and if man could die of remembrance, I would go to the grave of Amandus and die--Beata, Beata, in no human breast wilt thou find stronger love than mine was, though thou easily mayest stronger virtue--but when thou hast one day found that virtue, then remember not me, not my fall, repent not our short love, nor do him wrong who once under the starry heaven reclined upon thy noble breast.... O, thou my, my Beata! at the present instant thou dost indeed still belong to me, because thou dost not yet know me; at the present moment my spirit may, with its hand upon its wounds and stains come before thine and fall upon it and say to thee with stifled sighs: love me!... After this moment, no more.--After this moment I am alone, without love and without solace--a long life stretches away before me far and void, and there is no Thou in it----but this human life and its errors will pass away. Death will give me his hand and lead me away--the days beyond the earth will purify me for virtue and thee----then come, Beata, then, when an angel shall have borne thee through thy earthly evening twilight into the second world, then at last will a heart, broken here below, but healed up yonder, meet thine and sink on thy bosom and yet not die with rapture, and I shall say once more: 'Take me again, beloved soul, I, too, am blessed!'--all earthly wounds will vanish, the circle of Eternity will embrace and bind us together!... Ah, we must indeed first part, and this life still continues--live longer than I, weep less than I, and--yet do not wholly forget me.--Ah, hast thou, then, loved me very much, thou precious one, thou whom I have trifled away?...