Category Archives: Thomas Carlyle


E.T.A. Hoffmann: “The Fire-Lily”

From Thomas Carlyle’s “German Romance: Specimens of its Chief Authors; with Biographical and Critical Notices.” Vol. II, 1827. Excerpt: “The Golden Pot” by E.T. A. Hoffmann.

jThe Fire-Lily

The Spirit looked upon the water, and the water moved itself, and chafed in foaming billows, and plunged thundering down into the Abysses, which opened their black throats, and greedily swallowed it. Like triumphant conquerors, the granite Rocks lifted their cleft peaky crowns, protecting the Valley, till the Sun took it into its paternal bosom, and clasping it with its beams as with growing arms, cherished it and warmed it.

Then a thousand germs, which had been sleeping under the desert sand, awoke from their deep slumber, and stretched out their little leaves and stalks toward the Sun their father’s face; and the smiling infants in green cradles, the flowrets rested in their buds and blossoms, til they too, awakened by their father, decked themselves in lights, which their father, to please them, tinted in a thousand varied hues.

But in the midst of the Valley was a black Hill, which heaved up and down like the breast of man when warm longing swells it. From the Abysses mounted steaming vapours, and rolled themselves together into huge masses, striving malignantly to hide the father’s face: but he called the Storm to him, which rushed thither, and scattered them away; and when the pure sunbeam rested again on the bleak Hill, there started from it, in the excess of its rapture, a glorious Fire-Lily, opening its fair leaves like gentle lips to receive the kiss of its father.

And now came a gleaming Splendour into the Valley; it was the youth Phosphorus; the Lily saw him, and begged, being seized with warm longing love: “Be mine for ever, fair youth! For I love thee, and must die if thou forsake me!” Then spake the youth Phosphorus: “I will be thine, thou fair flower; but then wilt thou, like a naughty child, leave father and mother; thou wilt know thy playmates no longer, wilt strive to be greater and stronger than all that now rejoices with thee as thy equal.

The longing which now beneficently warms thy whole being, will be scattered into a thousand rays, and torture and vex thee; for sense will bring forth senses; and the highest rapture, which the Spark I cast into thee kindles, will be the hopeless pain wherein thou shalt perish, to spring up anew in foreign shape. This spark is Thought!”

“Ah!” mourned the Lily, “Can I not be thine in this glow, as it now burns in me; not still be thine? Can I love then more than now; could I look on thee as now, if thou wert to annihilate me?” Then the youth Phosphorus kissed the Lily; and as if penetrated with light, it mounted up in flame, out of which issued a foreign Being, that hastily flying from the Valley, roved forth into endless Space, no longer heeding its old playmates, or the youth it had loved.

This youth mourned for his lost beloved; for he too loved her, it was love to the fair Lily that had brought him to the lone Valley; and the granite Rocks bent down their heads in participation of his grief.

But one of these opened its bosom, and there came a black-winged Dragon flying out of it, and said: “My brethren, the Metals are sleeping in there; but I am always brisk and waking, and will help thee.”

Dashing up and down on its black pinions, the Dragon at last caught the Being which had sprung from the Lily; bore it to the Hill, and encircled it with his wing; then was it the Lily again; but Thought, which continued with it, tore asunder its heart; and its love for the youth Phosphorus was a cutting pain, before which, as if breathed on by poisonous vapours, the flowrets which had once rejoiced in the fair Lily’s presence, faded and died.

The youth Phosphorus put on a glittering coat of mail, sporting with the light in a thousand hues, and did battle with the Dragon, who struck the cuirass with his black wing, till it rung and sounded; and at this loud clang the flowrets again came to life, and like variegated birds fluttered round the Dragon, whose force departed; and who, thus being vanquished, hid himself in the depths of the Earth.

The Lily was freed; the youth Phosphorus clasped her, full of warm longing, of heavenly love; and in triumphant chorus, the flowers, the birds, nay even the high granite Rocks, did reverence to her as the Queen of the Valley.”

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Thomas Carlyle: “A Great Soul”

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Thomas Carlyle: “The Imagination of Jean Paul”

Excerpt, “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Jean Paul Friedrich Richter,” Thomas Carlyle. 1830
We have spoken warmly of Jean Paul’s Imagination, of his high devout feeling, which is now a still more grateful part of our task to exhibit. But in this also our readers must content themselves with some imperfect glimpses. What religious opinions and aspirations he specially entertained, how that noblest portion of man’s interest represented itself in such a mind, were long to describe, did we even know it with certainty.
He hints somewhere that ‘the soul, which by nature looks Heavenward, is without a Temple in this age ; ‘ in which little sentence, the careful reader will decipher much.
‘But there will come another era,’ says Paul, ‘when it shall be light, and man will awaken from his lofty dreams, and find — his dreams still there, and that nothing is gone save his sleep,’The stones and rocks, which two veiled Figures (Necessity and Vice), like Deucalion and Pyrrha, are casting behind them, at Goodness, will themselves become men.
‘And on the Western-gate of this century stands written: Here is the way to Virtue and Wisdom; as on the Western-gate at Cherson stands the proud Inscription: Here is the way to Byzance.
‘Infinite Providence, Thou wilt cause the day to dawn,’But as yet, struggles the twelfth-hour of the Night: the nocturnal birds of prey are on the wing, spectres uproar, the dead walk, the living dream.’
Connected with this, there is one other piece, which also,for its singular poetic qualities, we shall translate here. The reader has heard much of Richter’s Dreams, with what strange prophetic power he rules over that chaos of spiritual Nature, bodying forth a whole world of Darkness, broken by pallid gleams or wild sparkles of light, and peopled with huge, shadowy, bewildered shapes, full of grandeur and meaning.
No Poet known to us, not Milton himself, shows such a vastness of Imagination; such a rapt, deep, Old-Hebrew spirit as Richter in these scenes. He mentions, in his Biographical notes, the impression which these lines of the Tempest had on him, as recited by one of his companions:
“We are such stuff
As Dreams are made of, and our little Life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
‘The passage of Shakespeare,’ says he, ’rounded with a sleep in Plattner’s mouth, created whole ‘books in me.’ — The following Dream is perhaps his grandest, as undoubtedly it is among his most celebrated. We shall give it entire, long as it is, and therewith finish our quotations. What value he himself put on it, may be gathered from the following Note:
‘If ever my heart,’ says he, ‘were to grow so wretched and so dead that all feelings ‘in it which announce the being of a God were extinct’there, I would terrify myself with this sketch of mine ; it’ would heal me, and give me my feelings back.’ We translate from Siebenkas, where it forms the first Chapter, or Blumenstuck (Flower-Piece).
‘The purpose of this Fiction is the excuse of its boldness. Men deny the Divine Existence with as little feeling as the most assert it.
Even in our true systems we go on collecting- mere words, playmarks and medals, as misers do coins; and not till late do we transform the words into feelings, the coins into enjoyments, A man may, for twenty years, believe the Immortality of the Soul; — in the one-and-twentieth, in some great moment, he for the first time discovers with amazement the rich meaning of this belief, the warmth of this Naphtha-well, ‘Of such sort, too, was my error, at the poisonous stifling vapour which floats out round the heart of him who, for the first time, enters the school of Atheism.
I could with less pain deny Immortality than Deity : there I should lose but a world covered with mists, here I should lose the present world, namely, the Sun thereof: the whole spiritual Universe is dashed asunder by the hand of Atheism into numberless quicksilver-points of Me’s, which glitter, run, waver, fly together or asunder, without unity or continuance.
No one in Creation is so alone, as the denier of God ; he mourns, with an orphaned heart that has lost its great Father, by the Corpse of Nature, which no World-spirit moves and holds together, and which grows in its grave ; and he mourns by that Corpse till he himself crumble off from it. The whole world lies before him, like the Egyptian Sphinx of stone, half-buried in the sand; and the All is the cold iron mask of a formless Eternity…
‘I merely remark farther, that with the belief of Atheism, the belief of Immortality is quite compatible; for the same Necessity, which in this Life threw my light dewdrop of a Me into a flower-bell and — under a Sun, can repeat that process in a second life; nay,more easily embody me the second time than the first.
‘If we hear, in childhood, that the Dead, about midnight, when our sleep reaches near the soul, and darkens even our dreams, awake out of theirs, and in the church mimic the worship of the living, we shudder at Death by reason of the dead, and in the night-solitude turn away our eyes from the long silent windows of the church and fear to proceed from the moon.
“Childhood, and rather its terrors than its raptures, take wings and radiance again in dreams, and sport like fire-flies in the little knight of the soul. Crush not these flickering sparks!
Leave us even our dark painful dreams as higher half-shadows of reality! And wherewith will you replace to us those dreams, which bear us away from under the tumult of the stream of life yet ran silent in its little plain, and flowed towards it abysses, a mirror of the Heaven?
‘I was lying once, on a summer evening, in the sunshine; and I fell asleep. Methought I awoke in the Churchyard. The downrolling wheels of the steeple-clock which was striking eleven, had awakened me. In the emptied night-heaven I looked for the Sun;for I thought an eclipse was veiling him with the Moon.
All the Graves were open and the iron doors of the charnel-house were swinging to and fro by invisible hands. On the walls flitted shadows, which proceeded from no one, and other shadows stretched upwards in the pale air. In the open coffins none now lay sleeping, but the children. Over the whole heaven hung, in large folds, a gray sultry mist; which a giant shadow, like vapour, was drawing down,nearer, closer and hotter.
Above me I heard the distant fall of avalanches; under me the first step of a boundless earthquake. The Church wavered up and down with two interminable Dissonances, which strutted with each other in it; endeavouring in vain to mingle in unison. At times, a gray glimmer hovered along the windows, and under it the lead and iron fell down molten.
The net of the mist,and the tottering Earth brought me into that hideous Temple; at the door of which, in two poison-bushes, two glittering Basilisks lay brooding. I passed through unknown Shadows, on whom ancient centuries were impressed. — All the Shadows were standing round the empty Altar; and in all, not the heart, but the breast quivered and pulsed.
One dead man only, who had just been buried there, still lay on his coffin without quivering breast; and on his smiling countenance stood a happy dream. But at the entrance of one Living, he awoke, and smiled no longer ; he lifted his heavy eyelids, but within was no eye; and in his beating breast there lay, instead of a heart, a wound. He held up his hands, and folded them to pray; but the arms lengthened out and dissolved ; and the hands, still folded together, fell away.
Above, on the Church-dome, stood the dial-plate of Eternity, whereon no number appeared, and which was its own index : but a black finger pointed thereon, and the Dead sought to see the time by it,
“Now sank from aloft a noble, high Form, with a look of uneffaceable sorrow, down to the Altar, and all the Dead cried out, ” Christ, is there no God ?” He answered, “There is none!” The whole Shadow of each then shuddered, not the breast alone; and one after the other, all, in this shuddering, shook into pieces.
“Christ continued: “I went through the Worlds, I mounted into the Suns, and flew with the Galaxies through the wastes of Heaven ;but there is no God! I descended as far as Being casts its shadow, and looked down into the Abyss and cried, Father, where art thou? But I heard only the everlasting storm which no one guides, and this gleaming Rainbow of Creation hung without a Sun that made it,over the Abyss, and trickled down.
And when I looked up to the immeasurable world for the Divine Eye, it glared on me with an empty, black, bottomless Eye-socket; and Eternity lay upon Chaos, eating it and ruminating it. Cry on, ye Dissonances; cry away the Shadows, for He is not I!”
‘The pale-grown Shadows flitted away, as white vapour which frost has formed with the warm breach disappears ; and all was void. 0, then came, fearful for the heart, the dead Children who had been awakened in the Churchyard, into the Temple, and cast themselves before the high Form on the Altar, and said, ” Jesus, have we no Father?” And he answered, with streaming tears, ” We are all orphans, I and you : we are without Father ! ”
‘Then shrieked this Dissonances still louder, — the quivering walls of the Temple parted asunder; and the Temple and the Children sank down, and the whole Earth and the Sun sank after it, and the whole Universe sank with its immensity before us; and above, on the summit of immeasurable Nature, stood Christ, and gazed down into the Universe chequered with its thousand Suns, as into the Mine bored out of the Eternal Night, in which the Suns run like mine-lamps, and the Galaxies like silver veins.
‘And as he saw the grinding press of Worlds, the torch-dance of celestial wildfires, and the coral-banks of beating hearts ; and as he saw how world after world shook off its glimmering souls upon the Sea of Death, as a water-bubble scatters swimming lights on the waves, then majestic as the Highest of the Finite, he raised his eyes towards the Nothingness, and towards the void Immensity, and said: ” Dead, dumb Nothingness!
Cold, everlasting Necessity! Frantic Chance! Know ye what this is that lies beneath you? When will ye crush the Universe in pieces, and me? Chance, knowest thou what thou doest, when with thy hurricanes thou walkest through that snow powder of Stars, and extinguishest burn after Sun, and that sparkling dew of heavenly lights goes out as thou passest over it? How is each so solitary in this wide grave of the All?
I am alone with myself! O Father, O Father! Where is thy infinite bosom, that I might rest on it? Ah, if each soul is its own father and creator, why cannot it be its own destroyer, too?
“Is this beside me yet a Man! Unhappy one! Your little life is the sigh of Nature, or only its echo ; a convex-mirror throws its rays into that dust-cloud of dead men’s ashes, down on the Earth; and thus you, cloud-formed wavering phantasms, arise. — Look down into the Abyss, over which clouds of ashes are moving; mists full of Worlds reek up from the Sea of Death ; the Future is a mounting mist, and the Present is a falling one. — Knowest thou thy Earth again?’
‘Here Christ looked down, and his eye filled with tears, and he said: “Ah, I was once there; I was still happy then; I had still my Infinite Father, and looked up cheerfully from the mountains, into the immeasurable Heaven, and pressed my mangled breast on his healing form, and said even in the bitterness of death: Father, take thy son from this bleeding hull, and lift him to thy heart! —
Ah, ye too happy inhabitants of Earth, ye still believe in Him. Perhaps even now your Sun is going down, and ye kneel amid blossoms, and brightness, and tears, and lift trustful hands, and cry with joy-streaming eyes, to the opened Heaven; “Me too thou knowest. Omnipotent, and all my wounds; and at death thou receivest me, and closest them all!
“Unhappy creatures, at death they will not be closed! Ah, when the sorrow-laden lays himself, with galled back, into the Earth,to sleep till a fairer Morning full of Truth, full of Virtue and Joy, — he awakens in a stormy Chaos, in the everlasting Midnight, — and there comes no Morning, and no soft healing hand, and no Infinite Father! — Mortal, beside me! if thou still livest, pray to Him; else hast thou lost him forever!”
‘And as I fell down, and looked into the sparkling Universe, I saw the upborne Rings of the Giant-Serpent, the Serpent of Eternity, which had coiled itself round the ALL of Worlds,— and the Rings sank down, and encircled the ALL doubly ; and then it wound itself, innumerable ways, round Nature, and swept the Worlds from their places, and crashing, squeezed the Temple of Immensity together, into the Church of a Burying-ground, —and all grew strait, dark, fearful, — and an immeasurably extended Hammer was to strike the last hour of Time, and shiver the Universe asunder . . . WHEN I AWOKE.
‘My soul wept for joy that I Could still pray to God; and the joy, and the weeping, and the faith on him were my prayer. And as I arose, the Sun was glowing deep behind the full purpled corn-ears,and casting meekly the gleam of its twilight-red on the little Moon, which was rising in the East without an Aurora; and between the sky and the earth, a gay transient air-people was stretching out its short wings and living, as I did, before the Infinite Father; and from all Nature around me flowed peaceful tones as from distant evening-bells.’
We must here for the present close our lucubrations on Jean Paul…
We honour Richter, such as he was… and discern under this wondrous guise the spirit of a true Poet and Philosopher. A Poet, and among the highest of his time, we must reckon him, though he wrote no verses; a Philosopher, though he promulgated no systems: for, on the whole,that ‘ Divine Idea of the World ‘ stood in clear ethereal light before his mind; he recognised the Invisible, even under the mean forms of these days, and with a high, strong, not uninspired heart, strove to represent it in the Visible, and publish tidings of it to his fellow-men.
This one virtue, the foundation of all the other virtues, and which a long study more and more clearly reveals to us in Jean Paul … raises him into quite another sphere than that of the thousand elegant Sweet-singers, and cause-and-effect Philosophes, in his own country, or in this…
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Thomas Carlyle: “The Hero as a Man of Letters”

Excerpt, “On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History.” by Thomas Carlyle.

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LECTURE V,
THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS
JOHNSON, ROUSSEAU, BURNS

May 19, 1840

Hero-Gods, Prophets, Poets, Priests are forms of Heroism that belong to the old ages, make their appearance in the remotest times; some of them have ceased to be possible long since, and cannot any more show themselves in this world. The Hero as Man of Letters, again, of which class we are to speak to-day, is altogether a product of these new ages; and so long as the wondrous art of Writing, or of Ready-writing which we call Printing, subsists, he may be expected to continue, as one of the main forms of Heroism for all future ages. He is, in various respects, a very singular phenomenon.
He is new, I say; he has hardly lasted above a century in the world yet. Never, till about a hundred years ago, was there seen any figure of a Great Soul living apart in that anomalous manner; endeavoring to speak forth the inspiration that was in him by Printed Books, and find place and subsistence by what the world would please to give him for doing that. Much had been sold and bought, and left to make its own bargain in the market-place; but the inspired wisdom of a Heroic Soul never till then, in that naked manner.
He, with his copy-rights and copy-wrongs, in his squalid garret, in his rusty coat; ruling (for this is what he does), from his grave, after death, whole nations and generations who would, or would not, give him bread while living,—is a rather curious spectacle! Few shapes of Heroism can be more unexpected.
Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself into strange shapes: the world knows not well at any time what to do with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world! It seemed absurd to us, that men, in their rude admiration, should take some wise great Odin for a god, and worship him as such; some wise great Mahomet for one god-inspired, and religiously follow his Law for twelve centuries: but that a wise great Johnson, a Burns, a Rousseau, should be taken for some idle nondescript, extant in the world to amuse idleness, and have a few coins and applauses thrown him, that he might live thereby; this perhaps, as before hinted, will one day seem a still absurder phasis of things!—
Meanwhile, since it is the spiritual always that determines the material, this same Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our most important modern person. He, such as he may be, is the soul of all. What he teaches, the whole world will do and make. The world’s manner of dealing with him is the most significant feature of the world’s general position. Looking well at his life, we may get a glance, as deep as is readily possible for us, into the life of those singular centuries which have produced him, in which we ourselves live and work.
There are genuine Men of Letters, and not genuine; as in every kind there is a genuine and a spurious. If hero be taken to mean genuine, then I say the Hero as Man of Letters will be found discharging a function for us which is ever honorable, ever the highest; and was once well known to be the highest. He is uttering forth, in such way as he has, the inspired soul of him; all that a man, in any case, can do. I say inspired; for what we call “originality,” “sincerity,” “genius,” the heroic quality we have no good name for, signifies that.
The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists always, unseen to most, under the Temporary, Trivial: his being is in that; he declares that abroad, by act or speech as it may be in declaring himself abroad. His life, as we said before, is a piece of the everlasting heart of Nature herself: all men’s life is,—but the weak many know not the fact, and are untrue to it, in most times; the strong few are strong, heroic, perennial, because it cannot be hidden from them.
The Man of Letters, like every Hero, is there to proclaim this in such sort as he can. Intrinsically it is the same function which the old generations named a man Prophet, Priest, Divinity for doing; which all manner of Heroes, by speech or by act, are sent into the world to do.
Fichte the German Philosopher delivered, some forty years ago at Erlangen, a highly remarkable Course of Lectures on this subject: “Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten, On the Nature of the Literary Man.” Fichte, in conformity with the Transcendental Philosophy, of which he was a distinguished teacher, declares first: That all things which we see or work with in this Earth, especially we ourselves and all persons, are as a kind of vesture or sensuous Appearance: that under all there lies, as the essence of them, what he calls the “Divine Idea of the World;” this is the Reality which “lies at the bottom of all Appearance.”
To the mass of men no such Divine Idea is recognizable in the world; they live merely, says Fichte, among the superficialities, practicalities and shows of the world, not dreaming that there is anything divine under them. But the Man of Letters is sent hither specially that he may discern for himself, and make manifest to us, this same Divine Idea: in every new generation it will manifest itself in a new dialect; and he is there for the purpose of doing that.
Such is Fichte’s phraseology; with which we need not quarrel. It is his way of naming what I here, by other words, am striving imperfectly to name; what there is at present no name for: The unspeakable Divine Significance, full of splendor, of wonder and terror, that lies in the being of every man, of every thing,—the Presence of the God who made every man and thing. Mahomet taught this in his dialect; Odin in his: it is the thing which all thinking hearts, in one dialect or another, are here to teach.
Fichte calls the Man of Letters, therefore, a Prophet, or as he prefers to phrase it, a Priest, continually unfolding the Godlike to men: Men of Letters are a perpetual Priesthood, from age to age, teaching all men that a God is still present in their life, that all “Appearance,” whatsoever we see in the world, is but as a vesture for the “Divine Idea of the World,” for “that which lies at the bottom of Appearance.” In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world’s Priest;—guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time.
Fichte discriminates with sharp zeal the true Literary Man, what we here call the Hero as Man of Letters, from multitudes of false unheroic. Whoever lives not wholly in this Divine Idea, or living partially in it, struggles not, as for the one good, to live wholly in it,—he is, let him live where else he like, in what pomps and prosperities he like, no Literary Man; he is, says Fichte, a “Bungler, Stumper.” Or at best, if he belong to the prosaic provinces, he may be a “Hodman;” Fichte even calls him elsewhere a “Nonentity,” and has in short no mercy for him, no wish that he should continue happy among us! This is Fichte’s notion of the Man of Letters. It means, in its own form, precisely what we here mean.
In this point of view, I consider that, for the last hundred years, by far the notablest of all Literary Men is Fichte’s countryman, Goethe. To that man too, in a strange way, there was given what we may call a life in the Divine Idea of the World; vision of the inward divine mystery: and strangely, out of his Books, the world rises imaged once more as godlike, the workmanship and temple of a God. Illuminated all, not in fierce impure fire-splendor as of Mahomet, but in mild celestial radiance;—really a Prophecy in these most unprophetic times; to my mind, by far the greatest, though one of the quietest, among all the great things that have come to pass in them.
Our chosen specimen of the Hero as Literary Man would be this Goethe. And it were a very pleasant plan for me here to discourse of his heroism: for I consider him to be a true Hero; heroic in what he said and did, and perhaps still more in what he did not say and did not do; to me a noble spectacle: a great heroic ancient man, speaking and keeping silence as an ancient Hero, in the guise of a most modern, high-bred, high-cultivated Man of Letters! We have had no such spectacle; no man capable of affording such, for the last hundred and fifty years.
But at present, such is the general state of knowledge about Goethe, it were worse than useless to attempt speaking of him in this case. Speak as I might, Goethe, to the great majority of you, would remain problematic, vague; no impression but a false one could be realized. Him we must leave to future times. Johnson, Burns, Rousseau, three great figures from a prior time, from a far inferior state of circumstances, will suit us better here. Three men of the Eighteenth Century; the conditions of their life far more resemble what those of ours still are in England, than what Goethe’s in Germany were.
Alas, these men did not conquer like him; they fought bravely, and fell. They were not heroic bringers of the light, but heroic seekers of it. They lived under galling conditions; struggling as under mountains of impediment, and could not unfold themselves into clearness, or victorious interpretation of that “Divine Idea.” It is rather the Tombs of three Literary Heroes that I have to show you. There are the monumental heaps, under which three spiritual giants lie buried. Very mournful, but also great and full of interest for us. We will linger by them for a while.
Complaint is often made, in these times, of what we call the disorganized condition of society: how ill many forces of society fulfil their work; how many powerful are seen working in a wasteful, chaotic, altogether unarranged manner. It is too just a complaint, as we all know. But perhaps if we look at this of Books and the Writers of Books, we shall find here, as it were, the summary of all other disorganizations;—a sort of heart, from which, and to which all other confusion circulates in the world! Considering what Book writers do in the world, and what the world does with Book writers, I should say, It is the most anomalous thing the world at present has to show.—
We should get into a sea far beyond sounding, did we attempt to give account of this: but we must glance at it for the sake of our subject. The worst element in the life of these three Literary Heroes was, that they found their business and position such a chaos. On the beaten road there is tolerable travelling; but it is sore work, and many have to perish, fashioning a path through the impassable!
Our pious Fathers, feeling well what importance lay in the speaking of man to men, founded churches, made endowments, regulations; everywhere in the civilized world there is a Pulpit, environed with all manner of complex dignified appurtenances and furtherances, that therefrom a man with the tongue may, to best advantage, address his fellow-men. They felt that this was the most important thing; that without this there was no good thing. It is a right pious work, that of theirs; beautiful to behold! But now with the art of Writing, with the art of Printing, a total change has come over that business.
The Writer of a Book, is not he a Preacher preaching not to this parish or that, on this day or that, but to all men in all times and places? Surely it is of the last importance that he do his work right, whoever do it wrong;—that the eye report not falsely, for then all the other members are astray! Well; how he may do his work, whether he do it right or wrong, or do it at all, is a point which no man in the world has taken the pains to think of. To a certain shopkeeper, trying to get some money for his books, if lucky, he is of some importance; to no other man of any. Whence he came, whither he is bound, by what ways he arrived, by what he might be furthered on his course, no one asks.
He is an accident in society. He wanders like a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is as the spiritual light, either the guidance or the misguidance!
Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised. Odin’s Runes were the first form of the work of a Hero; Books written words, are still miraculous Runes, the latest form! In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined,—they are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece!
There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives: can be called up again into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.
Do not Books still accomplish miracles, as Runes were fabled to do? They persuade men. Not the wretchedest circulating-library novel, which foolish girls thumb and con in remote villages, but will help to regulate the actual practical weddings and households of those foolish girls. So “Celia” felt, so “Clifford” acted: the foolish Theorem of Life, stamped into those young brains, comes out as a solid Practice one day. Consider whether any Rune in the wildest imagination of Mythologist ever did such wonders as, on the actual firm Earth, some Books have done! What built St. Paul’s Cathedral?
Look at the heart of the matter, it was that divine Hebrew BOOK,—the word partly of the man Moses, an outlaw tending his Midianitish herds, four thousand years ago, in the wildernesses of Sinai! It is the strangest of things, yet nothing is truer. With the art of Writing, of which Printing is a simple, an inevitable and comparatively insignificant corollary, the true reign of miracles for mankind commenced. It related, with a wondrous new contiguity and perpetual closeness, the Past and Distant with the Present in time and place; all times and all places with this our actual Here and Now. All things were altered for men; all modes of important work of men: teaching, preaching, governing, and all else.
To look at Teaching, for instance. Universities are a notable, respectable product of the modern ages. Their existence too is modified, to the very basis of it, by the existence of Books. Universities arose while there were yet no Books procurable; while a man, for a single Book, had to give an estate of land. That, in those circumstances, when a man had some knowledge to communicate, he should do it by gathering the learners round him, face to face, was a necessity for him. If you wanted to know what Abelard knew, you must go and listen to Abelard.
Thousands, as many as thirty thousand, went to hear Abelard and that metaphysical theology of his. And now for any other teacher who had also something of his own to teach, there was a great convenience opened: so many thousands eager to learn were already assembled yonder; of all places the best place for him was that. For any third teacher it was better still; and grew ever the better, the more teachers there came. It only needed now that the King took notice of this new phenomenon; combined or agglomerated the various schools into one school; gave it edifices, privileges, encouragements, and named it Universitas, or School of all Sciences: the University of Paris, in its essential characters, was there.
The model of all subsequent Universities; which down even to these days, for six centuries now, have gone on to found themselves. Such, I conceive, was the origin of Universities.
It is clear, however, that with this simple circumstance, facility of getting Books, the whole conditions of the business from top to bottom were changed. Once invent Printing, you metamorphosed all Universities, or superseded them! The Teacher needed not now to gather men personally round him, that he might speak to them what he knew: print it in a Book, and all learners far and wide, for a trifle, had it each at his own fireside, much more effectually to learn it!—Doubtless there is still peculiar virtue in Speech; even writers of Books may still, in some circumstances, find it convenient to speak also,—witness our present meeting here!
There is, one would say, and must ever remain while man has a tongue, a distinct province for Speech as well as for Writing and Printing. In regard to all things this must remain; to Universities among others. But the limits of the two have nowhere yet been pointed out, ascertained; much less put in practice: the University which would completely take in that great new fact, of the existence of Printed Books, and stand on a clear footing for the Nineteenth Century as the Paris one did for the Thirteenth, has not yet come into existence. If we think of it, all that a University, or final highest School can do for us, is still but what the first School began doing,—teach us to read.
We learn to read, in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of Books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the Books themselves! It depends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done their best for us. The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.
But to the Church itself, as I hinted already, all is changed, in its preaching, in its working, by the introduction of Books. The Church is the working recognized Union of our Priests or Prophets, of those who by wise teaching guide the souls of men. While there was no Writing, even while there was no Easy-writing, or Printing, the preaching of the voice was the natural sole method of performing this. But now with Books!—He that can write a true Book, to persuade England, is not he the Bishop and Archbishop, the Primate of England and of All England? I many a time say, the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these are the real working effective Church of a modern country.
Nay not only our preaching, but even our worship, is not it too accomplished by means of Printed Books? The noble sentiment which a gifted soul has clothed for us in melodious words, which brings melody into our hearts,—is not this essentially, if we will understand it, of the nature of worship? There are many, in all countries, who, in this confused time, have no other method of worship. He who, in any way, shows us better than we knew before that a lily of the fields is beautiful, does he not show it us as an effluence of the Fountain of all Beauty; as the handwriting, made visible there, of the great Maker of the Universe? He has sung for us, made us sing with him, a little verse of a sacred Psalm. Essentially so. How much more he who sings, who says, or in any way brings home to our heart the noble doings, feelings, darings and endurances of a brother man! He has verily touched our hearts as with a live coal from the altar. Perhaps there is no worship more authentic.
Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an “apocalypse of Nature,” a revealing of the “open secret.” It may well enough be named, in Fichte’s style, a “continuous revelation” of the Godlike in the Terrestrial and Common. The Godlike does ever, in very truth, endure there; is brought out, now in this dialect, now in that, with various degrees of clearness: all true gifted Singers and Speakers are, consciously or unconsciously, doing so. The dark stormful indignation of a Byron, so wayward and perverse, may have touches of it; nay the withered mockery of a French sceptic,—his mockery of the False, a love and worship of the True. How much more the sphere-harmony of a Shakspeare, of a Goethe; the cathedral music of a Milton!
They are something too, those humble genuine lark-notes of a Burns,—skylark, starting from the humble furrow, far overhead into the blue depths, and singing to us so genuinely there! For all true singing is of the nature of worship; as indeed all true working may be said to be,—whereof such singing is but the record, and fit melodious representation, to us. Fragments of a real “Church Liturgy” and “Body of Homilies,” strangely disguised from the common eye, are to be found weltering in that huge froth-ocean of Printed Speech we loosely call Literature! Books are our Church too.
Or turning now to the Government of men. Witenagemote, old Parliament, was a great thing. The affairs of the nation were there deliberated and decided; what we were to do as a nation. But does not, though the name Parliament subsists, the parliamentary debate go on now, everywhere and at all times, in a far more comprehensive way, out of Parliament altogether? Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact,—very momentous to us in these times. Literature is our Parliament too.
Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Writing brings Printing; brings universal everyday extempore Printing, as we see at present. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures. the requisite thing is, that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite. The nation is governed by all that has tongue in the nation: Democracy is virtually there.
Add only, that whatsoever power exists will have itself, by and by, organized; working secretly under bandages, obscurations, obstructions, it will never rest till it get to work free, unencumbered, visible to all. Democracy virtually extant will insist on becoming palpably extant.—
On all sides, are we not driven to the conclusion that, of the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful and worthy are the things we call Books! Those poor bits of rag-paper with black ink on them;—from the Daily Newspaper to the sacred Hebrew BOOK, what have they not done, what are they not doing!—For indeed, whatever be the outward form of the thing (bits of paper, as we say, and black ink), is it not verily, at bottom, the highest act of man’s faculty that produces a Book? It is the Thought of man; the true thaumaturgic virtue; by which man works all things whatsoever. All that he does, and brings to pass, is the vesture of a Thought.
This London City, with all its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One;—a huge immeasurable Spirit of a THOUGHT, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick.—The thing we called “bits of paper with traces of black ink,” is the purest embodiment a Thought of man can have. No wonder it is, in all ways, the activest and noblest.
All this, of the importance and supreme importance of the Man of Letters in modern Society, and how the Press is to such a degree superseding the Pulpit, the Senate, the Senatus Academicus and much else, has been admitted for a good while; and recognized often enough, in late times, with a sort of sentimental triumph and wonderment. It seems to me, the Sentimental by and by will have to give place to the Practical. If Men of Letters are so incalculably influential, actually performing such work for us from age to age, and even from day to day, then I think we may conclude that Men of Letters will not always wander like unrecognized unregulated Ishmaelites among us!
Whatsoever thing, as I said above, has virtual unnoticed power will cast off its wrappages, bandages, and step forth one day with palpably articulated, universally visible power. That one man wear the clothes, and take the wages, of a function which is done by quite another: there can be no profit in this; this is not right, it is wrong. And yet, alas, the making of it right,—what a business, for long times to come! Sure enough, this that we call Organization of the Literary Guild is still a great way off, encumbered with all manner of complexities.
If you asked me what were the best possible organization for the Men of Letters in modern society; the arrangement of furtherance and regulation, grounded the most accurately on the actual facts of their position and of the world’s position,—I should beg to say that the problem far exceeded my faculty! It is not one man’s faculty; it is that of many successive men turned earnestly upon it, that will bring out even an approximate solution. What the best arrangement were, none of us could say. But if you ask, Which is the worst? I answer: This which we now have, that Chaos should sit umpire in it; this is the worst. To the best, or any good one, there is yet a long way.
One remark I must not omit, That royal or parliamentary grants of money are by no means the chief thing wanted! To give our Men of Letters stipends, endowments and all furtherance of cash, will do little towards the business. On the whole, one is weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is no evil to be poor; that there ought to be Literary Men poor,—to show whether they are genuine or not! Mendicant Orders, bodies of good men doomed to beg, were instituted in the Christian Church; a most natural and even necessary development of the spirit of Christianity.
It was itself founded on Poverty, on Sorrow, Contradiction, Crucifixion, every species of worldly Distress and Degradation. We may say, that he who has not known those things, and learned from them the priceless lessons they have to teach, has missed a good opportunity of schooling. To beg, and go barefoot, in coarse woollen cloak with a rope round your loins, and be despised of all the world, was no beautiful business;—nor an honorable one in any eye, till the nobleness of those who did so had made it honored of some!
Begging is not in our course at the present time: but for the rest of it, who will say that a Johnson is not perhaps the better for being poor? It is needful for him, at all rates, to know that outward profit, that success of any kind is not the goal he has to aim at. Pride, vanity, ill-conditioned egoism of all sorts, are bred in his heart, as in every heart; need, above all, to be cast out of his heart,—to be, with whatever pangs, torn out of it, cast forth from it, as a thing worthless. Byron, born rich and noble, made out even less than Burns, poor and plebeian. Who knows but, in that same “best possible organization” as yet far off, Poverty may still enter as an important element?
What if our Men of Letters, men setting up to be Spiritual Heroes, were still then, as they now are, a kind of “involuntary monastic order;” bound still to this same ugly Poverty,—till they had tried what was in it too, till they had learned to make it too do for them! Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it there; and even spurn it back, when it wishes to get farther.
Besides, were the money-furtherances, the proper season for them, the fit assigner of them, all settled,—how is the Burns to be recognized that merits these? He must pass through the ordeal, and prove himself. This ordeal; this wild welter of a chaos which is called Literary Life: this too is a kind of ordeal! There is clear truth in the idea that a struggle from the lower classes of society, towards the upper regions and rewards of society, must ever continue. Strong men are born there, who ought to stand elsewhere than there. The manifold, inextricably complex, universal struggle of these constitutes, and must constitute, what is called the progress of society.
For Men of Letters, as for all other sorts of men. How to regulate that struggle? There is the whole question. To leave it as it is, at the mercy of blind Chance; a whirl of distracted atoms, one cancelling the other; one of the thousand arriving saved, nine hundred and ninety-nine lost by the way; your royal Johnson languishing inactive in garrets, or harnessed to the yoke of Printer Cave; your Burns dying broken-hearted as a Gauger; your Rousseau driven into mad exasperation, kindling French Revolutions by his paradoxes: this, as we said, is clearly enough the worst regulation. The best, alas, is far from us!
And yet there can be no doubt but it is coming; advancing on us, as yet hidden in the bosom of centuries: this is a prophecy one can risk. For so soon as men get to discern the importance of a thing, they do infallibly set about arranging it, facilitating, forwarding it; and rest not till, in some approximate degree, they have accomplished that. I say, of all Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes at present extant in the world, there is no class comparable for importance to that Priesthood of the Writers of Books.
This is a fact which he who runs may read,—and draw inferences from. “Literature will take care of itself,” answered Mr. Pitt, when applied to for some help for Burns. “Yes,” adds Mr. Southey, “it will take care of itself; and of you too, if you do not look to it!”
The result to individual Men of Letters is not the momentous one; they are but individuals, an infinitesimal fraction of the great body; they can struggle on, and live or else die, as they have been wont. But it deeply concerns the whole society, whether it will set its light on high places, to walk thereby; or trample it under foot, and scatter it in all ways of wild waste (not without conflagration), as heretofore! Light is the one thing wanted for the world. Put wisdom in the head of the world, the world will fight its battle victoriously, and be the best world man can make it.
I called this anomaly of a disorganic Literary Class the heart of all other anomalies, at once product and parent; some good arrangement for that would be as the punctum saliens of a new vitality and just arrangement for all. Already, in some European countries, in France, in Prussia, one traces some beginnings of an arrangement for the Literary Class; indicating the gradual possibility of such. I believe that it is possible; that it will have to be possible.
By far the most interesting fact I hear about the Chinese is one on which we cannot arrive at clearness, but which excites endless curiosity even in the dim state: this namely, that they do attempt to make their Men of Letters their Governors! It would be rash to say, one understood how this was done, or with what degree of success it was done. All such things must be very unsuccessful; yet a small degree of success is precious; the very attempt how precious! There does seem to be, all over China, a more or less active search everywhere to discover the men of talent that grow up in the young generation.
Schools there are for every one: a foolish sort of training, yet still a sort. The youths who distinguish themselves in the lower school are promoted into favorable stations in the higher, that they may still more distinguish themselves,—forward and forward: it appears to be out of these that the Official Persons, and incipient Governors, are taken. These are they whom they try first, whether they can govern or not. And surely with the best hope: for they are the men that have already shown intellect.
Try them: they have not governed or administered as yet; perhaps they cannot; but there is no doubt they have some Understanding,—without which no man can! Neither is Understanding a tool, as we are too apt to figure; “it is a hand which can handle any tool.” Try these men: they are of all others the best worth trying.—Surely there is no kind of government, constitution, revolution, social apparatus or arrangement, that I know of in this world, so promising to one’s scientific curiosity as this. The man of intellect at the top of affairs: this is the aim of all constitutions and revolutions, if they have any aim.
For the man of true intellect, as I assert and believe always, is the noble-hearted man withal, the true, just, humane and valiant man. Get him for governor, all is got; fail to get him, though you had Constitutions plentiful as blackberries, and a Parliament in every village, there is nothing yet got—!
These things look strange, truly; and are not such as we commonly speculate upon. But we are fallen into strange times; these things will require to be speculated upon; to be rendered practicable, to be in some way put in practice. These, and many others. On all hands of us, there is the announcement, audible enough, that the old Empire of Routine has ended; that to say a thing has long been, is no reason for its continuing to be. The things which have been are fallen into decay, are fallen into incompetence; large masses of mankind, in every society of our Europe, are no longer capable of living at all by the things which have been.
When millions of men can no longer by their utmost exertion gain food for themselves, and “the third man for thirty-six weeks each year is short of third-rate potatoes,” the things which have been must decidedly prepare to alter themselves!—I will now quit this of the organization of Men of Letters.
Alas, the evil that pressed heaviest on those Literary Heroes of ours was not the want of organization for Men of Letters, but a far deeper one; out of which, indeed, this and so many other evils for the Literary Man, and for all men, had, as from their fountain, taken rise. That our Hero as Man of Letters had to travel without highway, companionless, through an inorganic chaos,—and to leave his own life and faculty lying there, as a partial contribution towards pushing some highway through it: this, had not his faculty itself been so perverted and paralyzed, he might have put up with, might have considered to be but the common lot of Heroes.
His fatal misery was the spiritual paralysis, so we may name it, of the Age in which his life lay; whereby his life too, do what he might, was half paralyzed! The Eighteenth was a Sceptical Century; in which little word there is a whole Pandora’s Box of miseries. Scepticism means not intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all sorts of infidelity, insincerity, spiritual paralysis. Perhaps, in few centuries that one could specify since the world began, was a life of Heroism more difficult for a man. That was not an age of Faith,—an age of Heroes! The very possibility of Heroism had been, as it were, formally abnegated in the minds of all.
Heroism was gone forever; Triviality, Formulism and Commonplace were come forever. The “age of miracles” had been, or perhaps had not been; but it was not any longer. An effete world; wherein Wonder, Greatness, Godhood could not now dwell;—in one word, a godless world!
How mean, dwarfish are their ways of thinking, in this time,—compared not with the Christian Shakspeares and Miltons, but with the old Pagan Skalds, with any species of believing men! The living TREE Igdrasil, with the melodious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs, deep-rooted as Hela, has died out into the clanking of a World-MACHINE. “Tree” and “Machine:” contrast these two things. I, for my share, declare the world to be no machine! I say that it does not go by wheel-and-pinion “motives” self-interests, checks, balances; that there is something far other in it than the clank of spinning-jennies, and parliamentary majorities; and, on the whole, that it is not a machine at all!—
The old Norse Heathen had a truer motion of God’s-world than these poor Machine-Sceptics: the old Heathen Norse were sincere men. But for these poor Sceptics there was no sincerity, no truth. Half-truth and hearsay was called truth. Truth, for most men, meant plausibility; to be measured by the number of votes you could get. They had lost any notion that sincerity was possible, or of what sincerity was. How many Plausibilities asking, with unaffected surprise and the air of offended virtue, What! am not I sincere? Spiritual Paralysis, I say, nothing left but a Mechanical life, was the characteristic of that century.
For the common man, unless happily he stood below his century and belonged to another prior one, it was impossible to be a Believer, a Hero; he lay buried, unconscious, under these baleful influences. To the strongest man, only with infinite struggle and confusion was it possible to work himself half loose; and lead as it were, in an enchanted, most tragical way, a spiritual death-in-life, and be a Half-Hero!
Scepticism is the name we give to all this; as the chief symptom, as the chief origin of all this. Concerning which so much were to be said! It would take many Discourses, not a small fraction of one Discourse, to state what one feels about that Eighteenth Century and its ways. As indeed this, and the like of this, which we now call Scepticism, is precisely the black malady and life-foe, against which all teaching and discoursing since man’s life began has directed itself: the battle of Belief against Unbelief is the never-ending battle! Neither is it in the way of crimination that one would wish to speak.
Scepticism, for that century, we must consider as the decay of old ways of believing, the preparation afar off for new better and wider ways,—an inevitable thing. We will not blame men for it; we will lament their hard fate. We will understand that destruction of old forms is not destruction of everlasting substances; that Scepticism, as sorrowful and hateful as we see it, is not an end but a beginning.
The other day speaking, without prior purpose that way, of Bentham’s theory of man and man’s life, I chanced to call it a more beggarly one than Mahomet’s. I am bound to say, now when it is once uttered, that such is my deliberate opinion. Not that one would mean offence against the man Jeremy Bentham, or those who respect and believe him. Bentham himself, and even the creed of Bentham, seems to me comparatively worthy of praise. It is a determinate being what all the world, in a cowardly half-and-half manner, was tending to be. Let us have the crisis; we shall either have death or the cure. I call this gross, steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach towards new Faith.
It was a laying-down of cant; a saying to oneself: “Well then, this world is a dead iron machine, the god of it Gravitation and selfish Hunger; let us see what, by checking and balancing, and good adjustment of tooth and pinion, can be made of it!” Benthamism has something complete, manful, in such fearless committal of itself to what it finds true; you may call it Heroic, though a Heroism with its eyes put out! It is the culminating point, and fearless ultimatum, of what lay in the half-and-half state, pervading man’s whole existence in that Eighteenth Century. It seems to me, all deniers of Godhood, and all lip-believers of it, are bound to be Benthamites, if they have courage and honesty.
Benthamism is an eyeless Heroism: the Human Species, like a hapless blinded Samson grinding in the Philistine Mill, clasps convulsively the pillars of its Mill; brings huge ruin down, but ultimately deliverance withal. Of Bentham I meant to say no harm.
But this I do say, and would wish all men to know and lay to heart, that he who discerns nothing but Mechanism in the Universe has in the fatalest way missed the secret of the Universe altogether. That all Godhood should vanish out of men’s conception of this Universe seems to me precisely the most brutal error,—I will not disparage Heathenism by calling it a Heathen error,—that men could fall into. It is not true; it is false at the very heart of it. A man who thinks so will think wrong about all things in the world; this original sin will vitiate all other conclusions he can form.
One might call it the most lamentable of Delusions,—not forgetting Witchcraft itself! Witchcraft worshipped at least a living Devil; but this worships a dead iron Devil; no God, not even a Devil! Whatsoever is noble, divine, inspired, drops thereby out of life. There remains everywhere in life a despicable caput-mortuum; the mechanical hull, all soul fled out of it. How can a man act heroically? The “Doctrine of Motives” will teach him that it is, under more or less disguise, nothing but a wretched love of Pleasure, fear of Pain; that Hunger, of applause, of cash, of whatsoever victual it may be, is the ultimate fact of man’s life.
Atheism, in brief;—which does indeed frightfully punish itself. The man, I say, is become spiritually a paralytic man; this godlike Universe a dead mechanical steam-engine, all working by motives, checks, balances, and I know not what; wherein, as in the detestable belly of some Phalaris’-Bull of his own contriving, he the poor Phalaris sits miserably dying!
Belief I define to be the healthy act of a man’s mind. It is a mysterious indescribable process, that of getting to believe;—indescribable, as all vital acts are. We have our mind given us, not that it may cavil and argue, but that it may see into something, give us clear belief and understanding about something, whereon we are then to proceed to act. Doubt, truly, is not itself a crime. Certainly we do not rush out, clutch up the first thing we find, and straightway believe that! All manner of doubt, inquiry, [Gr.] skepsis as it is named, about all manner of objects, dwells in every reasonable mind. It is the mystic working of the mind, on the object it is getting to know and believe.
Belief comes out of all this, above ground, like the tree from its hidden roots. But now if, even on common things, we require that a man keep his doubts silent, and not babble of them till they in some measure become affirmations or denials; how much more in regard to the highest things, impossible to speak of in words at all! That a man parade his doubt, and get to imagine that debating and logic (which means at best only the manner of telling us your thought, your belief or disbelief, about a thing) is the triumph and true work of what intellect he has: alas, this is as if you should overturn the tree, and instead of green boughs, leaves and fruits, show us ugly taloned roots turned up into the air,—and no growth, only death and misery going on!
For the Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get. We call those ages in which he gets so low the mournfulest, sickest and meanest of all ages. The world’s heart is palsied, sick: how can any limb of it be whole? Genuine Acting ceases in all departments of the world’s work; dexterous Similitude of Acting begins.
The world’s wages are pocketed, the world’s work is not done. Heroes have gone out; Quacks have come in. Accordingly, what Century, since the end of the Roman world, which also was a time of scepticism, simulacra and universal decadence, so abounds with Quacks as that Eighteenth?
Consider them, with their tumid sentimental vaporing about virtue, benevolence,—the wretched Quack-squadron, Cagliostro at the head of them! Few men were without quackery; they had got to consider it a necessary ingredient and amalgam for truth. Chatham, our brave Chatham himself, comes down to the House, all wrapt and bandaged; he “has crawled out in great bodily suffering,” and so on;—forgets, says Walpole, that he is acting the sick man; in the fire of debate, snatches his arm from the sling, and oratorically swings and brandishes it! Chatham himself lives the strangest mimetic life, half-hero, half-quack, all along. For indeed the world is full of dupes; and you have to gain the world’s suffrage!
How the duties of the world will be done in that case, what quantities of error, which means failure, which means sorrow and misery, to some and to many, will gradually accumulate in all provinces of the world’s business, we need not compute.
It seems to me, you lay your finger here on the heart of the world’s maladies, when you call it a Sceptical World. An insincere world; a godless untruth of a world! It is out of this, as I consider, that the whole tribe of social pestilences, French Revolutions, Chartisms, and what not, have derived their being,—their chief necessity to be. This must alter. Till this alter, nothing can beneficially alter. My one hope of the world, my inexpugnable consolation in looking at the miseries of the world, is that this is altering.
Here and there one does now find a man who knows, as of old, that this world is a Truth, and no Plausibility and Falsity; that he himself is alive, not dead or paralytic; and that the world is alive, instinct with Godhood, beautiful and awful, even as in the beginning of days! One man once knowing this, many men, all men, must by and by come to know it. It lies there clear, for whosoever will take the spectacles off his eyes and honestly look, to know! For such a man the Unbelieving Century, with its unblessed Products, is already past; a new century is already come. The old unblessed Products and Performances, as solid as they look, are Phantasms, preparing speedily to vanish.
To this and the other noisy, very great-looking Simulacrum with the whole world huzzaing at its heels, he can say, composedly stepping aside: Thou art not true; thou art not extant, only semblant; go thy way!—Yes, hollow Formulism, gross Benthamism, and other unheroic atheistic Insincerity is visibly and even rapidly declining. An unbelieving Eighteenth Century is but an exception,—such as now and then occurs. I prophesy that the world will once more become sincere; a believing world; with many Heroes in it, a heroic world! It will then be a victorious world; never till then.
Or indeed what of the world and its victories? Men speak too much about the world. Each one of us here, let the world go how it will, and be victorious or not victorious, has he not a Life of his own to lead? One Life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us forevermore! It were well for us to live not as fools and simulacra, but as wise and realities. The world’s being saved will not save us; nor the world’s being lost destroy us. We should look to ourselves: there is great merit here in the “duty of staying at home”! And, on the whole, to say truth, I never heard of “world’s” being “saved” in any other way.
That mania of saving worlds is itself a piece of the Eighteenth Century with its windy sentimentalism. Let us not follow it too far. For the saving of the world I will trust confidently to the Maker of the world; and look a little to my own saving, which I am more competent to!—In brief, for the world’s sake, and for our own, we will rejoice greatly that Scepticism, Insincerity, Mechanical Atheism, with all their poison-dews, are going, and as good as gone.—
Now it was under such conditions, in those times of Johnson, that our Men of Letters had to live. Times in which there was properly no truth in life. Old truths had fallen nigh dumb; the new lay yet hidden, not trying to speak. That Man’s Life here below was a Sincerity and Fact, and would forever continue such, no new intimation, in that dusk of the world, had yet dawned. No intimation; not even any French Revolution,—which we define to be a Truth once more, though a Truth clad in hell-fire!
How different was the Luther’s pilgrimage, with its assured goal, from the Johnson’s, girt with mere traditions, suppositions, grown now incredible, unintelligible! Mahomet’s Formulas were of “wood waxed and oiled,” and could be burnt out of one’s way: poor Johnson’s were far more difficult to burn.—The strong man will ever find work, which means difficulty, pain, to the full measure of his strength. But to make out a victory, in those circumstances of our poor Hero as Man of Letters, was perhaps more difficult than in any. Not obstruction, disorganization, Bookseller Osborne and Fourpence-halfpenny a day; not this alone; but the light of his own soul was taken from him.
No landmark on the Earth; and, alas, what is that to having no loadstar in the Heaven! We need not wonder that none of those Three men rose to victory. That they fought truly is the highest praise. With a mournful sympathy we will contemplate, if not three living victorious Heroes, as I said, the Tombs of three fallen Heroes! They fell for us too; making a way for us. There are the mountains which they hurled abroad in their confused War of the Giants; under which, their strength and life spent, they now lie buried.
I have already written of these three Literary Heroes, expressly or incidentally; what I suppose is known to most of you; what need not be spoken or written a second time. They concern us here as the singular Prophets of that singular age; for such they virtually were; and the aspect they and their world exhibit, under this point of view, might lead us into reflections enough! I call them, all three, Genuine Men more or less; faithfully, for most part unconsciously, struggling to be genuine, and plant themselves on the everlasting truth of things.
This to a degree that eminently distinguishes them from the poor artificial mass of their contemporaries; and renders them worthy to be considered as Speakers, in some measure, of the everlasting truth, as Prophets in that age of theirs. By Nature herself a noble necessity was laid on them to be so. They were men of such magnitude that they could not live on unrealities,—clouds, froth and all inanity gave way under them: there was no footing for them but on firm earth; no rest or regular motion for them, if they got not footing there. To a certain extent, they were Sons of Nature once more in an age of Artifice; once more, Original Men.
As for Johnson, I have always considered him to be, by nature, one of our great English souls. A strong and noble man; so much left undeveloped in him to the last: in a kindlier element what might he not have been,—Poet, Priest, sovereign Ruler! On the whole, a man must not complain of his “element,” of his “time,” or the like; it is thriftless work doing so. His time is bad: well then, he is there to make it better!—Johnson’s youth was poor, isolated, hopeless, very miserable. Indeed, it does not seem possible that, in any the favorablest outward circumstances, Johnson’s life could have been other than a painful one.
The world might have had more of profitable work out of him, or less; but his effort against the world’s work could never have been a light one. Nature, in return for his nobleness, had said to him, Live in an element of diseased sorrow. Nay, perhaps the sorrow and the nobleness were intimately and even inseparably connected with each other. At all events, poor Johnson had to go about girt with continual hypochondria, physical and spiritual pain. Like a Hercules with the burning Nessus’-shirt on him, which shoots in on him dull incurable misery: the Nessus’-shirt not to be stript off, which is his own natural skin! In this manner he had to live.
Figure him there, with his scrofulous diseases, with his great greedy heart, and unspeakable chaos of thoughts; stalking mournful as a stranger in this Earth; eagerly devouring what spiritual thing he could come at: school-languages and other merely grammatical stuff, if there were nothing better! The largest soul that was in all England; and provision made for it of “fourpence-halfpenny a day.” Yet a giant invincible soul; a true man’s.
One remembers always that story of the shoes at Oxford: the rough, seamy-faced, rawboned College Servitor stalking about, in winter-season, with his shoes worn out; how the charitable Gentleman Commoner secretly places a new pair at his door; and the rawboned Servitor, lifting them, looking at them near, with his dim eyes, with what thoughts,—pitches them out of window! Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger or what you will; but not beggary: we cannot stand beggary! Rude stubborn self-help here; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery and want, yet of nobleness and manfulness withal. It is a type of the man’s life, this pitching away of the shoes.
An original man;—not a second-hand, borrowing or begging man. Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On such shoes as we ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but honestly on that;—on the reality and substance which Nature gives us, not on the semblance, on the thing she has given another than us—!
And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help, was there ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to what was really higher than he? Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them; only small mean souls are otherwise. I could not find a better proof of what I said the other day, That the sincere man was by nature the obedient man; that only in a World of Heroes was there loyal Obedience to the Heroic. The essence of originality is not that it be new: Johnson believed altogether in the old; he found the old opinions credible for him, fit for him; and in a right heroic manner lived under them. He is well worth study in regard to that.
For we are to say that Johnson was far other than a mere man of words and formulas; he was a man of truths and facts. He stood by the old formulas; the happier was it for him that he could so stand: but in all formulas that he could stand by, there needed to be a most genuine substance. Very curious how, in that poor Paper-age, so barren, artificial, thick-quilted with Pedantries, Hearsays, the great Fact of this Universe glared in, forever wonderful, indubitable, unspeakable, divine-infernal, upon this man too! How he harmonized his Formulas with it, how he managed at all under such circumstances: that is a thing worth seeing. A thing “to be looked at with reverence, with pity, with awe.”
That Church of St. Clement Danes, where Johnson still worshipped in the era of Voltaire, is to me a venerable place.
It was in virtue of his sincerity, of his speaking still in some sort from the heart of Nature, though in the current artificial dialect, that Johnson was a Prophet. Are not all dialects “artificial”? Artificial things are not all false;—nay every true Product of Nature will infallibly shape itself; we may say all artificial things are, at the starting of them, true. What we call “Formulas” are not in their origin bad; they are indispensably good. Formula is method, habitude; found wherever man is found. Formulas fashion themselves as Paths do, as beaten Highways, leading toward some sacred or high object, whither many men are bent.
Consider it. One man, full of heartfelt earnest impulse, finds out a way of doing somewhat,—were it of uttering his soul’s reverence for the Highest, were it but of fitly saluting his fellow-man. An inventor was needed to do that, a poet; he has articulated the dim-struggling thought that dwelt in his own and many hearts. This is his way of doing that; these are his footsteps, the beginning of a “Path.”
And now see: the second men travels naturally in the footsteps of his foregoer, it is the easiest method. In the footsteps of his foregoer; yet with improvements, with changes where such seem good; at all events with enlargements, the Path ever widening itself as more travel it;—till at last there is a broad Highway whereon the whole world may travel and drive. While there remains a City or Shrine, or any Reality to drive to, at the farther end, the Highway shall be right welcome! When the City is gone, we will forsake the Highway. In this manner all Institutions, Practices, Regulated Things in the world have come into existence, and gone out of existence.
Formulas all begin by being full of substance; you may call them the skin, the articulation into shape, into limbs and skin, of a substance that is already there: they had not been there otherwise. Idols, as we said, are not idolatrous till they become doubtful, empty for the worshipper’s heart. Much as we talk against Formulas, I hope no one of us is ignorant withal of the high significance of true Formulas; that they were, and will ever be, the indispensablest furniture of our habitation in this world.—
Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his “sincerity.” He has no suspicion of his being particularly sincere,—of his being particularly anything! A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or “scholar” as he calls himself, trying hard to get some honest livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live—without stealing! A noble unconsciousness is in him. He does not “engrave Truth on his watch-seal;” no, but he stands by truth, speaks by it, works and lives by it. Thus it ever is. Think of it once more. The man whom Nature has appointed to do great things is, first of all, furnished with that openness to Nature which renders him incapable of being insincere!
To his large, open, deep-feeling heart Nature is a Fact: all hearsay is hearsay; the unspeakable greatness of this Mystery of Life, let him acknowledge it or not, nay even though he seem to forget it or deny it, is ever present to him,—fearful and wonderful, on this hand and on that. He has a basis of sincerity; unrecognized, because never questioned or capable of question. Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell, Napoleon: all the Great Men I ever heard of have this as the primary material of them. Innumerable commonplace men are debating, are talking everywhere their commonplace doctrines, which they have learned by logic, by rote, at second-hand: to that kind of man all this is still nothing.
He must have truth; truth which he feels to be true. How shall he stand otherwise? His whole soul, at all moments, in all ways, tells him that there is no standing. He is under the noble necessity of being true. Johnson’s way of thinking about this world is not mine, any more than Mahomet’s was: but I recognize the everlasting element of heart-sincerity in both; and see with pleasure how neither of them remains ineffectual. Neither of them is as chaff sown; in both of them is something which the seedfield will grow.
Johnson was a Prophet to his people; preached a Gospel to them,—as all like him always do. The highest Gospel he preached we may describe as a kind of Moral Prudence: “in a world where much is to be done, and little is to be known,” see how you will do it! A thing well worth preaching. “A world where much is to be done, and little is to be known:” do not sink yourselves in boundless bottomless abysses of Doubt, of wretched god-forgetting Unbelief;—you were miserable then, powerless, mad: how could you do or work at all? Such Gospel Johnson preached and taught;—coupled, theoretically and practically, with this other great Gospel, “Clear your mind of Cant!”
Have no trade with Cant: stand on the cold mud in the frosty weather, but let it be in your own real torn shoes: “that will be better for you,” as Mahomet says! I call this, I call these two things joined together, a great Gospel, the greatest perhaps that was possible at that time.
Johnson’s Writings, which once had such currency and celebrity, are now as it were disowned by the young generation. It is not wonderful; Johnson’s opinions are fast becoming obsolete: but his style of thinking and of living, we may hope, will never become obsolete. I find in Johnson’s Books the indisputablest traces of a great intellect and great heart;—ever welcome, under what obstructions and perversions soever. They are sincere words, those of his; he means things by them.
A wondrous buckram style,—the best he could get to then; a measured grandiloquence, stepping or rather stalking along in a very solemn way, grown obsolete now; sometimes a tumid size of phraseology not in proportion to the contents of it: all this you will put up with. For the phraseology, tumid or not, has always something within it. So many beautiful styles and books, with nothing in them;—a man is a malefactor to the world who writes such! They are the avoidable kind!—Had Johnson left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine man.
Looking to its clearness of definition, its general solidity, honesty, insight and successful method, it may be called the best of all Dictionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; it stands there like a great solid square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete: you judge that a true Builder did it.
One word, in spite of our haste, must be granted to poor Bozzy. He passes for a mean, inflated, gluttonous creature; and was so in many senses. Yet the fact of his reverence for Johnson will ever remain noteworthy. The foolish conceited Scotch Laird, the most conceited man of his time, approaching in such awe-struck attitude the great dusty irascible Pedagogue in his mean garret there: it is a genuine reverence for Excellence; a worship for Heroes, at a time when neither Heroes nor worship were surmised to exist. Heroes, it would seem, exist always, and a certain worship of them!
We will also take the liberty to deny altogether that of the witty Frenchman, that no man is a Hero to his valet-de-chambre. Or if so, it is not the Hero’s blame, but the Valet’s: that his soul, namely, is a mean valet-soul! He expects his Hero to advance in royal stage-trappings, with measured step, trains borne behind him, trumpets sounding before him. It should stand rather, No man can be a Grand-Monarque to his valet-de-chambre. Strip your Louis Quatorze of his king-gear, and there is left nothing but a poor forked radish with a head fantastically carved;—admirable to no valet. The Valet does not know a Hero when he sees him!
Alas, no: it requires a kind of Hero to do that;—and one of the world’s wants, in this as in other senses, is for most part want of such.
On the whole, shall we not say, that Boswell’s admiration was well bestowed; that he could have found no soul in all England so worthy of bending down before? Shall we not say, of this great mournful Johnson too, that he guided his difficult confused existence wisely; led it well, like a right valiant man? That waste chaos of Authorship by trade; that waste chaos of Scepticism in religion and politics, in life-theory and life-practice; in his poverty, in his dust and dimness, with the sick body and the rusty coat: he made it do for him, like a brave man.
Not wholly without a loadstar in the Eternal; he had still a loadstar, as the brave all need to have: with his eye set on that, he would change his course for nothing in these confused vortices of the lower sea of Time. “To the Spirit of Lies, bearing death and hunger, he would in nowise strike his flag.” Brave old Samuel: ultimus Romanorum!
Of Rousseau and his Heroism I cannot say so much. He is not what I call a strong man. A morbid, excitable, spasmodic man; at best, intense rather than strong. He had not “the talent of Silence,” an invaluable talent; which few Frenchmen, or indeed men of any sort in these times, excel in! The suffering man ought really “to consume his own smoke;” there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire,—which, in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming! Rousseau has not depth or width, not calm force for difficulty; the first characteristic of true greatness. A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength!
A man is not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then. He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the strong man. We need forever, especially in these loud-shrieking days, to remind ourselves of that. A man who cannot hold his peace, till the time come for speaking and acting, is no right man.
Poor Rousseau’s face is to me expressive of him. A high but narrow contracted intensity in it: bony brows; deep, strait-set eyes, in which there is something bewildered-looking,—bewildered, peering with lynx-eagerness. A face full of misery, even ignoble misery, and also of the antagonism against that; something mean, plebeian there, redeemed only by intensity: the face of what is called a Fanatic,—a sadly contracted Hero! We name him here because, with all his drawbacks, and they are many, he has the first and chief characteristic of a Hero: he is heartily in earnest. In earnest, if ever man was; as none of these French Philosophers were.
Nay, one would say, of an earnestness too great for his otherwise sensitive, rather feeble nature; and which indeed in the end drove him into the strangest incoherences, almost delirations. There had come, at last, to be a kind of madness in him: his Ideas possessed him like demons; hurried him so about, drove him over steep places—!
The fault and misery of Rousseau was what we easily name by a single word, Egoism; which is indeed the source and summary of all faults and miseries whatsoever. He had not perfected himself into victory over mere Desire; a mean Hunger, in many sorts, was still the motive principle of him. I am afraid he was a very vain man; hungry for the praises of men. You remember Genlis’s experience of him. She took Jean Jacques to the Theatre; he bargaining for a strict incognito,—”He would not be seen there for the world!”
The curtain did happen nevertheless to be drawn aside: the Pit recognized Jean Jacques, but took no great notice of him! He expressed the bitterest indignation; gloomed all evening, spake no other than surly words. The glib Countess remained entirely convinced that his anger was not at being seen, but at not being applauded when seen. How the whole nature of the man is poisoned; nothing but suspicion, self-isolation, fierce moody ways! He could not live with anybody. A man of some rank from the country, who visited him often, and used to sit with him, expressing all reverence and affection for him, comes one day; finds Jean Jacques full of the sourest unintelligible humor.
“Monsieur,” said Jean Jacques, with flaming eyes, “I know why you come here. You come to see what a poor life I lead; how little is in my poor pot that is boiling there. Well, look into the pot! There is half a pound of meat, one carrot and three onions; that is all: go and tell the whole world that, if you like, Monsieur!”—A man of this sort was far gone. The whole world got itself supplied with anecdotes, for light laughter, for a certain theatrical interest, from these perversions and contortions of poor Jean Jacques. Alas, to him they were not laughing or theatrical; too real to him!
The contortions of a dying gladiator: the crowded amphitheatre looks on with entertainment; but the gladiator is in agonies and dying.
And yet this Rousseau, as we say, with his passionate appeals to Mothers, with his contrat-social, with his celebrations of Nature, even of savage life in Nature, did once more touch upon Reality, struggle towards Reality; was doing the function of a Prophet to his Time. As he could, and as the Time could! Strangely through all that defacement, degradation and almost madness, there is in the inmost heart of poor Rousseau a spark of real heavenly fire.
Once more, out of the element of that withered mocking Philosophism, Scepticism and Persiflage, there has arisen in this man the ineradicable feeling and knowledge that this Life of ours is true: not a Scepticism, Theorem, or Persiflage, but a Fact, an awful Reality. Nature had made that revelation to him; had ordered him to speak it out. He got it spoken out; if not well and clearly, then ill and dimly,—as clearly as he could.
Nay what are all errors and perversities of his, even those stealings of ribbons, aimless confused miseries and vagabondisms, if we will interpret them kindly, but the blinkard dazzlement and staggerings to and fro of a man sent on an errand he is too weak for, by a path he cannot yet find? Men are led by strange ways. One should have tolerance for a man, hope of him; leave him to try yet what he will do. While life lasts, hope lasts for every man.
Of Rousseau’s literary talents, greatly celebrated still among his countrymen, I do not say much. His Books, like himself, are what I call unhealthy; not the good sort of Books. There is a sensuality in Rousseau. Combined with such an intellectual gift as his, it makes pictures of a certain gorgeous attractiveness: but they are not genuinely poetical. Not white sunlight: something operatic; a kind of rose-pink, artificial bedizenment. It is frequent, or rather it is universal, among the French since his time. Madame de Stael has something of it; St. Pierre; and down onwards to the present astonishing convulsionary “Literature of Desperation,” it is everywhere abundant.
That same rose-pink is not the right hue. Look at a Shakspeare, at a Goethe, even at a Walter Scott! He who has once seen into this, has seen the difference of the True from the Sham-True, and will discriminate them ever afterwards.
We had to observe in Johnson how much good a Prophet, under all disadvantages and disorganizations, can accomplish for the world. In Rousseau we are called to look rather at the fearful amount of evil which, under such disorganization, may accompany the good. Historically it is a most pregnant spectacle, that of Rousseau. Banished into Paris garrets, in the gloomy company of his own Thoughts and Necessities there; driven from post to pillar; fretted, exasperated till the heart of him went mad, he had grown to feel deeply that the world was not his friend nor the world’s law. It was expedient, if any way possible, that such a man should not have been set in flat hostility with the world.
He could be cooped into garrets, laughed at as a maniac, left to starve like a wild beast in his cage;—but he could not be hindered from setting the world on fire. The French Revolution found its Evangelist in Rousseau. His semi-delirious speculations on the miseries of civilized life, the preferability of the savage to the civilized, and such like, helped well to produce a whole delirium in France generally. True, you may well ask, What could the world, the governors of the world, do with such a man? Difficult to say what the governors of the world could do with him! What he could do with them is unhappily clear enough,—guillotine a great many of them! Enough now of Rousseau.
It was a curious phenomenon, in the withered, unbelieving second-hand Eighteenth Century, that of a Hero starting up, among the artificial pasteboard figures and productions, in the guise of a Robert Burns. Like a little well in the rocky desert places,—like a sudden splendor of Heaven in the artificial Vauxhall! People knew not what to make of it. They took it for a piece of the Vauxhall fire-work; alas, it let itself be so taken, though struggling half-blindly, as in bitterness of death, against that! Perhaps no man had such a false reception from his fellow-men. Once more a very wasteful life-drama was enacted under the sun.
The tragedy of Burns’s life is known to all of you. Surely we may say, if discrepancy between place held and place merited constitute perverseness of lot for a man, no lot could be more perverse then Burns’s. Among those second-hand acting-figures, mimes for most part, of the Eighteenth Century, once more a giant Original Man; one of those men who reach down to the perennial Deeps, who take rank with the Heroic among men: and he was born in a poor Ayrshire hut. The largest soul of all the British lands came among us in the shape of a hard-handed Scottish Peasant.
His Father, a poor toiling man, tried various things; did not succeed in any; was involved in continual difficulties. The Steward, Factor as the Scotch call him, used to send letters and threatenings, Burns says, “which threw us all into tears.” The brave, hard-toiling, hard-suffering Father, his brave heroine of a wife; and those children, of whom Robert was one! In this Earth, so wide otherwise, no shelter for them. The letters “threw us all into tears:” figure it. The brave Father, I say always;—a silent Hero and Poet; without whom the son had never been a speaking one!
Burns’s Schoolmaster came afterwards to London, learnt what good society was; but declares that in no meeting of men did he ever enjoy better discourse than at the hearth of this peasant. And his poor “seven acres of nursery-ground,”—not that, nor the miserable patch of clay-farm, nor anything he tried to get a living by, would prosper with him; he had a sore unequal battle all his days. But he stood to it valiantly; a wise, faithful, unconquerable man;—swallowing down how many sore sufferings daily into silence; fighting like an unseen Hero,—nobody publishing newspaper paragraphs about his nobleness; voting pieces of plate to him! However, he was not lost; nothing is lost. Robert is there the outcome of him,—and indeed of many generations of such as him.
This Burns appeared under every disadvantage: uninstructed, poor, born only to hard manual toil; and writing, when it came to that, in a rustic special dialect, known only to a small province of the country he lived in. Had he written, even what he did write, in the general language of England, I doubt not he had already become universally recognized as being, or capable to be, one of our greatest men. That he should have tempted so many to penetrate through the rough husk of that dialect of his, is proof that there lay something far from common within it.
He has gained a certain recognition, and is continuing to do so over all quarters of our wide Saxon world: wheresoever a Saxon dialect is spoken, it begins to be understood, by personal inspection of this and the other, that one of the most considerable Saxon men of the Eighteenth Century was an Ayrshire Peasant named Robert Burns. Yes, I will say, here too was a piece of the right Saxon stuff: strong as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the world;—rock, yet with wells of living softness in it! A wild impetuous whirlwind of passion and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly melody dwelling in the heart of it. A noble rough genuineness; homely, rustic, honest; true simplicity of strength; with its lightning-fire, with its soft dewy pity;—like the old Norse Thor, the Peasant-god!
Burns’s Brother Gilbert, a man of much sense and worth, has told me that Robert, in his young days, in spite of their hardship, was usually the gayest of speech; a fellow of infinite frolic, laughter, sense and heart; far pleasanter to hear there, stript cutting peats in the bog, or such like, than he ever afterwards knew him. I can well believe it. This basis of mirth (“fond gaillard,” as old Marquis Mirabeau calls it), a primal element of sunshine and joyfulness, coupled with his other deep and earnest qualities, is one of the most attractive characteristics of Burns. A large fund of Hope dwells in him; spite of his tragical history, he is not a mourning man.
He shakes his sorrows gallantly aside; bounds forth victorious over them. It is as the lion shaking “dew-drops from his mane;” as the swift-bounding horse, that laughs at the shaking of the spear.—But indeed, Hope, Mirth, of the sort like Burns’s, are they not the outcome properly of warm generous affection,—such as is the beginning of all to every man?
You would think it strange if I called Burns the most gifted British soul we had in all that century of his: and yet I believe the day is coming when there will be little danger in saying so. His writings, all that he did under such obstructions, are only a poor fragment of him. Professor Stewart remarked very justly, what indeed is true of all Poets good for much, that his poetry was not any particular faculty; but the general result of a naturally vigorous original mind expressing itself in that way. Burns’s gifts, expressed in conversation, are the theme of all that ever heard him.
All kinds of gifts: from the gracefulest utterances of courtesy, to the highest fire of passionate speech; loud floods of mirth, soft wailings of affection, laconic emphasis, clear piercing insight; all was in him. Witty duchesses celebrate him as a man whose speech “led them off their feet.” This is beautiful: but still more beautiful that which Mr. Lockhart has recorded, which I have more than once alluded to, How the waiters and ostlers at inns would get out of bed, and come crowding to hear this man speak! Waiters and ostlers:—they too were men, and here was a man!
I have heard much about his speech; but one of the best things I ever heard of it was, last year, from a venerable gentleman long familiar with him. That it was speech distinguished by always having something in it. “He spoke rather little than much,” this old man told me; “sat rather silent in those early days, as in the company of persons above him; and always when he did speak, it was to throw new light on the matter.” I know not why any one should ever speak otherwise!—But if we look at his general force of soul, his healthy robustness every way, the rugged downrightness, penetration, generous valor and manfulness that was in him,—where shall we readily find a better-gifted man?
Among the great men of the Eighteenth Century, I sometimes feel as if Burns might be found to resemble Mirabeau more than any other. They differ widely in vesture; yet look at them intrinsically. There is the same burly thick-necked strength of body as of soul;—built, in both cases, on what the old Marquis calls a fond gaillard. By nature, by course of breeding, indeed by nation, Mirabeau has much more of bluster; a noisy, forward, unresting man. But the characteristic of Mirabeau too is veracity and sense, power of true insight, superiority of vision.
The thing that he says is worth remembering. It is a flash of insight into some object or other: so do both these men speak. The same raging passions; capable too in both of manifesting themselves as the tenderest noble affections. Wit; wild laughter, energy, directness, sincerity: these were in both. The types of the two men are not dissimilar. Burns too could have governed, debated in National Assemblies; politicized, as few could. Alas, the courage which had to exhibit itself in capture of smuggling schooners in the Solway Frith; in keeping silence over so much, where no good speech, but only inarticulate rage was possible: this might have bellowed forth Ushers de Breze and the like; and made itself visible to all men, in managing of kingdoms, in ruling of great ever-memorable epochs!
But they said to him reprovingly, his Official Superiors said, and wrote: “You are to work, not think.” Of your thinking-faculty, the greatest in this land, we have no need; you are to gauge beer there; for that only are you wanted. Very notable;—and worth mentioning, though we know what is to be said and answered! As if Thought, Power of Thinking, were not, at all times, in all places and situations of the world, precisely the thing that was wanted. The fatal man, is he not always the unthinking man, the man who cannot think and see; but only grope, and hallucinate, and missee the nature of the thing he works with?
He mis-sees it, mistakes it as we say; takes it for one thing, and it is another thing,—and leaves him standing like a Futility there! He is the fatal man; unutterably fatal, put in the high places of men.—”Why complain of this?” say some: “Strength is mournfully denied its arena; that was true from of old.” Doubtless; and the worse for the arena, answer I! Complaining profits little; stating of the truth may profit. That a Europe, with its French Revolution just breaking out, finds no need of a Burns except for gauging beer,—is a thing I, for one, cannot rejoice at—!
Once more we have to say here, that the chief quality of Burns is the sincerity of him. So in his Poetry, so in his Life. The song he sings is not of fantasticalities; it is of a thing felt, really there; the prime merit of this, as of all in him, and of his Life generally, is truth. The Life of Burns is what we may call a great tragic sincerity. A sort of savage sincerity,—not cruel, far from that; but wild, wrestling naked with the truth of things. In that sense, there is something of the savage in all great men.
Hero-worship,—Odin, Burns? Well; these Men of Letters too were not without a kind of Hero-worship: but what a strange condition has that got into now! The waiters and ostlers of Scotch inns, prying about the door, eager to catch any word that fell from Burns, were doing unconscious reverence to the Heroic. Johnson had his Boswell for worshipper. Rousseau had worshippers enough; princes calling on him in his mean garret; the great, the beautiful doing reverence to the poor moon-struck man. For himself a most portentous contradiction; the two ends of his life not to be brought into harmony. He sits at the tables of grandees; and has to copy music for his own living.
He cannot even get his music copied: “By dint of dining out,” says he, “I run the risk of dying by starvation at home.” For his worshippers too a most questionable thing! If doing Hero-worship well or badly be the test of vital well-being or ill-being to a generation, can we say that these generations are very first-rate?—And yet our heroic Men of Letters do teach, govern, are kings, priests, or what you like to call them; intrinsically there is no preventing it by any means whatever. The world has to obey him who thinks and sees in the world.
The world can alter the manner of that; can either have it as blessed continuous summer sunshine, or as unblessed black thunder and tornado,—with unspeakable difference of profit for the world! The manner of it is very alterable; the matter and fact of it is not alterable by any power under the sky. Light; or, failing that, lightning: the world can take its choice. Not whether we call an Odin god, prophet, priest, or what we call him; but whether we believe the word he tells us: there it all lies. If it be a true word, we shall have to believe it; believing it, we shall have to do it. What name or welcome we give him or it, is a point that concerns ourselves mainly. It, the new Truth, new deeper revealing of the Secret of this Universe, is verily of the nature of a message from on high; and must and will have itself obeyed.—
My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burns’s history,—his visit to Edinburgh. Often it seems to me as if his demeanor there were the highest proof he gave of what a fund of worth and genuine manhood was in him. If we think of it, few heavier burdens could be laid on the strength of a man. So sudden; all common Lionism. which ruins innumerable men, was as nothing to this. It is as if Napoleon had been made a King of, not gradually, but at once from the Artillery Lieutenancy in the Regiment La Fere. Burns, still only in his twenty-seventh year, is no longer even a ploughman; he is flying to the West Indies to escape disgrace and a jail.
This month he is a ruined peasant, his wages seven pounds a year, and these gone from him: next month he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handing down jewelled Duchesses to dinner; the cynosure of all eyes! Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity. I admire much the way in which Burns met all this. Perhaps no man one could point out, was ever so sorely tried, and so little forgot himself.
Tranquil, unastonished; not abashed, not inflated, neither awkwardness nor affectation: he feels that he there is the man Robert Burns; that the “rank is but the guinea-stamp;” that the celebrity is but the candle-light, which will show what man, not in the least make him a better or other man! Alas, it may readily, unless he look to it, make him a worse man; a wretched inflated wind-bag,—inflated till he burst, and become a dead lion; for whom, as some one has said, “there is no resurrection of the body;” worse than a living dog!—Burns is admirable here.
And yet, alas, as I have observed elsewhere, these Lion-hunters were the ruin and death of Burns. It was they that rendered it impossible for him to live! They gathered round him in his Farm; hindered his industry; no place was remote enough from them. He could not get his Lionism forgotten, honestly as he was disposed to do so. He falls into discontents, into miseries, faults; the world getting ever more desolate for him; health, character, peace of mind, all gone;—solitary enough now. It is tragical to think of! These men came but to see him; it was out of no sympathy with him, nor no hatred to him. They came to get a little amusement; they got their amusement;—and the Hero’s life went for it!
Richter says, in the Island of Sumatra there is a kind of “Light-chafers,” large Fire-flies, which people stick upon spits, and illuminate the ways with at night. Persons of condition can thus travel with a pleasant radiance, which they much admire. Great honor to the Fire-flies! But—!

Carlyle – Past and Present

He had a Man’s Soul in him;

To which anarchy, mutiny and the other fruits of temporary Mercenaries were intolerable:

He had never been a Baron otherwise…

He felt it precious,

And at last it became

Habitual and his fruitful enlarged existence

Included it as a necessity,

To have those around him who in heart loved him;

Whose lives he watched over with rigor yet with love;

Who were prepared to give their lives for him,

If need came.

The task will be hard; but no noble task was ever easy.

The task will wear away your lives, and the lives

Of your sons and grandsons;

But for what purpose, if not for tasks like this,

Were lives given to men?

Thomas Carlyle, 1843...

Musäus: “Libussa” 5/5

Excerpt from Thomas Carlyle’s “German Romance: Specimens of its Chief Authors; with Biographical and Critical Notices.” Vol. I, 1827.

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By Johann Karl August Musäus

LIBUSSA
The fair speaker ceased ; and a deep reverent silence reigned throughout the hall of meeting ; none presumed to utter a word against her. Yet Prince Wladomir and his allies desisted not from their intention, but whispered in each other’s ear : ” Then sly Doe is loath to quit the fat pastures ; but the hunter’s horn shall sound yet louder, and scare her forth.” Next day they prompted the knights to call loudly on the Princess to choose a husband within three days, and by the choice of her heart to give the people a Prince, who might divide with her the cares of government.
At this unexpected requisition, coming as it seemed from the voice of the nation, a virgin blush overspread the cheeks of the lovely Princess ; her clear eye discerned all the sunken cliffs, which threatened her with peril. For even if, according to the custom of the great world, she should determine upon subjecting her inclination to her state-policy, she could only give her hand to one suitor, and she saw well that all the remaining candidates would take it as a slight, and begin to meditate revenge. Besides, the private vow of her heart was inviolable and sacred in her eyes.
Therefore she endeavoured prudently to turn aside this importunate demand of the States ; and again attempted to persuade them altogether to renounce their schemes of innovation. ” The eagle being dead,” said she, “the birds chose the Ring-dove for their queen, and all of them obeyed her soft cooing call. But light and airy, as is the nature of birds, they soon altered their determination, and repented them that they had made it. The proud Peacock thought that it beseemed him better to be ruler ; the keen Falcon, accustomed to make the smaller birds his prey, reckoned it disgraceful to obey the peaceful Dove ; they formed a party, and appointed the weak-eyed Owl to be the spokesman of their combination, and propose a new election of a sovereign.
The sluggish Bustard, the heavy-bodied Heath-cock, the lazy Stork, the small-brained Heron, and all the larger birds chuckled, flapped, and croaked applause to him ; and the host of little birds twittered, in their simplicity, and chirped out of bush and grove to the same tune. Then arose the warlike Kite, and soared boldly up into the air, and the birds cried out : ‘ What a majestic flight ! The brave, strong Kite shall be our King !’ Scarcely had the plundering bird taken possession of the throne, when he manifested his activity and courage on his winged subjects, in deeds of tyranny and caprice : he plucked the feathers from the larger fowls, and eat the little songsters.”
Significant as this oration was, it made but a small impression on the minds of the people, hungering and thirsting after change; and they abode by their determination, that within three days, Fraulein Libussa should select herself a husband.
At this, Prince Wladomir rejoiced in heart ; for now, he thought, he should secure the fair prey, for which he had so long been watching in vain. Love and ambition inflamed his wishes, and put eloquence into his mouth, which had hitherto confined itself to secret sighing. He came to Court, and required audience of the Duchess.
“Gracious ruler of thy people and my heart,” thus he addressed her, ” from thee no secret is hidden ; thou knowest the flames which burn in this bosom, holy and pure as on the altar of the gods, and thou knowest also what fire has kindled them. It is now appointed, that at the behest of thy people, thou give the land a Prince. Wilt thou disdain a heart, which lives, and beats for thee ? To be worthy of thy love, I risked my life to put thee on the throne of thy father. Grant me the merit of retaining thee upon it by the bond of tender affection : let us divide the possession of thy throne and thy heart ; the first be thine, the second be mine, and my happiness will be exalted beyond the lot*of mortals.”
Fraulein Libussa wore a most maidenlike appearance during this oration, and covered her face with her veil, to hide the soft blush which deepened the colour of her cheeks. On its conclusion, she made a sign with her hand, not opening her lips, for the Prince to step aside ; as if she would consider what she should resolve upon, in answer to his suit. Immediately the brisk Knight Mizisla announced himself, and desired to be admitted. “Loveliest of the daughters of princes,” said he, as he entered the audience-chamber, “the fair Ring-dove, queen of the air, must no longer, as thou well knowest, coo in solitude, but take to herself a mate.
The proud Peacock, it is talked, holds up his glittering plumage in her eyes, and thinks to blind her by the splendour of his feathers ; but she is prudent and modest, and will not unite herself with the haughty Peacock. The keen Falcon, once a plundering bird, has now changed his nature; is gentle and honest, and without deceit ; for he loves the fair Dove, and would fain that she mated with him. That his bill is hooked and his talons sharp, must not mislead thee : he needs them to protect the fair Dove his darling, that no bird hurt her, or disturb the habitation of her rule ; for he is true and kindly to her, and first swore fealty on the day when she was crowned. Now tell me, wise Princess, if the soft Dove will grant to her trusty Falcon the love which he longs for ?”
Fraulein Libussa did as she had done before : beckoned to the Knight to step aside ; and, after waiting for a space, she called the two rivals into her presence, and spoke thus : ” I owe you great thanks, noble Knights, for your help in obtaining me the princely crown of Bohemia, which my father Krokus honourably wore. The zeal, of which you remind me, had not faded from my remembrance ; nor is it hid from my knowledge, that you virtuously love me, for your looks and gestures have long been the interpreters of your feelings. That I shut up my heart against you, and did not answer love with love, regard not as insensibility ; it was not meant for slight or scorn, but for harmoniously determining a choice which was doubtful.
I weighed your merits, and the tongue of the trying balance bent to neither side. Therefore I resolved on leaving the decision of your fate to yourselves ; and offered you the possession of my heart, under the figure of an enigmatic; that it might be seen to which of you the greater measure of judgment and wisdom had been given, in appropriating to himself this gift, which could not be divided. Now tell me without delay, In whose hands is the apple ? Whichever of you has won it from the other, let him from this hour receive my throne and my heart as the prize of his skill.”
The two rivals looked at one another with amazement ; grew pale, and held their peace. At last, after a long pause, Prince Wladomir broke silence, and said : “The enigmas of the wise are, to the foolish, a nut in a toothless mouth, a pearl which the cock scratches from the sand, a lantern in the hand of the blind. O Princess, be not wroth with us, that we neither knew the use nor the value of thy gift ; we misinterpreted thy purpose ; thought that thou hadst cast an apple of contention on our path, to awaken us to strife and deadly feud ; therefore each gave up his share, and we renounced the divisive fruit, whose sole possession neither of us would have peaceably allowed the other !”
“You have given sentence on yourselves,” replied the Fraulein : “if an apple could inflame your jealousy, what fighting would ye not have fought for a myrtle-garland twined about a crown !”
With this response she dismissed the Knights, who now lamented that they had given ear to the unwise arbiter, and thoughtlessly cast away the pledge of love, which, as it appeared, had been the casket of their fairest hopes. They meditated severally how they might still execute their purpose, and by force or guile get possession . of the throne, with its lovely occupant.
Fraulein Libussa, in the mean while, was not spending in idleness the three days given her for consideration ; but diligently taking counsel with herself, how she might meet the importunate demand of her people, give Bohemia a Duke, and herself a husband according to the choice of her heart. She dreaded lest Prince Wladomir might still more pressingly assail her, and perhaps deprive her of the throne. Necessity combined with love to make her execute a plan, with which she had often entertained herself as with a pleasant dream ; for what mortal’s head has not some phantom walking in it, towards which he turns in a vacant hour, to play with it as with a puppet ?
There is no more pleasing pastime for a strait-shod maiden, when her galled corns are resting from the toils of the pavement, than to think of a stately and commodious equipage ; the coy beauty dreams gladly of counts sighing at her feet ; Avarice gets prizes in the Lottery ; the debtor in the jail falls heir to vast possessions ; the squanderer discovers the Hermetic Secret ; and the poor woodcutter finds a treasure in the hollow of a tree; all merely in fancy, yet not without the enjoyment of a secret satisfaction.
The gift of prophecy has always been united with a warm imagination ; thus the fair Libussa had, like others, willingly and frequently given heed to this seductive playmate, which, in kind companionship, had always entertained her with the figure of the young Archer, so indelibly impressed upon her heart. Thousands of projects came into her mind, which Fancy palmed on her as feasible and easy.
At one time she formed schemes of drawing forth her darling youth from his obscurity, placing him in the army, and raising him from one post of honour to another ; and then instantly she bound a laurel garland about his temples, and led him, crowned with victory and honour, to the throne she could have been so glad to share with him. At other times, she gave a different turn to the romance : she equipped her darling as a knight-errant, seeking for adventures ; brought him to her Court, and changed him into a Huon of Bourdeaux ; nor was the wondrous furniture wanting, for endowing him as highly as Friend Oberon did his ward.
But when Common Sense again got possession of the maiden’s soul, the many-coloured forms of the magic-lantern waxed pale in the beam of prudence, and the fair vision vanished into air. She then bethought her what hazards would attend such an enterprise ; what mischief for her people, when jealousy and envy raised the hearts of her grandees in rebellion against her, and the alarum beacon of discord gave the signal for uproar and sedition in the land. Therefore she sedulously hid the wishes of her heart from the keen glance of the spy, and disclosed no glimpse of them to any one.
But now, when the people were clamouring for a Prince, the matter had assumed another form : the point would now be attained, could she combine her wishes with the national demand. She strengthened her soul with manly resolution ; and as the third day dawned, she adorned herself with all her jewels, and her head was encircled with a myrtle crown. Attended by her maidens, all decorated with flower garlands, she ascended the ‘throne, full of lofty courage and soft dignity.
The assemblage of knights and vassals around her stood in breathless attention, to learn from her lips the name of the happy Prince with whom she had resolved to share her heart and throne. “Ye nobles of my people,” thus she spoke, “the lot of your destiny still lies untouched in the urn of concealment ; you are still free as my coursers that graze in the meadows,before the bridle and the bit have curbed them, or their smooth backs have been pressed by the burden of the saddle and the rider. It now rests with you to signify, Whether, in the space allowed me for the choice of a spouse, your hot desire for a Prince to rule over you has cooled, and given place to more calm scrutiny of this intention ; or you still persist inflexibly in your demand.”
She paused for a moment ; but the hum of the multitude, the whispering and buzzing, and looks of the whole Senate, did not long leave her in uncertainty, and their speaker ratified the conclusion, that the vote was still for a Duke. ” Then be it so” said she ; “the die is cast, the issue of it stands not with me ! The gods have appointed, for the kingdom of Bohemia, a Prince who shall sway its sceptre with justice and wisdom. The young cedar does not yet overtop the firm-set oaks ; concealed among the trees of the forest it grows, encircled with ignoble shrubs ; but soon it shall send forth branches to give shade to its roots ; and its top shall touch the clouds.
Choose a deputation, ye nobles of the people, of twelve honourable men from among you, that they hasten to seek out the Prince, and attend him to the throne. My steed will point out your path ; unloaded and free it shall course on before you”; and as a token that you have found what you are sent forth to seek, observe that the man whom the gods have selected for your Prince, at the time when you approach him, will be eating his repast on an iron table, under the open sky, in the shadow of a solitary tree. To him you shall do reverence, and clothe his body with the princely robe. The white horse will let him mount it, and bring him hither to the Court, that he may be my husband and your lord.”
She then left the assembly, with the cheerful yet abashed countenance which brides vear, when they look for the arrival of the bridegroom. At her speech there was much wondering ; and the prophetic spirit breathing from it worked upon the general mind like a divine oracle, which the populace blindly believe, and which thinkers alone attempt investigating. The messengers of honour were selected, the white horse stood in readiness, caparisoned with Asiatic pomp, as if it had been saddled for carrying the Grand Signior to mosque. The cavalcade set forth, attended by the concourse, and the loud huzzaing of the people ; and the white horse paced on before.
But the train soon vanished from the eyes of the spectators : and nothing could be seen but a little cloud of dust whirling up afar off: for the spirited courser, getting to its mettle when it reached the open air, began a furious gallop, like a British racer, so that the squadron of deputies could hardly keep in sight of it. Though the quick steed seemed abandoned to its own guidance, an unseen power directed its steps, pulled its bridle, and spurred its flanks. Fraulein Libussa, by the magicvirtues inherited from her Elfine mother, had contrived so to instruct the courser, that it turned neither to the right hand nor to the left from its path, but with winged steps hastened on to its destination : and she herself, now that all combined to the fulfilment of her wishes, awaited its returning rider with tender longing.
The messengers had in the mean time been soundly galloped ; already they had travelled many leagues, up hill and down dale ; had swum across the Elbe and the Moldau ; and as their gastric juices made them think of dinner, they recalled to mind the strange table, at which, according to the Fraulein’s oracle, their new Prince was to be feeding. Their glosses and remarks on it were many. A forward knight observed to his companions : “In my poor view of it, our gracious lady has it in her eye to bilk us, and make April messengers of us ; for who ever heard of any man in Bohemia that ate his victuals off an iron table ? What use is it ? our sharp galloping will bring us nothing but mockery and scorn.”
Another, of a more penetrating turn, imagined that the iron table might be allegorical ; that they should perhaps fall in with some knight-errant, who, after the manner of the wandering brotherhood, had sat down beneath a tree, and spread out his frugal dinner on his shield. A third said, jesting :* ” I fear our way will lead us down to the workshop of the Cyclops ; and we shall find the lame Vulcan, or one of his journeymen, dining from his stithy, and must bring him to our Venus.”
Amid such conversation, they observed their guiding quadruped, which had got a long start of them, turn across a new-ploughed field, and, to their wonder, halt beside the plough-man. They dashed rapidly forward, and found a peasant sitting on an upturned plough, and eating his black bread from the iron plough-share, which he was using as a table, under the shadow of a fresh pear-tree. He seemed to like the stately horse ; he patted it, offered it a bit of bread, and it ate from his hand. The Embassy, of course, was much surprised at this phenomenon ; nevertheless, no member of it doubted but that they had found their man.
They approached him reverently, and the eldest among them opened his lips, and said : “The Duchess of Bohemia has sent us hither, and bids us signify to thee the will and purpose of the gods, that thou change thy plough with the throne of this kingdom, and thy goad with its sceptre. She selects thee for her husband, to rule with her over the Bohemians.” The young peasant thought they meant to banter him ; a thing little to his taste, especially as he supposed that they had guessed his love-secret, and were now come to mock his weakness.
Therefore he answered somewhat stoutly, to meet mockery with mockery: “But is your dukedom worth this plough ? If the prince cannot eat with better relish, drink more joyously, or sleep more soundly than the peasant, then in sooth it is not worth while to change this kindly furrow-field with the Bohemian kingdom, or this smooth ox-goad with its sceptre. For, tell me, Are not three grains of salt as good for seasoning my morsel as three bushels?”
Then one of the Twelve answered : ” The purblind mole digs underground for worms to feed upon ; for he has no eyes which can endure the daylight, and no feet which are formed for running like the nimble roe ; the scaly crab creeps to and fro in the mud of lakes and marshes, delights to dwell under tree-roots and shrubs by the banks of rivers, for he wants the fins for swimming ; and the barn-door cock, cooped up within his hen-fence, risks no flight over the low wall, for he is too timorous to trust in his wings, like the high-soaring bird of prey.
Have eyes for seeing, feet for going, fins for swimming, and pinions for flight been allotted thee, thou wilt not grub like a mole underground ; nor hide thyself like a dull shellfish among mud ; nor, like the king of the poultry, be content with crowing from the barn-door : but come forward into day ; run, swim, or fly into the clouds, as Nature may have furnished thee with gifts.
For it suffices not the active man to continue what he is ; but he strives to become what he may be.
Therefore, do thou try being what the gods have called thee to ; then wilt thou judge rightly whether the Bohemian kingdom is worth an acre of corn-land in barter, yea or not.”
This earnest oration of the Deputy, in whose face no jesting feature was to be discerned ; and still more the insignia of royalty, the purple robe, the sceptre and the golden sword, which the ambassadors brought forward as a reference and certificate of their mission’s authenticity, at last overcame the mistrust of the doubting ploughman. All at once, light rose on his soul ; a rapturous thought awoke in him, that Libussa had discovered the feelings of his heart ; had, by her skill in seeing that was secret, recognised his faithfulness and constancy : and was about to recompense him, so as he had never ventured even in dreams to hope.
The gift of prophecy predicted to him by her oracle, then came into his mind ; and he thought that now or never it must be fulfilled. Instantly he grasped his hazel staff ; stuck it deep into the ploughed land ; heaped loose mould about it as you plant a tree ; and, lo, immediately the staff got buds, and shot forth sprouts and boughs with leaves and flowers. Two of the green twigs withered, and their dry leaves became the sport of the wind ; but the third grew up the more luxuriantly, and its fruits ripened. Then came the spirit of prophecy upon the rapt ploughman ; he opened his mouth, and said : “Ye messengers of the Princess Libussa and of the Bohemian people, hear the words of Primislaus the son of Mnatha, the stout-hearted Knight, for whom, blown upon by the spirit of prophecy, the mists of the Future part asunder.
The man who guided the ploughshare, ye have called to seize the handles of your princedom, before his day’s work was ended. O that the glebe had been broken by the furrow, to the boundary-stone ; so had Bohemia remained an independent kingdom to the utmost ages ! But since ye have disturbed the labour of the plougher too early, the limits of your country will become the heritage of your neighbour, and your distant posterity will be joined to him in unchangeable union.
The three twigs of the budding Staff are three sons which your Princess shall bear me : two of them, as unripe hoots, shall speedily wither away ; but the third shall inherit the throne, and by him shall the fruit of late grandchildren be matured, till the Eagle soar over your mountains and nestle in the land ; yet soon fly thence, and return as to his own possession. And then, when the Son of the Gods arises, who is his plougher’s friend, and smites the slave-fetters from his limbs, then mark it, Posterity, for thou shalt bless thy destiny !
For when he has trodden under his feet the Dragon, of Superstition, he will stretch out his arm against the waxing moon, to pluck it from the firmament, that he may himself illuminate the world as a benignant star.”
The venerable deputation stood in silent wonder, gazing at the prophetic man, like dumb idols : it was as if a god were speaking by his lips. He himself turned away from them to the two white steers, the associates of his toilsome labour ; he unyoked and let them go in freedom from their farm-service ; at which they began frisking joyfully upon the grassy lea, but at the same time visibly decreased in bulk ; like thin vapour melted into air, and vanished out of sight. Then Primislaus doffed his peasant wooden shoes, and proceeded to the brook to clean himself.
The precious robes were laid upon him ; he begirt himself with the sword, and had the golden spurs put on him like a knight ; then stoutly sprang upon the white horse, which bore him peaceably along. Being now about to quit his still asylum, he commanded the ambassadors to bring his wooden shoes after him, and keep them carefully, as a token Emperor Joseph II, that the humblest among the people had once been exalted to the highest dignity in Bohemia ; and as a memorial for his posterity to bear their elevation meekly, and, mindful of their origin, to respect and defend the peasantry, from which themselves had sprung.
Hence came the ancient practice of exhibiting a pair of wooden shoes before the Kings of Bohemia on their coronation ; a custom held in observance till the male line of Primislaus became extinct. The planted hazel rod bore fruit and grew ; striking roots out on every side, and sending forth new shoots, till at last the whole field was changed into a hazel copse ; a circumstance of great advantage to the neighbouring township, which included it within their bounds; for, in memory of this miraculous plantation, they obtained a grant from the Bohemian Kings, exempting them from ever paying any public contribution in the land, except a pint of hazel nuts ; which royal privilege their late descendants, as the story runs, are enjoying at this day.
Though the white courser, which was now proudly carrying the bridegroom to his mistress, seemed to outrun the winds, Primislaus did not fail now and then to let him feel the golden spurs, to push him on still faster. The quick gallop seemed to him a tortoise-pace, so keen was his desire to have the fair Libussa, whose form, after seven years, was still so new and lovely in his soul, once more before his eyes ; and this not merely as a show, like some bright peculiar anemone in the variegated bed of a flower-garden, but for the blissful appropriation of victorious love.
He thought only of the myrtle-crown, which, in the lover’s valuation, far outshines the crown of sovereignty ; and had he balanced love and rank against each other, the Bohemian throne without Libussa would have darted up, like a clipped ducat in the scales of the money-changer.
The sun was verging to decline, when the new Prince, with his escort, entered Vizegrad. Fraulein Libussa was in her garden, where she had just plucked a basket of ripe plums, when her future husband’s arrival was announced to her. She affirms that he saw, with his own eyes, a renewal of this charter from Charles IV went forth modestly, with all her maidens, to meet him ; received him as a bridegroom conducted to her by the gods, veiling the election of her heart under a show of submission to the will of Higher Powers.
The eyes of the Court were eagerly directed to the stranger ; in whom, however, nothing could beseen but a fair handsome man. In respect of outward form, there were several courtiers who, in thought, did not hesitate to measure with him ; anfl could not understand why the gods should have disdained the anti-chamber, and not selected from it some accomplished and ruddy lord, rather than the sunburnt ploughman, to assist the Princess in her government. Especially in Wladomir and Mizisla, it was observable that’ their pretensions were reluctantly withdrawn. It behoved the Fraulein then to vindicate the work of the gods ; and show that Squire Primislaus had been indemnified for the defect of splendid birth, by a fair equivalent in sterling common sense and depth of judgment.
She had caused a royal banquet to be prepared, no whit inferior to the feast with which the hospitable Dido entertained her pious guest ^neas. The cup of welcome passed diligently round, the presents of the Princess had excited cheerfulness and good-humour, and a part of the night had already vanished amid jests and pleasant pastime, when Libussa set on foot a game at riddles ; and, as a discovery of hidden things was her proper trade, she did not fail to solve, with satisfactory decision, all the riddles that were introduced.
When her own turn came to propose one, she called Prince Wladomir, Mizisla and Primislaus to her, and said : ” Fair sirs, it is now for you to read a riddle, which I shall submit to you, that it may be seen who among you is the wisest and of keenest judgment. I intended, for you three, a present of this basket of plums, which I plucked in my garden. One of you shall have the half, and one over ; the next shall have the half of what remains, and one over ; the third shall again have the half, and three over. Now, if so be that the basket is then emptied, tell me, How many plums are in it now ?”
The headlong Ritter Mizisla took the measure of the fruit with his eye, not the sense of the riddle with his understanding, and said : “What can be decided with the sword I might undertake to decide ; but thy riddles, gracious Princess, are, I fear, too hard for me. Yet at thy request I will risk an arrow at the bull’s-eye, let it hit or miss : I suppose there is a matter of some three score plums in the basket.”
“Thou hast missed, dear Knight,” said Fraulein Libussa. ” Were there as many again, half as many, and a third part as many as the basket has in it, and five over, there would then be as many above three score as there are now below it.”
Prince Wladomir computed as laboriously and anxiously, as if the post of Comptroller-General of Finances had depended on a right solution ; and at last brought out the net product five-and-forty. The Fraulein then said : “Were there a third, and a half, and a sixth as many againof them, the number would exceed forty-five as much as it now falls short of it.”
Though, in our days, any man endowed with the arithmetical faculty of a tapster, might have solved this problem without difficulty, yet, for an untaught computant, the gift of divination was essential, if he meant to get out of the affair with honour, and not stick in the middle of it with disgrace. As the wise Primislaus was happily provided with this gift, it cost him neither art nor exertion to find the answer.
“Familiar companion of the heavenly Powers,” said he, ” whoso undertakes to pierce thy high celestial meaning, undertakes to soar after the eagle when he hides himself in the clouds. Yet I will pursue thy hidden flight, as far as the eye, to which thou hast given its light, will reach. I judge that of the plums which thou hast laid in the basket, there are thirty in number, not one fewer, and none more.”
The Fraulein cast a kindly glance on him, and said : “Thou tracest the glimmering ember, which lies deep-hid among the ashes ; for thee light dawns out of darkness and vapour : thou hast read my riddle.”
Thereupon she opened her basket, and counted out fifteen plums, and one over, into Prince Wladomir’s hat, and fourteen remained. Of these she gave Ritter Mizisla seven and one over, and there were still six in the basket ; half of these she gave the wise Primislaus and three over, and the basket was empty. The whole Court was lost in wonder at the fair Libussa’s ciphering gift, and at the penetration of her cunning spouse. Nobody could comprehend how human wit was able, on the one hand, to enclose a common number so mysteriously in words ; or, on the other hand, to drag it forth so accurately from its enigmatical concealment.
The empty basket she conferred upon the two Knights, who had failed in soliciting her love, to remind them that their suit was voided. Hence comes it, that when a wooer is rejected, people say, His love has given him the basket, even to the present day.
So soon as all was ready for the nuptials and coronation, both these ceremonies were transacted with becoming pomp. Thus the Bohemian people had obtained a Duke, and the fair Libussa had obtained a husband, each according to the wish of their hearts ; and what was somewhat wonderful, by virtue of Chicane, an agent who has not the character of being too beneficent or prosperous. And if either of the parties had been overreached in any measure, it at least was not the fair Libussa.
Bohemia had a Duke in name, but the administration now, as formerly, continued in the female hand. Primislaus was the proper pattern of a tractable obedient husband, and contested with his Duchess neither the direction of her house nor of her empire. His sentiments and wishes sympathised with hers, as perfectly as two accordant strings, of which when the one is struck, the other voluntarily trembles to the self-same note. Nor was Libussa like those haughty overbearing dames, who would pass for great matches ; and having, as they think, made the fortune of some hapless wight, continually remind him of his wooden shoes : but she resembled the renowned Palmyran Queen ; and ruled, as Zenobia did her kindly Odenatus, by superiority of mental talent.
The happy couple lived in the enjoyment of unchangeable love ; according to the fashion of those times, when the instinct which united hearts was as firm and durable, as the mortar and cement with which they built their indestructible strongholds. Duke Primislaus soon became one of the most accomplished and valiant knights of his time, and the Bohemian Court the most splendid in Germany.
By degrees, many knights and nobles, and multitudes of people from all quarters of the empire, drew to it so that Vizegrad became too narrow for its inhabitants ; and, in consequence, Libussa called her officers before her, and commanded them to found a city, on the spot where they should find a man at noontide making the wisest use of his teeth. They set forth, and at the time appointed found a man engaged in sawing a block of wood. They judged that this industrious character was turning his saw-teeth, at noontide, to a far better use than the parasite does his jaw-teeth by the table of the great ; and doubted not but they had found the spot, intended by the Princess for the site of their town.
They marked out a space upon the green with the ploughshare, for the circuit of the city walls. On asking the workman what he meant to make of his sawed timber, he replied, ” Prah,” which in the Bohemian language signifies a door-threshold. So Libussa called her new city Praha, that is Prague, the well-known capital upon the Moldau. In process of time, Primislaus’s predictions were punctually fulfilled. His spouse became the mother of three Princes ; two died in youth, but the third grew to manhood, and from him went forth a glorious royal line, which flourished for long centuries on the Bohemian throne.
The end

Musäus: “Libussa” 4/5

Excerpt from Thomas Carlyle’s “German Romance: Specimens of its Chief Authors; with Biographical and Critical Notices.” Vol. I, 1827.

By Johann Karl August Musäus

LIBUSSA
Though in those distant times, the pairing of the sexes was as little estimated by parchments and genealogical trees, as the chaffers were arranged by their antennae and shell-wings, or the flowers by their pistils, stamina, calix and honey-produce ; it was understood that with the lofty elm the precious vine should mate itself, and not the rough tangleweed which creeps along the hedges.
A misassortment of marriage from a difference of rank an inch in breadth excited, it is true, less uproar than in these our classic times ; yet a difference of an ell in breadth, especially when rivals occupied the interstice, and made the distance of the two extremities more visible, was even then a thing which men could notice.
All this, and much more, did the Fraulein accurately ponder in her prudent heart ; therefore she granted Passion, the treacherous babbler, no audience, loudly as it spoke in favour of the youth whom Love had honoured. Like a chaste vestal, she made an irrevocable vow to persist through life in her virgin closeness of heart ; and to answer no inquiry of a wooer, either with her eyes, or her gestures, or her lips yet reserving to herself, as a just indemnification, the right of platonising to any length she liked.
This nunlike system suited the aspirants’ way of thought so ill, that they could not in the least comprehend the killing coldness of their mistress ; Jealousy, the confidant of Love, whispered torturing suspicion in their ears ; each thought the other was the happy rival, and their penetration spied about unweariedly to make discoveries, which both of them recoiled from. Yet Fraulein Libussa weighed out her scanty graces to the two valiant Ritters with such prudence and acuteness, on so fair a balance, that the scale of neither rose above the other.
Weary of this fruitless waiting, both of them retired from the Court of their Princess, and settled, with secret discontent,upon the affeoffments which Duke Krokus had conferred on them. They brought so much ill-humour home with them, that Wladomir was an oppression to all his vassals and his neighbours ; and Ritter Mizisla, on the other hand, became a hunter, followed deer and foxes over the seed-fields and fences of his subjects, and often with his train, to catch one hare, would ride ten acres of corn to nothing.
In consequence, arose much sobbing and bewailing in the land ; yet no righteous judge stepped forth to stay the mischief ; for who would willingly give judgment against the stronger ?
And so the sufferings of the people never reached the throne of the Duchess. By the virtue of her second-sight, however, no injustice done within the wide limits of her sway could escape her observation ; and the disposition of her mind being soft, like the sweet features of her face, she sorrowed inwardly at the misdeeds of her vassals, and the violence of the powerful. She took counsel with herself how the evil might be remedied, and her wisdom suggested an imitation of the gods, who, in their judicial procedure, do not fall upon the criminal, and cut him off as it were with the red hand ; though vengeance, following with slow steps, sooner or later overtakes him.
The young Princess appointed a general Convention of her Chivalry and States, and made proclamation, that whoever had a grievance or a wrong to be righted, should come forward free and fearless, under her safe-conduct. Thereupon, from every end and corner of her dominions, the maltreated and oppressed crowded towards her ; the wranglers also,and litigious persons, and whoever had a legal cause against his neighbour.
Libussa sat upon her throne, like the goddess Themis, and passed sentence, without respect of persons, with unerring judgment ; for the labyrinthic mazes of chicane could not lead her astray, -as they do the thick heads of city magistrates ; and all men were astonished at the wisdom with which she unravelled the perplexed hanks of processes for meum and tuum, and at her unwearied patience in picking out the threads of justice, never once catching a false end, but passing them from side to side of their embroilments, and winding them off to the uttermost thrum.
When the tumult of the parties at her bar had by degrees diminished, and the sittings were about to be concluded, on the last day of these assizes audience was demanded by a free neighbour of the potent Wladomir, and by deputies from the subjects of the hunter Mizisla.
They were admitted, and the Freeholder first addressing her, began: “An industrious planter,” said he, ” fenced-in a little circuit, on the bank of a broad river, whose waters glided down with ‘soft rushing through the green valley; for, he thought, The fair stream will be a guard to me on this side, that no hungry wild-beast eat my crops, and it will moisten the roots of my fruit-trees, that they flourish speedily and bring me fruit.
But when the earnings of his toil were about to ripen, the deceitful stream grew troubled ; its still waters began to swell and roar, it overflowed its banks, and carried one piece after another of the fruitful soil along with it ; and dug itself a bed through the middle of the cultivated land ; to the sorrow of the poor planter, who had to give up his little property to the malicious wasting of his strong neighbour, the raging of whose waves he himself escaped with difficulty.
Puissant daughter of the wise Krokus, the poor planter entreats of thee to command the haughty river no longer to roll its proud billows over the field of the toilsome husbandman, or wash away the fruit of his weary arms, his hope of glad harvest ; but to flow peacefully along within the limits of its own channel.”
During this speech, the cheerful brow of the fair Libussa became overclouded; manly rigour gleamed from her eyes, and all around was ear to catch her sentence, which ran thus: ” Thy cause is plain and straight ; no force shall disturb thy rightful privileges. A dike, which it shall not overpass, shall set bounds to the tumultuous river ; and from its fishes thou shalt be repaid sevenfold the plunder of its wasteful billows.”
Then she beckoned to the eldest of the Deputies, and he bowed his face to the earth, and said : ” Wise daughter of the far-famed Krokus, Whose is the grain upon the field, the sower’s, who has hidden the seed-corn in the ground that it spring up and bear fruit ; or the tempest’s, which breaks it and scatters it away ?”
She answered: “The sower’s.” “Then command the tempest,” said the spokesman, “that it choose not our corn-fields for the scene of its caprices, to uproot our crops and shake the fruit from our trees.” “So be it,” said the Duchess; ” I will tame the tempest, and banish it from your fields ; it shall battle with the clouds, and disperse them, where they are rising from the south, and threatening the land with hail and heavy weather.” Prince Wladomir and Ritter Mizisla were both assessors in the general tribunal.
On hearing the complaint, and the rigorous sentence passed regarding it, they waxed pale, and looked down upon the ground with suppressed indignation ; not daring to discover how sharply it stung them to be condemned by a decree from female lips. For although, out of tenderness to their honour, the complainants had modestly overhung the charge with an allegorical veil, which the righteous sentence of the fair President had also prudently respected, yet the texture of this covering was so fine and transparent, that whoever had an eye might see what stood behind it.
But as they dared not venture to appeal from the judgment-seat of the Princess to the people, since the sentence passed upon them had excited universal joy, they submitted to it, though with great reluctance.
Wladomir indemnified his freeholding neighbour sevenfold for the mischief done him ; and Nimrod Mizisla engaged, on the honour of a knight, no more to select the corn-fields of his subjects as a chase for hare-catching. Libussa, at the same time, pointed out to them a more respectable employment, for occupying their activity, and restoring to their fame, which now, like a cracked pot when struck, emitted nothing but discords, the sound ring of knightly virtues.
She placed them at the head of an army, which she was dispatching to encounter Zornebock, the Prince of the Sorbi, a giant, and a powerful magician withal, who was then meditating war against Bohemia.
This commission she accompanied with the penance, that they were not to appear again at Court, till the one could offer her the plume, the other the golden spurs, of the monster, as tokens of their victory.
The unfading rose, during this campaign, displayed its magic virtues once more. By means of it, Prince Wladomir was as invulnerable to mortal weapons, as Achilles the Hero ; and as nimble, quick and dextrous, as Achilles the Light-of-foot. The armies met upon the southern boundaries of the Kingdom, and joined in fierce battle.
The Bohemian heroes flew through the squadrons, like storm and whirlwind; and cut down the thick spear-crop, as the scythe of the mower cuts a field of hay. Zornebock fell beneath the strong dints of their falchions ; they returned in triumph with the stipulated spoils to Vizegrad; and the spots and blemishes, which had soiled their knightly virtue, were now washed clean away in the blood of their enemies. Libussa bestowed on them every mark of princely honour, dismissed them to their homes when the army was discharged ; and gave them, as a new token of her favour, a purple-red apple from her pleasure-garden, for a memorial of her by the road, enjoining them to part the same peacefully between them, without cutting it in two.
They then went their way ; put the apple on a shield, and had it borne before them as a public spectacle, while they consulted together how the parting of it might be prudently effected, according to the meaning of its gentle giver. While the point where their roads divided lay before them at a distance, they proceeded with their partition-treaty in the most accommodating mood; but at last it became necessary to determine which of the two should have the apple in his keeping, for both had equal shares in it, and only one could get it, though each promised to himself great wonders from the gift, and was eager to obtain possession of it.
They split in their opinions on this matter ; and things went so far, that it appeared as if the sword must decide, to whom this indivisible apple had been allotted by the fortune of arms. But a shepherd driving his flock overtook them as they stood debating; him they selected (apparently in imitation of the Three Goddesses, who also applied to a shepherd ‘to decide their famous apple-quarrel), and made arbiter of their dispute, and laid the business in detail before him.
The shepherd thought a little, then said : “In the gift of this apple lies a deep-hidden meaning ; but who can bring it out, save the sage Virgin who hid it there ? For myself, I conceive the apple is a treacherous fruit, that has grown upon the Tree of Discord, and its purple skin may prefigure bloody feud between your worshipful knightships ; that each is to cut off the other, and neither of you get enjoyment of the gift. For, tell me, how is it possible to part an apple, without cutting it in twain?”
The Knights took the shepherd’s speech to heart, and thought there was a deal of truth in it. ” Thou hast judged rightly,” said they : ” Has not this base apple already kindled anger and contention between us ? Were we not standing harnessed to fight, for the deceitful gift of this proud Princess? Did she not put us at the head of her army, with intention to destroy us ? And having failed in this, she now arms our hands with the weapons of discord against each other ! We renounce her crafty present ; neither of us will have the apple. Be it thine, as the reward of thy righteous sentence : to the judge belongs the fruit of the process, and to the parties the rind.”
The Knights then went their several ways, while the herdsman consumed the objectum litis with all the composure and conveniency common among judges. The ambiguous present of the Duchess cut them to the heart ; and as they found, on returning home, that they could no longer treat their subjects and vassals in the former arbitrary fashion, but were forced to obey the laws, which Fraulein Libussa had promulgated for the general security among her people, their ill humour grew more deep and rancorous.
They entered into a league offensive and defensive with each other ; made a party for themselves in the country ; and many mutinous wrongheads joined them, and were sent abroad in packs to decry and calumniate the government of women. ” Shame ! Shame !” cried they, ” that we must obey a woman, who gathers our victorious laurels to decorate a distaff with them ! The Man should be master of the house, and not the Wife ; this is his special right, and so it is established everywhere, among all people.
What is an army without a Duke to go before his warriors, but a helpless trunk without a head ? Let us appoint a Prince, who may be ruler over us, and whom we may obey.”
These seditious speeches were no secret to the watchful Princess ; nor was she ignorant what wind blew them thither, or what its sounding boded. Therefore she convened a deputation of the States ; entered their assembly with the stateliness of an earthly goddess, and the words of her mouth dropped like honey from her virgin lips. ” A rumour flies about the land,” said she, “that you desire a Duke to go before you to battle, and that you reckon it inglorious to obey me any longer.
Yet,in a free and unconstrained election, you yourselves did not choose a man from among you ; but called one of the daughters of the people, and clothed her with the purple, to rule over you according to the laws and customs of the land. Whoso can accuse me of error in conducting the government, let him step forward openly and freely, and bear witness against me.
But if I, after the manner of my father Krokus, have done prudently and justly in the midst of you, making crooked things straight, and rough places plain ; if I have secured your harvests from the spoiler, guarded the fruit-tree, and snatched the flock from the claws of the wolf; if I have bowed the stiff neck of the violent, assisted the down-pressed, and given the weak a staff to rest on ; then will it beseem you to live according to your covenant, and be true, gentle and helpful to me, as in doing fealty to me you engaged.
If you reckon it inglorious to obey a woman, you should have thought of this before appointing me to be your Princess ; if there is disgrace here, it is you alone who ought to bear it. But your procedure shows you not to understand your own advantage : for. woman’s hand is soft and tender, accustomed only to waft cool air with the fan ; and sinewy and rude is the arm of man, heavy and oppressive when it grasps the supreme control. And know ye not that where a woman governs, the rule is in the power of men ? For she gives heed to wise counsellors, and these gather round her.
But where the distaff excludes from the throne, there is the government of females ; for the women, that please the king’s eyes, have his heart in their hand. Therefore, consider well of your attempt, lest ye repent your fickleness too late.”
To be continued…

 

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Rossetti

Musäus: “Libussa” 3/5

Excerpt from Thomas Carlyle’s “German Romance: Specimens of its Chief Authors; with Biographical and Critical Notices.” Vol. I, 1827.

By Johann Karl August Musäus

LIBUSSA
The young man felt himself unworthy of the gentle virgin’s gift ; and blushed that he should receive it and make no return. With ineloquent lips, but with looks so much the more eloquent, he took mournful leave of her ; and at the gate below found two white Steers awaiting him, as sleek and glittering as of old the godlike Bull, on whose smooth back the virgin Europa swam across the blue sea waves. Joyfully he loosed them from the post, and drove them softly on before him.
The distance home seemed but a few ells, so much was his spirit busied with the fair Libussa : and he vowed, that as he never could obtain her love, he would love no other all his days. The old Knight rejoiced in the return of his son ; and still more in learning that the oracle of the fair heiress agreed so completely with his own wishes. As husbandry had been appointed by the gods for the young man’s trade, he lingered not in harnessing his white Steers, and yoking them to the plough.
The first trial prospered to his wish : the bullocks had such strength and alacrity that they turned over in a single day more land than twelve yoke of oxen commonly can master for they were fiery and impetuous, as the Bull is painted in the Almanac, where he rushes from the clouds in the sign of April; not sluggish and heavy like the Ox, who plods on with his holy consorts, in our Gospel-Book, phlegmatically, as a Dutch skipper in a calm.
Duke Czech, who had led the first colony of his people into Bohemia, was now long ago committed to his final rest, yet his descendants had not been promoted to succeed him in his princely dignity. The magnates had in truth, at his decease, assembled for a new election ; but their wild stormy tempers would admit of no reasonable resolution. Self-interest and self-sufficiency transformed the first Bohemian Convention of Estates into a Polish Diet : as too many hands laid hold of the princely mantle, they tore it in pieces, and no one of them obtained it. The government had dwindled to a sort of Anarchy ; every one did what was right in his own eyes; the strong oppressed the weak, the rich the poor, the great the little.
There was now no public security in the land ; yet the frank spirits of the time thought their new republic very well arranged : ” All is in order,” said they, ” everything goes on its way with us as well as elsewhere ; the wolf eats the lamb, the kite the dove, the fox the cock.” This artless constitution could not last ; when the first debauch of fancied freedom had gone off, and the people were again grown sober, reason asserted its rights ; the patriots, the honest citizens, whoever in the nation loved his country, joined together to destroy the idol Hydra, and unite the people once more under a single head. “Let us choose a Prince,” said they, ” to rule over us, after the manner of our fathers, to tame the froward, and exercise right and justice in the midst of us.
Not the strongest, the boldest, or the richest ; the wisest be our Duke !” The people, wearied out with the oppressions of their petty tyrants, had on this occasion but one voice, and loudly applauded the proposal. A meeting of Estates was convoked ; and the choice unanimously fell upon the wise Krokus. An embassy of honour was appointed, inviting him to take possession of the princely dignity. Though he had never longed for lofty titles, he hesitated not about complying with the people’s wish. Invested with the purple, he proceeded, with great pomp, to Vizegrad, the residence of the Dukes ; where the people met him with triumphant shouting, and did reverence to him as their Regent.
Whereby he perceived, that now the third Reed-stalk of the bountiful Elf was likewise sending forth its gift upon him. His love of justice, and his wise legislation, soon spread his fame over all the surrounding countries. The Sarmatic Princes, incessantly at feud with one another, brought their contention from afar before his judgment-seat. He weighed it with the undeceitful weights of natural Justice, in the scales of Law; and when he opened his mouth, it was as if the venerable Solon, or the wise Solomon from between the Twelve Lions of his throne, had been pronouncing sentence.
Some seditious instigators having leagued against the peace of their country, and kindled war among the Poles, he advanced at the head of his army into Poland ; put an end to the civil strife ; and a large portion of the people, grateful for the peace which he had given them, chose him for their Duke also. He there built the city Cracow, which is called by his name, and has the privilege of crowning the Polish Kings, even to the present time. Krokus ruled with great glory to the end of his days. Observing that he was now near their limit, and must soon set out, he caused a coffin to be made from the fragments of the oak which his spouse the Elf had inhabited ; and then departed in peace, bewept by the Princesses his three daughters, who deposited the Ducal remains in the coffin, and consigned him to the Earth as he had commanded ; and the whole land mourned for him.
When the obsequies were finished, the Estates assembled to deliberate who should now possess the vacant throne. The people were unanimous for one of Krokus’s daughters ; but which of the three they had not yet determined. Fraulein Bela had, on the whole, the fewest adherents ; for her heart was not good ; and her magic -lantern was too frequently employed in doing sheer mischief. But she had raised such a terror of herself among the people, that no one liked to take exception at her, lest he might draw down her vengeance on him. When the vote was called, therefore, the Electors all continued dumb; there was no voice for her, but also none against her.
At sunset the representatives of the people separated, adjourning their election to another day. Then Fraulein Therba was proposed : but confidence in her incantations had made Fraulein Therba’s head giddy; she was proud and overbearing ; required to be honoured as a goddess ; and if incense did not always smoke for her, she grew peevish, cross, capricious ; displaying all the properties by which the fair sex, when they please, can cease to be fair. She was less feared than her elder sister, but not on that account more loved. For these reasons, the election-field continued silent as a lykewake ; and the vote was never called for. On the third day came Libussa’s turn.
No sooner was this name pronounced, than a confidential hum was heard throughout the electing circle ; the solemn visages unwrinkled and brightened up, and each of the Electors had some good to whisper of the Fraulein to his neighbour. One praised her virtue, another praised her modesty, a third her prudence, a fourth her infallibility in prophecy, a fifth her disinterestedness in giving counsel, a tenth her chastity, other ninety her beauty, and the last her gifts as a housewife. When a lover draws out such a catalogue of the perfections of his mistress, it remains still doubtful whether she is really the possessor of a single one among them ; but the public seldom errs on the favourable side, however often on the other, in the judgments it pronounces on good fame.
With so many universally acknowledged praiseworthy qualities, Fraulein Libussa was undoubtedly the favoured candidate of the sage Electors : but the preference of the younger sister to the elder has so frequently, in the affair of marriage, as experience testifies, destroyed the peace of the house, that reasonable fear might be entertained lest in affairs of still greater moment it might disturb the peace of the country. This consideration put the sapient guardians of the people into such embarrassment, that they could come to no conclusion whatever.
There was wanting a speaker, to hang the clock-weight of his eloquence upon the wheel of the Electors’ favourable will, before the business could get into motion, and the good disposition of their minds become active and efficient ; and this speaker now appeared, as if appointed for the business.
Wladomir, one of the Bohemian Magnates, the highest after the Duke, had long sighed for the enchanting Libussa, and wooed her during Father Krokus’s lifetime. The youth being one of his most faithful vassals, and beloved by him as a son, the worthy Krokus could have wished well that love would unite this pair ; but the coyness of the maiden was insuperable, and he would in nowise force her inclination. Prince Wladomir,however, would not be deterred by these doubtful aspects ; but still hoped, by fidelity and constancy, to tire out the hard heart of the Fraulein, and by his tender attentions make it soft and pliant.
He continued in the Duke’s retinue to the end, without appearing by this means to have advanced a hair’s-breadth towards the goal of his desires. But now, he thought, an opportunity was offered him for opening her closed heart by ameritorious deed, and earning from her noble-minded gratitude what love did not seem inclined to grant him voluntarily. He determined on braving the hatred and vengeance of the two dreaded sisters, and raising his beloved to her paternal throne.
Observing the indecision of the wavering assembly, he addressed them, and said :” If ye will hear me, ye courageous Knights and Nobles from among the people, I will lay before you a similitude, by which you shall perceive how this coming choice may be accomplished, to the weal and profit of the land.”
Silence being ordered, he proceeded thus :”The Bees had lost their Queen, and the whole hive sat sad and moping ; they flew seldom and sluggishly out, had small heart or activity in honey-making, and their trade and sustenance fell into decay. Therefore they resolved upon a new sovereign, to rule over their community, that discipline and order might not be lost from among them. Then came the Wasp flying towards them, and said : ‘ Choose me for your Queen, I am mighty and terrible ; the strong horse is afraid of my sting ; with it I can even defy the lion, your hereditary foe, and prick him in the snout when he approaches your store : I will watch you and defend you.’
This speech was pleasant to the Bees ; but after deeply considering it, the wisest among them answered : ‘ Thou art stout and dreadful, but even the sting which is to guard us we fear : thou canst not be our Queen.’
Then the Humble-bee came buzzing towards them, and said :’ Choose me for your Queen ; hear ye not that the sounding of my wings announces loftiness and dignity ? Nor is a sting wanting to me, wherewith to protect you.’ The Bees answered : ‘We are a peaceable and quiet people ; the proud sounding of thy wings would annoy us, and disturb the continuance of our diligence : thou canst not be our Queen.’ Then the Royal-bee requested audience : ‘ Though I am larger and stronger than you,’ said she, ‘my strength cannot hurt or damage you ; for, lo, the dangerous sting is altogether wanting. I am soft of temper, a friend of order and thrift, can guide your honey-making and further your labour.’ ‘Then,’ said the Bees, ‘thou art worthy to rule over us : we obey thee ; be our Queen.’ ”
Wladomir was silent. The whole assembly guessed the meaning of his speech, and the minds of all were in a favourable tone for Fraulein Libussa. But at the moment when the vote was to be put, a croaking raven flew over their heads : this evil omen interrupted all deliberations, and the meeting was adjourned till the morrow. It was Fraulein Bela who had sent this bird of black augury to stop their operations, for she well knew how the minds of the Electors were inclining ; and Prince Wladomir had raised her bitterest spleen against him. She held a secret consultation with her sister Therba ; when it was determined to take vengeance on their common slanderer, and to dispatch a heavy Incubus to suffocate the soul from his body.
The stout Knight, dreaming nothing of this danger, went, as he was wont, to wait upon his mistress, and was favoured by her with the first friendly look ; from which he failed not to presage for himself a heaven of delight ; and if anything could still have increased his rapture, it must have been the gift of a rose, which was blooming on the Fraulein’s breast, and which she reached him, with an injunction to let it wither on his heart.
He interpreted these words quite otherwise than they were meant ; for of all the sciences, there is none so deceitful as the science of expounding in matters of love : here errors, as it were, have their home. The enamoured Knight was anxious to preserve his rose as long as possible in freshness and bloom ;he put it in a flower-pot among water, and fell asleep with the most flattering hopes.
At gloomy midnight, the destroying angel sent by Fraulein Bela glided towards him ; with panting breath blew off the bolts and locks of his apartment ; lighted like a mountain of lead upon the slumbering Knight, and so squeezed him together, that he felt on awakening as if a millstone had been hung about his neck. In this agonising suffocation, thinking that the last moment of his life was at hand, he happily remembered the rose,which was standing by his bed in a flower-pot, and pressed it to his breast, saying : ” Wither with me, fair rose, and die on my chilled bosom, as a proof that my last thought was directed to thy gentle mistress.”
In an instant all was light about his heart ; the heavy Incubus could not withstand the magic force of the flower ; his crushing weight would not now have balanced a feather ; his antipathy to the perfume soon scared him from the chamber ; and the narcotic virtue of this rose-odour again lulled the Knight into refreshing sleep. He rose with the sun next morning, fresh and alert, and rode to the field, to see what impression his similitude had made on the Electors, and to watch what course the business was about to take ; determined at all hazards, should a contrary wind spring up, and threaten with shipwreck the vessel of his hopes, to lay his hand upon the rudder, and steer it into port.
For the present this was not required. The electing Senate had considered Wladomir’s parable, and so sedulously ruminated and digested it overnight, that it had passed into their hearts and spirits. A stout Knight, who espied this favourable crisis, and who sympathised in the concerns of his heart with the enamoured Wladomir, was endeavouring to snatch away, or at least to share with him, the honour of exalting -Fraulein Libussa to the throne. He stept forth, and drew his sword, and with a loud voice proclaimed Libussa Duchess of Bohemia, calling upon all who thought as he did, to draw their swords and justify the choice.
In a moment hundreds of swords were gleaming through the field ; a loud huzza announced the new Regent, and on all sides arose the joyful shout : ” Libussa is our Duchess !” A commission was appointed, with Wladomir and the stout sword-drawer at its head, to acquaint the Fraulein with her exaltation to the princely rank. With that modest blush, which gives the highest grace to female charms, she accepted the sovereignty over the people ; and the magic of her enrapturing look made all hearts subject to her.
The nation celebrated the event with vast rejoicings : and although her two sisters envied her, and employed their secret arts to obtain revenge on her and their country for the slight which had been put upon them, and endeavoured by the leaven of criticism, by censuring all the measures and transactions of their sister, to produce a hurtful fermentation in the state, yet Libussa was enabled wisely to encounter this unsisterly procedure, and to ruin all the hostile projects, magical or other, of these ungentle persons ; till at last, weary of assailing her in vain, they ceased to employ their ineffectual arts against her.
The sighing Wladomir awaited, in the mean time, with wistful longing, the unfolding of his fate. More than once he had tried to read the final issue of it in the fair eyes of his Princess;but Libussa had enjoined them strict silence respecting the feelings of her heart ; and for a lover, without prior treaty with the eyes and their significant glances, to demand an oral explanation, is at all times an unhappy undertaking. The only favourable sign, which still sustained his hopes, was the unfaded rose ; for after a year had passed away, it still bloomed as fresh as on the night when he received it from her fair hand.
A flower from a lady’s hand, a nosegay, a ribbon, or a lock of hair, is certainly in all cases better than an empty nut ; yet all these pretty things are but ambiguous pledges of love, if they have not borrowed meaning from some more trustworthy revelation.
Wladomir had nothing for it but to play in silence the part of a sighing shepherd, and to watch what Time and Chance might in the long-run do to help him. The unquiet Mizisla pursued his courtship with far more vivacity : he pressed forward on every occasion where he could obtain her notice, At the coronation, he had been the first that took the oath of fealty to the Princess ; he followed her inseparably, as the Moon does the Earth, to express by unbidden offices of zeal his devotion to her person ; and on public solemnities and processions, he flourished his sword before her, to keep its good services in her remembrance.
Yet Libussa seemed, like other people in the world, to have very speedily forgotten the promoters of her fortune ; for when an obelisk is once standing perpendicular, one heeds not the levers and implements which raised it ; so at least the claimants of her heart explained the Fraulein’s coldness. Meanwhile both of them were wrong in their opinion : the Fraulein was neither insensible nor ungrateful ; but her heart was no longer a free piece of property, which she could give or sell according to her pleasure. The decree of Love had already passed in favour of the trim Forester with the sure cross-bow.
The first impression, which the sight of him had made upon her heart, was still so strong, that no second could efface it. In a period of three years, the colours of imagination, in which that Divinity had painted the image of the graceful youth, had no whit abated in their brightness ; and love therefore continued altogether unimpaired. For the passion of the fair sex is of this nature, that if it can endure three moons, it will then last three times three years, or longer if required. In proof of this, see the instances occurring daily before our eyes.
When the heroes of Germany sailed over distant seas, to fight out the quarrel of a self-willed daughter of Britain with her motherland, they tore themselves from the arms of their dames with mutual oaths of truth and constancy; yet before the last Buoy of the Weser had got astern of them, the heroic navigators were for most part forgotten of their Chloes. The fickle among these maidens, out of grief to find their hearts unoccupied, hastily supplied the vacuum by the surrogate of new intrigues ; but the faithful and true, who had constancy enough to stand the Weser-proof, and had still refrained from infidelity when the conquerors of their hearts had got beyond the Black Buoy, these, it is said, preserved their vow unbroken till the return of the heroic host into their German native country ; and are still expecting from the hand of Love the recompense of their unwearied perseverance.
It is therefore less surprising that the fair Libussa, under these circumstances, could withstand the courting of the brilliant chivalry who struggled for her love, than that Penelope of Ithaca could let a whole cohort of wooers sigh for her in vain, when her heart had nothing in reserve but the gray-headed Ulysses.
Rank and birth, however, had established such a difference in the situations of the Fraulein and of her beloved youth, that any closer union than Platonic love, a shadowy business which can neither warm nor nourish, was not readily to be expected.

To be continued…

 

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Musäus: “Libussa” 2/5

Excerpt from Thomas Carlyle’s “German Romance: Specimens of its Chief Authors; with Biographical and Critical Notices.” Vol. I, 1827.

By Johann Karl August Musäus

LIBUSSA
In some few years, the tender girls had waxed in stature; their maiden forms blossomed forth, as the rose pushing up from the bud ; and the fame of their beauty spread abroad over all the land. The noblest youths of the people crowded round, with cases to submit to Father Krokus for his counsel ; but at bottom, these their specious pretexts were directed to the fair maidens, whom they wished to get a glimpse of ; as is the mode with young men, who delight to have some business with the master of the household, when his daughters are beautiful.
The three sisters lived in great simplicity and unity together ; as yet but little conscious of their talents. The gift of prophecy had been communicated to them in an equal degree ; and all their words were oracles, although they knew it not.
Yet soon their vanity awoke at the voice of flattery ; word-catchers eagerly laid hold of every sound proceeding from their lips ; Celadons noted down every look, spied out the faintest smile, explored the aspect of their eyes, and drew from it more or less favourable prognostics, conceiving that their own destiny was to be read by means of it ; and from this time, it has become the mode with lovers to deduce from the horoscope of the eyes the rising or declining of their star in courtship.
Scarcely had Vanity obtained a footing in the virgin heart, till Pride, her dear confidante, with her wicked rabble of a train, Self-love, Self-praise, Self-will, Self-interest, were standing at the door ; and all of them in time sneaked in. The elder sisters struggled to outdo the younger in their arts ; and envied her in secret her superiority in personal attractions. For though they all were very beautiful, the youngest was the most so. Fraulein Bela turned her chief attention to the science of plants ; as Fraulein Medea did in earlier times.
She knew their hidden virtues, could extract from them poisons and antidotes ; and farther, understood the art of making from them sweet or nauseous odours for the unseen Powers. When her censer steamed, she allured to her Spirits out of the immeasurable depth of aether, from beyond the Moon, and they became her subjects, that with their fine organs they might be allowed to snuff these delicious vapours : and when she scattered villianous perfumes upon the coals, she could have smoked away with it the very Zihim and the Ohim from the Wilderness.
Fraulein Therba was inventive as Circe in devising magic formulas, which could command the elements, could raise tempests and whirlwinds, also hail and thunder ; could shake the bowels of the Earth, or lift itself from the sockets of its axle.
She employed these arts to terrify the people, and be feared and honoured by them as a goddess ; and she could, in fact, arrange the weather more according to the wish and taste of men than wise old Nature does. Two brothers quarreled on this subject, for their wishes never were the same. The one was a husbandman, and still desired rain for the growth and strengthening of his crops. The other was a potter, and desired constant sunshine to dry his dishes, which the rain destroyed.
And as Heaven never could content them in disposing of this matter, they repaired one day with rich presents to the Castle of the wise Krokus ; and submitted their petitions to Therba. The daughter of the Elf gave a smile over their unquiet grumbling at the wise economy of Nature ; and contented the demands of each : she made rain fall on the seedlands of the cultivator ; and the sun shone on the potter-field close by. By these enchantments both the sisters gained much fame and riches, for they never used their gifts without a fee.
With their treasures they built castles and country-houses ; laid out royal pleasure-gardens ; to their festivals and divertisements there was no end. The gallants, who solicited their love, they gulled and laughed at.
Fraulein Libussa was no sharer in the vain proud disposition of her sisters. Though she had the same capacities for penetrating the secrets of Nature, and employing its hidden powers in her service, she remained contented with the gifts she had derived from her maternal inheritance, without attempting to increase them, or turn them to a source of gain.
Her vanity extended not beyond the consciousness that she was beautiful ; she cared not for riches ; and neither longed to be feared nor to be honoured like her sisters. Whilst these were gadding up and down among their country-houses, hastening from one tumultuous pleasure to another, with the flower of the Bohemian chivalry fettered to their chariot-wheels, she abode in her father’s house, conducting the economy, giving counsel to those who begged it, friendly help to the afflicted and oppressed ; and all from good-will, without remuneration.
Her temper was soft and modest, and her conduct virtuous and discreet, as beseems a noble virgin. She might secretly rejoice in the victories which her beauty gained over the hearts of men, and accept the sighing and cooing of her languishing adorers as a just tribute to her charms ; but none dared speak a word of love to her, or venture on aspiring to her heart. Yet Amor, the roguish urchin, takes a pleasure in exerting his privileges on the coy ; and often hurls his burning torch upon the lowly straw-roof, when he means to set on fire a lofty palace.
Far in the bosom of the forest lived an ancient Knight, who had come into the land with the host of Czech. In this seclusion he had fixed his settlement ; reduced the desert undercultivation, and formed for himself a small estate, where he thought to pass the remainder of his days in peace, and live upon the produce of his husbandry. A strong-handed neighbour took forcible possession of the land, and expelled the owner, whom a hospitable peasant sheltered in his dwelling.
The distressed old Knight had a son, who now formed the sole consolation and support of his age ; a bold active youth, but possessed of nothing save a hunting-spear and a practised arm,for the sustenance of his gray-haired father. The injustice of their neighbour stimulated him to revenge, and he had been prepared for resisting force by force ; but the command of the anxious father, unwilling to expose his son to danger, had disarmed him. Yet ere long he resumed his former purpose.
Then the father called him to his presence, and said : “ Pass over, my son, to the wise Krokus, or to the cunning virgins his daughters, and ask counsel whether the gods approve thy undertaking, and will grant it a prosperous issue. If so, gird on thy sword, and take the spear in thy hand, and go forth to fight for thy inheritance. If not, stay here till thou hast closed my eyes and laid me in the earth ; then do what shall seem good to thee.”
The youth set forth, and first reached Bela’s palace, a building like a temple for the habitation of a goddess. He knocked at the door, and desired to be admitted ; but the porter observing that he came empty-handed, dismissed him as a beggar, and shut the door in his face. He went forward in sadness, and reached the house of Sister Therba, where he knocked and requested an audience. The porter looked upon him through his window, and said : “ If thou bringest gold in thy bag, which thou canst weigh out to my mistress, she will teach thee one of her good saws to read thy fortune withal.
If not, then go and gather of it in the sands of the Elbe as many grains as the tree hath leaves, the sheaf ears, and the bird feathers, then will I open thee this gate.” The mocked young man glided off entirely dejected ; and the more so, as he learned that Seer Krokus was in Poland, arbitrating the disputes of some contending Grandees. He anticipated from the third sister no more flattering reception ; and as he descried her father’s castle from a hill in the distance, he could not venture to approach it, but hid himself in a thicket to pursue his bitter thoughts.
Ere long he was roused by an approaching noise ; he listened, and heard a sound of horses’ hoofs. A flying roe dashed through the bushes, followed by a lovely huntress and her maids on stately steeds. She hurled a javelin from her hand ; it flew whizzing through the air, but did not hit the game. Instantly the watchful young man seized his bow and launched from the twanging cord a bolt, which smote the deer through the heart, and stretched it lifeless on the spot. The lady, in astonishment at this phenomenon, looked round to find her unknown hunting partner : and the archer, on observing this, stept forward from his bush, and bent himself humbly before her to the ground.
Fraulein Libussa thought she had never seen a finer man. At the first glance, his figure made so deep an impression on her, that she could not but award him that involuntary feeling of good-will which a beautiful appearance claims as its prerogative. “Tell me, fair stranger,” said she to him, “ who art thou, and what chance is it that leads thee to these groves ?”
The youth guessed rightly that his lucky star had brought him what he was in search of ; he disclosed his case to her in modest words; not hiding how disgracefully her sisters had dismissed him, or how the treatment had afflicted him. She cheered his heart with friendly words. “Follow me to my abode,” said she; “I will consult the Book of Fate for thee, and answer thy demand tomorrow by the rising of the sun.”
The young man did as he was ordered. No churlish porter here barred for him the entrance of the palace; the fair lady exercised the rights of hospitality with generous attention. He was charmed by this benignant reception, but still more by the beauty of his gentle hostess. Her enchanting figure hovered all night before his eyes ; he carefully defended himself from sleep, that he might not for a moment lose from his thoughts the delightful events of the day.
Fraulein Libussa, on the contrary, enjoyed soft slumber: for seclusion from the influences of the external senses, which disturb the finer presentiments of the future, is an indispensable, condition for the gift of prophecy. The glowing fancy of the maiden blended the form of this young stranger with all the dreaming images which hovered through her mind that night. She found him where she had not looked for him, in connexion with affairs in which she could not understand how this unknown youth had come to be involved.
On her early awakening, at the hour when the fair prophetess was wont to separate and interpret the visions of the night, she felt inclined to cast away these phantasms from her mind, as errors which had sprung from a disturbance in the operation of her prophetic faculty, and were entitled to no heed from her.
Yet a dim feeling signified that this creation of her fancy was not idle dreaming ; but had a significant allusion to certain events which the future would unravel ; and that last night this presaging Fantasy had spied out the decrees of Fate, and blabbed them to her, more successfully than ever. By help of it, she found that her guest was inflamed with warm love to her ; and with equal honesty her heart confessed the same thing in regard to him.
But she instantly impressed the seal of silence on the news ; as the modest youth had, on his side, set a guard upon his lips and his eyes, that he might not expose himself to a contemptuous refusal ; for the chasm which Fortune had interposed between him and the daughter of the wise Krokus seemed impassable.
Although the fair Libussa well knew what she had to say in answer to the young man’s question, yet it went against her heart to let him go from her so soon. At sunrise she called him to her in her garden, and said : “The curtain of darkness yet hangs before my eyes ; abide with me till sunset ;” and at night she said : ” Stay till sunrise ;” and next morning : ” Wait another day ;” and the third day: ” Have patience till tomorrow.”
On the fourth day she at last dismissed him ; finding no more pretexts for detaining him, with safety to her secret. At parting, she gave him his response in friendly words : ” The gods will not that thou shouldst contend with a man of violence in the land; to bear and suffer is the lot of the weaker. Return to thy father ; be the comfort of his old age ; and support him by the labour of thy diligent hand. Take two white Steers as a present from my herd; and this Staff to drive them ; and when it blossoms and bears fruit, the spirit of prophecy will descend on thee.”
To be continued…

 

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Musäus: “Libussa” 1/5

Excerpt from Thomas Carlyle’s “German Romance: Specimens of its Chief Authors; with Biographical and Critical Notices.” Vol. I, 1827.

By Johann Karl August Musäus

 

LIBUSSA
DEEP in the Bohemian forest, which has now dwindled to a few scattered woodlands, there abode, in the primeval times, while it stretched its umbrage far and wide, a spiritual race of beings, airy and avoiding light, incorporeal also, more delicately fashioned than the clay-formed sons of men ; to the coarser sense of feeling imperceptible, but to the finer, half-visible by moonlight ; and well known to poets by the name of Dryads, and to ancient bards by that of Elves. From immemorial ages, they had dwelt here undisturbed ; till all at once the forest sounded with the din of warriors, for Duke Czech of Hungary, with his Sclavonic hordes, had broken over the mountains, to seek in these wild tracts a new habitation.
The fair tenants of the aged oaks, of the rocks, clefts and grottos, and of the flags in the tarns and morasses, fled before the clang of arms and the neighing of chargers : the stout Erl-King himself was annoyed by the uproar, and transferred his court to more sequestered wildernesses. One solitary Elf could not resolve to leave her darling oak ; and as the wood began here and there to be felled for the purposes of cultivation, she alone undertook to defend her tree against the violence of the strangers, and chose the towering summit of it for her residence.
Among the retinue of the Duke was a young Squire, Krokus by name, full of spirit and impetuosity ; stout and handsome, and of noble mien, to whom the keeping of his master’s stud had been entrusted, which at times he drove far into the forest for their pasture. Frequently he rested beneath the oak which the Elf inhabited : she observed him with satisfaction ; and at night, when he was sleeping at the root, she would whisper pleasant dreams into his ear, and announce to him in expressive images the events of the coming day. When any horse had strayed into the desert, and the keeper had lost its tract, and gone to sleep with anxious thoughts, he failed not to see in vision the marks of the hidden path, which led him to the spot where his lost steed was grazing.
The farther the new colonists extended, the nearer came they to the dwelling of the Elf ; and as by her gift of divination, she perceived how soon her life-tree would be threatened by the axe, she determined to unfold this sorrow to her guest. One moonshiny summer evening, Krokus had folded his herd somewhat later than usual, and was hastening to his bed under the lofty oak. His path led him round a little fishy lake, on whose silver face the moon was imaging herself like a gleaming ball of gold; and across this glittering portion of the water, on the farther side, he perceived a female form, apparently engaged in walking by the cool shore. This sight surprised the young warrior : What brings the maiden hither, thought he, by herself, in this wilderness, at the season of the nightly dusk ? Yet the adventure was of such a sort, that, to a young man, the more strict investigation of it seemed alluring rather than alarming.
He redoubled his steps, keeping firmly in view the form which had arrested his attention ; and soon reached the place where he had first noticed it, beneath the oak. But now it looked to him as if the thing he saw were a shadow rather than a body ; he stood wondering and motionless, a cold shudder crept over him, and he heard a sweet soft voice address to him these words : “Come hither, beloved stranger, and fear not ; I am no phantasm, no deceitful shadow : I am the Elf of this grove, the tenant of the oak, under whose leafy boughs thou hast often rested. I rocked thee in sweet delighting dreams, and prefigured to thee thy adventures ; and when a brood-mare or a foal had chanced to wander from the herd, I told thee of the place, where thou wouldst find it.

Repay this favour by a service which I now require of thee ; be the Protector of this tree, which has so often screened thee from the shower and the scorching heat ; and guard the murderous axes of thy brethren, which lay waste the forest, that they harm not this venerable trunk.”

The young warrior, restored to self-possession by this soft still voice, made answer : “Goddess or mortal, whoever thou mayest be, require of me what thou pleasest ; if I can, I will perform it. But I am a man of no account among my people, the servant of the Duke my lord. If he tell me today or tomorrow, Feed here, feed there, how shall I protect thy tree in this distant forest? Yet if thou commandest me, I will renounce the service of princes, and dwell under the shadow of thy oak, and guard it while I live.”
“ Do so,” said the Elf: “thou shalt not repent it.”
Hereupon she vanished ; and there was a rustling in the branches above, as if some breath of an evening breeze had been entangled in them, and had stirred the leaves. Krokus, for a while, stood enraptured at the heavenly form which had appeared to him. So soft a female, of such slender shape and royal bearing, he had never seen among the short squat damsels of his own Sclavonic race. At last he stretched himself upon the moss, but no sleep descended on his eyes ; the dawn overtook him in a whirl of sweet emotions, which were as strange and new to him as the first beam of light to the opened eye of one born blind.

With the earliest morning he hastened to the Court of the Duke, required his discharge, packed up his war-accoutrements, and, with rapid steps, his burden on his shoulders, and his head full of glowing enthusiasm, hied him back to his enchanted forest-hermitage.

Meanwhile, in his absence, a craftsman among the people, a miller by trade, had selected for himself the round straight trunk of the oak to be an axle, and was proceeding with his mill-men to fell it. The affrighted Elf sobbed bitterly, as the greedy saw began with iron tooth to devour the foundations of her dwelling. She looked wildly round, from the highest summit, for her faithful guardian, but her glance could find him nowhere ; and the gift of prophecy, peculiar to her race, was in the present case so ineffectual, that she could as little read the fate that stood before her, as the sons of Aesculapius, with their vaunted prognosis, can discover ways and means for themselves when Death is knocking at their own door.
Krokus, however, was approaching, and so near the scene of this catastrophe, that the screeching of the busy saw did not escape his ear. Such a sound in the forest boded no good : he quickened his steps, and beheld before his eyes the horror of the devastation that was visiting the tree which he had taken under his protection. Like a fury he rushed upon the woodcutters, with pike and sword, and scared them from their work ; for they concluded he must be a forest-demon, and fled in great precipitation.

By good fortune, the wound of the tree was still curable ; and the scar of it disappeared in a few summers.

In the solemn hour of evening, when the stranger had fixed upon the spot for his future habitation ; had meted out the space for hedging round as a garden, and was weighing in his mind the whole scheme of his future hermitage ; where, in retirement from the society of men, he purposed to pass his days in the service of a shadowy companion, possessed apparently of little more reality than a Saint of the Calendar, whom a pious friar chooses for his spiritual paramour the Elf appeared before him at the brink of the lake, and with gentle looks thus spoke: “Thanks to thee, beloved stranger, that thou hast turned away the wasteful arms of thy brethren from ruining this tree, with which my life is united.

For thou shalt know that Mother Nature, who has granted to my race such varied powers and influences, has combined the fortune of our life with the growth and duration of the oak. By us the sovereign of the forest raises his venerable head above the populace of other trees and shrubs ; we further the circulation of the sap through his trunk and boughs, that he may gain strength to battle with the tempest, and for long centuries to defy destructive Time.

On the other hand, our life is bound to his : when the oak, which the lot of Destiny has appointed for the partner of our existence, fades by years, we fade along with him ; and when he dies, we die, and sleep, like mortals, as it were a sort of death-sleep, till, by the everlasting cycle of things, Chance, or some hidden provision of Nature, again weds our being to a new germ ; which, unfolded by our enlivening virtue, after the lapse of long years, springs up to be a mighty tree, and affords us the enjoyment of existence anew.

From this thou mayest perceive what a service thou hast done me by thy help, and what gratitude I owe thee. Ask of me the recompense of thy noble deed ; disclose to me the wish of thy heart, and this hour it shall be granted thee.”

Krokus continued silent. The sight of the enchanting Elf had made more impression on him than her speech, of which, indeed, he understood but little. She noticed his embarrassment ; and, to extricate him from it, plucked a withered reed from the margin of the lake, broke it into three pieces, and said : “Choose one of these three stalks, or take one without a choice. In the first, lie Honour and Renown ; in the second, Riches and the wise enjoyment of them ; in the third is happiness in Love laid up for thee.”
The young man cast his eyes upon the ground, and answered: “Daughter of Heaven, if thou wouldst deign to grant the desire of my heart, know that it lies not in these three stalks which thou offerest me ; the recompense I aim at is higher. What is Honour but the fuel of Pride ? what are Riches but the root of Avarice? and what is Love but the trap-door of Passion, to ensnare the noble freedom of the heart?
Grant me my wish, to rest under the shadow of thy oak-tree from the toils of warfare, and to hear from thy sweet mouth the lessons of wisdom, that I may understand by them the secrets of the future.”
“Thy request,” replied the Elf, “is great ; but thy deserving towards me is not less so : be it then as thou hast asked.
Nor, with the fruit, shall the shell be wanting to thee ; for the wise man is also honoured ; he alone is rich, for he desires nothing more than he needs, and he tastes the pure nectar of Love without poisoning it by polluted lips.”
So saying, she again presented him the three reed-stalks, and vanished from his sight.
The young Eremite prepared his bed of moss, beneath the oak, exceedingly content with the reception which the Elf had given him. Sleep came upon him like a strong man ; gay morning dreams danced round his head, and solaced his fancy with the breath of happy forebodings. On awakening, he joyfully began his day’s work ; ere long he had built himself a pleasant hermit’s-cottage ; had dug his garden, and planted in it roses and lilies, with other odoriferous flowers and herbs ; not forgetting pulse and cold, and a sufficiency of fruit-trees.

This Elf never failed to visit him at twilight ; she rejoiced in the prospering of his labours ; walked with him, hand in hand, by the sedgy border of the lake ; and the wavering reeds, as the wind passed through them, whispered a melodious evening salutation to the trustful pair. She instructed her attentive disciple in the secrets of Nature ; showed him the origin and cause of things ; taught him their common and their magic properties and effects ; and formed the rude soldier into a thinker and philosopher.

In proportion as the feelings and senses of the young man grew refined by this fair spiritual intercourse, it seemed as if the tender form of the Elf were condensing, and acquiring more consistency; her bosom caught warmth and life ; her brown eyes sparkled with the fire of love ; and with the shape, she appeared to have adopted the feelings of a young blooming maiden.

The sentimental hour of dusk, which is as if expressly calculated to awaken slumbering feelings, had its usual effect ; and after a few moons from their first acquaintance, the sighing Krokus found himself possessed of the happiness in Love, which the Third Reed-stalk had appointed him ; and did not repent that by the trap-door of Passion the freedom of his heart had been ensnared. Though the marriage of the tender pair took place without witnesses, it was celebrated with as much enjoyment as the most tumultuous espousals ; nor were speaking proofs of love’s recompense long wanting.

The Elf gave her husband three daughters at a birth ; and the father, rejoicing in the bounty of his better half, named, at the first embrace, the eldest infant, Bela ; the next born, Therba ; and the youngest, Libussa. They were all like the Genies in beauty of form;, and though not moulded of such light materials as the mother, their corporeal structure was finer than the dull earthy clay of the father. They were also free from all the infirmities of childhood ; their swathings did not gall them ; they teethed without epileptic fits, needed no calomel taken inwardly, got no rickets ; had no small-pox, and, of course, no scars, no cum-eyes, or puckered faces : nor did they require any leading-strings ; for after the first nine days, they ran like little partridges ; and as they grew up, they manifested all the talents of the mother for discovering hidden things, and predicting what was future.

Krokus himself, by the aid of time, grew skillful in these mysteries also. When the wolf had scattered the flocks through the forest, and the herdsmen were seeking for their sheep and horses ; when the woodman missed an axe or bill, they took counsel from the wise Krokus, who showed them where to find what they had lost. When a wicked prowler had abstracted naught from the common stock ; had by night broken into the pinfold, or the dwelling of his neighbour, and robbed or slain him, and none could guess the malefactor, the wise Krokus was consulted.

He led the people to a green ; made them form a ring ; then stept into the midst of them, set the faithful sieve a-running, and so failed not to discover the misdoer. By such acts his fame spread over all the country of Bohemia ; and whoever had a weighty care, or an important undertaking, took counsel from the wise Krokus about its issue. The lame and the sick, too, required from him help and recovery ; even the unsound cattle of the fold were driven to him ; and his gift of curing sick kine by his shadow, was not less than that of the renowned St. Martin of Schierbach.

By these means the concourse of the people to him grew more frequent, day by day, no otherwise than if the Tripod of the Delphic Apollo had been transferred to the Bohemian forest : and though Krokus answered all inquiries, and cured the sick and afflicted, without fee or reward, yet the treasure of his secret wisdom paid him richly, and brought him in abundant profit ; the people crowded to him with gifts and presents, and almost oppressed him with testimonies of their good-will. It was he that first disclosed the mystery of washing gold from the sands of the Elbe ; and for his recompense he had a tenth of all the produce.

By these means his wealth and store increased ; he built strongholds and palaces ; had vast herds of cattle ; possessed fertile pasturages, fields and woods ; and thus found himself imperceptibly possessed of all the Riches which the beneficently foreboding Elf had enclosed for him in the Second Reed.

One fine summer evening, when Krokus with his train was returning from an excursion, having by special request been settling the disputed marches of two townships, he perceived his spouse on the margin of the sedgy lake, where she had first appeared to him. She waved him with her hand ; so he dismissed his servants, and hastened to clasp her in his arms.
She received him, as usual, with tender love ; but her heart was sad and oppressed ; from her eyes trickled down ethereal tears, so fine and fugitive, that as they fell they were greedily inhaled by the air, and not allowed to reach the ground. Krokus was alarmed at this appearance ; he had never seen his wife’s fair eyes otherwise than cheerful, and sparkling with youthful gaiety. “ What ails thee, beloved of my heart ?” said he ; “ black forebodings overcast my soul. Speak, say what mean those tears.”
The Elf sobbed, leaned her head sorrowfully on his shoulder, and said : “Beloved husband, in thy absence I have looked into the Book of Destiny ; a doeful chance overhangs my life-tree ; I must part from thee forever. Follow me into the Castle, till I bless my children ; for from this day you will never see me more.”
“ Dearest wife,” said Krokus, “ chase away these mournful thoughts. What misfortune is it that can harm thy tree ? Behold its sound boughs, how they stretch forth loaded with fruit and leaves, and how it raises its top to the clouds. While this arm can move, it shall defend thy tree from any miscreant that presumes to wound its stem.”
“Impotent defense,” replied she, “which a mortal arm can yield ! Ants can but secure themselves from ants, flies from flies, and the worms of Earth from other earthly worms.
But what can the mightiest among you do against the workings of Nature, or the unalterable decisions of Fate ? The kings of the Earth can heap up little hillocks, which they name fortresses and castles ; but the weakest breath of air defies their authority, blows where it lists, and mocks at their command. This oak-tree thou hast guarded from the violence of men ; canst thou likewise forbid the tempest that it rise not to disleaf its branches ; or if a hidden worm is gnawing in its marrow, canst thou draw it out, and tread it under foot ?”
Amid such conversation they arrived at the Castle. The slender maidens, as they were wont at the evening visit of their mother, came bounding forth to meet them ; gave account of their day’s employments, produced their needlework, and their embroideries, to prove their diligence : but now the hour of household happiness was joyless. They soon observed that the traces of deep suffering were imprinted on the countenance of their father ; and they looked with sympathising sorrow at their mother’s tears, without venturing to inquire their cause.
The mother gave them many wise instructions and wholesome admonitions ; but her speech was like the singing of a swan, as if she wished to give the world her farewell. She lingered with her husband, till the morning-star went up in the sky; then she embraced him and her children with mournful tenderness; and at dawn of day retired, as was her custom, through the secret door, to her oak-tree, and left her friends to their own sad forebodings.
Nature stood in listening stillness at the rising sun ; but heavy black clouds soon veiled his beaming head. The day grew sultry and oppressive ; the whole atmosphere was electric.
Distant thunder came rolling over the forest ; and the hundred-voiced Echo repeated, in the winding valleys, its baleful sound.
At the noontide, a forked thunderbolt struck quivering down upon the oak ; and in a moment shivered with resistless force the trunk and boughs, and the wreck lay scattered far around it in the forest. When Father Krokus was informed of this, he rent his garments, went forth with his daughters to deplore the life-tree of his spouse, and to collect the fragments of it, and preserve them as invaluable relics. But the Elf from that day was not seen any more.
To be continued…

 

rossetti

Thomas Carlyle: On Novalis 5/5

Excerpt: “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Novalis” by Thomas Carlyle, 1829.
What degree of critical satisfaction, what insight into the grand crisis of Novalis’s spiritual history, which seems to be here shadowed forth, our readers may derive from this Third Hymn to the Night, we shall not pretend to conjecture. Meanwhile, it were giving them a false impression of the Poet, did we leave him here; exhibited only under his more mystic aspects; as if his Poetry were exclusively a thing of Allegory, dwelling amid Darkness and Vacuity, far from all paths of ordinary mortals and their thoughts.
Novalis can write in the most common style, as well as in this most uncommon one; and there too not without originality. By far the greater part of his First Volume is occupied with a Romance, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, written, so far as it goes, much in the everyday manner; we have adverted the less to it, because we nowise reckoned it among his most remarkable compositions.
Like many of the others, it has been left as a Fragment; nay, from the account Tieck gives of its ulterior plan, and how from the solid prose world of the First part, this ‘Apotheosis of Poetry’ was to pass, in the Second, into a mythical, fairy and quite fantastic world, critics have doubted whether, strictly speaking, it could have been completed. From this work we select two passages, as specimens of Novalis’ manner in the more common style of composition; premising, which in this one instance we are entitled to do, that whatever excellence they may have will be universally appreciable.
The first is the introduction to the whole Narrative, as it were the text of the whole; the Blue Flower there spoken of being Poetry, the real object, passion and vocation of young Heinrich, which, through manifold adventures, exertions and sufferings, he is to seek and find. His history commences thus: ‘The old people were already asleep; the clock was beating its monotonous tick on the wall; the wind blustered over the rattling windows; by turns, the chamber was lighted by the sheen of the moon.
The young man lay restless in his bed; and thought of the stranger and his stories.
“It was not the treasure,” he said to himself, “which awoke in me such unutterable desire; all covetousness is far from me; but I long to see the Blue Flower. It haunts me all the time, and I can think and fancy of nothing else.”
Never did I feel so before: it is as if, till now, I had been dreaming, or as if sleep had carried me into another world; for in the world I used to live in, who troubled himself about flowers?
Such wild passion for a Flower was never heard of there. But whence could that stranger have come? None of us ever saw such a man; yet I know not how I alone was so caught with his discourse: the rest heard the very same, yet none seems to mind it. And then that I cannot even speak of my strange condition! I feel such rapturous contentment; and only then when I have not the Flower rightly before my eyes, does so deep, heartfelt an eagerness come over me; these things no one will or can believe.
I could fancy I were mad, if I did not see, did not think with such perfect clearness; since that day, all is far better known to me. I have heard tell of ancient times; how animals and trees and rocks used to speak with men. This is even my feeling: as if they were on the point of breaking out, and I could see in them, what they wished to say to me. There must be many a word which I know not; did I know more, I could better comprehend these matters. Once I liked dancing; now I had rather think to the music.” —
The young man lost himself, by degrees, in sweet fancies, and fell asleep. He dreamed first of immeasurable distances, and wild unknown regions. He wandered over seas with incredible speed; strange animals he saw; he lived with many varieties of men, now in war, in wild tumult, now in peaceful huts. He was taken captive and fell into the lowest wretchedness. All emotions rose to a height as yet unknown to him. He lived through an infinitely variegated life; died and came back; loved to the highest passion, and then again was forever parted from his loved one.
‘At length towards morning, as the dawn broke up without, his spirit also grew stiller, the images grew clearer and more permanent. It seemed to him he was walking alone in a dark wood. Only here and there did day glimmer through the green net. Ere long he came to a rocky chasm, which mounted upwards. He had to climb over many crags, which some former stream had rolled down. The higher he came, the lighter grew the wood.
At last he arrived at a little meadow, which lay on the declivity of the mountain. Beyond the meadow rose a high cliff, at the foot of which he observed an opening, that seemed to be the entrance of a passage hewn in the rock. The passage led him easily on, for some time, to a great subterranean expanse, out of which from afar a bright gleam was visible.
On entering, he perceived a strong beam of light, which sprang as if from a fountain to the roof of the cave, and sprayed itself into innumerable sparks, which collected below in a great basin: the beam glanced like kindled gold: not the faintest noise was to be heard, a sacred silence encircled the glorious sight. He approached the basin, which waved and quivered with infinite hues. The walls of the cave were coated with this fluid, which was not hot but cool, and on the walls threw out a faint bluish light. He dipt his hand in the basin, and wetted his lips.
It was as if the breath of a spirit went through him; and he felt himself in his inmost heart strengthened and refreshed. An irresistible desire seized him to bathe; he undressed himself and stept into the basin. He felt as if a sunset cloud were floating round him; a heavenly emotion streamed over his soul; in deep pleasure innumerable thoughts strove to blend within him; new, unseen images arose, which also melted together, and became visible beings around him; and every wave of that lovely element pressed itself on him like a soft bosom. The flood seemed a Spirit of Beauty, which from moment to moment was taking form round the youth.
“Intoxicated with rapture, and yet conscious of every impression, he floated softly down that glittering stream, which flowed out from the basin into the rocks. A sort of sweet slumber fell upon him, in which he dreamed indescribable adventures, and out of which a new light awoke him. He found himself on a soft sward at the margin of a spring, which welled out into the air, and seemed to dissipate itself there. Dark-blue rocks, with many-coloured veins, rose at some distance; the daylight which encircled him was clearer and milder than the common; the sky was black-blue, and altogether pure. But what attracted him infinitely most was a high, light-blue Flower, which stood close by the spring, touching it with its broad glittering leaves.
Round it stood innumerable flowers of all colours, and the sweetest perfume filled the air. he saw nothing but the Blue Flower and gazed on it long with nameless tenderness. At last he was for approaching, when all at once it began to move and change; the leaves grew more resplendent, and clasped themselves round the waxing stem; the Flower bent itself towards him; and the petals showed like a blue spreading ruff, in which hovered a lovely face. His sweet astonishment at this transformation was increasing, –when suddenly his mother’s voice awoke him, and he found himself in the house of his parents, which the morning sun was already gilding.’
Our next and last extract is likewise of a dream. Young Heinrich with his mother travels a long journey to see his grandfather at Augsburg; converses, on the way, with merchants, miners and red-cross warriors (for it is in the time of the Crusades); and soon after his arrival falls immeasurably in love with Matilda, the Poet Klingsohr’s daughter, whose face was that fairest one he had seen in his old vision of the Blue Flower.
Matilda, it would appear, is to be taken from him by death (as Sophie was from Novalis): meanwhile, dreading no such event, Heinrich abandons himself with full heart to his new emotions: ‘He went to the window. The choir of the Stars stood in the deep heaven; and in the east a white gleam announced the coming day.
‘Full of rapture, Heinrich exclaimed: “You, ye everlasting Stars, ye silent wanderers, I call you to witness my sacred oath. For Matilda will I live, and eternal faith shall unite my heart and hers. For me too the morn of an everlasting day is dawning. The night is by: to the rising Sun, I kindle myself as a sacrifice that never be extinguished.”
‘Heinrich was heated; and not till late, towards morning, did he fall asleep. In strange dreams the thoughts of his soul embodied themselves. A deep-blue river gleamed from the plain. On its smooth surface floated a bark; Matilda was sitting there, and steering. She was adorned with garlands; was singing a simple Song, and looking over to him with fond sadness. His bosom was full of anxiety. He knew not why. The sky was clear, the stream calm. Her heavenly countenance was mirrored in the waves. All at once the bark began to whirl. He called earnestly to her. She smiled and laid down her oar in the boat, which continued whirling.
An unspeakable terror took hold of him. He dashed into the stream; but he could not get forward; the water carried him. She beckoned, she seemed as if she wished to say something to him; the bark was filling with water; yet she smiled with unspeakable affection, and looked cheerfully into the vortex. All at once it drew her in. A faint breath rippled over the stream, which flowed on as calm and glittering as before. His horrid agony robbed him of consciousness. His heart ceased beating.
On returning to himself, he was again on dry land. It seemed as if he had floated far. It was a strange region. He knew not what had passed with him. His heart was gone. Unthinking he walked deeper into the country. He felt inexpressibly weary. A little well gushed from a hill; it sounded like perfect bells. With his hand he lifted some drops, and wetted his parched lips. Like a sick dream, lay the frightful event behind him. Farther and farther he walked; flowers and trees spoke to him. He felt so well, so at home in the scene. Then he heard that simple Song again. He ran after the sounds.
Suddenly some one held him by the clothes. “DearHenry,” cried a well-known voice. He looked round, and Matilda clasped him in her arms. “Why didst thou run from me, dear heart?” said she, breathing deep: “I could scarcely overtake thee.” Heinrich wept. He pressed her to him. “Where is the river?” cried he in tears. —
“Seest thou not its blue waves above us?” He looked up, and the blue river was flowing softly over their heads. “Where are we, dear Matilda?” –“With our Fathers.” –“Shall we stay together?” –“Forever,” answered she, pressing her lips to his, and so clasping him that she could not again quit hold. She put a wondrous secret Word in his mouth, and it pierced through all his being. He was about to repeat it, when his Grandfather called and he awoke. He would have given his life to remember that Word.’
This image of Death, and of the River being the Sky in that other and eternal country, seems to us a fine and touching one: there is in it a trace of that simple sublimity, that soft still pathos, which are characteristics of Novalis, and doubtless the highest of his specially poetic gifts.
But on these, and what other gifts and deficiencies pertain to him, we can no farther insist: for now, after such multifarious quotations, and more or less stinted commentaries, we must consider our little enterprise in respect of Novalis to have reached its limits; to be, if not completed, concluded. Our reader has heard him largely; on a great variety of topics, selected and exhibited here in such manner as seemed the fittest for our object, and with a true wish on our part, that what little judgment was in the mean while to be formed of such a man might be a fair and honest one.
Some of the passages we have translated will appear obscure; others, we hope, are not without symptoms of a wise and deep meaning; the rest may excite wonder, which wonder again it will depend on each reader for himself, whether he turn to right account or to wrong account, whether he entertain as the parent of Knowledge, or as the daughter of Ignorance. For the great body of readers, we are aware, there can be little profit in Novalis, who rather employs our time than helps us to kill it; for such any farther study of him would be unadvisable.
To others again, who prize Truth as the end of all reading, especially to that class who cultivate moral science as the development of purest and highest Truth, we can recommend the perusual and reperusal of Novalis with almost perfect confidence. If they feel, with us, that the most profitable employment any book can give them, is to study honestly some earnest, deep-minded, truth-loving Man, to work their way into his manner of thought, till they see the world with his eyes, feel as he felt and judge as he judged, neither believing nor denying, till they can in some measure so feel and judge, –then we may assert that few books known to us are more worth of their attention than this.
They will find it, if we mistake not, an unfathomed mine of philosophical ideas, where the keenest intellect may have occupation enough; and in such occupation, without looking farther, reward enough. All this, if the reader proceed on candid principles; if not it will be all otherwise. To no man, so much as to Novalis is that famous motto applicable:
Leser, wie gefall ich Dir?
Leser, wie gefullst Du mir?

Reader, how likest thou me?
Reader, how like I thee?
For the rest, it were but a false proceeding did we attempt any formal character of Novalis in this place; did we pretend with such means as ours to reduce that extraordinary nature under common formularies; and in few words sum-up the net total of his worth and worthlessness. We have repeatedly expressed our own imperfect knowledge of the matter, and our entire despair of bringing even an approximate picture of it before readers so foreign to him.
The kind words, ‘amiable enthusiast,’ ‘poetic dreamer,’ or the unkind ones, ‘German mystic,’ ‘crackbrained rhapsodist,’ are easily spoken and written; but would avail little in this instance. If we are not altogether mistaken, Novalis cannot be ranged under any one of these noted categories; but belongs to a higher and much less known one, the significance of which is perhaps also worth studying, at all events will not till after long study become clear to us.
Meanwhile let the reader accept some vague impressions of ours on this subject, since we have no fixed judgment to offer him. We might say, that the chief excellence we have remarked in Novalis is his to us truly wonderful subtlety of intellect; his power of intense abstraction, of pursuing the deepest and most evanescent ideas through their thousand complexities, as it were, with lynx vision, and to the very limits of human Thought.
He was well skilled in mathematics, and, as we can easily believe, fond of that science; but his is a far finer species of endowment than any required in mathematics, where the mind, from the very beginning of Euclid to the end of Laplace, is assisted with visible symbols, with safe implements for thinking; nay, at least in what is called the higher mathematics, has often little more than a mechanical superintendence to exercise over these. This power of abstract meditation, when it is so sure and clear as we sometimes find it with Novalis, is a much higher and rarer one; its element is not mathematics, but that Mathesis, of which it has been said many a Great Calculist has not even a notion.
In this power, truly, so far as logical and not moral power is concerned, lies the summary of all Philosophic talent: which talent, accordingly, we imagine Novalis to have possessed in a very high degree; in a higher degree than almost any other modern writer we have met with.
His chief fault, again, figures itself to us as a certain undue softness, a want of rapid energy; something which we might term passiveness extending both over his mind and his character. There is a tenderness in Novalis, a purity, a clearness, almost as of a woman; but he has not, at least not at all in that degree, the emphasis and resolute force of a man. Thus, in his poetical delineations, as we complained above, he is too diluted and diffuse; not verbose properly; not so much abounding in superfluous words as in superfluous circumstances, which indeed is but a degree better.
In his philosophical speculations, we feel as if, under a different form, the same fault were not and then manifested. Here again, he seems to us, in one sense, too languid, too passive. He sits, we might say, among the rich, fine, thousandfold combinations, which his mind almost of itself presents him; but perhaps, he shows too little activity in the process, is too lax in separating the true from the doubtful, is not even at the trouble to express his truth with any laborious accuracy.
With his stillness, with his deep love of Nature, his mild, lofty, spiritual tone of contemplation, he comes before us in a sort of Asiatic character, almost like our ideal of some antique Gymnosophist, and with the weakness as well as the strength of an Oriental. However, it should be remembered that his works both poetical and philosophical, as we now see them, appear under many disadvantages; altogether immature, and not as doctrines and delineations, but as the rude draught of such; in which, had they been completed, much was to have changed its shape, and this fault, with many others, might have disappeared.
It may be, therefore, that this is only a superficial fault, or even only the appearance of a fault, and has its origin in these circumstances, and in our imperfect understanding of him. In personal and bodily habits, at least, Novalis appears to have been the opposite of inert; we hear expressly of his quickness and vehemence of movement.
In regard to the character of his genius, or rather perhaps of his literary significance, and the form under which he displayed his genius, Tieck thinks he may be likened to Dante. ‘For him’ says he, ‘it had become the most natural disposition to regard the commonest and nearest as a wonder, and the strange, the supernatural as something common; men’s every-day life itself lay round him like a wondrous fable, and those regions which the most dream of or doubt of as of a thing distant, incomprehensible, were for him a beloved home.
Thus did he, uncorrupted by examples, find out for himself a new method of delineation: and, in his multiplicity of meaning; in his view of Love, and his belief in Love, as at once his Instructor, his Wisdom, his Religion; in this, too, that a single grand incident of life, and one deep sorrow and bereavement grew to be the essence of his Poetry and Contemplation, –he, alone among the moderns, resembles the lofty Dante; and sings us, like him, an unfathomable mystic song, far different from that of many imitators, who think to put on mysticism and put it off, like a piece of dress.’
Considering the tendency of his poetic endeavors, as well as the general spirit of his philosophy, this flattering comparison may turn out to be better founded than at first sight it seems to be. Nevertheless, were we required to illustrate Novalis in this way, which at all times must be a very loose one, we should incline rather to call him the German Pascal than the German Dante. Between Pascal and Novalis, a lover of such analogies might trace not a few points of resemblance.
Both are of the purest, most affectionate moral nature; both of a high, fine, discursive intellect; both are mathematicians and naturalists, yet occupy themselves chiefly with Religion; nay, the best writings of both are left in the shape of ‘Thoughts,’ materials of a grand scheme, which each of them, with the views peculiar to his age, had planned, we may say, for the furtherance of Religion, and which neither of them lived to execute.
Nor in all this would it fail to be carefully remarked, that Novalis was not the French but the German Pascal; and from the intellectual habits of the one and the other, many national contrasts and conclusions might be drawn; which we leave to those that have a taste for such parallels.
We have thus endeavoured to communicate some views not of what is vulgarly called, but of what is a German Mystic; to afford English readers a few glimpses into his actual household establishment, and show them by their own inspection how he lives and works. We have done it, moreover, not in the style of derision, which would have been so easy, but in that of serious inquiry, which seemed so much more profitable. For this we anticipate not censure, but thanks from our readers. Mysticism, whatever it may be, should, like other actually existing things, be understood in well-informed minds.
We have observed, indeed, that the old-established laugh on this subject has been getting rather hollow of late; and seems as if erelong it would in a great measure die away. It appears to us that, in England there is a distinct spirit of tolerant and sober investigation abroad in regard to this and other kindred matters; a persuasion, fast spreading wider and wider, that the plummet of French or Scotch logic, excellent, nay, indispensable as it is for surveying all coasts and harbours, will absolutely not sound the deep-seas of human Inquiry; and that many a Voltaire and Hume, well-gifted and highly meritorious men, were far wrong in reckoning that when their six-hundred fathoms were out.
They had reached the bottom, which, as in the Atlantic, may lie unknown miles lower. Six-hundred fathoms is the longest, and a most valuable nautical line: but many men sound with six and fewer fathoms, and arrive at precisely the same conclusion.
‘The day will come,’ said Lichtenberg, in bitter irony, ‘when the belief in God will be like that in nursery Spectres’; or, as Jean Paul has it, ‘Of the World will be made a World-Machine, of the AEther a Gas, of God a Force, and of the Second-World — a Coffin.’ We rather think, such a day will not come. At all events, while the battle is still waging, and that Coffin-and-Gas philosophy has not yet secured itself with tithes and penal statutes, let there be free scope for Mysticism, or whatever else honestly opposes it. A fair field and no favour, and the right will prosper!
‘Our present time,’ says Jean Paul elsewhere, ‘is indeed a criticising and critical time, hovering betwixt the wish and the inability to believe; a chaos of conflicting times: but even a chaotic world must have its centre, and revolution round that centre; there is no pure entire Confusion, but all such presupposes its opposite, before it can begin.’

Novalis

Thomas Carlyle: On Novalis 4/5

Excerpt: “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Novalis” by Thomas Carlyle, 1829.
‘The Pupil,’ it is added, ‘listens with alarm to these conflicting voices.’ If such was the case in half-supernatural Sais, it may well be much more so in mere sublunary London. Here again, however, in regard to these vaporous lucubrations, we can only imitate Jean Paul’s Quintus Fixlein, who, it is said, in his elaborate Catalogue of German Errors of the Press, ‘states that important inferences are to be drawn from it, and advises the reader to draw them.’
Perhaps these wonderful paragraphs, which look, at this distance, so like chasms filled with mere sluggish mist, might prove valleys, with a clear stream and soft pastures, were we near at hand. For one thing, either Novalis, with Tieck and Schlegel at his back, are men in a state of derangement; or there is more in Heaven and Earth than has been dreamt of in our Philosophy. We may add that, in our view, this last Speaker, the ‘earnest Man,’ seems evidently to be Fichte; the first two Classses look like some sceptical or atheistic brood, unacquainted with Bacon’s Novum Organum, or having, the First class at least, almost no faith in it. That theory of the human species ending by a universal simultaneous act of Suicide, will, to the more simple sort of readers, be new.
As farther and more directly illustrating Novalis’ scientific views, we may here subjoin two short sketches, taken from another department of this Volume. To all who prosecute Philosophy, and take interest in its history and present aspects, they will not be without interest. The obscure parts of them are not perhaps unintelligible, but only obscure; which unluckily cannot, at all times, be helped in such cases: ‘Common Logic is the Grammar of the higher Speech, that is, of Thought; it examines merely the relations of ideas to one another, the Mechanics of Thought, the pure Physiology of ideas. Now logical ideas stand related to one another, like words without thoughts.
Logic occupies itself with the mere dead Body of the Science of Thinking. –Metaphysics, again, is the Dynamics of Thought; treats of the primary Powers of Thought; occupies itself with the mere Soul of the Science of Thinking. Metaphysical ideas stand related to one another, like thoughts without words. Men often wondered at the stubborn Incompletibility of these two Sciences; each followed its own business by itself; there was a want everywhere, nothing would suit rightly with either.
From the very first, attempts were made to unite them, as everything about them indicated relationship; but every attempt failed; the one or the other Science still suffered in these attempts, and lost its essential character. We had to abide by metaphysical Logic, and logical Metaphysic, but neither of them was as it should be. With Physiology and Psychology, with Mechanics and Chemistry, it fared no better. In the latter half of this Century there arose, with us Germans, a more violent commotion than ever; the hostile masses towered themselves up against each other more fiercely than heretofore; the fermentation was extreme; there followed powerful explosions.
And now some assert that a real Compenetration has somewhere or other taken place; that the germ of a union has arisen, which will grow by degrees, and assimilate all to one indivisible form: that this principle of Peace is pressing out irresistibly on all sides, and that erelong there will be but one Science and one Spirit, as one Prophet and one God.’–
‘The rude, discursive Thinker is the Scholastic (Schoolman Logician). The true Scholastic is a mystical Subtlist; out of logical Atoms he builds his Universe; he annihilates all living Nature, to put an Artifice of Thoughts (Gedankenkunststuck, literally Conjuror’s-trick of Thoughts) in its room. His aim is an infinite Automaton. Opposite to him is the rude, intuitive Poet: this is a mystical Macrologist: he hates rules and fixed form; a wild, violent life reigns instead of it in Nature; all is animate, no law; wilfulness and wonder everywhere. He is merely dynamical.
Thus does the Philosophic Spirit arise at first, in altogether separate masses. In the second stage of culture these masses begin to come in contact, multifariously enough; and, as in the union of infinite Extremes, the Finite, the Limited arises, so here also arise “Eclectic Philosophers” without number; the time of misunderstanding begins. The most limited is, in this stage, the most important, the purest Philosopher of the second stage. This class occupies itself wholly with the actual, present world, in the strictest sense.
The Philosophers of the first class look down with contempt on those of the second; say, they are a little of everything, and so nothing; hold their views as the results of weakness, as Inconsequentism. On the contrary, the second class, in their turn, pity the first; lay the blame on their visionary enthusiasm, which they say is absurd, even to insanity.
‘If on the one hand the Scholastics and Alchemists seem to be utterly at variance, and the Eclectics on the other hand quite at one, yet, strictly examined, it is altogether the reverse. The former, in essentials, are indirectly of one opinion; namely, as regards the non-dependence, and infinite character of Meditation, they both set out from the Absolute: whilst the Eclectic and limited sort are essentially at variance; and agree only in what is deduced. The former are infinite but uniform, the latter bounded but multiform; the former have genius, the latter talent; those have Ideas, these have knacks (Handgriffe); those are heads without hands, these are hands without heads.
The third stage is for the Artist, who can be at once implement and genius. He finds that that primitive Separation in the absolute Philosophical Activities’ (between the Scholastic, and the “rude, intuitive Poet”) ‘is a deeper-lying Separation in his own Nature; which Separation indicates, by its existence as such, the possibility of being adjusted, of being joined: he finds that, heterogeneous as these Activities are, there is yet a faculty in him of passing from the one to the other, of changing his polarity at will.
He discovers in them, therefore, necessary members of his spirit; he observes that both must be united in some common Principle. He infers that Eclecticism is nothing but the imperfect defective employment of this principle. It becomes —‘
–But we need not struggle farther, wringing a significance out of these mysterious words: in delineating the genuine Transcendentalist, or ‘Philosopher of the third state,’ properly speaking the Philosopher, Novalis ascends into regions whither few readers would follow him. It may be observed here that British Philosophy, tracing it from Duns Scotus to Dugald Stewart, has now gone through the first and second of these ‘stages,’ the Scholastic and the Eclectic, and in considerable honour. With our amiable Professor Stewart, than whom no man, not Cicero himself, was ever more entirely Eclectic, that second or Eclectic class may be considered as having terminated; and now Philosophy is at a stand among us, or rather there is now no Philosophy visible in these Islands.
It remains to be seen, whether we also are to have our ‘third stage’; and how that new and highest ‘class’ will demean itself here. The French Philosophers seem busy studying Kant, and writing of him: but we rather imagine Novalis would pronounce them still only in the Eclectic stage. He says afterwards, that ‘all Eclectics are essentially and at bottom sceptics; the more comprehensive, the more sceptical.’
These two passages have been extracted from a large series of Fragments, which, under the three divisions of Philosophical, Critical, Moral, occupy the greatest part of Volume Second. They are fractions, as we hinted above, of that grand ‘encyclopedical work’ which Novalis had planned. Friedrich Schlegel is said to be the selector of those published here. They come before us without note or comment; worded for the most part in very unusual phraseology; and without repeated and most patient investigation, seldom yield any significance, or rather we should say, often yield a false one.
A few of the clearest we have selected for insertion: whether the reader will think them ‘Pollen of Flowers,’ or a baser kind of dust, we shall not predict. We give them in a miscellaneous shape; overlooking those classifications which, even in the text, are not and could not be very rigidly adhered to.
‘Philosophy can bake no bread; but she can procure for us God, Freedom, Immortality. Which, then, is more practical, Philosophy or Economy?–
‘Philosophy is properly Home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home.–
‘We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.–
‘The true philosophical Act is annihilation of self (Selbsttodtung); this is the real beginning of all Philosophy; all requisites for being a Disciple of Philosophy point hither. This Act alone corresponds to all the conditions and characteristics of transcendental conduct.–
‘To become properly acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it.–
‘Man is the higher Sense of our Planet; the star which connects it with the upper world; the eye which it turns towards Heaven.–
‘Life is a disease of the spirit; a working incited by Passion. Rest is peculiar to the spirit.–
‘Our life is no Dream, but it may and will perhaps become one.–
‘What is Nature? An encyclopedical, systematic Index or Plan of our Spirit. Why will we content us with the mere catalogue of our Treasures? Let us contemplate them ourselves, and in all ways elaborate and use them.–
‘If our Bodily Life is a burning, our Spiritual Life is a being burnt, a Combustion (or, is precisely the inverse the case?); Death, therefore, perhaps a Change of Capacity.–
‘Sleep is for the inhabitants of Planets only. In another time, Man will sleep and wake continually at once. The greater part of our Body, of our Humanity itself, yet sleeps a deep sleep.–
‘There is but one Temple in the World; and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than this high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven, when we lay our hand on a human body.–
‘Man is a Sun; his Senses are the Planets.–
‘Man has ever expressed some symbolical Philosophy of his Being in his Works and Conduct; he announces himself and his Gospel of Nature; he is the Messiah of Nature.–
‘Plants are Children of the Earth; we are Children of the AEther. Our Lungs are properly our Root; we live, when we breathe; we begin our life with breathing.–
‘Nature is an AEolian Harp, a musical instrument; whose tones again are keys to higher strings in us.–
‘Every beloved object is the centre of a Paradise.–
‘The first Man is the first Spirit-seer; all appears to him as Spirit. What are children, but first men? The fresh gaze of the Child is richer in significance than the forecasting of the most indubitable Seer.–
‘It depends only on the weakness of our organs and of our self-excitement (Selbstberuhrung), that we do not see ourselves in a Fairy-world. All Fabulous Tales (Mahrchen) are merely dreams of that home world, which is everywhere and nowhere. The higher powers in us, which one day as Genies, shall fulfil our will, are, for the present, Muses, which refresh us on our toilsome course with sweet remembrances.–‘
(*1*) Novalis’s ideas, on what has been called the ‘perfectibility of man,’ ground themselves on his peculiar views of the constitution of material and spiritual Nature, and are of the most original and extraordinary character.
With our utmost effort, we should despair of communicating other than a quite false notion of them. He asks, for instance, with scientific gravity: Whether any one, that recollects the first kind glance of her he loved, can doubt the possibility of Magic?
‘Man consists in Truth. If he exposes Truth, he exposes himself. If he betrays Truth, he betrays himself. We speak not here of lies, but of acting against Conviction.–
‘A character is a completely fashioned will (vollkommen gebildeter Wille).–
‘There is, properly speaking, no Misfortune in the world. Happiness and Misfortune stand in continual balance. Every Misfortune is, as it were, the obstruction of a stream, which, after overcoming this obstruction, but bursts through with the greater force.–
‘The ideal of Morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of highest Strength, of most powerful life; which also has been named (very falsely as it was there meant) the ideal of poetic greatness. It is the maximum of the savage; and has, in these times, gained, precisely among the greatest weaklings, very many proselytes. By this ideal, man becomes a Beast-Spirit, a Mixture; whose brutal wit has, for weaklings, a brutal power of attraction.–
‘The spirit of Poesy is the morning light, which makes the Statue of Memnon sound.–
‘The division of Philosopher and Poet is only apparent, and to the disadvantage of both. It is a sign of disease, and of a sickly constitution.–
‘The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.–
‘Klopstock’s works appear, for the most part, free Translations of an unknown Poet, by a very talented but unpoetical Philologist.–
‘Goethe is an altogether practical Poet. He is in his works what the English are in their wares: highly simple, neat, convenient and durable. He has done in German Literature what Wedgwood did in English Manufacture. He has, like the English, a natural turn for Economy, and a noble Taste acquired by Understanding. Both these are very compatible, and have a near affinity in the chemical sense. * * —Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship may be called throughout prosaic and modern. The Romantic sinks to ruin, the Poesy of Nature, the Wonderful. The Book treats merely of common worldly things: Nature and Mysticism are altogether forgotten.
It is a poetised civic and household History; the Marvellous is expressly treated therein as imagination and enthusiasm. Artistic Atheism is the spirit of the Book. * * * It is properly a Candide, directed against Poetry: the Book is highly unpoetical in respect of spirit, poetical as the dress and body of it are. * * * The introduction of Shakspeare has almost a tragic effect. The hero retards the triumph of the Gospel of Economy; and economical Nature is finally the true and only remaining one.–
‘When we speak of the aim and Art observable in Shakspeare’s works, we must not forget that Art belongs to Nature; that it is, so to speak, self-viewing, self-imitating, self-fashioning Nature. The Art of a well-developed genius is far different from the Artfulness of the Understanding, of the merely reasoning mind. Shakspeare was no calculator, no learned thinker; he was a mighty, many-gifted soul, whose feelings and works, like products of Nature, bear the stamp of the same spirit; and in which the last and deepest of observers will still find new harmonies with the infinite structure of the Universe; concurrences with later ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of man.
They are emblematic, have many meanings, are simple and inexhaustible, like products of Nature; and nothing more unsuitable could be said of them than that they are works of Art, in that narrow mechanical acceptation of the word.’
The reader understands that we offe these specimens not as the best to be found in Novalis’s Fragments, but simply as the most intelligible. Far stranger and deeper things there are, could we hope to make them in the smallest degree understood. But in examining and reexamining many of his Fragments, we find ourselves carried into more complex, more subtle regions of thought than any we are elsewhere acquainted with: here we cannot always find our own latitude and longitude, sometimes not even approximate to finding them; much less teach others such a secret.
What has been already quoted may afford some knowledge of Novalis, in the characters of Philosopher and Critic: there is one other aspect under which it would be still more curious to view and exhibit him, but still more difficult, –we mean that of his Religion. Novalis nowhere specially records his creed, in these Writings: he many times expresses, or implies, a zealous, heartfelt belief in the Christian system; yet with such adjuncts and coexisting persuasions, as to us might seem rather surprising. One or two more of these his Aphorisms, relative to this subject, we shall cite, as likely to be better than any description of ours.
The whole Essay at the end of Volume First, entitled Die Christenheit oder Europa
(Christianity or Europe) is also well worthy of study, in this as in many other points of view.
‘Religion contains infinite sadness. If we are to love God, he must be in distress (hulfsbedurftig, help-needing). In how far is this condition answered in Christianity?–
‘Spinoza is a God-intoxicated man (Gott-trunkener Mensch).–
‘Is the Devil, as the Father of Lies, himself but a necessary illusion?–
‘The Catholic Religion is to a certain extent applied Christianity. Fichte’s Philosophy too is perhaps applied Christianity.–
‘Can Miracles work Conviction? Or is not real Conviction, this highest function of our soul and personality, the only true God-announcing Miracle?
‘The Christian Religion is especially remarkable, moreover, as it so decidedly lays claim to mere good-will in Man, to his essential Temper, and values this independently of all Culture and Manifestation. It stands in opposition to Science and to Art, and properly to Enjoyment.
‘Its origin is with the common people. It inspires the great majority of the limited in this Earth.
‘It is the Light that begins to shine in the Darkness.
‘It is the root of all Democracy, the highest Fact in the Rights of Man (die hochste Thatsache der Popularitat).
‘Its unpoetic exterior, its resemblance to a modern family-picture, seems only to be lent it.
‘Martyrs are spiritual heroes. Christ was the greatest martyr of our species; through him has martyrdom become infinitely significant and holy.–
‘The Bible begins nobly, with Paradise, the symbol of youth; and concludes with the Eternal Kingdom, the Holy City. Its two main divisions, also, are genuine grand-historical divisions (acht gross his torisch). For in every grand-historical compartment (Glied), the grand history must lie, as it were, symbolically re-created (verjungt, made young again). The beginning of the New Testament is the second higher Fall (the Atonement of the Fall), and the commencement of the new Period. The history of every individual man should be a Bible. Christ is a new Adam. A Bible is the highest problem of Authorship.–
‘As yet there is no Religion. You must first make a Seminary (Bildungs-schule) of genuine Religion. Think ye that there is Religion? Religion has to be made and produced (gemacht und hervorgebracht) by the union of a number of persons.’
Hitherto our readers have seen nothing of Novalis in his character of Poet, properly so called; the Pupils at Sais being fully more of a scientific than poetic nature. As hinted above, we do not account his gifts in this latter province as of the first, or even of a high order; unless, indeed, it be true, as he himself maintains, that ‘the distinction of Poet and Philosopher is apparent only, and to the injury of both.’
In his professedly poetical compositions there is an indubitable prolixity, a degree of languor, not weakness but sluggishness; the meaning is too much diluted; and diluted, we might say, not in a rich, lively, varying music, as we find in Tieck, for example; but rather in a low-voiced, not unmelodious monotony, the deep hum of which is broken only at rare intervals, though sometimes by tones of purest and almost spiritual softness.
We here allude chiefly to his unmetrical pieces, his prose fictions: indeed the metrical are few in number; for the most part, on religious subjects; and in spite of a decided truthfulness both in feeling and word, seem to bespeak no great skill or practice in that form of composition. In his prose style he may be accounted happier; he aims in general at simplicity, and a certain familiar expressiveness; here and there, in his more elaborate passages, especially in his Hymns to the Night, he has reminded us of Herder.
These Hymns to the Night, it will be remembered, were written shortly after the death of his mistress: in that period of deep sorrow, or rather of holy deliverance from sorrow. Novalis himself regarded them as his most finished productions. They are of a strange, veiled, almost enigmatical character; nevertheless, more deeply examined, they appear nowise without true poetic worth; there is a vastness, an immensity of idea; a still solemnity reigns in them, a solitude almost as of extinct worlds.
Here and there too some light-beam visits us in the void deep; and we cast a glance, clear and wondrous, into the secrets of that mysterious soul. A full commentary on the Hymns to the Night would be an exposition of Novalis’s whole theological and moral creed: for it lies recorded there, though symbolically, and in lyric, not in didactic language. We have translated the Third, as the shortest and simplest; imitating its light, half-measured style, above all deciphering its vague deep-laid sense, as accurately as we could.
By the word ‘Night,’ it will be seen, Novalis means much more than the common opposite of Day. ‘Light’ seems, in these poems, to shadow forth our terrestrial life; Night the primeval and celestial life:
‘Once when I was shedding bitter tears, when dissolved in pain my Hope had melted away, and I stood solitary by the grave that in its dark narrow space concealed the Form of my life; solitary as no other had been; chased by unutterable anguish; powerless; one thought and that of misery; –here now as I looked round for help; forward could not go, nor backward, but clung to a transient extinguished Life with unutterable longing; –lo, from the azure distance, down from the heights of my old Blessedness, came a chill breath of Dusk, and suddenly the band of Birth, the fetter of Life was snapped asunder.
Vanishes the Glory of Earth, and with it my Lamenting; rushes together the infinite Sadness into a new unfathomable World: thou Night’s-inspiration, Slumber of Heaven, camest over me; the scene rose gently aloft; over the scene hovered my enfranchised new-born spirit; to a cloud of dust that grave changed itself; through the cloud I beheld the transfigured feature of my Beloved.
In her eyes lay Eternity; I clasped her hand, and my tears became a glittering indissoluble chain. Centuries of Ages moved away into the distance, like thunder-clouds. On her neck I wept, for this new life, enrapturing tears. –It was my first, only Dream; and ever since then do I feel this changeless everlasting faith in the Heaven of Night, and its Sun my Beloved.’
To be continued…
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