I should not have allowed the hairdresser(2) to sing and carry on so long, had I been able to use my hero, this entire Sunday, for anything more than a figurant; but the whole day he did nothing of any account except that, out of charity perhaps, he obliged our old friend Appel -- by himself unpacking her boxes and chests of drawers -- to prepare, printed with typographical splendor, the regular Sabbath edition of her body, which preferred dressing hams to dressing itself, as early as three o'clock in the afternoon; ordinarily she did not deliver this till after supper. The Jews believe that on the Sabbath they get a new Sabbath soul; into girls there enters at least one; into Appel there entered at least two.
But why should I today expect more action from my hero -- from him, who today -- absorbed in his dream-night and in the coming evening -- moved by each friendly eye and by the urns of the spring which he had dreamed away -- gently dissolved by the peaceful tepid summer which lay smiling and dying on the incense-burning altars of the mountains, on the meadows draped in muslin, and beneath the receding funeral procession of the birds, now hushed, and which, as the first cloud rose against the foliage, departed -- from Victor, I repeat, who today, smiled upon sadly by one tender recollection after another, felt that till now he had been far too merry. He could only look upon the good souls about him with loving, shimmering eyes, turn these away again still more shimmering and say nothing and go out. Over his heart and over his every note stood the word tremolando. No one is more deeply sad than he who smiles too much; for if once this smiling stops, then anything has power over the compliant soul, and a foolish lullaby, a flute concerto -- whose d- and f-sharp keys and embouchures are but two lips with which a shepherd boy is piping -- sets free the well-remembered tears as a slight sound the threatening avalanche. It seemed to him as though the morning's dream did not at all allow him to address Clothilde; she seemed to him too sacred, still led on by winged children and seated by them on thrones of ice. Because today he simply had no tongue or ears for Le Baut's conversations in the realm of the morally dead, he would listen unobserved in the great leafy garden to Stamitz's concerto(3) and, at the most, allow himself to be presented by chance. His second reason was his heart, created as a sounding board for music; by preference this absorbed the fleeting sounds undisturbed, hiding their effects from ordinary men, who in truth can no more do without the works of Goethe, Raphael, and Sacchini (and for no less important reasons) than without those of Löschenkohl.(4) It is true that emotion lifts us above the shame of showing emotion; but in his emotional moments he shunned and hated all attention to the attentions of others, for the devil smuggles vanity into the best of feelings, one often knows not how. In the night, in the shadow, tears fall more easily and evaporate more slowly.
The parson's wife encouraged him in everything; for she had secretly -- sent to town, invited her son,(5) and trumped up a surprise in the garden.
At length the parson's family elevated itself to the leafy concert hall, little knowing how much they were looked down on by the family Le Baut, who accepted only noble metals and noble birth as tickets of admission and who rated the parson's family highly as friends of milord(6) and Matthieu,(7) but would have rated them still more highly as their lap dogs.
Victor remained behind a moment in the garden of the parsonage, because it was still too light, also because he felt sorry for poor Apollonia; the latter, in gala attire, lonely and unobserved, was gazing out into space from the window of the little garden house and rocking his godchild(8) straight up and down, holding him now above her head, now below her waist. Like a small-town worthy Victor kept on his hat in the garden house, hoping to stimulate her courage by politeness. The child in arms is, as it were, the prompter and bellows treader of the nursemaid; the young Sebastian lent Appel sufficient reinforcement against the old one, and at length she ventured to speak and to observe that the godchild was a dear, good, beautiful "Bastel." "But," she added, "the gnädige Frölen (Clothilde) mustn't hear me say so; she wants us to call him Victor when she hears Father say `Bastel.' Then she made much of how Clothilde loved his godchild, of how she took the little rascal from her and smiled at him and kissed him; and everything she praised the panegyrist repeated with the little one. Nay, even the grown-up Sebastian imitated it, but on the tiny lips he sought only another's kisses; and perhaps in Appel's case his own were among the things for which she sought. A happier man took leave of a happier woman; for Cupid now sent one bright hope after another to his heart as messengers and every one bore the same message: "We do not belie thee, truly; have faith in us!"
At last Stamitz began to tune, a thing the grand-chamberlain's tenacious purse would certainly not have bothered about, since there were today no strangers present, if Clothilde had not asked to have this garden concert as the sole celebration of her birth night. Stamitz and his orchestra filled a lighted arbor -- the noble auditorium sat in the nearest, most brightly lighted niche and wished it were already over -- the common one sat further off and the Chaplain, afraid of the catarrhal dewy floor, twined one leg around the other over the thigh -- Clothilde and her Agathe rested in the darkest leafy box. Victor did not steal in until the overture announced to him the seat and the sitting of the company; in the furthest arbor, at the true aphelion, this comet found a place. The overture consisted of that musical scratching and scrawling -- of that harmonious phraseology -- of that firework-like crackling of passages sounding one against another -- that I so highly recommend, if it is only in the overture. There it belongs; it is the fine rain that softens the heart for the bigger drops of the simpler sounds. Every emotion requires its exordium and music clears the way for music -- or for tears.
Stamitz climbed gradually -- following a dramatic plan not drawn up by every capellmeister -- from the ears into the heart, as though from Allegros into Adagios; this great composer sweeps in narrower and narrower circles about the breast that holds a heart until he finally reaches it and in ecstasy embraces it.
Without seeing his beloved, Horion trembled alone in the dark arbor into which a single dried-up branch let in the light of the moon and of its driving clouds. Nothing ever moved him more, while listening to music, than to watch the clouds course by. When, with his eyes and with the music, he followed these nebulous streams in their eternal flight about our shadow orb, when he relinquished to them all his joys and his desires; then, as in all his joys and sorrows, he thought of other clouds, of another flight, of other shadows than those above him, then his whole soul longed and yearned; but the music stilled the longing as the bullet in the mouth stills thirst, and harmony loosed the flooding tears from his full soul.
Faithful Victor! in man there is a great desire, never fulfilled; it has no name, it seeks no object, it is nothing that you call it nor any joy; but it returns, when on a summer's night you look toward the north or toward the distant mountains, or when there is moonlight on the earth, or when the heavens are bright with stars, or when you are very happy. This great monstrous desire exalts our spirit, but with sorrows: Alas, prostrate here below, we are hurled into the air like epileptics. But this desire, to which nothing can give a name, our songs and harmonies name it to the human spirit -- the longing spirit then weeps the more vehemently and can control itself no longer and calls amid the music in sobbing rapture: Truly, all that you name, I lack.
The enigmatic mortal likewise has a nameless, monstrous fear that has no object, that is awakened when one hears ghostly apparitions, and that is sometimes felt when one but speaks of it . . . .
With silent tears whose flowing no one saw, Horion abandoned his battered heart to the lofty Adagios, which spread themselves with warm eider-down wings over all his wounds. All that he loved came now into his shadow-arbor, his oldest and his youngest friend -- he hears the raging of life's thunderstorms, but the hands of friendship reach out to one another and clasp and in the second life they still hold one another incorrupt.
Each note seemed a celestial echo of his dream, answering to beings whom one did not see and did not hear . . . .
He could not possibly stay longer in this dark enclosure with his burning fantasies and at this too great distance from the pianissimo. He approached the music -- almost too boldly and too closely -- through a leafy corridor, leaning far forward through the foliage in order at last to see Clothilde in the distant green shimmer.
Ah, he did see her! But too lovely, too celestial! He saw, not the pensive eye, the cold mouth, the tranquil form that forbade so much and desired so little; for the first time he saw her mouth enveloped by a sweet harmonious pain in an indescribably touching smile -- for the first time he saw her eyes weighed down under a great tear, like forget-me-nots bent under a tear of rain. Oh, this kind creature indeed concealed her finest feelings most of all! But the first tear in a beloved eye is too much for an overly tender heart . . . . Victor knelt down, overpowered by reverence and bliss, before the noble soul and lost himself in the shadowy weeping figure and in the weeping sounds. And then, when he saw her features grow pale, for the green foliage cast upon her lips and cheeks a deathlike reflection from the lanterns -- and when his dream appeared again and in it the Clothilde who had sunk beneath the flowery mound -- and when his soul dissolved in dreams, in sorrows, in joys, and in desires for the creature who was consecrating her birthday feast with pious tears, then was it still necessary to his dissolution that the violin ceased sounding and that the second harmonica, the viole d'amour, sent forth its sphere harmonics to his naked, inflamed, and throbbing heart? Oh, the aching of this bliss appeased him, and he thanked the creator of this melodic Eden for having relieved his bosom, his sighs, and his tears with the harmonica's highest notes, which with an unknown force split into tears the heart of man, as high notes burst a glass; amid such sounds, after such sounds, there was no further place for words; the full soul was enshrouded by leaves and night and tears -- the swelling speechless heart absorbed the tones unto itself and took the outer tones for inner ones -- and at the end the tones played only softly, like zephyrs, about his listless rapture, and only within his expiring inner self did there still falter the overly blissful wish: "Alas, Clothilde, if only I might today give up to you this mute and glowing heart -- alas, if only I might, on this memorable heavenly evening, sink dying at your feet with this trembling soul and speak the words, `I love thee!'"
And when he thought of her festival, and of her letter to Maienthal,(9) which had paid him the high compliment of calling him Emanuel's pupil, and of little signs of her respect for him, and of the beautiful companionship of his heart and hers -- then amid the music there came to him vividly and for the first time the bright hope of winning this ennobled heart, and with this hope the harmonica tones flowed like radiating echoes far over the whole future of his life . . . .
I jumped to my feet at the name Franz Koch.(11) If one of my readers is a guest at Carlsbad for the waters, or His Majesty King William II of Prussia, or a member of his court, or the Elector of Saxony, or the Duke of Brunswick, or some other princely personage, he will have heard the excellent Koch, a modest soldier on half pay who travels about everywhere, playing his instrument. This last, which he calls "double mouth- harmonica," consists in an improved pair of simultaneously played Jew's harps, which he exchanges after every piece of music. His way of playing the Jew's harp compares with the old way as do the bells of musical glasses with a servant's bell. It is my duty to persuade those of my readers whose imaginations have wren's wings, or who are lithopaedic (stillborn), at least from the heart out, or who have eardrums only to drum on, to persuade such readers, with what few oratorical powers I have, to throw the said Franz out of doors if he should come and offer to hum before them. For there is nothing to him, and the most miserable viola or straw-fiddle screams, in my opinion, more shrilly; indeed, his music is so delicate that in Carlsbad he never strikes up before more than twelve customers at one time, it being impossible to sit close enough to him, and when he plays his best pieces he actually has the light carried out so that neither eye nor ear may disturb the fantasy. But should one reader be otherwise disposed -- a poet, perhaps -- or a lover -- or very delicate -- or like Victor -- or like myself, then let him hearken unhesitatingly, his soul at peace and ready to melt, to Franz Koch -- or -- since at this precise moment he is not to be had -- to me.
My witty English friend(12) had sent this harmonist to Victor with a card: "The bearer is the bearer of an echo which he keeps in his pocket." Victor, on this account, preferred to take him over to Clothilde, the friend of all musical beauty, in order that her departure might not deprive her of this hour of melody. He felt as though he were going down a long aisle in a church when he entered Clothilde's Santa Casa; her simple room, like Our Lady's, was enclosed within a temple. She had already finished her black finery. A black costume is a lovely darkening of the sun, in the midst of which one cannot take one's eyes off it. Victor, who with his Sinese awe of this color brought to this magic a defenseless soul, a kindled eye, grew pale and confused at Clothilde's sympathetic features, over which the trace of a recently fallen rain of sorrow hovered like a rainbow against a bright blue sky. Hers was not the serenity of diversion -- which every girl derives from dressing herself -- it was the serenity of a pious soul filled with love and patience. He was embarrassed at having to walk among thistles of two sorts-the painted ones on the parquet, on which he was continually stepping, and the satiric ones of the nice observers about him, against which he was continually pricking himself. Her stepmother(13) was still busied with the plastering and painting of her body corruptible, and the evangelist(14) was in her dressing room as toilet acolyte and collaborator. Hence Clothilde had still time to hear the mouth-harmonist; and the chamberlain offered himself to his daughter and to our hero -- for he was a father who knew what to do where his daughter was concerned -- as a part of the audience, although he could make little of music, dinner music and dance music excepted.
Not until now did Victor gather, from Clothilde's joy over the musician he had brought with him, that her harmonious heart vibrated gladly to music, altogether, he was often wrong about her because she -- like you, dearest ____________, expressed with silence both her highest praise and highest blame. She asked her father, who had heard the mouth-harmonica before in Carlsbad, to give her and Victor an idea of it -- he gave one: "It expresses in masterly fashion both the fortissimo and the piano-dolce and, like the single harmonica, it lends itself most readily to the Adagio." To this she replied -- on Victor's arm, which was guiding her to a quiet room, darkened for the music -- "Music is perhaps too good for drinking songs and for the expression of merriment. Just as suffering ennobles a man, unfolding him by the little pricks it gives him as regularly as one splits open with a knife the bud of a carnation that it may bloom with bursting, so music, as a sort of artificial suffering, takes the place of the genuine variety." "Is genuine suffering so unusual?" Victor asked, in the darkened room, lighted only by a single wax candle. He sat down next to Clothilde, and her father seated himself opposite them.
Blissful hour that thou once broughtest to my soul with the echoing music of thy harmonica -- speed by once more, and may the reverberations of that echo again sound about thee!
Scarcely had the modest quiet virtuoso laid the implement of enchantment to his lips than Victor felt that (while the light still shone) he might not, as he usually did, paint scenes of his own to each Adagio and adapt to each piece particular inspirations from his poems. For an infallible means of giving music the omnipotence that belongs to it is to make of it an accompaniment to one's own inner melody, turning instrumental music into vocal, as it were, inarticulate sounds into articulate ones, not permitting the lovely succession of tones, to which no definite object lends alphabet or language, to glide from our hearts, leaving them bathed but not made tender. Hence, when the loveliest sounds that ever flowed from human lips as consonants (or consonances) of the soul began to flutter from the trembling mouth-harmonica; when he felt that these tiny rings of steel, as though the frame and fingerboard of his heart, would make their convulsions his; he forced his feverish heart, whose every wound bled afresh today, apart from the music, to contract itself against it and to paint itself no pictures, merely so that he might not burst into tears before the light was taken away.
Higher and higher rose the dragnet of uplifting tones, carrying his captive heart aloft. One melancholy reminiscence after another, in this spectral hour of the past, called out to him: "Do not suppress me, give me my tear." All his pent-up tears collected about his heart, and his whole inner self, lifted off the bottom, swam gently in them. Yet he composed himself: "Canst thou not yet deny thyself (he asked), not even a moistened eye? No, with a dry eye receive this muffled echo of thy whole breast, receive this Arcadian resonance and all these tearful sounds into your distraught soul." In the midst of this veiled distillation, which he often took for fortitude, it always seemed to him as though there were addressing him, from distant parts, a breaking voice whose words had the rhythm of verse; once again the breaking voice addressed him: "Are not these tones composed of faded hopes? Do not these sounds run one into another, Horion, like the days of man? O look not on thy heart! There, as it turns to dust, the shimmering days of yore have etched themselves as in a mist!" Nevertheless he replied, still quietly: "Life is after all too short for the two tears -- for the tear of woe and for the other." . . . But now -- as the white dove that Emanuel saw falling in the cemetery(15) sped through the images of his recollection -- as he thought: "In my dream of Clothilde this dove was already fluttering and clinging to the iceberg; alas, it is the image of the fading angel beside me!" -- as the music fluttered more and more quietly and at length stole back and forth among the whispering foliage of a funeral wreath -- and as the breaking voice returned and said: "Dost not recall the familiar sounds? Lo, before her birthday feast they were already in thy dreams and there they lowered to the heart into the grave the sick soul beside thee, and she left thee but an eye filled with tears, a soul filled with grief!" -- "No, more than that she did not leave me," his weary heart repeated haltingly, and all the tears he had held back came rushing to his eyes in streams . . . .
But, since the light had just been carried from the room, the first stream fell unnoticed into the lap of night.
The harmonica began the melody of the dead -- "Wie sie so sanft ruhn."(16) Alas, in sounds like these the spent waves of the sea of eternity beat against the hearts of the somber watchers standing on the shore and yearning to put forth! Now, Horion, shalt thou be wafted by a sounding breeze out of the rainy mist of life into the clear hereafter. What sounds are these that fill the faroff fields of Eden? Do they not hark back, dissipated as breath, to distant flowers and flow, swollen by the echo, about the swanlike breast that, blissfully expiring, swims on pinions and draw it from melodic tide to tide and sink with it into the distant flowers that a mist of perfumes fills, and, in the dark perfume, does not the soul catch fire like a sunset before it blissfully departs?
Ah, Horion, does the earth still rest beneath us that bears its funeral mounds around the breadth of life? Is it in earthly air that these sounds vibrate? O Music, thou who bringest past and future so near our wounds with their flying flames, art thou the evening breeze from this life or the morning air of the life to come? In truth, thine accents are echoes, gathered by angels from the joyous sounds of a second world to bring to our mute hearts, to our deserted night, the faded spring song of the soaring heavens! And thou, re-echoing sound of the harmonica, thou comest to us truly from a shout that, ringing from heaven to heaven, dies out at last in that remotest, stillest heaven of them all, consisting only of a deep, broad, eternally silent rapture . . . .
"Eternally silent rapture," repeated Horion's melted soul, whose delight I have in the foregoing made my own, "yes, there the country lies, there where I lift up mine eyes to the all- benevolent and hold out my arms to her, to this weary soul, to this great heart -- then, Clothilde, will I fall on my heart, then will I cling to thee forever, and the flood of that eternally silent rapture shall envelop us. Breathe once again toward life, ye earthly tones, between my breast and hers, then let there float toward me over your clear waves a tiny night, an undulating silhouette, and I will look on it and say: `This was my life' -- then will I say more softly, weeping more intensely: `Indeed, man is unhappy, but only on the earth.'"
Oh, if there be a mortal over whom, at these last words, memory draws great rain clouds, then I say to him: Beloved brother, beloved sister, I am today as touched as thou, I respect the grief thou hidest -- ah, thou forgivest me and I thee . . . .
The song stopped and died away. How silent now the darkness! All sighing was clothed in halting breath. Only the nebulous stars of feeling sparkled brightly through the gloom. No one could see whose eyes had wept. Victor gazed into the still black air before him, which a few moments earlier had been filled with hanging gardens of sound, ebbing air castles of the human ear, miniature heavens, and which remained there as a naked, blackened scaffolding for fireworks.
But the harmonica soon filled this gloom again with a mirage of other worlds. Ah, why did it have to hit precisely on "Vergissmeinnicht," the melody that gnawed at Victor's heart,(17) repeating the lines to him as though he were himself repeating them to Clothilde: "Forget me not, now that relentless fate calls thee from me -- Forget me not, if loose and cooling earth engulf this heart that gently beat for thee -- Think it is I, if echo answers in thy soul: `Forget me not.'" . . . Oh, if after this these sounds entwine themselves in waving flowers, flow back from one past time into another, run more and more softly through the departed years that lie behind mankind -- finally murmur beneath the morning dawn of life -- roll on unheard below the cradle of mankind -- grow cold in our chill twilight and dry up in the midnight where no one of us has been; then, deeply moved, man ceases to conceal his sighs and his unending sorrows.
The silent angel beside Victor could no longer veil them, and Victor heard Clothilde's first sigh.
Then he took her by the hand, as though to support her, hovering, above an open grave.
She let him keep it, and her pulse beat tremulously in unison with his.
At length the last note of the song projected its melodious circles in the ether and flowed expanding over all past time -- then a distant echo wrapped it in a fluttering breeze and wafted it through deeper echoes to that last echo lying round about the heavens -- then the sound expired and sped as a soul into Clothilde's sigh.
At this, her first tear fell, like a burning heart, on Victor's hand.
NOTES 1. Text: Sämtliche Werke, 1. Abteilung, III (Weimar, 1929), 289-294. The scene is the garden of Chamberlain Le Baut in St. Lune, an imaginary watering-place not far from Flachsenfingen, the capital of a likewise imaginary principality; the supposed date is Sunday, October 21, 1792. Chamberlain Le Baut has arranged a garden concert in honor of the birthday of his daughter Clothilde. Besides Clothilde, the assembled company includes Pastor Peter Eyman and his wife, their daughters Agathe and Apollonia (Appel), chamberlain Le Baut and his second wife, and Victor (also called by his middle name, Sebastian), the hero of the novel, supposedly the heir of Lord Horion, an English peer, but actually the son of Pastor Fyman. Jean Paul admits that Victor is to some extent a self-portrait. Throughout the evening Victor is under the spell of a dream which had come to him the night before: in this he stands beneath the evening star upon a plain covered with forget-me-nots and encircled by pyramids of ice, tinted by the setting sun; Clothilde appears to him, deathlike and serene, led by winged children; flower-covered funeral mounds are seen to rise and fall; into these mounds Clothilde sinks to the heart; forget-me-nots cover her; butterflies, doves, and swans with outspread wings cling to the purple peaks; at the summit of the highest peak he sees Clothilde again, transfigured. her arms outstretched. 2. Meuseler, the local wig-maker, a member of the village choir. 3. In August 1792, Carl Stamitz played in concert at Hof, where Jean Paul lived during the writing of the Hesperus (see Hans Bach's introduction to Vol. 3 of the Sämtliche Werke, p. xxxiv). 4. Johann Löschenkohl, Viennese engraver and art dealer. "His things were thrown on the market with the utmost haste, yet despite their faulty drawing and coloring -- time did not permit better workmanship -- people actually fought over them. Of his engraving "Maria Theresia on Her Death Bed," 7,000 copies at two gulden each were sold within a few days. With his restless industrial activity he produced without tiring and was always offering something new -- silhouettes, portraits in miniature, calendars; he opened a factory for the manufacture of boxes, of fans, of buttons, and was responsible for setting many fashions" [Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich]. 5. Fiamin, actually the illegitimate son of the local prince and of Le Baut's first wife, Clothilde's mother. 6. Lord Horion. 7. Matthieu von Schleunes, son of the prince's Minister. 8. Sebastian, the Eymans' youngest child. 9. In this letter to her tutor, Clothilde had written: "Today in the garden I thought of your Maienthal with a longing that was almost too sad; Herr Sebastian often reminds me of it, for he appears to have had a teacher much like my own." Victor now knows that Clothilde's tutor Emanuel and his own tutor Dahore are one and the same. 10. Text: ibid., IV (Weimar, 1929), 52-58. The scene is the house of Chamberlain Le Baut; the supposed date is Tuesday, April 2, 1793. 11. "Franz (Paul) Koch, celebrated German virtuoso on the Jew's harp, was born in 1761 at Mittersill near Salzburg and as a boy learned the book-binding trade. In 1782 recruiting officers induced the itinerant worker to come to Magdeburg, where he was at once pressed into service as a grenadier. In this capacity an officer chanced to hear him play his Jew's harp (mouth harmonica) and spoke to others of his amazement at Koch's skill, so that the soldier's reputation soon spread even as far as Berlin and Potsdam. King Friedrich Wilhelm II sent for Koch, listened to him play, and ordered him discharged from his involuntary service in the army. Encouraged from every quarter, Koch now went on tour and attracted uncommon attention, so that even Jean Paul (in his Hesperus) took note of him. The year of his death is not known. A more detailed account of his life appears in Schummel's almanac for 1793 (p. 322)" [Mendel, Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon]. Like Stamitz, Koch played in concert at Hof in August 1792. 12. "Cato the Elder," an illegitimate son of the local prince. 13. Le Baut's second wife. 14. Matthieu von Schleunes. 15. A reference to an earlier letter in which Emanuel gives an account of a conversation between himself and the blind Julius, Lord Horion's son, and foretells the circumstances of his own death. "`Now a white dove flies over the deep blue like a great dazzling snowflake . . . Now it circles about the sparkling golden tip of the lightening-rod, as though about a glimmering star hung in the sunlit sky -- it weaves and weaves and sinks and disappears among the tall flowers of the cemetery . . . Julius, didst thou feel nothing as I spoke? Alas, the white dove was perhaps thy angel [Clothilde]; perhaps this is why thy heart dissolved today at its approach" (ibid., III, 400). 16. "The cemetery" (Der Gottesacker), words by A. C. Stockmann, music by Pastor F. B. Beneken (1787); cf. Max Friedländer, Das deutsche Lied im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1902), I, 318; II, 130; Musikbeispiel 181. 17. Words by Franz von Knebel, music by Lorenz Schneider (1792); cf. Friedländer, op. cit., II, 448. Schneider's music was at first generally attributed to Mozart and repeatedly published under his name (cf., Köchel, Anhang 246). In the continuation of our first excerpt (omitted above), Victor and Clothilde had heard the melody played by Stamitz.