Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume I Part 29

But one should never set _moral_ and _physical_ revolutions and developments too near to each other. All Nature has no other motions than _former_ ones; the circle is her path, she has no other years than Platonic,--but man alone is _changeable_, and the straight line or the zigzag describes his course. A sun has its eclipses as well as the moon, has its bloom and decay like a flower, but also its _palingenesia_ and renovation. But there lies in the human race the necessity of an everlasting mutation; yet here there are only _ascending_ and _descending_ signs, no culmination; they do not necessarily draw one another after them, as in physics, and have no extreme limit. No people, no period returns; in physics, all must come back again. It is only accidental, not necessary, that nations, at a certain age and stage of progress, and on a certain rotten round of the ladder, fall again,--one only confounds the _last_ step, from which nations fall, with the _highest_; the Romans, with whom not single rounds, but the whole ladder broke, were not necessitated to sink by a culture which does not equal even our own.[291] Nations have no age, or old age with them often precedes youth. Even with individuals the crab's-walk of the mind in old age is only accidental; still less has virtue in them a summer-solstice. Humanity has then the capacity of an endless improvement; but has it the hope also?--

The disturbance of the _equipoise_ of his own faculties makes the individual man miserable; the _inequality_ of citizens, the _inequality_ of nations, makes the earth miserable; just as lightnings arise from the neighborhood of the ebb and flow of the ether, and all storms from unequal distributions of air. But fortunately it lies in the nature of mountains to fill the valleys.

Not inequality of goods,--for the majority of voices and fists on the part of the poor balances in the scale the power of the rich,--but inequality of culture, does most to create and distribute the political fly-presses and forcing-pumps. The _Lex agraria_ in the fields of science pa.s.ses over at last into the physical fields. Since the tree of knowledge has thrust out its branches from the school windows of philosophy and the church windows of the priesthood into the common garden, all nations have become stronger.--Unequal cultivation chains the West Indies to the feet of Europe, Helots to Spartans, and the iron hollow-head[292] with the trigger on the negro's tongue presupposes a hollow-head of another kind.

With such a frightful disparity among nations in power, wealth, culture, only a universal rush of storms from all points of the compa.s.s can terminate in a lasting calm. A perpetual balance of Europe presuppose a balance of the four remaining parts of the world, which one may, deducting small librations, promise our globe. In future men will quite as little discover a salvage as an island. One people must draw another out of pits blundering years. A more equal culture will conclude commercial treaties with more equal advantages. The longest rainy months of humanity--which always fell upon the time of national transplantations, just as one always sets out flowers on cloudy days--have spent themselves.

One spectre still remains from the midnight, which reaches far into the hours of light,--War. But the claws and bill of the armorial eagle grow on, till, like the boar's tusks, they crook up and make themselves useless. As it was calculated in regard to Vesuvius, that it contained material for only forty-three eruptions more,--so might one also reckon the number of future wars. This long tempest, which already for six thousand years has been standing over our planet, will continue to storm till clouds and earth have charged each other full with an _equal_ measure of electric matter.

_All_ nations become illuminated only in joint fermentation; and the precipitate is blood and dead men's bones. Were the earth narrowed to one half of its size, then would the time of its moral--and physical--development be shortened one half.

With wars the strongest drag-chains of the sciences are cut off. Once war-machines were the sowing-machines of new knowledges, while they crushed old harvests; now it is the press which scatters the pollen more widely and gently. Instead of an Alexander, Greece would need now to send to Asia nothing but a--compositor; the conqueror grafts, the author sows.

It is a characteristic of enlightenment that, although it still leaves to individuals the possibility of the illusion and weakening of vice, nevertheless it releases nations from company-vices and national deceptions,--e. g. from wrecking, piracy. The best and worst deeds we do in company; war is an example. The slave-trade must in our days, unless indeed the trade in subjects begins, come to an end.[293]

The highest and steepest thrones stand, like the highest mountains, in the warmest lands. The political mountains, like the physical, daily grow lower (especially when they spout fire), and must at last be with the valleys in a common plain.

From all this follows:--

There comes one day a golden age, which every wise and virtuous man even now enjoys, and when men will find it easier to live well because they will find it easier to live indeed,--when men will have, not more pleasure (for this honey they draw from every flower and leaf-louse), but more virtue,--when the people Will take part in thinking, and the thinker--in working,[294] in order that he may save himself the need of Helots,--when military and judicial murder shall be condemned, and only occasionally cannon-b.a.l.l.s shall be turned up with the plough. When that time comes, then will a preponderance of good no more stop the machine by frictions. When it comes, then will the necessity no longer lie in human nature of degenerating again and again breeding tempests (for heretofore the n.o.ble element has merely kept up a flying fight with the overpowering evil), just as, according to Forster, even on the hot island of St. Helena[295] there are no storms.

When this festal day comes, then will our children's children be--no more. We stand now in the evening and see at the close of our dark day the sun go down with a red-hot glory, and promise us behind the last cloud the still, serene sabbath-day of humanity; but our posterity have yet to travel through a night full of wind, and through a cloud full of poison, till at last over a happier earth an eternal morning-wind full of blossom-spirits, moving on before the sun, expelling all clouds, shall breathe on men without a sigh. Astronomy promises the earth an eternal vernal equinox;[296] and history promises it a higher one; perhaps the two eternal springs may coincide.--

Since man disappears among men, we downcast ones must erect ourselves before humanity. When I think of the Greeks, I see that our hopes move faster than fate.--As one travels by night with lights over the icy Alps, in order not to be terrified at the abysses and at the long road, so does fate spread night around us, and hands us only torches for the way immediately before us, that we may not worry ourselves about the chasms of the future, and the distance of the goal.--There were centuries when humanity was led with bandaged eyes--from one prison to another;--there were other centuries when spectres rattled and overturned all night long, and in the morning nothing was disturbed; there can be no other centuries except those in which individuals die, but nations rise, and in which nations decay, but mankind rises: when mankind itself sinks and falls to ruins, and ends with the scattering of the globe in a dust-cloud ... what shall console us?--

A veiled eye behind the bounds of time, an infinite heart beyond the world. There is a higher order of things than we can demonstrate,--there is a Providence in the world's history and in every one's life which reason has the boldness to deny, and which the heart has the boldness to believe;--there must be a Providence, which, according to other rules than we have hitherto a.s.sumed, links this confused earth as daughter-land to a higher city of G.o.d,--there must be a G.o.d, a Virtue, and an Eternity.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: His collected works, Vol. III. p. 68.]

[Footnote 2: In Faust,--Scene of the Easter Holidays.--Tr.]

[Footnote 3: A Jew once separated from his wife when she appeared with bare arms; but it is difficult to ascribe the present frequent divorces in Paris to that cause.]

[Footnote 4: It is amusing to hear Jean Paul call it so, but the German diminutive, "Werk_lein_," also expresses attachment to the thing in question. Thus children say _Vater-chen_, "Little Papa; Daddy."--Tr.]

[Footnote 5: Descriptive of Venus, or written under her influence.--Tr.]

[Footnote 6: The stick on which a painter rests his arm.--Tr.]

[Footnote 7: Similarity of the parts to the whole.--Tr.]

[Footnote 8: _Fliegende Blatter_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 9: Of course, "Forgive us our debts."--Tr.]

[Footnote 10: A city of the Tauric Chersonesus, the modern Crimea.--Tr.]

[Footnote 11: A Jesuit astronomer, A. D. 1598-1671, who named the moon's spots Tycho, Plato, Hercules, St. Catharine, &c.--Tr.]

[Footnote 12: He alludes to the chimney-sweeper of his perukes.]

[Footnote 13: The name the Germans give to Death. _Hein_ would seem to mean Hal.--Tr.]

[Footnote 14: Probably peas, which the children, as now, blew through long tubes with great force.--Tr.]

[Footnote 15: In Upper Alsace, where every three years only the best youth receives the crown and medal, and the jurisdiction of the pastures.]

[Footnote 16: A sort of fire-ball, which, as it goes, emits smoke to blind the enemy.--Tr.]

[Footnote 17: Small b.a.l.l.s invented by him to put into a horse's ear, and act as a spur.--Tr.]

[Footnote 18: An island of the Malay Archipelago, wooded, volcanic, and spicy.--Tr.]

[Footnote 19: It is notorious how little I know of mining operations; I therefore thought I had reason to apply to my superiors for a spur which might stimulate me to do something in such a weighty science,--and such a spur is certainly the office of mining-superintendent.]

[Footnote 20: Except the two emperors Silluck and Athnac, and the four kings Sgolta, Sakeph-Katon, etc., I never had intercourse with any; and that only as upper-cla.s.s scholar, because we jurists, with the Devil's help, had to learn Hebrew, wherein just the above-mentioned six potentates appear as the names of the accents on words. Perhaps, however, my correspondent means the great, acute, crowned accents of nations. [_Sakeph-Katon_ is the only one the translator has not been able to verify of these interesting names. _Kauton_ is given among the Hebrew accents, but not Sakeph.--Tr.]]

[Footnote 21: Justus Moser, author of the "Patriotic Fantasies," one of Germany's dearest memories, in many respects a Franklin.--Tr.]

[Footnote 22: Lane of the mine.--Tr.]

[Footnote 23: a.s.s's Post.--Tr.]

[Footnote 24: Instrument for taking the distance of a star north or south from the equator.--Tr.]

[Footnote 25: Instrument for reckoning the deviation of the hour-circle from the meridian.--Tr.]

[Footnote 26: Jean Paul seems to indulge here in an hexameter himself: "Welches sie auch mehr bedarf, als der harmonische Gessner."--Tr.]

[Footnote 27: _Bewahren_ and _bewahren_ are the two German words.--Tr.]

[Footnote 28: E. g. their honor suffers, if their carriage does not pa.s.s ahead of another carriage of rank.]

[Footnote 29: Such letters as David sent by Uriah to Joab. (See 2 Samuel xi. 14, 15.)--Tr.]

[Footnote 30: _Kleeblatt_ (_trefoil_) in the German.--Tr.]

[Footnote 31: After an operation for the cataract, the sensitive retina represents everything magnified.]

[Footnote 32: A piece of charred bone or horn used by natives of the East to absorb the blood from wounds made by the bite of a snake. See Tennent's Natural History of Ceylon, p. 312.--Tr.]

[Footnote 33: The _Psalter_ in the ox's stomach is the _Blattermagen_ (lit. _leaf-stomach_), the third stomach of ruminant animals, the tripe. So we speak of the _leaves_ of fat.--Tr.]

[Footnote 34: "My spirit flew in feathers then, That is so heavy now."--Hood.]