. World's and Man's History,' says the Thinker of our time, whereto all other themes are subordinated, remains the Conflict of UNBELIEF and BELIEF. All epochs wherein Belief prevails, under what form it may, are splendid, heartelevating, fruitful for contemporaries and posterity. All epochs, on the contrary, wherein Unbelief, under what form * soever, maintains its sorry victory, should they even for a * moment glitter with a sham splendour, vanish from the eyes of posterity; because no one chooses to burden himself with study of the unfruitful.' COUNT CAGLIOSTRO: IN TWO FLIGHTS,' [1833.] FLIGHT FIRST. 'THE life of every man,' says our friend Herr Sauerteig. 'the life even of the meanest man, it were good to remem'ber, is a Poem; perfect in all manner of Aristotelean requisites; with beginning, middle and end; with perplexities, and solutions; with its Will-strength (Willenkraft) and war'fare against Fate, its elegy and battle-singing, courage 'marred by crime, everywhere the two tragic elements of Pity and Fear; above all, with supernatural machinery enough, — for was not the man born out of NONENTITY; 'did he not die, and miraculously vanishing return thither? The most indubitable Poem! Nay, whoso will, may he not name it a Prophecy, or whatever else is highest in his vo'cabulary; since only in Reality lies the essence and founda'tion of all that was ever fabled, visioned, sung, spoken, or babbled by the human species; and the actual Life of Man 'includes in it all Revelations, true and false, that have been, 'are, or are to be. Man! I say therefore, reverence thy fel'low-man. He too issued from Above; is mystical and supernatural (as thou namest it): this know thou of a 'truth. Seeing also that we ourselves are of so high Au'thorship, is not that, in very deed, "the highest Reverence,” ' and most needful for us: "Reverence for oneself?" 1 FRASER'S MAGAZINE, Nos. 43, 44 (July and August). Thus, to my view, is every Life, more properly is every 'Man that has life to lead, a small strophe, or occasional 6 verse, composed by the Supernal Powers; and published, in such type and shape, with such embellishments, emble'matic head-piece and tail-piece as thou seest, to the thinking 'or unthinking universe. Heroic strophes some few are; 'full of force and a sacred fire, so that to latest ages the 'hearts of those that read therein are made to tingle. 'Jeremiads others seem; mere weeping laments, harmoni'ous or disharmonious Remonstrances against Destiny; 'whereat we too may sometimes profitably weep. Again, 'have we not flesh-and-blood strophes of the idyllic sort, "though in these days rarely, owing to Poor-Laws, Game'Laws, Population-Theories and the like! Farther, of the 'comic laughter-loving sort; yet ever with an unfathomable ' earnestness, as is fit, lying underneath: for, bethink thee, 'what is the mirthfullest grinning face of any Grimaldi, but 'a transitory mask, behind which quite otherwise grins — the 'most indubitable Death's-head! However, I say farther, 'there are strophes of the pastoral sort (as in Ettrick, 'Afghanistan, and elsewhere); of the farcic-tragic, melodra'matic, of all named and a thousand unnamable sorts there 'are poetic strophes, written, as was said, in Heaven, printed ' on Earth, and published (bound in woollen cloth, or clothes) 'for the use of the studious. Finally, a small number seem utter Pasquils, mere ribald libels on Humanity: these too, 'however, are at times worth reading. 'In this wise,' continues our too obscure friend, out of all 'imaginable elements, awakening all imaginable moods of heart and soul, “barbarous enough to excite, tender enough 'to assuage," ever contradictory yet ever coalescing, is that 'mighty world-old Rhapsodia of Existence page after page '(generation after generation), and chapter (or epoch) after 'chapter, poetically put together! This is what some one names "the grand sacred Epos, or Bible of World-History; 'infinite in meaning as the Divine Mind it emblems; where in he is wise that can read here a line and there a ' line." ---- 'Remark too, under another aspect, whether it is not in 'this same Bible of World-History that all men, in all times, 'with or without clear consciousness, have been unwearied to 'read, what we may call read; and again to write, or rather 'to be written! What is all History, and all Poesy, but a 'deciphering somewhat thereof, out of that mystic heaven'written Sanscrit; and rendering it into the speech of men? · Know thyself, value thyself, is a moralist's commandment (which I only half approve of); but Know others, value others, is the hest of Nature herself. Or again, Work while 'it is called To-day: is not that also the irreversible law of 'being for mortal man? And now, what is all working, what is all knowing, but a faint interpreting and a faint showing-forth of that same Mystery of Life, which ever ' remains infinite, -heaven-written mystic Sanscrit? View it as we will, to him that lives, Life is a divine matter; felt 'to be of quite sacred significance. Consider the wretched ́est “straddling biped that wears breeches" of thy acquaint'ance; into whose wool-head, Thought, as thou rashly sup'posest, never entered; who, in froth-element of business, 'pleasure, or what else he names it, walks forever in a vain show; asking not Whence, or Why, or Whither; looking up to the Heaven above as if some upholsterer had made it, and down to the Hell beneath as if he had neither part 'nor lot there yet tell me, does not he too, over and above 'his five finite senses, acknowledge some sixth infinite sense, 'were it only that of Vanity? For, sate him in the other 'five as you may, will this sixth sense leave him rest? Does he not rise early and sit late, and study impromptus, and (in constitutional countries) parliamentary motions, and 'bursts of eloquence, and gird himself in whalebone, and pad himself and perk himself, and in all ways painfully 'take heed to his goings; feeling (if we must admit it) that an altogether infinite endowment has been intrusted him 6 al-o, namely, a Life to lead? Thus does he too, with his ⚫ whole force, in his own way, proclaim that the world-old Rhapsodia of Existence is divine, and an inspired Bible; ⚫ and, himself a wondrous verse therein (be it heroic, be it pasquillic), study with his whole soul, as we said, both to read and to be written! Here also I will observe, that the manner in which men 'read this same Bible is, like all else, proportionate to their stage of culture, to the circumstances of their environment. First, and among the earnest Oriental nations, it was read wholly like a Sacred Book; most clearly by the most earnest, those wondrous Hebrew Readers; whose reading accordingly was itself sacred, has meaning for all tribes of ⚫ mortal men; since ever, to the latest generation of the ⚫ world, a true utterance from the innermost of man's being • will speak significantly to man. But, again, in how differ*ent a style was that other Oriental reading of the Magi; of ⚫ Zerdusht, or whoever it was that first so opened the matter? • Gorgeous semi-sensual Grandeurs and Splendours: on in⚫ finite darkness, brightest-glowing light and fire; of which, ⚫ all defaced by Time, and turned mostly into lies, a quite late reflex, in those Arabian Tales and the like, still leads cap⚫tive every heart. Look, thirdly, at the earnest West, and that Consecration of the Flesh, which stept forth life-lusty, * radiant, smiling-earnest, in immortal grace, from under the chisel and the stylus of old Greece. Here too was the Infinite intelligibly proclaimed as infinite: and the antique man ⚫ walked between a Tartarus and an Elysium, his brilliant Paphos-islet of Existence embraced by boundless oceans * of sadness and fateful gloom. Of which three antique ⚫ manners of reading, our modern manner, you will remark, ⚫ has been little more than imitation: for always, indeed, the West has been rifer of doers than of speakers. The Hebrew manner has had its echo in our Pulpits and choral aisles; the Ethnic Greek and Arabian in numberless mountains of Fiction, rhymed, rhymeless, published by subscrip |