Emanuel

“ Emanuel opened his eyes at that, sent them through the foliage over to the churchyard that overlooked the village and said, with a convulsion of his being, "Horion, wake up; Giulia has left eternity and is standing on her grave."—Victor cast a feverish glance up thither; and all the warm thoughts and nerves of life grew hard and stiff in a cutting ice-cold shudder, as he saw up there a white, veiled form resting on the grave. Emanuel snatched himself up, and his pupil, and said: "We will go up to the theatre of the spirits; perhaps the dead one will lay hold on my soul and take me with her." ”

“ Emanuel peered into Eternity, it looked like a long night.
He looked round him to see whether he cast a shadow,—a shadow casts no shadow.
Ah! a mute lays man in the cradle, a mute stretches him out in the grave.—When he has a joy, it looks as if a sleeper smiled,—when he weeps and wails, it looks like weeping in one's sleep.—We all look up to heaven and pray for solace; but overhead in the endless blue there is no voice for our heart,—nothing appears, nothing consoles us, nothing answers us.—
And so we die.... ”

“ The conclusion depends on you alone, Emanuel; it is in your power to render it, if not happy, at all events becoming. I cannot have recourse to my father. Alas! I know not even if he could recognise his daughter. I have no hope in my mother; her glance freezes me, her words are death to me. You alone, Emanuel, were left to me, to whom I could say, brother: you are now the head of the family; it is to you alone that we are answerable for our honor. ”

“ Emanuel's ecstasy soared above life: "The dark streak in the next world is only a meadow of flowers, [177] —suns shine to light us onward,—flying heavens come to meet us with spring-breezes. With only empty graves the earth flies round the sun; for her dead stand remote on brighter suns."—
"Emanuel?" said Victor, in a questioning tone, weeping aloud, and with a voice of the most fervent yearning,—and the flute-notes sank sorrowfully into the broad night,—"Emanuel?"
Emanuel, returning to himself, looked on him, and said, calmly: "Yes, my beloved!—I can no more accustom myself to the earth ”

“ O All-gracious One! we die more happily; only the poor Emanuel wrestled in the silent darkness with fierce thoughts which for so long a time he had not seen, and which clutched at his paling countenance. ”

“ Emanuel seems to me to be a magnificent character, with one extraordinary limitation. I think it must be a Jewish limitation—for I have seen it pointed out that they do not invent things. That is Emanuel’s flaw; he has not an original thought in his head. He merely carries to a mathematical point of expansion and development the ready-made ideas which he finds accepted all about him. What you see in him is a triumph of the Semitic passion for working a problem out to its ultimate conclusion. ”

“ I know why thy eye is still dry, and why thou sayst brokenly and with a shake of the head, "No, my dear Emanuel, I shall not come, for indeed I cannot."—What ate most deeply into thy heart was, that thy true Emanuel should be the very one who still believed thou wert loved by his friend.—An undeveloped sorrow is without tears or signs ”

“ CHAPTER XII It has done Emanuel a world of good to have you here,” said Kathleen, on the morning of Christian’s leave-taking. “Of course it has been a delight to us both—but he has had a personal benefit from it, too. He works too hard. He carries such a burden of details about in his mind—by day and by night, for he sleeps badly and is forever dreaming of his work—that companionship with some new and attractive mind is of the greatest rest and help to him. ”

“ The country people talk fluently by their firesides of Sir Emanuel in his wild youth as the head of some wild race, the lord of some dark-eyed, dark-skinned princess. They have romanced out a grand story of his leading the devoted natives to battle, with all the terrors of European arms, and winning great victories and domains for them. ”

“ Ah, ere the one grows pale and the other stiff, thou comest often and goest often, and only down below with sleep and with death thou abidest, whereas above, men with the greatest wings, like birds of paradise, are whirled about most of all by the storms!
The tranquillity with which Emanuel played out the star-part of life, even to the last catch-word,—with which he packed up everything—set all to rights—gave all directions—took leave of all,—stirred up tears and tempests together in his tormented friend. ”

“ Ah, Emanuel! if thy friend is now in a fine banquet-hall, now in a garden, now in an opera-box, now under the great night-heavens, now in the presence of a coquette, and now before thee,—surely, this ambiguous alternation of scenes must bring him sorrows, and perhaps leave stains....
"No, I will not deceive my Emanuel—O, are, then, the trifles and the pebbles of this life worth our choosing crooked paths to avoid them, as the sapping-caterpillar submits to winding courses through the twig-work of its leaf? No, all that I have said is true ”

“ The bishop-princes of feudal England were as often as not the sons of swineherds or starveling clerks, whereas now no such thing could conceivably happen to the hierarchy. Above all things, it was the age of human character. Men like Thomas More, with their bewildering circle of attainments and their extraordinary individual force, were familiar products. In a thousand other directions, Emanuel saw convincing proofs that mankind then and there had come closest to the possibilities of a golden age. ”

“ And you will make it all clear to me, will you not? in every detail what it is I am to do?”
“Oh, hardly to that length,” said Emanuel. He smiled once more—that grave, sweet, introspective smile of his, which suggested humor as little as it did flippancy—and spoke more freely, as if conscious that the irksome part of his task lay behind him. “We dream a great dream of you, but it would be folly to attempt to dictate to you at every stage of its realization. That would do you more harm than good, and it would be unfair to both parties, into the bargain. ”

“ Suddenly Emanuel began, with an ill-fitting, not sufficiently controlled voice: "Verily we should stand more composedly beside the genius who lets fall the last sands of slumber on the eyes of our loves, if they did not afterward sleep out their last sleep in church vaults, in churchyards, but upon meadows, under the open heavens, or as mummies in chambers.... Now then, my beloved," they heard already the waving of the weeping-birch, "control thy fantasy; thou wilt see near the birch-tree my resting-pit open ”

“ The impulse toward a mission was discernible in the lad; it altogether dominated the young man. His parents, regarding him lovingly and yet with wise inquiry, were fascinated by what they saw. A sense of lofty responsibility in their trusteeship for this beneficent new force formed a fresh bond between them, which grew to absorb within itself all their other ties. They came to regard themselves in no other light than as the parents of Emanuel. ”

“ He stationed himself unhappily out before the hushed sultry fields through which once had passed the rivers of paradise of his love, on which he had once at Clotilda's side seen fairer evenings; on the earth was the stillness of death, as in a church by night, only a leaden cloud, bent down toward the earth, blustered round the heavens, and Death seemed to go from cloud to cloud and array them for battle.
At last he heard Julius weeping. Emanuel came flying out, but in his eyes stood heavier drops than his former ones. ”

“ As, notoriously, the sense of hearing remains longest with the dying, when all other senses have already closed to earth, Emanuel said to Victor: "So soon as thou seest that a change is about to come over me, then give thy Julius the flute, and thou! play me then the old song of rapture, that I may die upon the tones, as I have already often wished, and continue to play on some minutes after the end." ”

“ Christian wondered if he ought to put into words the comment which rose in his mind. “But you, and your father,” he ventured—“you personally—”
“Ah,” interposed Emanuel, with a rapt softening of expression in face and tone, “when women like my mother and my wife appear—that lifts us away from the earth and things earthly, altogether. But they are as rare as a great poem—or a comet. If they were plentiful there would be no need of any System. The human race would never have fallen into the mud. We should all be angels.” ”

“ I shall meet them, and know them, and not feel that I am bound to them at all—whereas Emanuel is like a brother to me, whom I have been with and loved all my life. And you,” he added, with a smile in his eyes—“you are more than any sister to me.”
“Well, then, let me talk to you like a sister,” she rejoined.
He thought he had not seen her before in precisely the mood which was discernible in her face and tone this morning. Outwardly she was as gay and light-hearted as ever, and certainly she had not seemed on any previous day to come so near being beautiful as well. ”

“ There was thirteen years between us—but when you get to be an old man, that seems no more than as many weeks. And Emanuel”—he addressed his son with the solemnity befitting a revelation—“I am an old man.”
Emanuel frowned a little in his abstracted fashion. “You are less old than any other man of your years in England,” he protested.
Christian, listening, somehow found no conviction in these reassuring words. It dawned upon him suddenly that Lord Julius had in truth aged a great deal. The perception of this disarranged the speech he had in his mind. ”

“ The implication that he was expected to do still more with it than Emanuel, its inventor and evangel, had done, possessed its terrors, no doubt, but one is not young for nothing. The buoyancy of youth, expanding genially amid these delightful surroundings, thrust these shadows off into the indefinite future, whenever they approached.
This system need not detain us long, or unnerve us at all. Lord Julius had spoken figuratively of it as the Pursuit of Happiness ”

“ As there are but few souls that know how far the harmony of outward nature with our own reaches, and in how very great a degree the whole creation is but an Æolian harp, with longer and shorter strings, with slower and swifter vibrations, passive before a divine breath, [164] —I demand not that every one should forgive this Emanuel.—
After this finding of each other again, which threw a far gleam over a whole life, the two came home to the blind youth; and his flute carried the heart softly over in dream from the tossings of fevered blood into the tranquil ether of heaven. ”

“ There is no pagan Rome, but there is a Christian Germany; the dead ashes of the divine Emperor Tiberius were long ago blown about the world, but the divine Emperor William lives; there is no Herod, but there is an Emanuel, whose name is as characteristic of the man as the word Eumenides of what it was intended to represent. Who shall say that there are no Pilates still, who would fain wash their minds of conviction and their hands of the blood of Christ with a little water? Are none living who cast lots for his seamless garment? ”

“ Veit, Johann Emanuel was born in Ruthenplan, in Bohemia, in 1789, died in Vienna in 1876. He was the son of a rich Jew named Benedict (Boruch) . He studied medicine and philosophy first at Prague and then in Vienna, in which city he became professor and director in the Veterinary College in 1819. In the newspaper "Bohemia," he was reported to have given the reason for his conversion in these words:—"I went through the Old Testament, and now I must look into the New." ”

“ He staggered, without following any path, down into the village, with the pewit in its great circles, and the may-chafer in its little ones, sweeping around him. At the foot of the mountain the hybrid day grew darker,—in the starry heaven the curtain rose,—the vapor of evening, which had gone up hot, fell cold, as men do, back to the earth: one more loud lark went circling upward, as the last echo of day, over the mountain.
At last he neared Emanuel's linden. He would rather have embraced him under the great heavens than under the close ceiling of a room. ”

“ Why should other women not even try?
Emanuel had been born some ten years after the marriage of his parents, and they thus came into his baby consciousness as persons of middle age, in appearance and its suggested authority at least, by comparison with the parents of other children he saw about him. Nowhere else, however, either then or in later years, did he see another home so filled from center to circumference with love, and tender gentleness of eye and word and deed. The perception that this environment was unique colored all his boyhood. ”

“ No [Pg 131] names could have been more offensive to them than these. Even Adams, in his “Meditations upon the Creed,” while attacking his friends on their eccentricity in preferring “Safe-deliverance” to “Richard,” takes care to rebuke those on the other side, who would introduce Emanuel, or even Gabriel or Michael, into their nurseries:
“Some call their sons Emanuel: this is too bold. The name is proper to Christ, therefore not to be communicated to any creature.”
Emanuel was imported from the Continent about 1500 ”

“ He became conscious of growth within himself as well. The conviction that life is a thing not to be written about, but to be lived, formulated itself in his mind, and he elaborated this new view in an argument which persuaded his father. The Somersetshire estates of the family, which had been bought by Lord Julius in 1859, when the duke and his son Porlock joined to set aside the entail, were placed now unreservedly at Emanuel’s disposal. ”