Hyperion to Bellarmin
A few moments later, just as I was about to write to Diotima, Alabanda came back gleefully into the room. ‘A letter, Hyperion,’ he cried; I startled and flew across.
‘How long,’ wrote Diotima, ‘had I to live without a sign from you! You wrote to me about the fateful day at Mistra and I responded swiftly; yet it seems you never received my letter. Soon afterwards you wrote to me again, briefly and gloomily, and told me you were minded to join the Russian fleet; again I replied; but you didn’t receive that letter either; then it was my turn to wait in vain, from May till now, the end of summer, until a few days ago the letter came, telling me I should renounce you, my love!
‘You counted on me, had faith enough in me to know this letter couldn’t offend me. That gave me heartfelt joy in the midst of my grief.
‘Unhappy sublime spirit! I’ve understood you only too well. Oh, it’s so wholly natural that you no longer want to love, since your greater wishes languish. For must you not spurn food when you're dying of thirst?
‘I soon came to know that I couldn’t be everything to you. Could I loosen the bonds of mortality for you? could I still the flame in your breast for which no fountain flows and no vine grows? could Ihand you the joys of a world in a chalice?
‘That’s what you want. That’s what you need, and you can do no other. The boundless impotence of your fellow-men has robbed you of your life.
‘He who, like you, has suffered hurt in his whole soul can no longer rest in solitary joy, he who, like you, has suffered shallow nothingness quickens only in the highest spirit, he who has suffered death, like you, heals among the gods alone.
‘Happy all those who do not understand you! He who understands you must share your greatness and your despair.
‘I found you as you are. Life’s first curiosity drove me to that wondrous being. Ineffably the tender soul drew me on, and childishly fearless I played about your dangerous flame. — The beautiful joys of our love appeased you; but only, wicked man! to make you more savage. They soothed, they solaced me too, they made me forget you were fundamentally beyond solace, and that I wasn’t far from becoming so myself, ever since I’d looked into your beloved heart.
‘In Athens, among the ruins of the Olympieion, it seized me anew. I might well still have thought in a carefree hour that the grief of the youth could not really be so earnest and unrelenting. It’s so rare that with his first step into life a man has felt so all at once, so minutely, so quickly, so deeply the whole fate of his age, and that it inheres indelibly within him, this feeling, because he isn’t rough enough to drive it out and not weak enough to weep it away; that, my dearest! is so rare that we deem it almost unnatural.
‘Now, amidst the rubble of bright Athens, now it came home to me all too painfully how the tables are turned, that now it’s the dead who walk above the earth and the quick, the divine men, who are below, now I also saw it too plainly and palpably written on your face, now once and for all I conceded you were right. But at the same time you appeared greater to me too. A being full of hidden power, full of deep, undeveloped meaning, a youth uniquely promising, so you seemed to me. He to whom fate speaks so loud is entitled to speak still louder back to fate, I told myself; the more unfathomably he suffers, the more unfathomably powerful he is. From you, from you alone I hoped for all healing. I saw you travelling. I saw you working. Oh, what a transformation! Founded by you, the grove of Academe greened again above the listening pupils, and the plane tree of Ilissus again heard holy discourse as of old.
‘In your school the genius of our youth soon gained the earnestness of the ancients and its ephemeral games grew more immortal, for it became ashamed, holding butterfly flight to be imprisonment. —
‘This one might have been content to steer a steed; now he’s general. His whole pleasure another might have found in warbling an idle ditty; now he’s an artist. For you'd laid bare before them in open combat the energies of the heroes, the energies of the world; you’d given them the riddles of your heart to solve; and so the youths learned to bring together what is great, learned to understand nature’s play, full of soul, and put aside frivolity. — Hyperion! Hyperion! have you not made me, the mute maiden, into a muse? So it went with the others too.
‘Oh! now these congenial men didn’t leave one another so lightly; no longer did they drift aimlessly amongst one another like sand in the storm of the desert, nor did youth and age scorn each other, nor the stranger want a welcoming host, and fellow countrymen never more
hived themselves off and lovers never more wearied of each other; from your springs, nature, they refreshed themselves, oh! with the holy joys that well up mysteriously from your depths and renew the spirit; and the gods quickened again the withering souls of men; every bond of friendship amongst them was guarded by the heart-sustaining gods. For you, Hyperion! had healed the eyes of your Greeks, that they could see living life; and the inspiration sleeping amongst them like fire in wood had been kindled by you, that they could feel the still and steady inspiration of nature and its pure children. Oh! now men no longer took the beautiful world like laymen the artist’s poem when they praise the words and note the utility. A magical model you became for the Greeks, living nature! and kindled by the bliss of the ever-youthful gods, all man’s doings were a festival as of old; and to their deeds the young heroes were escorted by Helios’ light, more beautiful than any martial music.
‘Hush! hush! It was my most beautiful dream, my first and my last. You’re too proud to busy yourself further with this knavish race. And you're quite right in that. You led them to freedom and they thought of pillage. You lead them victorious into their ancient Lacedaemon and these monsters plunder, and by your own father you're cursed, great son! and no wilderness, no cave is safe enough for you on this Greek soil that you’ve reverenced like holy ground, that you’ve loved more than me.
‘O my Hyperion! I’m the gentle maid no more since I’ve known all this. Outrage drives me upwards, that I can barely look to earth and my hurt heart won’t stop trembling.
‘We must part. You're right. Besides, I don’t want any children; for I grudge them to the world of slaves, and in this drouth the poor plants would wither away before my eyes.
‘Farewell! you dear youth! go where it seems to you worth the effort to offer up your soul. The world must have one battlefield, one place of sacrifice where you can find release. It would be a pity if so the good energies all passed away like a dream. But however you find your end, you'll return to the gods, return to the holy, free, youthful life of nature whence you came, and that is all you long for and I too.’
So she wrote to me. I was shaken to the marrow, full of fear and joy, yet I sought to compose myself and find words for a reply.
‘You consent, Diotima?’ I wrote, ‘you think my renunciation right? you could comprehend it? — Faithful soul! you could reconcile yourself to that? Even to my darkest erring you could reconcile yourself, heavenly patience! and surrendered yourself, gloomed yourself for love, happy child of nature! and became like me and sanctified by sharing it my grief? Beautiful heroine! what crown have you not earned?
‘But let there now be an end to grieving, my love! You’ve followed me into my night, now come! and let me follow you into your light, to your grace let us return, beautiful heart! oh, your tranquillity let me see again, blissful nature! and for ever let my hubris pass away before the image of your peace.
‘It’s true, isn’t it, dearest! that it’s not yet too late for my return, and you'll take me back and can love me again as before? it’s true, isn’t it, that the happiness of past days is not yet lost to us?
‘I’ve taken it all to extremes. I’ve acted the ingrate towards my motherly earth, flinging away like a serf’s pittance my blood and all the loving gifts she gave me, and oh! a thousand times more of an ingrate towards you, holy maiden! who once received me into her peace, me, a feral, fractured being, from whose deeply oppressed breast stole hardly a glimmer of youth, like the odd blade of grass on bare-trodden paths. Had you not called me into life? was Inot yours? how could I then — oh, you don’t yet know, I hope, haven’t yet in your hands the unhappy letter I wrote to you before the last battle? I wanted to die then, Diotima, and imagined I was doing holy work. But how can that be holy which pulls lovers apart? how can that be holy which ruptures our life’s pious happiness? — Diotima! life born of beauty! for that I’ve now become the more similar to you in what is uniquely yours, I’ve finally learned to reverence, I’ve learned to preserve what’s good and essential on earth. Oh, even if I could land up there in the radiant islands of heaven, would I find more than I do with Diotima?
‘Hear me now, beloved!
‘In Greece I can remain no longer. That you know. When he cast me off my father sent me from his surplus funds enough for us to flee into some holy vale of the Alps or Pyrenees, and there to buy a couthie cottage and enough green earth to meet the needs of life’s golden mean.
‘If you’re willing, then I'll come at once and lead you and your mother on my faithful arm, and we'll kiss Calauria’s shores and dry away our
tears, and hasten across the Isthmus to the Adriatic Sea whence a safe ship shall carry us onwards.
‘Oh, come! in the depths of the mountain world the secret of our hearts shall rest like the precious stone in the mine, in the womb of the heaven-soaring forests we'll feel ourselves as amidst the pillars of the innermost temple where the godless dare not near, and we'll sit by the source, contemplating our world in its mirror, heaven and house and garden and us. Often on bright nights we'll stroll in the shade of our fruit trees and listen for the god in us, the loving one, while the plant from midday slumber raises its sunken head and the gentle life of your flowers quickens when they bathe their tender arms in the dew and the night breeze breathes coolingly around them, infusing them, and over us blossoms the meadow of heaven with all its sparkling flowers, and to the side behind westering clouds, as if out of love, shyly the moonlight mimics the sun-youth’s setting — and then in the mornings when, like a river-bed, our valley fills with warm light and the golden flood runs tranquilly through our trees and flows around our house, enhancing the loveliness of the rooms, your creation, and you walk in the sunlit radiance and in your grace you sanctify the day for me, my love! when then, as we thus celebrate the bliss of morning, the bustling life of the earth kindles before our eyes like a sacrificial fire, and we go forth on our daily tasks to cast them too, as a part of us too, into the rising flame, will you not then say that we’re happy, that we’re become again like the ancient priests of nature, holy and joyful, those who were pious ere ever a temple stood.
‘Have I said enough? decide now my fate, dear maiden, and soon! — It’s as well that I’m still half an invalid from the last battle, and that I’ve yet to be released from service; else I couldn’t stay here, I'd need to be off to ask you in person, and that wouldn’t be good, that would be to besiege you. —
‘O Diotima! foolish qualms strike me at the heart, and yet — I can’t thole the thought that this hope too shall founder.
‘Are you not grown too great to return to the happiness of earth? The fierce flame of the spirit, kindled by your sorrow, will it not consume everything mortal in you?
‘T know full well that he who lightly falls out with the world more lightly makes peace with it too. But you, with your childlike stillness,
you so happy once in your high humility, Diotima! who will appease you when fate arouses you?
‘Dear life! is there no more healing power for you in me? of all the sounds from the heart is there none to call you back again to human life where you once so lovingly lingered in low flight? oh come, oh remain in this twilight! This shadowland is the element of love, and only here does the still dew of sadness run from the heaven of your eyes.
‘And do you mind our golden days no more? those lovely, divinely melodious days? do they not whisper to you from all the groves of Calauria?
‘And look! there’s so much has perished in me, and I no longer have many hopes. Your image with its heavenly disposition I managed still to rescue like a house-god from the flames. Our life, ours, is still intact in me. Should I now go and bury this too? Shall I go forth, restless and without a goal, from one alien land to another? Is it for this I learned to love?
‘Oh no! you first and you last! Mine you were and mine you will stay.’