It may be worth noting that there are many attempts at explaining the sense of a festively human high tide, as of a great wedding, and that some of those theories account for the experience of natural piety and love at such moments by supposing that behind the everyday earthly-round, bad-good, but at any rate definitely existing man or woman some far-off true human being can be expected to come to light. The siblings examined these well-intended attempts one by one and did not believe any of them. Not the Sunday wisdom according to which nature on her feast days brings to the fore all that is good and beautiful in her creatures. Not the more psychological explanation that while man, even in this tender transparency, does not turn out to be a different sort of creature, he nevertheless displays the lovable qualities for which he would like to be known: sweating out through his pores, like honey, as it were, all his self-love and inward-gazing indulgence. Nor the variant according to which human beings display their goodwill, which certainly never prevents them from doing bad things but on such days emerges from the ill-will that usually controls them, miraculously unharmed, like Jonah from the belly of the whale. And the briefest and most exhilarating explanation, which Agathe shyly touched on once more, that it is the immortal portion of our inheritance that occasionally shimmers through the mortal part, was certainly not believable to either of them either. Incidentally, all these solemn inspirations had one thing in common: every one of them sought the salvation of man in a state that does not come into its own under ordinary, inessential conditions; and just as the presentiment of salvation is clearly an upward-directed process, there is a second, no less plentiful group of self-deceptions where the same process clearly moves in a downward direction: These are all the familiar confessions and testimonies, not a few of them fondly preserved in historical record, according to which man is supposed to have forfeited the innocence of his natural state, his own natural innocence, through spiritual pride and other plagues of civilization.

Accordingly, there were two kinds of “true human being” that proposed themselves to spiritual perception with perfect punctuality on the same occasion; except that—insofar as one of them was supposed to be a celestial superman, the other an unalloyed creature of the earth—they were on opposite sides of the actual human being, und Ulrich’s dry comment was: “All they have in common is that the real human, even at elevated moments, does not feel himself to be the true human, except plus or minus something that makes him appear enchantingly unreal to himself!”

And so the siblings had arrived from one limit case of interpretation to the other, and there remained only one last possibility of explaining this love, which was so gentle, settling on all things without distinction, like dew on an early morning. It was Agathe, finally, who gave voice to this possibility, with a graceful sigh of vexation. “So the sun shines, and one is gripped by an unconscious urge like a schoolgirl and a schoolboy.”