Titan: A Romance. v. 2 (of 2)
by Jean Paul · English · Gutenberg #36403 · 914,075 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Titan: A Romance. v. 2 (of 2)
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Titan: A Romance. v. 2 (of 2)
Author: Jean Paul
Translator: Charles Timothy Brooks
Release date: June 12, 2011 [eBook #36403]
Most recently updated: November 22, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36403
Credits: Produced by Charles Bowen, from page images provided by Google Books
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TITAN: A ROMANCE. V. 2 (OF 2) ***
Produced by Charles Bowen, from page images provided by Google Books
Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source:
http://books.google.com/books?id=p-ukFFdXOVoC&dq
TITAN:
A ROMANCE.
FROM THE GERMAN OF
_JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER_.
TRANSLATED BY
CHARLES T. BROOKS.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
LONDON:
TRÜBNER & CO., 60 Paternoster Row.
1863.
Contents of Vol. II.
SEVENTEENTH JUBILEE.
Princely Nuptial-Territion.--Illumination of Lilar.
EIGHTEENTH JUBILEE.
Gaspard's Letter.--The Blumenbühl Church.--Eclipse of the Sun and of
the Soul.
NINETEENTH JUBILEE.
Schoppe's Office of Comforter.--Arcadia.--Bouverot's Portrait-painting.
TWENTIETH JUBILEE.
Gaspard's Letter Partings.
TWENTY-FIRST JUBILEE.
The Trial-lesson of Love.--Froulay's Fear of Fortune.--The Biter
Bit.--Honors of the Observatory.
TWENTY-SECOND JUBILEE.
Schoppe's Heart.--Dangerous Spiritual Acquaintances.
TWENTY-THIRD JUBILEE.
Liana.
TWENTY-FOURTH JUBILEE.
The Fever.--The Cube.
TWENTY-FIFTH JUBILEE.
The Dream.--The Journey.
TWENTY-SIXTH JUBILEE.
The Journey.--The Fountain.--Rome.--The Forum.
TWENTY-SEVENTH JUBILEE.
St. Peter's.--Rotunda.--Colosseum.--Letter to Schoppe.
--The War.--Gaspard.--The Corsican.--Entanglement with the
Princess.--Sickness.--Gaspard's Brother.--St. Peter's Dome,
and Departure.
TWENTY-EIGHTH JUBILEE.
Letter From Pestitz.--Mola.--The Heavenly Ascension of a
Monk.--Naples.--Ischia.--The New Gift of the Gods.
TWENTY-NINTH JUBILEE.
Julienne.--The Island.--Sundown.--Naples.--Vesuvius.--Linda's
Letter.--Fight.--Departure.
THIRTIETH JUBILEE.
Tivoli.--Quarrel.--Isola Bella.--Nursery of
Childhood.--Love.--Departure.
THIRTY-FIRST JUBILEE.
Pestitz.--Schoppe.--Dread of Marriage.--Arcadia.--Idoine.--Entanglement
THIRTY-SECOND JUBILEE.
Roquairol.
THIRTY-THIRD JUBILEE.
Albano And Linda.--Schoppe and the Portrait.-The Wax Cabinet.--The
Duel.--The Madhouse.--Leibgeber.
THIRTY-FOURTH JUBILEE.
Schoppe's Discoveries.--Liana.--The Chapel of the Cross.--Schoppe and
the "I" and the Uncle.
THIRTY-FIFTH JUBILEE.
Siebenkäs.--Confession of the Uncle.--Letter from Albano's Mother.--The
Race for the Crown.--Echo and Swan-song of the Story.
TITAN.
SEVENTEENTH JUBILEE.
Princely Nuptial-territion.[1]--Illumination of Lilar.
77. CYCLE.
What a universal joy of the people could now ring and roar, for a space
of eight days, from one frontier of the land to the other! For so long
was the public sorrow suspended; the bells sounded for something better
than a march to the grave; music was again allowed to all musical
clocks and people; all theatres would have been opened, had there been
one there, or had the court been shut up, which was a continual
play-house; and now one could walk and visit and promulgate decrees in
high places, without the black border. By and by, when this refreshing
interlude was over, during which one enjoyed orchestra, punch, and
cakes, they were to go back again with the more zest to weeping and
tragedies.
On the morning of the tedious procession of carriages going forth to
form the escort, the Prince rode out beforehand over the limits, with
Bouverot and Albano,--all three as being the only people in the land
who were independent and uninterested in the festival. Poor Luigi! I
have already very distinctly stated, in the first volume of "Titan,"
that the princely bridegroom who to-day mounts the bridal bed can only
be a father of his _country_, not father of a family. Under the heaven
of his princely throne, as on the first row of the chess-field, all is
to be made and regenerated,--officers, even the queen of chess, but not
the Schach[2] himself. It were to be wished, since the circumstance
makes the festival shade into the ridiculous, that the bridegroom could
only, by way of shaming many _old_ families that laugh at him,--old so
often, even in the heraldic and medical sense at once,--show them some
dozen of the princes ranged around the nuptial altar, whom he has
seated in Calabria, Wales, Asturia, in _Dauphiny_,--all Europe was a
Dauphiny to him,--in short, in so many _active_[3] hereditary
lands,--that is, the heirs, not heirlooms, of foreign princes. Could he
do that, then would he look more contentedly into this day's
congratulations, because some dozen fulfilments would be already
standing by, and awaiting his nod. But as the Marchioness of Exeter can
transform the bed of the Marquis in London, which costs three thousand
pounds, into a throne, so must the Princess also do with hers, without
being able, like her, to reverse the transformation.
I will therefore introduce and lead him out on the dancing-floor of
to-day's joy, not at all as bridegroom, but, in every instance,--just
as we speak of the crown without the crowned head,--merely as
Bridegroom's-coat, so as not to make him ridiculous. Albano rode along
with a breast full of indignation, scorn, and pity beside this victim
of dark state policy, and simply could not comprehend how it was that
Luigi did not send the German gentleman, that hired axe and uprooter of
his family tree, with one kick far behind him howling. Good youth! a
prince more easily sets himself free from men whom he loves, than from
such as he has full long hated; for his fear is stronger than his love.
The great-hearted, never narrow-chested, always broad-breasted youth
found to-day, in his solemn, painful frame of mind, everything
tragical, noble and ignoble, greater than it was. He showed, indeed,
only a fiery eye and animated countenance, because he was too young and
modest to make a display of personal grief; but beneath the eye, which
was fixed on the spot of blue in the heavens where his dark clouds were
this day to break away or fall upon him, stood the glistening
tear-drop. The coming evening, into which he had so often looked as
into a hell, and full as often as into a heaven, stood now, as a
confused medium between the two, so near,--ah, hard by him! A throng of
kindred feelings attended him to the (in his opinion unhappy) bride
of--his father and this prince.
A quarter of a mile the other side of Hohenfliess might already be seen
jogging on her _Gibbon_, well known among all natural historians--not
among the politicians--by the long arms which this owner of the
Moluccas and Ape notoriously carries. "Where is my Gibbon?" the
Princess usually asked (even supposing she had in her hand, at the
moment, the English namesake,--the historian with long nails and short
sentences against the Christians) when she wanted her Longimanus.
At last she came prancing along--all plumed and in riding-habit--on the
finest English steed,--a tall, majestic figure, who, indifferent to her
court-retinue, although freighted with relatives, would much rather
have looked a welcome to the blue morning sun behind a rearing horse's
and swan's neck. She gave the Bridegroom's-coat with propriety greeting
and kiss, but neither with emotion nor dissimulation nor embarrassment,
but freely and frankly and cordially, too far exalted above the
ridiculousness of her genealogical disproportion to do otherwise; yes,
even above every thought of that disproportion which necessity or
tyranny created. In her otherwise fairly built--rather than finely
drawn--face, her nose alone was not so, but angularly cut and
presenting more bones than cartilage in contrast to the commonplace
character of regents. With women, marked, irregular noses, e. g. with
deep indenture of the bridge, or with concave or convex archings, or
with _facettes_ at the knob, &c., signify far more for talent than with
men; and--except in the case of a few whom I myself have seen--beauty
must always sacrifice something to genius, although not so much as
afterward the genius of others sacrifices to beauty, as we men in
general have, unfortunately perhaps, done.
The Count was presented to the Princess; she had not known
him,--although she had heard of him and seen his father so long,--but
had rather fancied him to resemble the Bridegroom's-coat. The coat
could not--or should not--have failed to be flattered by this blooming
likeness. The likeness entirely explains the beautiful interest which
she now must needs take in both, because it always takes a couple of
people to make a resemblance.
She spoke with the son without any embarrassment about the Knight of
the Fleece having been presented by her and her Court with a (flower-)
basket,[4] and extolled his knowledge of art. "Art," said she, "makes
in the end all lands alike and agreeable. When that is once had, one
thinks of nothing further. At Dresden, in the inner gallery, I really
believed I was in joyous Italy. Yes, if one should go to Italy itself,
one would forget even Italy in the midst of all that one finds there."
Albano answered, "I know, I too shall one day intoxicate myself with
the old wine of art, and glow under it; but for the present it is to me
merely a beautiful, blooming vineyard, whose powers I certainly know
beforehand, without as yet feeling them." The Princess won his esteem
so exceedingly, that he put the question to her, when the Prince, a few
steps onward, was surveying from the window the swelling flood of the
Pestitz escort, how the German ceremonies of her rank struck her
artistic taste. "Tell me," said she, lightly, "what station among us
has not full as many, and where, in the whole range of situations, do
not priests and advocates play their part? Just look for once at the
marriages of the imperial cities. The Germans are herein no better nor
worse than any other nation, old or new, wild or polished. Think of
Louis Fourteenth. Once for all, such is man; but I do not, of course,
respect him for that."
The Prince reminded them now of the hour of march; and the Princess
mustered together, by way of attiring herself for the grand _entrée_,
more, dressing-maids and toilet-boxes than Albano, according to her
words, or we, according to the cartilages of her nose,--which seemed
spiritual wing-bones,--should have expected. Her hurrying people
followed her with more dread than reverence for her rank or character;
and some, who occasionally ran by out of the dressing-chamber, had
downcast faces.
At last she appeared again, but much fairer than before. There must
surely belong to the manliest woman more charming womanliness than we
think, since such a one gains by female finery, by which the most
effeminate man would only lose. "Rank," said she to Albano, showing a
great candor in opinions, which easily consists with a quite as great
reserve in emotions, "oppresses and confines a great soul oftentimes
less than sex." Her calling herself a great soul could not but strike
the Count, because he now saw before him the first example--another man
knows innumerable examples--of the fact, that distinguished women
praise themselves outright, and far more than distinguished men.
The grand movement began. On a boundary bridge, which, like the
printer's hyphen, was at once sign of separation and of connection
between the two principalities, half Hohenfliess already sat halting in
carriages and on horseback, until an upset, shabby old vehicle, with
village comedians, could be raised again on the fourth wheel, and the
mythological household furniture which they had in hand packed in. But
when the Princess made her way by main force on to the bridge, suddenly
passengers and packers converted themselves into muses, gods of music,
gods of love, and a pretty little Hymen, and, in theatrical decoration
and apparatus, flooded the encircled bride with their poetic effusions,
representing the war of the other gods against the virgin-stealer
Hymen. The son of the muses who had versified the matter acted a part
himself, as father of the muses. I dare say that this original
invention of the Minister was very favorably received, as well by
Haarhaar as by Hohenfliess.
Froulay, all prinked and powdered, as if he were stretching himself out
on the bed of state between funeral-gueridons,[5] marched out before
her as spokesman of the country, which wished to testify its happy
participation in her marriage to the Bridegroom's-coat. The Princess
abridged and clipped short all festal lying with a fine pair of ladies'
scissors.
Froulay had, among other carriages, brought with him also one
containing several trumpeters and kettle-drummers, levied from all
quarters, in which, for joke's sake, Schoppe stood, too, who did not
often stay away from great processions of men, for this reason, because
men never looked more ridiculous than when they did anything in mass
and multitude. By way of bringing salt to the solemnities, he set up in
his carriage the hypothesis that they were doing all this merely, with
the best intention, for the sake of driving the bride back again to
where she had come from, partly by way of sparing her the sham- and
stage-marriage, partly by way of sparing the land the new court-state.
Her ear, he assumed, when the cannon drawn up on the surrounding hills
mingled with the trumpeting of his thunder-car, and three postmasters,
with fifteen postilions, who had not been posted there _for nothing_,
with their best horns and lungs, blew their horns at the same
moment,--her ear must be very much tortured, and she somewhat repelled,
by such a welcome. Hence they even send empty state-coaches with the
rest, just for the sake of the rattling, even as, in the province of
Anspach, the farmer, merely by frightful screaming, without ammunition
or dogs, drives the stags from his crops.[6] As ships do in the fog by
lanterns and drums, so would states fain keep themselves apart by
illumination and firing.
She still, however, I see, moves onward, said he, on the
way,--sometimes taking into his hands with profit the diphthong of the
kettle-drum,--and we must all accordingly follow after; but perhaps her
ear is already dead, and she is now only to be come at through the eye.
In this hope he was exceedingly delighted with the dapple uniform of
the assembled officers and feather scarecrows of the court-liveries.
Now there is still to come, he predicted, joyfully, the gold-spangled,
triumphal arch, with vases and pipers, through which she must directly
pass; and do not people scare away sparrows from the cherry trees,
then, with gold leaf and Selzer pitchers?
O, thought he, when she was through, if that Gothic tyrant suffered
himself to be led back from his plundering expedition into holy Rome by
the suppliant procession of the Pope that came to meet him, then
certainly it must prevail with her, when the orphan children in the
suburbs come imploringly to meet her with their foster-father, then
the schoolmasters with their pages, then the gymnasium and the
university,--all which, however, to be sure, is only a skirmish with
the outposts; for the gate is occupied with infantry, the whole market
with citizens capable of bearing arms, the cathedral is guarded by the
clergy, the council-house by the magistracy, all ready, if she does not
turn back, to march after her at a certain distance, as police-patrol
and choirs of observation; and are there not seven bridal couples
stationed at the palace-gate, as seven prayers and penitential psalms?
and do they not bring to meet her--upon a pillory of satin, quite
unconscious of the effect--a dismal Pereat-Carmen[7] composed by
myself, a decree of the 19th June?
All right! said he, when the whole train, by way of affording an
easier inspection to the powers and principalities clustered at the
palace-windows, rode twice through the palace-yard; this double dose
must take hold. Schoppe's hopes were farthest from falling when he
found that, because it was gala, they kept themselves up-stairs long
concealed and silent; and at length the Prince, as victor, but
exhausted, was brought down by court-cavaliers into the chapel, in
order publicly to give thanks for the retreat of the hostile forces.
Nay, when presently the bride, too, pressed after, held back, however,
by the arms of chamberlains,--even drawn back by her court-dames
holding her train,--then could the Librarian easily afford to dismiss
all anxiety.
Albano's tossing soul imaged the confused court world as still more
wild and misshapen than it was. He heard the princely cousins, even the
future successor to chair and throne, wish their cousin Luigi health, a
happy marriage, and sequel thereto, although they, through their
friend,--a living succession-poison,[8]--had caused so much of these
three things to be taken away from him that they could assign him
precisely their cold-blooded kinswoman as crown-guard of their next
succession. He heard the same marriage-songs from all court Pestitzers,
who, like a muscle, manifested a special effort to make themselves
short. He saw how lightly, coldly, and with what malicious pleasure,
the Prince, although with the feeling that he should soon drown in his
dropsy, his water or fat in the limbs, carried off all the lies. O,
must not princes themselves lie, because they are eternally cheated?
themselves learn to flatter, because they are forever flattered? He
himself could not bring himself to cast so much as the smallest mite of
a lying congratulation into the general treasury of lies.
The Princess flung the Count--as often as it would do, and almost
oftener--two or three looks or words; for this blooming one, among the
throne-coasters, from whom one more easily hears an echo than an
answer, was reminded only of his powerful father. The Captain--who,
like all enthusiasts, and like moths and crickets, loved _warmth_ and
shunned _light_, and because all people of mere understanding were
tedious to him--complained several times to Albano, that the Princess
displeased him with her cold, witty understanding; but the Count--out
of regard for the beloved of his father, and out of hatred toward her
sacrificial priests and butchers--could only pity a being, who perhaps
must hate now, because her greatest love had set. How many noble women,
who would otherwise have held it a higher thing to admire than to be
admired, have become powerful, rich in knowledge, almost great, but
unhappy and coquettish and cold, because they found only a pair of
arms, but no heart between them, and because their ardently devoted
souls met with no likeness of themselves, by which a woman means an
unlike image, namely one higher than her own! Then the tree with its
frozen blossoms stands there in autumn high, broad, green, and fresh,
and dark with foliage, but with empty, fruitless twigs.
At last they came out of the sweltry dining-halls into the fresh
evening of Lilar, into the open air and freedom. Half indignant, half
bewildered with love, Albano went to meet a veiled hour, in which so
many a riddle and his dearest one were to be solved. What does man see
before him, when with the thread in his hand he steps out of the
subterranean labyrinth? Nothing but the open entrances into other
labyrinths, and the choice among them is his only wish.
78. CYCLE.
On the loveliest evening, when the heavens were transparent to the very
bottom of all the stars, the Prince let the weary assembly drive to
Lilar, in order to make a better illusion with his two invisibilities,
with the Illumination and with Liana's _tableau vivant_. With what
growing anxiety and tenderness did the honest Albano's susceptible
heart beat, as, during the rolling down from the woodland bridge into
the expectant throng of the tumultuous populace, he thought to
himself,--_She_, too, went this way into the Lilar which used to be so
dear to her. His whole realm of ideas became an evening rain before the
sun, of which one half trembles glistening before the sun and the other
vanishes in a gray mist. Ah, before Liana it had rained without
sunshine, when she to-day secretly went over merely into the Temple of
_Dream_, in order only to personate a beloved being, but not to be one.
Not a lamp was yet burning. Albano looked into every green depth after
his angel of light. Even the Prince himself, who kept the sudden
kindling up of the St. Peter's dome still awaiting his nod and beck,
anticipated the pleasure, so rare at courts, of giving a twofold
surprise. The Princess had spared the Minister the dilemma of a lie or
an answer, for she had not inquired at all after her future court-dame
Liana, like the whole of that strong class of women, indifferent to her
sex, but attaching herself so much the more fixedly to a select one.
Albano espied, in the dark, driving whirl, his foster-parents and
Rabette; but in this reeling of the ground and of the soul he could
only, like others, direct his eyes toward the veil (itself veiled)
behind which he had more than all others to find and to lose. In the
years of youth, however, no black veil, only a motley one, hangs down,
and in all its sorrows are still hopes!
The people awaited the splendor and the music. The Prince at last led
his bride toward the Temple of Dream; Charles, to-day blind to his
Rabette, not _for_ her, took with him the glowing Count. In the outer
temple nothing could be detected corresponding to its magic name; only
the windows went from the roof of this Pavilion down to the very
ground; and, instead of frames and window-sills, were set in twigs and
leaves. But when the Princess had gone in through a glass door, the
Pavilion seemed to her to have vanished away; one seemed to stand on a
solitary, open spot, guarded with some tree-stems, which all vistas of
the garden met and crossed. Wondrously, as if by sportive dreams, were
the regions of Lilar intermingled, and opposites drawn together; beside
the mountain with the thunder-house stood the one with the altar, and
hard by the enchanted wood the high, dark Tartarus reared itself.
The near and the far swallowed each other up; a fresh rainbow of
garden-hues and a faded mock-rainbow ran on beside each other, as, when
one wakes, the shadow of the dream-image glides away, still visible,
before the glittering present. While the Princess was still sinking
away into the dreamy illusion,[9] Liana--as if gliding out of the air
through a glass side-door, in Idoine's favorite attire,--in a white
dress with silver flowers, and in unadorned hair, with a veil, which,
fastened only on the left side, flowed down at full length--came
tremulously forth, and when the deceived Princess cried out, "Idoine!"
she whispered, with a trembling and scarcely audible voice: "_Je ne
suis qu'un songe_."[10] She was to say more and offer a flower; but
when the Princess, with emotion, went on to exclaim: "_Sœur
chérie!_"[11] and folded her passionately in her arms, then she forgot
all, and only wept out her heart upon another heart, because to her
another's vain languishing after a sister was so touching. Albano stood
near to the sublime scene; the bandage was torn off from all his
wounds, and their blood flowed down warmly out of them all. O, never
had she, or any other form, been so ethereally beautiful, so
heavenly-blooming, and so meek and lowly!
When she raised her eyes out of the embrace, they fell upon Albano's
pale countenance. It was pale, not with sickness, but with emotion. She
started back, quivering, and embraced the Princess again; the pale
youth had wrung from her agitated heart one tear after another; but the
two did not greet each other,--and thus began their evening.
During the illusion and the embrace, at a nod from the Prince, all
twigs and gates of the garden were involved in a glistening
conflagration; all water-works of the enchanted wood started up, and
fluttered aloft with golden wings; in the inverted rain played a white,
green, golden, and gloomy world, and the jets of water and of flame
flew up mischievously against each other, like silver and gold
pheasants. And the splendor of the burning Eden embraced the Temple of
Dream, and the reflection fell on its inner green foliage-work, and
turned it to gold.
Liana, holding the hand of the admiring Princess, stepped out, with
downcast, bashful eyes, into the bright, busy city of the sun, into the
din of the music and of the exultant spectators. Upon Albano the stormy
scene came shooting like a torrent; such opposite and strangely
intermingled parts played before such opposite persons, the splendor of
the evening's gladness, and the nightly bewilderment in his bosom, made
it hard for him to walk through this evening with a firm step.
The Princess soon drew him onward in her wake and vortex; Liana she let
not go from her side. The Minister daubed and starched up with old
gallantries the erotic slave; but to every one he appeared, as the
Princess settles with creditors after the death of the Prince, to
imitate only the manner of ministers, whose spirit loves to proceed
from Father and Dauphin--_filioque_[12]--at once, in order to seat
itself, not between, but upon two princely chairs. She seemed, however,
since his manœuvring with Liana, to receive him more haughtily. He
was sufficiently blessed in the good fortune of his daughter, as his
step-son Bouverot was by her nearness, and this pair of knaves lay
deeply buried and revelling in nothing but flowers. Albano could divine
nothing more than that even a cold dragon, an orang-outang of souls,
was darkly spying out the charms of this angel.
The Minister's lady and the Lector took turns, with an easy
alternation, in guarding Liana from every word--of Albano. The Princess
let herself be conducted through the sparkling pleasure-avenues,
through the enchanted wood which was standing in moist lightnings, and
finally to the thunder-house, by way of taking the burning garden from
all points into her picturesque eye; Liana and Albano attended her
through all the walks of her withered, stale Arcadia, and held their
shattered hearts mutely and steadfastly together. True to her word
with her parents, she gave him no warmer look or tone than any other,
but no colder one neither; for her soul would not torment, but only
suffer and obey. He made--he thought--all his looks and tones gentle,
nor did the noble man avenge himself by a single manifestation of
coldness, or in fact of any insincere making-of-friends with the
princely female-recruiting-officer of crowns and hearts.
The Princess began to be unintelligible to him. They passed from the
romantic to romance, then to the question, why it did not portray
marriage. "Because," she replied, "it [romance] cannot be without
love." "And marriage?" asked Albano, uncourteously. "Cannot exist
without a friend," said she; "but Love is a god, _nec Deus intersit,
nisi dignus vindice nodus inciderit_,"[13] she added, for she had
learned Latin for the sake of the poets.
Bouverot finished the verse, in order to make the sense
ambiguous,--"_Nec quarta loqui persona laboret_."[14] No one understood
this last but the Lector and the Princess.
"Why are there no lamps in that house?" she inquired. "Who lives
there?" She meant Spener's house. Liana answered only the latter
question, and concluded her glowing picture with the words, "He lives
for immortality." "What does he write?" inquired the Princess,
misunderstanding her; and Liana must needs give a Christian explanation
of the matter, whereupon the unbelieving woman smiled. There arose
forthwith a dispute for and against the eternal sleep, which took up
not much less time than they needed for making the circle of the
thunder-house. The Princess began: "We should have quite as much to say
against our every-day sleep, if it were not a fact, as against the
eternal one." "More, too, however, against our ever waking out of it,"
said Albano, striking in, and cut short the religious disturbances.
The Princess came back again with her inquiries after Spener, who had
interested her by his long mourning for her deceased father-in-law; and
Liana, sure of her mother's concurrence, poured herself out into a
stream of speech and emotion,--her eyes were forbidden to shed one,--on
which was borne along a sublime image of her teacher. How the
exaltation of this so delicate, tender soul thrilled her friend! So in
the pale, small moon and evening star do higher mountains rear
themselves than on our larger earth! "She was once inspired for thee,
too, but now no more," said Albano to himself, and stayed behind after
all the rest had gone on, because his soul had been long since full of
pains, and because now the Princess began to displease him.
He posted himself alone, and looked at the ringing, gleaming war-dance
of joy. The children ran illuminated through the uproar and in the
bright green foliage. The tones hovered and hung twining together into
one wreath, high in their ether above the noisy swarm of men, and sang
down to them their heavenly songs. Only in me, said he to himself, do
the tones and the lights toss a sea of agony to and fro, in no one
else, in her not at all; she has brought with her for all others her
old gladdening heart of love, not for me; she has not thus far
suffered, she blooms in health. He considered not, however, that in
fact his struggles also had shed not a drop of water into the dark red
glow of his youth; in Liana well might wounds from such conflicts, like
those of the scratched Aphrodite, only dye the white roses red.
But he determined to remain a man before so many eyes, and to await the
crisis and Liana's solitude. He therefore exchanged several rational
words with his foster relatives from Blumenbühl;--he said to Rabette:
"It pleases you, does it not?" He startled, unintentionally, the
Captain, who was hovering about some new faces from Haarhaar, with the
unmeaning question, "Why dost thou leave my sister so alone?"
But as often as he looked at Liana, who to-day went in her long veil,
as the only one without any thick, heavy gala-wrappage, as if she were
a young, breathing, tender form among painted stone statues, so
bashfully putting others to the blush, glistening and trembling like an
egrette,--so often did masses of flame fly wildly to and fro within
him. Passion, as the epilepsy often does with its victims, hurries us
away, precisely at the dangerous crises of life, to shores and
precipices. He leaned his head against a tree, slightly bowed down;
then Charles came along out of his waltzes of joy, and asked him, with
alarm, what provoked him so; for his bending down had cast gloomy, wild
shadows upon his tense, muscular face; "Nothing," said he, and the face
gleamed mildly when he lifted it up. At this moment, also, came the
unreflecting Rabette, and would fain draw him into the general joy, and
said, "Does anything ail thee?" "Thou!" he replied, and looked at her
very indignantly.
"Go into the gloomy oak-grove to Gaspard's rock!" cried his heart. "Thy
father never bowed; be his son!" Thereupon he strode away through the
world of brilliancy; but when, far within, amidst the darkness, he
leaned his head upon the rock, and the tones came toyingly and
teasingly in after him, and he thought to himself, how he could have
loved such a noble soul,--O how exceedingly!--then it was as if
something said within him, "Now thou hast thy _first_ sorrow on earth!"
As during an earthquake doors fly open and bells ring, so at the
thought, "first sorrow," was his soul rent asunder, and hard tears
dashed down. But he wondered at hearing himself weep, and indignantly
wiped his face on the cool moss.
Weakened, not hardened, he stepped out into the enchanted land,
besprinkled with glimmering jewels, and among the tones which came
dancing more rapturously to meet him, and would fain snatch his soul
away and lift it up and set it on high places, so that it might look
down into far and wide spring-times of life! Here on this once blessed
soil he saw lying the shattered, trampled pearl-string of his future
days. "O how happy we might have been this evening!" thought he, and
looked into the bright Feast of Tabernacles, into the gilded but
living branchwork,--into the green, flitting reflection, rocked
by the night-wind, and into the wild-fire of burning bushes in the
flowing waters. On the arched triumphal gates stood lights like
heaven-descended constellations of the wain, and behind him the dark
cloister-wall of Tartarus, which showed sublimely in its summits
only single small lights; and, over beyond, the silent mountains
sleeping in night, and here the noisy life of men, playing with the
night-butterflies about the lamps!
Thus does the fire within us of itself create in us the storm-wind
which fans it still higher. The tones that floated by him spoke to him
every thought which he would fain kill. As man sees himself, so does he
often hear himself, in the presence of a sound of music.
At this moment Liana went off some distance from the crowd with
Augusti. "I will speak with her, then it will be over," said he to
himself, as he drew near her, battling and wrestling with himself: he
saw plainly that she wanted to be back again among strange listeners.
"Liana, what have I then done to thee?" said he, with the deep-souled
tone of a tender heart, bitterly despising the Lector's presence and
powers. "Only do not desire an answer to-day, dear Count," said she,
turning back, and took in haste Augusti's arm; but he remarked not that
she did it to avoid sinking. Upon this he cast at the Lector a fiery
look, hoping to be offended and then avenged,--left her in haste and
silence;--the sweetest wine of love a hot ray had sharpened into
vinegar;--and he slipped away, without knowing it, into the temple of
dream.
He went up and down therein, murmuring, "_Je ne suis qu'un songe_"; but
was soon driven out into Tartarus by his disgust at so many copies of
himself moving round with him, and by the eternal spring of tones
flying after him, which just now beside the upturned flower-bed of life
was so intolerable.
In Tartarus all the apparatus of horror seemed to him now very
diminutive and ridiculous. Just then, not far from the Catacomb avenue,
Roquairol and Rabette came to meet him. Roquairol's flaming face was
extinguished and Rabette's turned backward, when Albano passionately
strode forth to meet them, and, still more imbittered by the
remembrance of the time when their heavens were contemporaneous, and
flaming up under the wind which blew upon his glowing ruins, attacked
the Captain with: "Art thou a friend? Art thou no devil? Thou hast
referred me to this evening: never, never say a word more of it!" Both
trembled, confused and colorless; Albano, without further reflection,
ascribed the growing pale and turning away to their sympathy for his
martyrdom. What a confounding, hostile night!
He roved onward and onward, the licking fire of the joy and music that
pursued him tormented him unspeakably,--the tones were to him mocking
tropical birds of fairer, warmer zones that came fluttering to meet
him. "I will just go to my bed, so soon as it once becomes still within
there!" He was half a mile off, when the music of Lilar still continued
to sound after him; he sternly stopped his ears, but Lilar still
sounded on within them,--then he perceived that he was only listening
to himself. But all the time it seemed to him as if the merry ringing
must, as in _Don Juan_, resolve itself into a cry of murder at the
presence of ghosts.
The avenue of coming days ran to a frightful point before him, when he
now snatched out from them the moon of his heaven, which had once
gleamed upon his childish heart and upon the paths of Blumenbühl. The
blooming, dancing genius of his past, all unseen, with only the wreath
of joy in its hand, stole away behind him, while he struggled with the
dark angel of futurity going before him, who dragged him along after
him through sounding thickets,--through sleepy villages,--through
moist, trickling valleys. At last Albano looked up to heaven, beneath
the innumerable eternal stars, to the hanging blossom-garden of God. "I
am not ashamed before you," said he, "because I weep on this ball, and
am oppressed before your immensity. Up there ye stand, all of you, far
asunder,--and on all great worlds every poor spirit has, after all,
only one little spot beneath its feet where it is happy or miserable.
When only this night has once gone by, and I am gone to my bed;
to-morrow I shall certainly be a man and stand fast!"
Suddenly he heard several times an almost exasperated cry of
lamentation. At length he beheld, near a stream, outstretched white
sleeves or arms; he went to the female form. "Alas! I am blind of God,"
said she; "I too was at the illumination, and have strayed away; I am
generally acquainted with road and lane; over yonder lies our village;
I hear the shepherd dog, but I cannot find the bridge over the water."
It was the grown-up blind girl of the herdsman's hut. "Does it still go
on pleasantly there?" he asked, as he guided her along. "All over!"
said she. On the bridge of the Rosana she would not, out of vanity, let
herself be directed any farther.
He returned through the pleasant bushes, which were already dripping
with the dew of morning, to an eminence before Lilar. All was still
down below there; a few scattered lamps flickered in the flute-dell,
and in Tartarus a couple, like deadly tiger-eyes, still lingered. He
went down into the vacant land away over the silent, flat grave,--up
through his gloomy, downward-ascending cavern-avenue,--and into his
bed. "To-morrow!" said he with energy, and meant his vow of
steadfastness.
EIGHTEENTH JUBILEE.
Gaspard's Letter.--The Blumenbühl Church.--Eclipse of
the Sun and of the Soul.
79. CYCLE.
If in the foregoing night a strange, hostile spirit cruelly drove
against each other and away from each other human beings with bandaged
eyes, so will that spirit on the morning after, when from a cold cloud
he surveyed his battle-field with sparkling eyes, have almost smiled at
all the joys and harvests which lie prostrate round about him down
below there.
In Blumenbühl, Rabette, in lonely corners, wrings her hands with
trembling arms, and breathes upon the wall-plaster, to wipe away the
redness of wet eyes; out of Lilar comes Albano, gloomily looks upon the
earth instead of its inhabitants, and from the astronomical tower gazes
eagerly into the heavens, and seeks no friend; Roquairol musters up
horses and riders, and makes himself, out in the country, a merry,
drunken evening; Augusti shakes his head over letters from Spain,
and reflects upon them disagreeably, but deeply; Liana leans in an
easy-chair, all crushed, with her face falling towards her shoulder,
and nothing blooming in it any longer save innocence; her father
strides up and down, with a reddish-brown complexion; she answers but
faintly, lifting from time to time her folded hands a little. Before
the night-spirit on the cloud men's time goes swiftly by, as a fleeting
pair of wings without beak or tail; the spirit has near him the distant
week when Albano shall see by night from the observatory how in the
Blumenbühl church there burns an altar-light, how Liana kneels therein
with uplifted hands, and how an old man lays his own on her serene,
shining brow, which directs itself with tearless eyes toward heaven.
The spirit looks down deeper into the months; he writhes around himself
for delight, and grins over all dwelling-places and pleasure-haunts of
men which lie about him; often a laugh runs round along all his open
hell-teeth, only sometimes he gnashes them under the cover of the
lip-flesh.
Look away,--for he too sees and wills it,--and step down from the
wintry spectre among the warm children of men, and on the firm ground
of reality, where flying time, like the flying earth, seems to rest
upon steadfast roots, and where only eternity, like the sun, seems to
rise.
Albano's wound, which cut through his whole inner man, you can best
measure by the bandage which he sought to bind around it. Our grief may
be guessed from the solace and self-deception we resort to. The next
morning he let his griefs discourse across one another, and lay still,
before their funeral wail, as a corpse; then he rose up, and spoke thus
to himself: "Only one of two things is possible,--either she is still
true to me, and only her parents now constrain her,--then they again
must be constrained, and there is nothing at all to be lamented,--or
else, from some weakness or other, perhaps towards her tyrannical and
beloved parents, she is no longer true to me, or it may be out of
coldness toward me, or from religious scruples, error, and so on; in
that case I see," he continued, and tried to tread his two feet deeper
and firmer into the ground, without, however, having any _purchase_,
"nothing else to be done than to do nothing; not to be a crying
suckling, a groaning sickling, but an iron man; not to weep blood over
a past heart, over the ashes of death lying deep upon all fields and
plantations of my youth, and over my monstrous grief." Thus did he
delude himself, and mistake the necessity of consolation for its actual
presence.
Every evening he visited the star-tower out of the city, on the
Blumenbühl heights. He found the old, solitary, meagre,
eternally-reckoning, wifeless, and childless keeper, always friendly
and unembarrassed as a child, making no inquiries after war-news,
journals of fashion, and poesies, and never paying money for his
pleasure, except on the coach to Bode and Zach. But the old eye
sparkled when it looked from under the sparse eyebrows into heaven, and
his heart and tongue rose to poetry when he spoke of the highest
mundane spot, the light heaven over the dark, low earth,--of the
immense, universal sea without shore, wherein the spirit, which in vain
seeks to fly across it, sinks exhausted, and whose ebb and flow only
the Infinite One sees at the foot of his throne,--and of the hope of a
starry heaven after death, which then no earthly disk, as now, shall
intersect, but which shall arch itself around itself, without beginning
and without end.
If Socrates humbled the proud Alcibiades with a map of the world, so,
when this in turn is annihilated by a chart of the heavens, must our
pride and sorrow on the earth be still more put to the blush. Albano
was ashamed to think of himself, when he looked up into the immense
ascending night above him, wherein days and morning twilights abide and
move. He edified himself and his teacher when he spoke of _this_: how
even now overhead, in the immensity, spring-times and paradises of
new-born worlds and thundering[15] suns and earths burning up are flying
across each other's paths, and we stand here below like deaf men under
the sublime hurricane, and the roaring tempest and torrent shows itself
to us, so far off, only as a still, stationary, white rainbow on the
brow of night.
As often as Albano's great eye came back from heaven, it found the
earth brighter and lighter. But at length the night came, which the
hostile spirit had already so long lived in anticipation. It was
already very late, and the heavens quite serene; the nebulæ crowded
down nearer, as higher market-towns;[16] the sky seemed more white than
blue. Albano thought of the hidden loved one, who, were she by his
side, would still more consecrate the heavens and himself with her
heartful of unceasing prayers; when suddenly, through his lowered
telescope, he espied light in the Blumenbühl church,--the princely
vault open,--Liana kneeling at the altar, with uplifted hands,--and an
old man near her, as if blessing her. Fearfully stood the torch-flames
and Liana's face and arms upside down; for the telescope caused
everything to appear inverted.
Albano, shuddering, begged the astronomer to look that way. He too saw
the apparitions, to him, however, nameless. "There are probably people
in the church," said he, indifferently. But Albano rushed down,--hardly
allowing the astonished astronomer time to call out after him with an
invitation to the total eclipse of the sun tomorrow,--and ran toward
Blumenbühl. How his heart wore itself out in the race, and most of all
in the hollows, where he lost sight of the illuminated church, must
remain a secret, because it was hidden even from himself in the tempest
of his feelings. At last he saw the white church before him, but the
church-windows were without any light. He knocked hard at the iron
church-door, and cried, "Open!" he heard only the echo in the empty
church, and nothing more.
So he went back, with a stormy past in his bosom, through the sleeping
night: the earth was to him a spirit-island, the spirit-islands were to
him earths; his being, his city of God was burning up, he felt.
It lay on the morrow still in full glow, when the Lector came to him,
and brought him the incomprehensible message from Liana, that she
wished, about noon, to speak with him alone in Lilar. He was not this
time enraged against the suspected messenger, and said, full of wonder,
"Yes." With what bold, adventurous forms does our life-cloud rise to
heaven, ere it disappears!
80. CYCLE.
Let us go to Liana, with whom the riddles dwell! On the morning after
the illuminated night she felt, upon reflection, for the first time,
the horrible effort with which she had kept the promise of silence made
to her parents; she sank down with unstrung energies, but also with
renewed and ardent fidelity. "What," she kept continually saying to
herself,--"what then had this noble man done to deserve that I should
cause him a whole evening full of pangs? How often he looked at me
imploringly and judgingly! O that I might have been permitted to hold
up thy beautiful head, when thou leanedst it heavily against the rough
pine-bark!" What had made her most melancholy in the heavy midnight had
been his silent disappearance; how often had she looked up at his
thunder-house outwardly illuminated with lamps, while within only
darkness lay at the window! Now she felt how near he dwelt to her soul;
and she wept the whole morning over the night, and the ray of love
stung her more and more hotly, just as burning-glasses bring the sun
before us more potently when it looks down just after rain. The mother
showed her gratitude to her to-day for her yesterday's sacrifice in
keeping her word by returning love and confidence; though the father
did not by any means, since with him one was as little saved by good
works as with the elder Lutherans, but only damned for the want of
them; even now, however, when the parents had drawn from the previous
night the newest hopes of renunciation, the daughter could not humor a
single one of them.
How often she thought of Gaspard's letter! Is it a shot-off arrow,
which, with a wound on its poisonous point, is on its slow way from
Spain to Germany, or the friendly light of a never yet seen fixed star,
just entered upon its distant track towards our lower world?
Augusti had, however, received the letter even before the night of the
illumination, only he had not found good reasons for delivering it.
Here it is:--
"I must needs value your anxiety very much, without, however, adopting
it. Albano's love for Mademoiselle von Fr., in whom I have already
formerly remarked, with great pleasure, a certain _virtuosity_[17] in
virtue, so to speak, secures us and him against the influence of the
ghostly machinery, and against connections of other kinds which might
well be more dangerous for his studies and his warm blood. Only one
must leave this kind of youthful plays to their own course. If he
becomes too closely attached to her, then he may see to the
_dénouement_ of the affair. Why shall we cut this pleasure still
shorter for him, when you, too, already complain to me of the
sickliness of the fair one? In the latter part of autumn I shall see
him. His brave, vigorous nature will know well how to bear privation.
Assure the Froulay house of my best sentiments.
G. d. C."
The Lector would gladly have thrown this letter into the paper-mill, so
little was there in it that was "_ostensible_." To be sure, Gaspard's
murderously polished and pointed irony about Liana's sickliness, if he
showed her the letter, would still remain, to this innocent,
unsuspecting peace-princess, a sheathed blade. The north-wind of
egotism, too, which ran through the communication would not, as it was,
after all, a favorable side-wind for Albano's prosperous passage
through life, be felt or heeded by the lovers; but that was the very
rub; for she might look upon Gaspard's disguised "No" as a "Yes," and
just fatally entangle herself in the thread whereby a friend would draw
her up over her steep precipice.
Meanwhile the letter must be delivered; but he did it with long,
hesitating evasions, which were intended apparently to withdraw the
veil for her from the covered "No." She read it with fear, smiled,
weeping, at the murderous irony, and said, softly, "Yes indeed!" The
Lector had already half a hope in his eye. "If the knight," said she,
"thinks so, can I do less? No, good Albano; now I remain true to thee.
My life is so short, therefore let it be cheering and devoted to him as
long as is in my power."
She thanked the Lector so warmly and pleasantly for the arrow from
Spain, that he had not the capacity of being hard enough to thrust home
its darkly poisoned end into the fair heart. She begged him, for the
sake of sparing him, not to be present at her firm explanation with her
father, but rather, at most, out of indulgence to her own and her
mother's feelings, to take upon himself the task of making her
explanation to her mother. He consented simply to--both, instead of
one, of these things.
The gentle form stepped quietly into her father's presence, and there,
shrinking not before thunder and lightning, carried her explanation
through to a close, saying that she severely rued her disapproved love,
that she would bear all penalties, and do and suffer all, both here and
with the Princess, as "_cher père_" should demand, but that she dared
not longer offend the innocent Count of Zesara by the show of a most
undutiful desertion. At this address the Minister, who had suffered
himself, in consequence of her recent submissive self-denial, to be
lifted up by refreshing expectations, now stretched prostrate on the
ground, dashed down from his Tarpeian rock, could not utter a single
sound but this: "Imbécille! thou marriest Herr von Bouverot; he takes
thy picture tomorrow; thou sittest to him." He took her, with stern
hand and three terribly long strides, to his lady. "She will remain,"
said he, "under guard in her chamber; no one may visit her except my
son-in-law; he will paint the Imbécille _en miniature_." "Go,
Imbécille!" said he, beside himself. Her entire want of womanly cunning
had actually, to the statesman, drawn a curtain over her deep, sharp
eye. A straightforward man and mind resembles a straight alley, which
appears only half as long as one which runs by crooks and turns.
The Lector, who never meant to be regarded as a special amateur of
connubial sham-fights, had already taken himself off. The thirty years'
war of the spouses--for it only wanted a few years of that--gained life
and reinforcement. The old bridegroom diffused over his face that
convulsive smile which, with some men, resembles the convulsive quiver
of the cork when it announces the bite of the fish. He asked whether he
were now wrong in trusting neither daughter nor mother, both of whom he
charged with a partisan understanding against him, and insisted that
now, after such proofs, he ought not to be blamed either for stricter
measures or for a straightforward march to his object; and with the
sitting, for which the German gentleman had twice begged him, he
commenced the campaign. The Minister's lady, as a punishment for Liana,
remained silent on the subject of so excessively great a present to
Bouverot as a miniature likeness would be.
The tender daughter, jammed and crushed in the meeting between two
stone statues, represented to her mother, that she could not possibly
hold out under so long inspection of a man's eye, and least of all Herr
von Bouverot's, whose looks often went like thorns into her soul.
Hereupon the father replied and retorted in the mother's name, by
drawing a chair up to the desk, and inviting, on the spot, the German
gentleman to come to-morrow and paint. Then Liana was sent away with a
word which drew even from this delicate flower the lightning-spark of a
momentary hatred.
The Imperial peace-protocol lay open now before the two spouses, and
there merely wanted some one to dictate, when the Minister's lady rose
up, and said, "You must learn to respect me more."
She had the coach tackled, and drove off to the Court Chaplain,
Spener's. She knew Liana's respect for him, and his omnipotence over
her pious disposition. Even to herself he was still imposing. Down from
that earlier theological age in which the Lutheran Father-confessor
still reigned nearer to the Catholic, he had, through the power and
magnanimity of his character, brought a shepherd's staff, which was
distinguished from a bishop's staff only by being made of better wood.
She must needs narrate to him twice over Liana's relations; the ardent,
indignant old man could not at all comprehend or believe a love which
must have been spun out right under his old eyes without his knowledge.
"Your excellence," he at length answered, "has, indeed, committed a
mistake in not communicating to me this important circumstance before
to-day. How easily, with God's help, would I have conducted all to a
blessed issue! However, there is nothing lost. Let your excellence send
the maiden this very night to me, but alone, without you; that must be
done; then I stand pledged for the rest!"
Objections and cautions would merely have inflamed the old man's
ambition and anger,--both which still worked on beneath the ice of his
hoary hair; she therefore confidently promised him all, with that
submissiveness, which she had also transmitted as an inheritance to
Liana.
Right hopefully did Liana receive the command of a night ride to the
good, pious father. She started off with only her devoted maiden. With
deeply agitated soul she appeared before her father-confessor. She
opened herself to him as to a God; he decided just as if he were one.
What a sight for another eye less proud than Spener's would have been
this lowly, but composed saint, whose heart, like a sunbeam, always
appeared loveliest in its breaking asunder.
But here the history moves in veils! The old man commanded her maiden
to stay behind, and took her alone over into the silent Blumenbühl. He
unlocked for her the church, lighted a torch at the altar, in order
that the desolate darkness might not play any prelude to her timid eye,
and completed what her parents could not.
How he extorted from her the promise to renounce her Albano forever is
a mystery watched and hidden by the Great Sphinx of the oath which she
swore to him,--only the far-off man, who lost the fair soul, had from
the observatory of the suns gazed at the bright church-windows and
discovered behind them disturbing apparitions, without knowing that
they were true, and decided his life.
She went back again coldly across the meadows and mountains of old
days, which had once been so bright, to the dwelling of the old man,
who dismissed her with greater reverence than had marked his reception
of her. On the night-journey she was mute, and wrapped up in herself,
and exchanged not a word with her maiden. Her parents still awaited
her; the mother looked anxiously out into the night and into the
future. At length the living carriage rolled into the court. Great and
mighty as one who, having been executed in innocence, starts up into
life again before the dissector and, regarding him as the judge on
high, speaks with unfettered freedom and gladness, so did she come into
the presence of her parents: like the cold marble of a god's form, she
stood there, pale, tearlessly cold and calm. She knew it not, and she
willed it not, but she soared high over life, even beyond a child's
love,--she could not kiss her mother so fervently as once,--she stood
undismayed before her blustering father, and said, then, without a
tear, without emotion, without a blush, and with soft voice, "I have
this night renounced my love before God. The pious father has convinced
me." "And had the man better reasons for it _in petto_ than I?" said
Froulay. "Yes," said she; "but I have sworn in the Temple to keep
silence until time discloses all. Now I pray you by the All-just One
only to allow me to give him back in person his letters, and tell him
that I cease to be his, not, however, from fickleness, but from duty; I
entreat this, dear parents. Then may God dispose of the rest, and I
shall never be disobedient to you again." The wretched father, puffed
up still more by this triumph, would fain have made this last prayer of
the dying heart bitter to her, and even insinuated a flying suspicion
of the motive of the interview; but the mother, smitten in her fair
soul by the fairest, interceded warmly, and contemptuously and
arbitrarily decided in the affirmative. Nor did Liana seem to take much
notice of the paternal No. When he had gone, the mother, weeping for
bliss, snatched the silent form to her embrace; but Liana wept not so
easily upon her bosom as once out of love, whether it was that her
heart was too much exalted, or that it came back just as slowly into
the old condition as it went out of it. "Receive thanks, daughter,"
said the mother; "I shall now make thy life more happy." "It was happy
enough. I was to die; therefore I must needs love," said she. So she
went smiling into the arms of sleep, with hard-beating heart. But in
dream it appeared to her as if she were sinking away in a swoon, losing
her mother, and struggling up again fearfully out of the grasp of
flying death, and then weeping for joy that she lived again. Thereupon
she awoke, and the glad drops, softly released by the dream, still
flowed from her open eyes, and softened like a thawing-wind the stiff
soil of life.
Ye great or blessed spirits above us! When man here, under the poor
clouds of life, throws away his fortune, because he prizes it less than
his heart, then is he as blessed and as great as you. And we are all
worthy of a holier earth, because the sight of the sacrifice exalts,
and does not oppress us, and because we shed burning tears, not from
pity, but from the deepest, holiest love and joy.
81. CYCLE.
Warmly and brilliantly did the sun, who today, like the unhappy one,
was to be eclipsed, begin his morning race. Liana awoke on the
burial-day of her love, not with yesterday's strength, but faint and
languid, somewhat cheered, however, by the prospect of a return of her
peaceful time. The mother, although herself sickly, pressed her, early
in the morning, to her heart, in order to prove the pulse of the heart
most precious to her. Liana looked affectionately and yearningly, with
moist eye, into her moist eye a long time, and was silent. "What wilt
thou?" asked her mother. "Mother, love me more now, as I am alone,"
said she. Then in her mother's presence she bound together all Albano's
letters, without reading them, except the one in which he begs her
brother for his love. She sported with her mother, as fate does with us
and as poor parents do with their children, who at first give them
bright, gay garments, because these are more easily dyed into dark
ones.
Her mother sought gradually to take away from her her spiritual
fantasies, the death-moss, as it were, which clung sucking to her
green, young life. "Thou seest," said she, "how thy angel can err,
since he approved thy love, which thou now condemnest." But she had an
answer: "No, the pious father said, it had been right until the time
when he told me the secret, and that the Bible says, one must forsake
everything for love." Thus, then, does this poor creature, as they tell
of the bird of Paradise, soar straight upward in heaven, until she
drops down dead.
She manifested to her mother almost a feverish gayety,--a sunshine on
the last day of the year. She said, how it refreshed her, that she
could now speak freely with her dear mother of her former lovely days.
She portrayed to her Albano's great, glowing heart, and how he deserved
the sacrifice, and the "pearly hours" which they had lived together.
"After all," said she, cheerfully, but in such a way that tears came
into the hearer's eyes, "nothing of it has really passed away.
Remembrances last longer than present reality, as I have conserved
blossoms many years, but never fruits." Yes, there are tender female
souls which intoxicate themselves only among the blossoms of the
vineyard of joy, as others do only with the berries of the vine-hill.
The Lector's note arrived with the intelligence that Albano was
awaiting her in Lilar.
Now, as the hour of interview drew so near, she grew more and more
uneasy. "If I can only persuade him," said she, "that I have acted as
an upright maiden!" Before exchanging her morning chamber for the
mourning-carriage, she set all things to rights there for drawing, when
she should return; she had, she said, had a very bad dream, but she
hoped it would not come to pass.
With her work-basket on her arm, in which the letters lay, she stepped
into the carriage, which they had to open, because its sultry air
oppressed her. But the sultriness was the breath and atmosphere of her
own spirit, and everything beautiful which met her became to her to-day
a benumbing poison-flower. Fearfully she kept grasping and pressing the
hand of her mother, because every cry, every form that darted by,
fluttered over her like a rustling storm-bird; a crier, with his rough
tone, cut across her nerves; they trembled more gently again, only when
a pastor and his servant passed by with the sick-cup for the evening
drink of weary people. O, the fair way was long to her! She had so long
to hold together with fainting powers the breaking heart, which was to
speak so firmly and decidedly and distinctly with her beloved.
The sky was blue, and yet neither of them remarked that it was
beginning to be dark without clouds, since the moon already stood with
her night upon the sun. As they passed over the woodland bridge into
the living Lilar, where on all branches hung the old bridal-dresses of
a decorated past, Liana said, with intense earnestness, to her mother:
"For God's sake, not into the old castle of the dead!"[18] "But
which way then? That is his rendezvous," said the mother. "Anywhere
else,--into the Dream-temple. He sees us already; yonder he goes over
the gates," said she. "God Almighty be with thee, and speak not long,"
said the weeping mother, as she went from her into the temple, in whose
mirrors she could behold the parting of the innocent beings.
Albano came slowly along down through the walks; he had cleared
his eye of tears and his heart of storms. O, how had he hitherto,
like a long-tossed mariner, peered into his dark clouds, in order
between their misty peaks to discover the mountain-peaks of a green
continent!--that he was to-day to lose so much, namely all, his most
mournful conclusions had not gone so far as that; nay, he maintained so
much tranquillity, that he sent back overhead the little Pollux, who
came dancing after, not with threats, but with presents.
At last he stood with quivering lips before the beloved, beautiful
form, who, childlike, pale, trembling, and watching her work-basket,
looked upon him a little, and then struggled with her sinking eyes.
Then his heart melted; the flood of old love rushed back high into his
life. "Liana," said he, in the softest tone, and drops fell from his
eyes, "art thou still my Liana? I am still the same as ever; and hast
thou too not changed?" But she could not say no. A gash was made into
the arteries of her life, and tears sprang up instead of blood. His
good form, his familiar, brotherly voice stood again so near to her,
and his hand held hers again, and yet all was over; a hot sun-glance
flashed across her former flowery garden-life, and showed it in a
melancholy illumination, but it lay far from her. "Let us," he went on,
"be strong now at this singular meeting again. Tell me very briefly
everything, why thou hast hitherto been so silent and done so. I have
nothing to say,--then let all be forgotten." He had unconsciously
raised her hand, but the hand pressed itself down and trembled withal.
"Dost thou tremble, or do I?" said he. "I, Albano," said she, "but not
from any fault: I am true, O God, I am true even unto death!" He looked
upon her with a wild, wondering look. "To you, to you I am so, but it
is all over," she cried, confounded and confounding. "No," she added,
commandingly, as he was accidentally on the point of going with her out
of the perspective range of the Dream-temple,--"no, my mother wishes to
see us from the Dream-temple yonder."
He grew red at the maternal espionage; his eye flashed into hers a
certain resentment against the "you," and his hot looks wanted to draw
out of her agitated face the delaying riddle. Necessity commanded
strength; she began.
"Here"--she stammered, and could hardly raise the basket for trembling,
"your letters to me!" He took them gently. "I have resigned you," she
continued; "my parents are not to blame, although they did not like our
love. There is a mystery, which concerns merely you and your happiness,
that has constrained me to part from you and from every joy." "Do you
wish your letters too?" said he. "My parents--" said she. "The mystery
about me?" said he. "An oath binds me," said she. "Last night in the
church at Blumenbühl before the priest?" he asked. She covered her eyes
with her hand and nodded slowly.
"O God!" cried he, weeping aloud, "is it thus with life and joy and all
truth? So? How ye have lied"--he looked at his letters--"about eternal
fidelity and love! Whom did you mean then, ye hellish liars?" He flung
them away. Liana was about to pick them up; he trod on them violently,
and looked bitterly upon the affrighted one. Now he fell into a storm,
and drew and poured out, like a water-wheel during the influx of the
floods, his tumultuous, suffering breast, and ceased not his cruel
pictures of his love, her weakness, her coldness, his pain, her former
oaths, and her present violated one about his mysterious fortune, which
he said he did not want at all. Her silence wrought him up to a wilder
whirl. Her quick, intense breathing he heard not.
"Do not torment thyself. It is all impossible now," she answered,
imploringly. "O," said he indignantly, "I will not re-change the
change, for the Lector and the Pope would again change that!" He fell
now into that induration and palsy of the heart which is peculiar to
man; the stream of love hung as a frozen, jagged waterfall over the
rocks.
"I did not think thou wert so hard," said she, and smiled strangely. "I
am harder still," said he; "I speak as thou actest." "Leave off, leave
off, Albano,--it grows so dark to me. O, I will instantly to my
mother!" she cried suddenly. The two old black spiders, let down by
Fate, stood again over her fair eyes and overspun them, busily
spinning, with a closer and closer web; and over the golden strips of
life already grew a gray mould.
"It is the solar eclipse," said he, ascribing the blindness to the
faintly gleaming sickle of the quarter-sun. He saw overhead in the blue
heaven the lunar lump cast like a gravestone into the pure sun. Not so
much as a real shadow, but only enervated shadows lived in the
uncertain gray light; the birds fluttered timidly around; cold shudders
played like ghosts of the noonday hour in the little, faint lustre
which was neither sunlight nor moonlight. Gloomy, gloomy lay life
before the youth; through the long black marble colonnade of the years
sorrows came stalking on like panthers, and grew brightly spotted under
the retreating sun-glances of the past.
"This is indeed very fitting for to-day," he continued; "such a sudden
night without evening-twilight. Lilar must be covered up to-day. Look
up at the moon,--how darkly it has rolled over the sun; once she too
was our friend. O, make it still gloomier, utter night!" "Albano,
forbear; I am innocent, and I am blind. Where is the temple and my
mother?" she cried, moaning; the spiders had fast closed the wet,
tearful eyes.
"By the Devil, it is the eclipse of the sun!" said he, and gazed into
the blindly groping, timid face, and guessed all; but he could not
weep, he could not console. The black tiger of the most cruel anguish
hung clambering on his breast and carried him away. "No, no," said
Liana, "I am blind, and I am innocent too."
Little Pollux, made happy by his presents, had led along a begging
mute, who followed with the ringing mute's-bell. "The dumb man cannot
say anything," said Pollux. Liana cried, "Mother, mother! my dream
comes, the death-bell tolls."
The Minister's lady rushed out. "Your daughter," said Albano, "is blind
again, and God send the father and the mother, and whoever is to blame
for it, their retribution of misery." "What is the matter?" cried
Spener, suddenly stepping out, who had previously seen the meeting, and
had come to the mother. "A wretched maiden; your work too!" replied
Albano.
"Farewell, unhappy Liana!" said he, and was about to depart; but
stopped, and after gazing wildly on the beautiful, tortured countenance
which wept with its blind eyes, he cried, "Dreadful!" and went away.
Long did he lie, up in the thunder-house, with his eyes buried in his
arms, and when he at last, and quite late, without knowing where he
was, roused himself, as from a dream, he saw the whole landscape
illumined by a serene day, the sunshine unveiled and warm in the pure
blue, and the close carriage with the blind one rolled rapidly across
the woodland bridge. Then Albano sank down again on his arms.
NINETEENTH JUBILEE.
Schoppe's Office of Comforter.--Arcadia.--Bouverot's
Portrait-painting.
82. CYCLE.
Now that Albano lived without love or hope; now that he had seen the
polar-star of his life fall like a shooting-star into a wilderness
still as death; now that every one of his actions and every
recollection darted out a scorpion-sting, and he sent back Liana's
letters, forsook Lilar, the house of the Doctor, the Lector, Liana's
relatives, and the pious father; now that he directed his face,
gradually growing pale, only to books and stars; men who know no higher
sorrow than selfish sorrow must needs imagine that nothing weighs upon
his bosom but the ruins and rubbish of the shattered air-castles of his
hope and youthful love. But he was more nobly unhappy and disconsolate:
he was so, because he had for the first time made a human creature and
the best of beings miserable,--his beloved blind! Into this abyss of
his heart all neighboring fountains of sorrow flowed together. The
smallest gayly-painted shards of his urn of fortune were as if
shattered afresh, when he heard from day to day that the poor girl,
although daily stationed in the bath-house before the healing
fountains, was nevertheless brought back each time without a ray of
light or hope, and that she now feared nothing more, lamented nothing
more on this robbers' earth, than that death might perhaps close her
eyes before they had seen her mother again.
O, the wound of conscience is no sear, and time cools it not with his
wing, but merely keeps it open with his scythe! Albano called back to
remembrance Liana's bitter entreaty for indulgence; and then it was no
consolation to him, that, during that eclipse of the sun, he had not
wished to sacrifice her eyes, but only her heart. In the burning-glass
and magnifying-mirror of consequences fate shows us the light, playing
worms of our inner man as grown-up and armed furies and serpents. How
many sins pass through us unseen and with soft looks, like nightly
robbers, because, like their sisters in dreams, they steal not out from
the circle of the breast, and get no outward object to fall upon and
strangle. The fair soul readily detects in an accident a sin. Only
those hard stormers of heaven and earth before whose triumphal chariots
there starts up beforehand a wagon-rampart full of wounds and
corpses,--that is, the fathers of war, which, in the long course of
history, ministers have oftener been than princes,--only these
can calmly kindle all the volcanoes of earth, and let all their
lava-torrents stream down, merely that they may have--fair prospects.
They manure Elysian fields into a battle-field, in order to raise
therein a redder rose-bush for a mistress.
The first thing Albano did, when he arrived at the Doctor's house, was
to trudge out of it down into the remote valley town, in order neither
to see the suspected Lector, still less to hear daily the malicious
Doctor Sphex upon the relapse of the blindness. Only the faithful
Schoppe jogged off with him, especially as he, by a well-adapted course
of behavior, had contrived to get up an opposition party against
himself in the Sphex family, which could no longer suffer him in the
house. The Librarian's warmth toward the Count had grown very much with
the Lector's coldness, and on similar grounds. The bold march out to
Lilar and the passionate wildness of the youth had fastened him more
closely to Albano's side. "I thought at first," said Schoppe, "the
young man was coming to be nothing but an elderly one, when I saw him
stalking along so to school. I often held the man in the moon--where
notoriously, from an absence of thirst and atmosphere, there is nothing
to drink--to be a greater tippler than he. But at last he strikes out.
A youth must not, like old Spener, represent everything in bird's-eye
perspective, from the apex downward. He must, in the beginning, like
incipients in authors' studies and painters' studios, make all lines a
little too large, because the little ones come of themselves. There are
thunder-steeds, but no thunder-asses and thunder-sheep; as, however,
the tutors and lectors would be glad if there were, and would be glad
to have such to drive along before them,--they who, like the
billiard-markers, suffer no open fire in the pipe, but only one under
cover."
Albano lived alone now among books. Liana's brother came to him seldom,
and then ice-cold, and said nothing of the patient, although he always
stayed for her sake. As he himself had once woven the first web of her
blindness, he must, of course, especially with his _un_painted fire of
love for his sister, have a real hatred for him who had drawn it over
her again; so Albano thought, and gladly bore it as a punishment. So
much the oftener did the Captain let himself be drawn to the German
gentleman's, upon whose good graces he now, contrary to what was to be
expected, always won. It is a question--that is to say, there can be no
question--whether his talent and inclination for winding himself around
the most unlike men was not mere coldness toward all hearts, all of
which he only travels over, because he does not mean to dwell in any
one.
Rabette, also, wrote the Count several bills of impeachment about the
Captain's growing coolness. In one she even says, "Could I only see
thee, in order for once to have some one who would let me weep, for
laughter I have not for a considerable time any longer known." The good
Albano entered this desertion also upon his sin-register, as if it were
grandchild to his devil's children.
The Princess prevailed occasionally to allure him out of solitude, when
she put the gentle bird-whistle to her fair lips. She seemed, for the
father's sake, to take a veritable interest in the melancholy son, who
showed no grief, to be sure, but also no joy. Besides, the masculine
woman, more helmeted than hooded, loves to place the pillow of rest
under the sick head, and under the faint head her arm as a chair-back;
and such a one consoles fondly and tenderly, often more tenderly than
the too feminine woman. Almost every day she visited her future
court-dame and visionary sister[19] at the Minister's, and could
therefore tell the lover all about her. Meanwhile, she acted as if she
knew nothing of Albano's relations to the blind one;--the very
dissembling betrays tender forbearance toward two beings at once, Albano
said;--so she could freely give him all the medical reports of the fair
sufferer's case, as well as the opinions entertained about her in
general. After the manner of the strong women, she bestowed upon her
all just praise, without any petty womanish deduction, and wished
nothing so much as her restoration and future company.
"I am capable of doing everything _for_ an uncommon woman, as well as
everything _against_ a common one," said she, and asked whether his
father had already written him about her plan with Liana. He said no,
and begged her for it. She referred him, however, to the paternal
letter, which must soon come. She found fault only with Liana's
propensity to be always embroidering fantasy-flowers into the
groundwork of her life, and called her a rich Baroque pearl.
But from all these conversations Albano returned only more confused to
Schoppe; he heard only lip-solace, and the death-sentence, that the
long-suffering soul from whom he had stolen creation was becoming more
and more immured in the deepest cavern of life, near which only the
deeper one of the grave lies bright and open. Every soft, soothing,
warm gale wafted to him by the sciences or by human beings passed over
that cold cavern, and became to him a sharp norther. O, had he been
called to release her from his sinking arms amidst lovely days, into a
long, eternal Paradise, and had she forgotten him in the intoxication
of rapture, he too could have forgotten that; but that he should have
thrust her away into a cold realm of shadows, and that she must needs
remember him for sorrow,--this must he forever remember.
Schoppe knew no "plaster" for all this distress (to use his own fine
play on words) "except the plaster of Paris,"[20] namely, an excursion.
At least, he concluded, when one is out in the country, all inquiries
about one's health are done with, and all these poisonous anxieties
about the answer; and on return one finds much pain spared or in fact
all the trouble gone.
Albano obeyed his last friend; and they rode off into the Principality
of Haarhaar.
83. CYCLE.
Whoever thinks that Schoppe, on the way, was to Albano a flying
field-lazaretto of consolation,--an _antispasmodicum_,--a Struve's
table of ailments and remedies,--a pulverized _Fox's lung_ for the
hectic of the heart, &c., and that at every milestone he delivered a
consolatory sermon,--whoever thinks so, Schoppe himself laughs him to
scorn.
"What then," said he, "if misfortune does knead a young man thoroughly
and soundly in her kneading-trough? The next time, he, who is now in
the power of grief, will have her in his power. Whoso has never borne
anything, never learns to bear up under anything."[21] As regards
weeping, he, as a Stoic, was, as may well be imagined, an enemy to it
at least; Epictetus, Antonine, Cato, and several such, men made less of
ice than of iron, would very willingly, as he so often said, have
allowed the body these extreme unctions of sorrow, provided only the
spirit beneath and behind all had kept itself dry. The true
disconsolateness is to desire and to accept consolation; why will not
one then for once just go through with the pang out and out without any
physic?
But his view of things and his actual life became, without his express
intention, powerful over the Count, whom everything great only
enlarged, as it belittles others. Schoppe sat like a Cato upon ruins,
but, to be sure, upon the greatest of all; if the wise man ought to be
a barometer-tube at the Equator, in which even the tornado produces
little displacement, he was a wise man. Accidentally he tore open the
Count's glued-up wings at an inn by means of the _Hamburg Impartial
Correspondent_, which he found lying there. Schoppe read aloud out of
it two extensive battles, wherein, as by an earthquake, lands instead
of houses were buried, and whose wounds and tears only the evil genius
of the earth could be willing to know; thereupon he read,--after the
death-marches of whole generations, and the rending open of the craters
of humanity,--with uninterrupted seriousness, the notices, under the
head of Intelligence, where one solitary individual mounts upon an
unknown little grave and announces and asseverates to the world, which
surely condoles with him,--"Frightful was the blow which laid our child
of five weeks--"; or, "In the bitterest anguish which ever--"; or,
"Overwhelmed with the loss of our father in the eighty-first year of
his age," &c.
Schoppe said, he pronounced that to be right; for every distress, even
a universal one, after all, housed itself only in one individual
breast; and were he himself lying on a red battle-field full of fallen
sheaves, he would sit up among them, if only he could, and deliver to
those lying around him a short funeral sermon upon his shot-wound. "So
has Galvani observed," he said, "that a frog which stands in electrical
relations quivers as often as thunder rolls over the earth."
He adhered to this position, also, out of doors. He cited with
disapprobation what Matthison remarks,--as a traveller's note by the
way,--that in the modern town, _Avenches_, in Switzerland, on the site
of the Helvetian capital, _Aventicum_, which was laid in ruins by the
Romans, the plan of the streets and walls may be traced by the thinner
strips of grass; whereas, in fact, the same stereographic projections
of the past lay manifestly all about in every meadow,--every mountain
was the shore of a deluged old world; every spot here below was
actually six thousand years old and a relic; all was churchyards and
ruins on the earth, particularly the earth itself; "Heavens!" he
continued, "what is there, in fact, which is not already gone
by,--nations, fixed stars, female virtue, the best Paradises, many just
men, all Reviews, Eternity a _parte ante_, and just now even my feeble
description of all this? Now, if life is such a game of nothingness,
one must prefer to be _card-painter_ rather than _king of cards_."
A vigorous, high-minded man, like Albano, will hardly, then, in the
midst of thirty-years' wars, last days, emigrating nations, crumbling
suns, strip off his coat, and exhibit to himself or the universe the
ruptured vein which bleeds on his breast.
So stood matters, when the two friends at evening climbed a half-open
woodland height, from which they saw below them a wonderful glory-land,
so friendly and foreign, as if it were the remains of a time when the
whole earth was still warm, and an ever-green orient land. It seemed,
so far as they could see for the trees and the evening-sun, to be a
valley formed by the angle of mutually approaching mountains, and
stretching away immeasurably toward the west. A party-colored windmill,
flinging round its broad wings before the sun, confused the eye, which
would fain analyze the throng of evening lights, gardens, sheep,
and children; on both steeps white-clad children, with long, green
hat-ribbons flowing behind them, were keeping watch; a motley Swissery
ran through the meadow-green along the dark brook; on a high-arched
hay-wagon there drove along a peasant-woman, dressed as if for a
marriage festival, and at the side went country-people in Sunday
finery; the sun withdrew behind a colonnade of round, leafy
oaks,--those German liberty-trees and temple-pillars,--and they
soared aloft, transfigured and magnified in the golden blue. At this
moment the surprised travellers saw the shaded Dutch village near
below,--composed, as it were, of neat, painted garden-houses clustered
together, with a linden-circle in the middle, and a young, blooming
hunter not far off, or an Amazon, who with one hand took off her hat,
stuck full of twigs, and with the other let the crossbeam with the
bucket mount high over the well.
"My friend," inquired Schoppe of an official messenger who came behind
them with tin-plate and knapsack, "what do you call this village?"
"Arcadia," was the reply. "But to speak without any poetic white-heat
or culminating of fancy, my poetic friend, how is that canton down
below there properly named?" asked Schoppe again. Petulantly the
official messenger answered, "Arcadia, I say, if you cannot retain
it,--it is an old crown-domain; our Princess Idone (Idoine) keeps
herself there year in and year out for constancy, and does everything
there at her own pleasure; what will you have more?" "Are you, too, in
Arcadia?"[22] "No, in Sowbow," answered the messenger, very loud, over
his shoulders, for he was already five steps ahead.
The Librarian, who saw his friend in great commotion at the messenger's
discourse, put to him joyfully the question, whether they could have
found better night-quarters than these, except these very same in the
moon of May. But how was he astounded at Albano's plunging back into
the limbo which conscience and his love had kindled! Idoine's illusive
resemblance to Liana had suddenly flashed across his thoughts. "Know'st
thou," said he, continuing to tremble more violently in his agitation
by reason of the magic of evening, "wherein Idoine is unlike her? She
_can_ see," he himself added, "for she has not seen _me_ yet. O
forgive, forgive, firm man! truly I am not always so. She is dying at
this moment, or some calamity or other draws near to her; like a smoke
before a conflagration, it mounts up duskily and in long clouds within
my soul. I must absolutely go back."
"Believe me," said Schoppe, "I shall one day tell you all that I now
think; for the present, however, I will spare you." Neither did this,
however, produce any effect; he turned about; but through the whole of
the next day's journey his cup of sorrow, which Schoppe had scoured so
shiny, continued to be stained with moisture and blackness. They could
not arrive till evening, when a magic mist of twilight, moonlight,
smoke, vapor, and cloud-red made the city a somewhat strange place.
Albano's eagle eye clove the smoke in twain, and it vanished. He saw
only the blind Liana, on the high Italian roof, run against the
statues, or headlong down over the edge. Wildly, and without uttering a
sound, he ran through the deep streets,--lost sight of the Palace
buried in buildings, and ran so much the more furiously; he imagined to
find her crushed to atoms on the pavement,--he sees the white statues
again, she holds one entwined within her arms, and the old gardener, he
of the _Cereus serpens_, stands with his hat on his head before her.
When, at length, he arrived directly under the walls of the Palace,
there stood overhead a strange maiden beside her, and below women,
running together, looked up, asking one another, "God, what is the
matter now?" Liana looked (so it seemed) to the heavens, wherein only a
few stars burned, and then for a long space into the moon, and then
down upon the people; but directly she stepped back from the statues.
The gardener came out of the court, and said, as he passed, to his
inquiring wife, "She can see." "O my good man," said Albano, "what do
you say?" "Only just go up there!" he replied, and strode busily away.
At this moment came Bouverot on foot,--Albano, with a short bow and
greeting, stepped across his path. Bouverot looked at him a moment: "I
have not the honor of your acquaintance," said he, wildly, and hurried
off.
84. CYCLE.
Take now a nearer look at the blind Liana! From the day when her mother
bore her home, a ruined creature, there gradually began for her, under
her solar eclipse, a cooler and a tranquil life. Earth had changed; her
duties towards it seemed rolled off from her; the silver-glance of
youth, like a human look, now blinded; her short joys, those little
May-flowers, plucked off already under the morning-star; the object of
her first love, alas! as her mother had predicted, not so tender as she
had thought, but very masculine, rough, and wild, like her father, time
and the future extinguished, and the coming days for her only a blind,
painted show-gate, which men's hands do not open, and through which she
can no longer force her way, except with her unencumbered soul, when it
has thrown back on the earth the heavy trailing mantle of the flesh.
Her heart clung now--as Albano did to a man's--more than ever to a
female heart, which beat more tenderly and without the fever of the
passions; just as the compass-needle shows itself as a spiral lily, so
did virtue show itself to her as female beauty.
Her mother never left her blind-chair; she read to her, even the French
prayers, and kept her up by consolation; and she was easily consoled,
for she saw not her mother's distressed face, and heard only the quiet
tones of her voice. Julienne, since the burial of the first love, had
thrown off an old crust, and a fresh flame for her friend sprang up in
her heart. "I have dealt by thee honestly," said she, upon one
occasion; then they secretly declared themselves to each other, and
then their souls, like flower-leaves, linked themselves together to
form one sweet cup. The Princess spoke seriously about studies and
sciences, and gained even the mother, whom in men's society she had
pleased less. At evening, before retiring, Caroline flew down, still,
as from the heaven of joy, into her realm of shadows, and grew daily in
brilliancy and beauty of complexion, but spoke no more; and Liana fell
softly to sleep, while they looked upon each other.
At times a pang came to her when she thought that she should perhaps
never see her precious parents, especially her mother, any more; then
it seemed to her as if she were herself invisible and already making
her pilgrimage alone down the deep, dark avenue to the next world and
heard her friends and companions at the gate far behind calling after
her. Then she tenderly sent her love over, as if out of death, and
rejoiced in the great reunion. Spener visited his pupil daily; his
manly voice, full of strengthening and solace, was, in her darkness,
the evening-prayer-bell, which leads the traveller out of the dusky
thicket back to the more cheerful lights. Thus was her holy heart drawn
up to still greater heights of holiness, and the dark passion-flowers
of her sorrows shut themselves up to sleep in the tepid night of
blindness. How different are the sufferings of the sinner and those of
the saint! The former are an eclipse of the moon, by which the dark
night becomes still blacker and wilder; the latter are a solar eclipse,
which cools off the hot day, and casts a romantic shade, and wherein
the nightingales begin to warble.
In this way Liana maintained, in the midst of the sighs of others
around her, and in the tempestuous weather that enveloped her, a
tranquil, healing bosom. So does the tender white cloud often in the
beginning hurry away, a torn and tattered fugitive through the heavens,
but at last move along in rounded form and slow pace overhead there,
when down below the storm still sweeps over the earth, and whirls and
tears everything. But, good Liana, all the thirty-two winds, let them
waft pleasant days to thee or blow them away, hold on longer than the
dead calm of repose!
85. CYCLE.
The Minister, when she came home from Lilar with murdered eyes, had set
in _his_ right eye a hell, and into his left a purgatory, for no
fatality had ever before so cheated him, namely, so completely upset
all his projects and prospects,--the office of court-dame for his
daughter, that ring guard on the finger of the Princess, and finally
every chance of a haul with his double-woven net.
Unspeakably did the man struggle against the spoon in which fate
offered him the powder wherein he was to let the swallowed diamonds of
his plans go down; he delivered the strongest sermons,--so did he, like
Horace, name his Satires against "his women"; he was a war-god, a
hell-god, a beast, a monster, a satan,--everything;--he was in a frame
now to undertake anything and everything,--but what availed it?--Much,
when the German gentleman surprised him just in this mood of moral
feeling. He made no scruple of refreshing the paternal memory on the
subject of the promised sitting of the daughter for a miniature, and
asserting his claim to it; for the rest he was all-knowing, and seemed
to know nothing. For the sitting-scene of a blind girl he had cut out
certain original, romantic situations, according to the notices which
he had drawn out of the Captain. His artistic love for Liana had
hitherto suffered little, and his slow, stealthy advances and
reconnoitrings were in accordance with his viper-coldness and his
worldsman-like energy. The old father--who in life, as in an imperial
advertiser, always sought a partner with 60-80,000 dollars for his
business--declared himself anything but averse to the match. These two
falcons on one pole, trained by one falcon-master, the Devil,
understood and agreed with each other excellently well. The German
gentleman gave to understand that her miniature-likeness would, through
her striking resemblance to Idoine, who, like her, had never been
willing to sit, be serviceable for many a piece of pleasantry with the
Princess, but still more indispensable to his "flame" for Liana, and
just now, in her blindness, one might, indeed, sketch her without her
knowledge,--and he would write under the picture, _La belle aveugle_,
or something of the kind. The old Minister, as was said, swallowed
the idea with perfect _goût_. As the Italian female singers carry a
so-called mother instead of a passport on their journeys, so did he
regard himself as in a similar sense a so-called father; he thought to
himself: at all events there is little more to be done with the girl;
she lies there as so much dead capital, and pays a miserable interest;
I can take the god-penny-medal which the German gentleman in his
godfatherly capacity offers to me as the father like a name for the
child, and just put it in my pocket.
This duplicate of rogues was held back in mid-current merely by a
drag-rake, which threatened to draw the prey out of their pike-like
teeth. An old, scolding, but true-souled chambermaid from Nuremberg was
the rake; she could not be drawn away from Liana, or reduced to
silence. Bouverot, to be sure, a Robespierre and destroying angel to
his servants, would, in Froulay's place, have caused the Nuremberg
dame, a couple of days beforehand, to be furnished by a servant with
some complex fractures, and then thrown upon the street; but the
Minister--his heart was soft--could not do that. All that was possible
for him was this: He sent for her to his chamber; represented to her
that she had stolen his Magdeburg ear; remained, in his present state
of hearing, deaf to every objection, but not to every incivility, and
at last found himself under the necessity (a word and a blow) of
driving the thievish wench out of service. With every successor to the
office, as being a new one, money would have weight, he knew.
He proposed thereupon to beg of the Princess an invitation for himself
and his lady to tea and supper, to bespeak the miniature-painter, to
instruct the new chambermaid, and put all things in a right train.
Two tigers, according to the legend, digged the Apostle Paul's grave;
so do our two men here scratch away at one for a saint. So much the
more confidently do I say this, as I do not otherwise see through--if
nothing is to be made but a picture--the meaning of so many
circumstances. But the father I could almost excuse. In the first
place, he said expressly to the German gentleman, the Abigail might, in
his opinion, as well stay in the chamber, or in the adjoining one, in
case the patient wanted anything; secondly, the otherwise soft man had
contracted, from his ministerial commerce with justice, a certain grit,
a certain barbarity, which is so much the more natural to Themis,
passing sentence behind the bandage, and, as an Areopagus, without the
sight of the pains, as even Diderot[23] asserts that blind people are
more cruel than others; and, thirdly, no one could well be more ready
than he to pity the more deeply, in case she should die, the very child
whom he, as it was once pretended Jews and witches did with Christian
children, crucified, in order, like them, to do something with the
blood (as parents generally, and particularly human parents, can indeed
get over easily the misfortunes of those who are near and dear to them,
but hardly their loss, just as we, in the case of the hair of the head,
which is still nearer to us, feel not the singeing or cutting of it,
but very painfully the tearing of it up by the root); and, fourthly,
Froulay had always the misfortune that thoughts which in his head had a
tolerable, innocent hue, became, like muriate of silver or good ink,
black on the spot, when they once came to light.
Otherwise, and without taking these alleviating circumstances into
view, there remains, indeed, much in his conduct which I do not
vindicate.
The evening appeared. The Minister's lady went on her husband's arm to
the court. The new chambermaid had, as Bouverot's bridesmaid, already,
three days beforehand, made the most necessary arrangements or
manœuvres. She had, with great ease, borrowed for him Liana's
letters to Albano, as the mother, from habit, forgot that a present eye
was not necessarily a seeing one; and he could extract from them the
historical touches or watercolors, wherewith he could assume, before
the blind one, in case of a recognition on the stage, the semblance of
her hero,--namely, Albano's. With Roquairol he had played often enough
to have his voice, consequently Albano's, in his power. Methinks his
preparation-days for the festal evening were suitably spent.
He could, as little residences drink tea earlier than others, make his
appearance quite as early as a miniature-painter in September
absolutely must. When he beheld the silent form in the easy-chair, with
the discolored flower-cups of the cheeks, but more firmly rooted in
every purpose, a more coldly commanding saint, then did the
exasperation and inflammation which he had imbibed at once from her
letters kindle each other into a higher flame. Only in such chests,
strung at once with metal and catgut, with cruelty and sensuality, is
such an alliance of lust and gall conceivable. Bouverot's whole past,
the books of his life's history, ought, as those of Herodotus are to
the nine Muses, to have been dedicated to the three Fates, one to each.
He stole to the window, seated himself, set down his paint-box, and
began hastily to dot. Meanwhile Liana heard her very cultivated,
well-read chambermaid read to her out of the second volume of Fénelon's
_Œuvres Spirituelles_. Zefisio was not affected by the Archbishop in
the least,--what he caught about pure love (_sur le pur amour de Dieu_)
he perverted into an impure by applications, and let himself be
devilishly inflamed by the divine,--for the rest what there was
touching in Liana's relations he left as it was, as he had now to
paint. Odiously did his motley-colored panther-eyes lick like red,
sharp tiger-tongues over the sweet, soft countenance!--"Dear Justa,
stop, the reading is disagreeable to thee, thou breathest so short!"
said she at last, because she heard the portrait-painter breathe. It
was no sacrifice to him, but a foretaste, a sweet early-bit, to put off
the kiss of this tender little hand and lip and the whole exhibition
of his burning heart, until he saw her outline dotted off with the
poison-tints on the white ivory by the rapid dotting machine of his
hand. At length he had her, many-colored[24] on white. "Very well, dear
Justa," said she, "the prayer bell tolls; thou canst not see any
longer. Rather lead me to the instrument,"--namely the harmonica. She
did so. Bouverot gave Justa a sign to retire. She did that too. The
yellow garden-spider now ran up to the tender, white flower. The spider
heard her evening choral not without enjoyment, and the devout
upcasting of her ruined eyes seemed to him a right picturesque idea,
which the true _painter_[25] resolved to transfer to the ivory leaf, if
it could be done.
"Lovely goddess!" cried he, suddenly, with Albano's stolen voice, into
the midst of those holy tones, which Albano had once, in a happier
hour, but more nobly, interrupted. She listened with alarm, but hardly
believing her own ear in this night. The astonishment did not displease
the prospect painter--for her face was his prospect--by any means
whatever; "remember this harmonica in the thunder-house." He confounded
it with the water-house. "You here, Count?--Justa! where art thou?"
cried she distressfully. "Justa, come here!" he added, calling after
her. The maiden followed his voice and his--eye. "Gracious damsel?"
asked she. But now Liana had not the heart to ask about the door and
the admission-ticket of the Count. To speak French with her lover
would not do, as the maid understood it; hence it was that in Vienna in
the years of the Revolution they forbade this language very
judiciously, because it so surely and pestilentially spreads a certain
_equality_,--_freedom_ follows,--between the nobility and the servile
orders.
Maliciously and joyfully did Bouverot, to whom she now seemed to betray
a serviceable mistrust about the Count, which pointed out a freer
play-room for his character mask, remind the perplexed maiden of her
commands for Justa; she must now cause her to bring a light.
"_Infidèle_," he thereupon began, "I have overcome all obstacles, in
order to throw myself at your feet and supplicate your forgiveness. _Je
m'en flatte à tort pent être, mais je l'ose_," he went on, made more
passionate through her. "_O cruelle! de grace, pourquoi ces régards,
ces mouvements? Je suis ton Alban et il t'aime encore,--Pense à
Blumenbühl, cé sejour charmant,--Ingrate, j'esperais te trouver un peu
plus reconnaisante. Souviens-toi de ce que tu m'a promis_," said he, by
way of sounding her, "_quand tu me pressas contre ton sein divin_." ...
A pure soul mirrors, without staining itself, the unclean one and feels
darkly the distressing neighborhood, just as doves, they say, bathe
themselves in limpid water, in order to see therein the images of the
hovering birds of prey. The short breath, the wavering tone of speech,
every word, and an indefinable something, drove the frightful spectre
close before her soul, the suspicion that it was not Albano. She
started up; "Who are you? God, you are not the Count. Justa, Justa!"
"Who else could it be," replied he, coldly, "that would dare to assume
my name? _O, je voudrais que je ne le fusse pas. Vous m'avez écrit, que
l'esperance est la lune de la vie. Ah, ma lune s'est couchée, mais
j'adore encore le soleil, qui l'éclaire_."
Here he grasped the hand of this eclipsed sun fighting with a dragon.
Then his gnawed finger-nails and dry fingers, and a passing touch of
his order-cross, discovered to her the real name. She tore herself
loose with a shriek, and ran away without seeing whither, and fell into
his hands again. He snatched her violently to his meagre hot lips:
"Yes, it is I," said he, "and I love you more than does your Count with
his _étourderie_."
"You are wicked and godless toward a blind maiden; what will you?
Justa! is there no one then to help me? Ah, good God, give me my eyes,"
she cried, flying, without knowing whither, and again overtaken.
"Bouverot! Thou evil spirit!" she cried, warding off in places where he
was not. He, like gunpowder, cooling on the tongue, and singeing and
shattering when greed kindled him, placed himself at a considerable
darting-distance from her, threw a painter's eye at the charming waves
and bendings of her tempest-struck flowerage, and said quietly, with
that mildness which resembles the eating and devouring milk of spunges:
"Only be calm, fairest; it is I still; and what would it all avail
thee, child?"
Giddy with the snake-breath of distress, wandering nature began
to sing, but only beginnings: "Joy, thou spark of Heaven-born
fire!"--"I am a German maiden." She ran round and sang again: "Know'st
thou the land?" "Thou evil spirit!"
At this moment the giant snake, thus charmed, reared himself aloft on
his cold rings, with darting tongue, to spring and to coil; "_Mon
cœur_," said the snake, who always in passion spoke French, "_vole
sur cette bouche qui enchante tous les sens_." "Mother!" cried
she, "Caroline! O God, let me see, O God--my eyes!" Then did the
All-gracious give them back to her once more; the agony of nature, the
noisy preparations for the burial, opened again the eye of the tranced
victim.
How eagerly she flew out of the chamber of torture! The disappointed,
mortified beast of prey was still reckoning on blindness and
distraction. But when Bouverot saw that she ran lightly up the stairway
to the Italian roof, then he merely sent the maid, who came running in,
after her, to see that she received no injury; and now again he held
her previous blindness for dissimulation. He himself took from the
chamber the miniature sketch, and dragged himself like a hungry,
wounded monster sullenly and slowly out of the house.
TWENTIETH JUBILEE.
Gaspard's Letter.--Partings.
86. CYCLE.
"She can see again," cried Charles to the Count the morning after, in
the intoxication of joy, without concerning himself at all about the
cold relations of the recent period; and was entirely his old self. His
enmity was more frail and fleeting than his love, for the former dwelt,
in his case, on the ice, which soon melted and ran away, the latter
upon the fluid element, on which he always sailed. Coloring, Albano
asked who had been the ophthalmist. "A well-meant fright," said he;
"the German gentleman made as if he would paint her, when my parents,
according to appointment, were not there,--or he really painted
her,--at this moment I have but a confused idea of the whole,--all at
once she heard a strange man's voice, and terror and fright worked
naturally like electric shocks!" Although the Captain heard, down on
the bottom of his billowy sea, all voices only confusedly, nevertheless
he had this time heard correctly; for Liana had extorted from her
mother the concealment of the martyrology, in order to take away from
her brother the occasion of proving his love to her by a duel with her
adversary.
Albano laid up many questions about the dark history in his breast; and
broke off the conversation by a description of his journey.
After some days he heard that Liana with her mother had left the city,
and gone to visit the mountain-castle of a solitary old noble widow,
which lay above Blumenbühl. Out in the clean country, it was hoped
light would fall again upon her life, and the maternal hand was to
paint over anew its fading colors. The Minister, who, like other old
men and like old hair, was hard to frizzle and to shape, was, in this
last and deepest pitfall of fate, struck quite spiritless, so that he
did not devour Liana, who was also caught therein, but let her go. The
whole story was to the public eye very much covered over and beflowered
like the wall of a park. Only the Lector knew it in full, but he could
hold his tongue. He demanded back the miniature from the German
gentleman, in the name of the mother; that personage gave in its stead
cold, hollow lies; nevertheless Augusti, at the entreaty of mother and
daughter, knew how to control himself, and sacrifice to them the
challenge wherewith he was going to take satisfaction for all.
Our friend was now, since his conscience had been appeased with respect
to accidental consequences, smitten with new and unmingled sorrow over
the emptiness of his present condition; the most precious soul was
nothing to him any longer; his hours were no more harmoniously
sounded out by the chime of love and poesy, but monotonously by the
steeple-clock of every-day routine. Therefore he took refuge with men
and friendship, as under trees still blooming in greenness near the
smouldering ruins of a conflagration; women he shunned, because
they--as strange children do a mother who has lost hers--too painfully
reminded him of his loss. How gayly, on the contrary, does a general
lover, who celebrates only all-souls' and all-saints' days, go about
like one new-born, when he has happily slipped the noose of a heart
which had caught him, and now can reckon up all female forms again with
the prospect of a redeemed estate! The very feeling of this freedom may
animate him to surrender himself the oftener, by way of tasting it
again, as prisoner to a female heart.
Albano let himself be drawn by the hands of Roquairol and Schoppe to
wild festivals of men,--which would fain render the sphere-music of joy
on the kettle-drum;--they were only the thorn-festivals after the
feasts of roses. So there is a despair which relieves itself by
revelry; as, for example, during the plague at Athens,--or in the
expectation of the last day,--or in the anticipation of a Robespierre's
butcher-knife. The Captain went back deeper into his old labyrinth and
wilderness, and drew, so far as he could, the innocent youth into his
popular festivals with so-called sons of the muses, into his recruiting
places of pleasure, just as if he had need on his own account to bring
his friend down to himself a little.
Albano fancied, with these Dithyrambics, his weeping soul would be
quite sung to sleep, and he only gave it in addition a gentle rocking.
Meanwhile, although he would not have confessed it, his young rosy
cheeks grew as pale as a forehead, and his face fell in like a
piano-forte key upon the snapping of a string. It was touching and hard
at once, when he sat laughing among his friends and their friends with
a colorless face,--with higher, sharper bones of eyes and nose,--with a
wilder eye, which blazed out of a darker socket. From music, especially
Roquairol's, wherein under the hackneyed, artistical alternation of
damper and thunder, the passionate rolling and plunging of our ship
were too vividly represented, his ear and heart fled as from a
destroying siren. The broken-off lance-splinter of the wound rankled
and festered in his whole being. O, as, in the years of childhood, when
the rosy cloud in heaven seemed to him to lie directly on the mountain
where it was so easy to be reached, the magnificent pile retired far
into the sky so soon as he had climbed the mountain, so now did the
aurora of life and the spirit, which he would fain seize and hold near
to him, stand so high and far overhead beyond his reach in the blue!
Painfully does man attain the alp of ideal love; still more painful and
dangerous--as in the case of other alps--is the descent from it.
One day Chariton came into town, merely to hand him at last a letter of
her husband's,--for Dian, like all artists, much more easily and
agreeably executed a work of art than a letter,--wherein he expressed
his joy that he should see Albano so soon. "Is he coming back, then?"
asked the Count. She exclaimed, with a sad tone: "Body o' me!--that
indeed!--according to his former letter he has still to stay his year
longer." "I do not understand him so," said Albano.
The same evening he was invited by the Princess to see the engravings
of Herculaneum, which had come by the same post with Chariton's letter.
She welcomed him with that animated look of love which we put on before
one who will immediately, as we hope, pour out before us the unmeasured
thanks of his heart. But he had nothing to pour out from his. She asked
at length, somewhat surprised, whether he had received no letters
to-day from Spain. She forgot that the post is courteous and
expeditious toward no house except the princely house. As, however, his
letter must certainly be already lying in his chamber, she allowed
herself to take upon herself the part of Time, who brings all things to
daylight, and told what was in the letter, namely, "that she should in
autumn undertake a little artistic journey to Rome, upon which his
father would accompany her, and he him if he liked; that was the whole
secret." It was only the half; for she soon added, that she should be
most glad to extend the pleasure of this tour to the best draughtsman
in the city, as soon as she recovered,--Liana.
As the whole heart is suddenly illuminated with joy, when, after a
long, dark rainy day, at last in the evening the sun arches for himself
under the heavy water a golden, open western gate, stands therein pure
and brilliant as in a rose-bower before the mirroring earth, announces
to her a fairer day, and then, with warm looks, disappears from the
open rose-bower, so was it with our Albano.
The fair day had not yet come, but the fair evening had. He left the
Herculanean pictures under their rubbish, and hastened, as quickly as
gratitude allowed, back to the letter of his father, who so seldom sent
such a favor.
Here it is:--
"Dearest Albano: My affairs and my health are at length in such order,
that I can conveniently carry out my plan, which I have proposed, in
conjunction with the Princess, of making a short artistical tour to
Rome this very autumn, to which I invite thee, and will come myself to
take thee in October. The rest of the travelling party will not
displease thee, as it consists entirely of clever connoisseurs, Herr
von Bouverot, Mr. Counseller of Arts Fraischdörfer, Mr. Librarian
Schoppe (if he will). Unfortunately Herr von Augusti must stay behind
as Lector. Thy teacher in Rome (Dian) is expecting thee with much
eagerness. They have written to me that thou art particularly partial
to the new court-dame of the good Princess, Madlle. von Fr., whom I
recollect as a very capital draughtsman. It will interest thee,
therefore, to know, that the Princess takes her, too, with her,
especially since, as I hear, a journey for health is as needful to her
as to me. In spring, which, besides, is not the pleasantest season of
the year in Italy, thou wilt return to Germany to thy studies. One
thing more, in confidence, my best one! They have unreservedly
communicated to my ward, the Countess of Romeiro, thy ghost-visions in
Pestitz. Now, as she is to spend the autumn and winter during my
absence with her friend, the Princess Julienne, and besides will arrive
earlier than I, let it not strike thee as strange that she shuns thy
acquaintance, because her female and personal pride has been mortified
by the juggling use of her name, and feels itself challenged to a
direct refutation of the juggler. In fact, if the game has really
a serious object, one could not well choose worse means to effect
it.--Thou wilt do what honor bids, and, although she is my ward, not
insist upon seeking her company. All this between ourselves. Adio!
"G. v. C."
These prospects,--the elevating one of being so long with his father;
the healing one of wading out from this deep ashes into a freer,
lighter land; the flattering one that the sick, tormented heart in the
mountain-castle might perhaps, in citron and laurel groves, find, yes,
and haply give back, too, joy and health again,--these prospects
were, what the joys of human beings are, very pleasant walks in a
prison-yard.
On this happy walk he was soon disturbed by the image of the coming
Linda, not, however, on his own account, but on that of his poor sister
and his friend. How malignantly must this strange _ignis fatuus_,
thought he, dance into the nightly conflict of all these clashing
relations! Roquairol seemed, besides, to leave the too intensely loving
Rabette alone with her solitary wishes. She sent him weekly, under
cover to Albano,--once it was the reverse,--her epistolary sighs and
tears, all which he coldly pocketed, without speaking of them or of the
forlorn one.
Albano, weighing in silence Liana and Rabette, compassionated, himself,
the unequal lot of his over-hasty friend, over whose sun-steeds only an
Amazon and Titaness, but not a good country-girl, could fling the
bridle, and whose Psyche's-chariot and thunder-car seemed to him too
good for a mere connubial post-chaise or child's carriage. What a
strangling struggle of all feelings will there be, thought he, when he,
kneeling at the nuptial altar with Rabette, accidentally looks up, and
discovers among the spectators the never-to-be-forgotten lofty bride of
his whole youth, and must stammer out the renouncing "Yes!"
He was therefore in doubt whether he might venture to disclose to him
the contents of the letter, but not long indeed. "Shall I," said he,
"dissemble and juggle before a friend? May I dare to presuppose him
weak, and shun the acceleration of connections, which, after all, must
come with her?"
So soon as Charles came to him, he spoke to him first of the intended
journey, and even added the request for his company, moved by the
thought of the first parting with his youthful friend. The Captain,
whose heart always needed the sounding-board of fancy for musical
utterance, was not able, on the spot, to have or to picture any
considerable emotions about the farewell. Then Albano, who could not
get it over his lips, gave him the whole letter.
During the reading, Roquairol's whole face became hateful, even in his
friend's eye. He darted then such a flaming look of indignation at
Albano, that the latter involuntarily and unconsciously returned it.
"O, verily, I understand it all," said Charles; "so was the thing to be
solved. Only wait till to-morrow!" All muscles in him were alive, all
features distorted, everything in commotion, just as, in a violent
tempest, little cloudlets whirl around each other. Albano would fain
question and detain him. "To-morrow, to-morrow!" he cried, and went off
like a storm.
87. CYCLE.
On the morrow, Albano received a singular letter from Roquairol, for
the understanding of which some notices of his connection with Rabette
must be prefixed.
Nothing is harder, when one really loves one's friend, than scarcely to
look at that friend's sister. Nothing is easier (except only the
converse) than, after being disenchanted by city hearts, to be
enchanted by country hearts. Nothing is more natural for a general
lover, who loves all, than to love one among them. It needs not be
proved that the Captain had been in all three cases at once, when he,
for the first time, told Rabette she had his heart, as he was pleased
to call it. She, of course, should not have worshipped, at such a
nearness, the Hamadryad in such a Upas-tree, with whose sap so many of
Cupid's arrows are poisoned; but she and most of her sisters are so
dazzled by men's advantages as not to see men's misuse of them.
In the beginning many things went well; the pure innocence of his
sister and his friend threw a strange magic light upon the unnatural
union. The prominent advantage was, that he, as concert-master of his
love, needed little more of Rabette than her ears; loving was with him
talking, and he looked upon actions merely as the drawing of our soul;
words being the colors. There is a twofold love,--love of the feeling
and love of the object. The former is more man's love; it wishes the
enjoyment of its own being, the foreign object is to it only the
microscopic object-bearer, or much rather subject-bearer, whereupon it
beholds its "I" magnified; it can therefore easily let its objects
change, if only the flame into which they are thrown as fuel continues
to blaze up high; and it enjoys itself less through actions, which are
always long, tedious, and troublesome, than by words, which picture and
promote it at the same time. The love of the object, on the contrary,
enjoys and desires nothing but its welfare (such is for the most part
female and parental love), and only deeds and sacrifices give it peace
and satisfaction; it loves for the sake of blessing, whereas the other
only blesses for the sake of loving.
Roquairol had long since devoted himself to the love of the feeling.
Hence it was that he must make so many words; at the Rhine-fall of
Schaffhausen he would not have been in the best, that is, the most
excited mood, merely because he could not--since the flood out-thunders
everything--have delivered anything himself in praise thereof, on
account of the sublime uproar.
His Romance with Rabette after the declaration of love was divided into
distinct chapters.
The first chapter he sweetened for himself in her society, by the
consideration that she was new and belonged to him and yielded him an
admiring obedience. He painted for her therein great pieces of
beautiful nature, mixed therewith some nearer emotions, and thereupon
kissed her; so that she really enjoyed his lips in two forms, that of
action and that of speech; from her, as has been said, he wanted only a
pair of open ears. In this chapter he assumed also some possibility of
their marriage; men so easily confound the charm of a new love with the
worth and duration of it.
He set himself about his second chapter, and swam therein blissfully in
the tears with which he sought to write it out. In fact, this ocular
pleasure afforded him more true joy than almost the best chapters.
When, in such mood, he sat and drank by her side,--for, like a dead
prince's heart, he loved to bury his living one in cups,--and then
began to describe his life, particularly his death, and his sorrows and
errors in the interval, and his suicide and infanticide at the
masquerade, and his rejected and spurned love for Linda: who was
then more moved to tears than himself? No one but Rabette, whose
eyes,--having been, through her father and brother, as little
acquainted with men's tears as with elephants', stags', or crocodiles'
tears,--so much the more richly, but not so sweetly as bitterly,
streamed over into his sorrow and love. This poured fresh oil again
into his flame and lamp, until he at last, like that pupil of Goethe's
master wizard, with the brooms that carried water, could no longer
govern his spirits. Poetic natures have a sympathetic one; like
justice, they keep a surgeon in their pay near the rack, who
immediately sets again the broken limbs, yes, even regulates beforehand
the places for the crushing fractures.[26]
A man should never weep on his own account, except for ecstasy. But
poets and all people of much fancy are magicians who--exact
counterparts of the burnt enchantresses--weep more easily, although
more at images, than at the rough, sore calamity itself, in order to
put the poor enchantresses to the worst water-ordeal. Trust them not!
On the machinelle-poison-tree the rain-drops are poisonous which roll
from its leaves.
Meanwhile it must never be concealed, that the Captain in this second
chapter strengthened his resolution of really marrying the good and so
tender Rabette. "Thou knowest," he said to himself, "what upon the
whole there is in and about women, one or two deficiencies, more or
less, make little difference; thy man-like folly of requiring her, as
they do hired animals, to be warranted without fault, may surely be
regarded as gone by, friend."
Now he set himself down to dip into the ink for his third chapter,
wherein he merely sported. His lip-omnipotence over the listening heart
refreshed him to such a degree, that he made frequent experiments to
see whether she could not laugh herself almost to death. Women in love,
by reason of weakness and fire, take the laughter-plant most easily;
they hold the comic heroic-poet still more as their hero, and prove
therewith the innocence of their laughing at him. But Roquairol loved
her less when she laughed.
In his fourth chapter,--or sector, or Dog-Post-day, or letter-box,[27]
or in whatever other way I have (ludicrously enough) made my divisions,
instead of using the Cycle,--in his fourth Jubilee, I say, it went, so
to speak, harder with him. Rabette grew at last sated and sick of his
eternally jumping off and opening the pot of the lachrymal glands that
hung between the wheels, to grease his mourning-coach. Deep emotion was
every day made more disagreeable and bitter to him; he must be ever
giving longer and more vivid tragedies. Then he began to perceive
that the tongue of the country maiden is not the very greatest
landscape-painter, soul-portrayer, and silhouettiste, and that she
hardly knew how to say much more to him than, "Thou, my heart!" He
made, on that account, in the fourth chapter, rarer visits; that again
helped him considerably, but only for a short time. Fortunately, the
half-mile from Pestitz to Blumenbühl counted in with Rabette's lines
and rays of beauty; in the city, in the same street, or in fact under
the same roof, he would have remained too cold from very nearness.
The most natural consequence of such a chapter is the fifth, or the
chapter of alternations, which still blows up some flames by the
ever-swifter interchange of reproaches and reconciliations, so that the
two, as electrical bodies do little ones, alternately attract and repel
each other. Sometimes he drank nothing, and merely treated her harshly.
Sometimes he took his glass, and said to her: "I am the devil, thou the
angel." The greatest offence to his love his father gave, by the
approbation which, most unexpectedly, he bestowed upon it. It was to
the Captain exactly as if he should realize the silver-wedding if he
ever solemnized the golden one. In the service of the goddess of love
one more easily grows bald than gray; he was already morally bald
toward the silver-bride. Fortunately, a short time before the
illumination Sunday in Lilar,[28] he carried all sins of omission and
commission so far, that on Sunday he was in a condition to curse them;
only after scolding and sinning could he with comparative ease love and
pray, as the grovelling spring-scarabee snaps up only when turned over
on his back. It has probably slipped, or at least escaped, the memory
of few readers, among the events of that Sunday, that Roquairol sat in
the morning with Rabette in the flute-dell, that Rabette sang there in
a depressed and lonesome mood, and how he, dissolved thereby,
encountered his friend glorified by love. The dell affair is
natural; after so long coolness (not coldness) on this breezy, free
Otaheite-day, with all that he had in his hands (another's hand--and a
flask) beside that heart of hers, as warm and yet as tranquil as the
sun in the heavens,--and then the solitary orphan flute which he made
play its call,--and with his most hearty wish to profit somewhat by
such a day and sky,--under these circumstances he found himself
actually compelled to draw upon his genuine emotions, to give himself
vent on the subject of his past life (he resembled the old languages,
which, according to Herder, have many Preterites and no Present),--yes,
even on the subject of his death (also a fragment of the past),--and
then as on a heavenly way to move forward. Of course he went not far;
he let his blood of St. Januarius, namely, his eyes, become fluid
again, (his own blood having previously become so,) and then demanded
of the enraptured soul, whirled about in the fairest heaven nothing
less than--since she was mute before the pocket-handkerchief thrown to
her as the canary-bird is under the one thrown over him,--a faint
singing. Rabette could not sing; she said so, she declined, at last she
sang; but during the empty singing she thought of nothing save him and
his wild, wet face.
The most miserable chapter of all, which he brought out in his Romance,
may well be the sixth, which he wrote down on the night of the
illumination in Lilar. In the beginning he had left Rabette to stand
alone a mute, inglorious[29] spectator, while he ran, jumping up behind
the car of Venus full of strange goddesses. Gradually one pleasure
after another crept along toward him and gave him the Tarantula bite,
which was followed by a sick raving. As moderation is a true
strengthening medicine of life, so did he uncommonly seldom resort to
this powerful medicine, in order not to be obliged to use it in
stronger and stronger doses, and he did not accustom himself to it at
all. At last, when he was full, forms appeared in him as in Chinese
porcelain;[30] he stepped sympathizingly and lovingly to Rabette, and
fancied, as she did, that he was tender or affectionate towards her,
when he merely was so towards all.
He would fain draw her away from the hostile array of eyes, to seek
from her the kiss to which interdiction and privation lent honey again;
but she refused, because there, where the eye stops, suspicion begins,
when he unfortunately caught sight of the blind girl from Blumenbühl,
and could call her as a pretended guard of Rabette, in order to lead
her out of the temptation among men to the temptation in the
wilderness. Pressing her to him with such a passionate impetuosity of
love as he had never showed before,--so that the poor soul who had been
so forsaken and forlorn this evening wept over the return of all her
joys,--and speaking to her like an angel, who acts like none, he
involuntarily arrived with her at the silent Tartarus, where all was
blind and dumb.
Rabette had not suffered the blind girl to leave her; but when they
entered the catacomb-avenue, which holds only two persons, unless the
third will creep along in the water, the eyeless maid was stationed at
the gate, and so much the more, because he would not willingly let
himself be checked by a superfluous listener. And besides, what then
was there to fear in the very raree-show of the grave?
Within there he spoke about the everywhere stretched-out index-finger
of death,--how "it indicated that life, stupid as it is, should not be
made by us more stupid, but joyous." He seated himself by her side,
caressing her,--as the destroying angel sits invisible beside the
blooming child that plays in the old masonry, and into whose tender
hands he presses the black scorpion. It was the very spot where he had
sat in that first covenant-night, with Albano, opposite the skeleton
with the Æolian-harp, when his friend swore to him his renunciation of
Linda. His tongue streamed like his eye. He was tender, as, according
to the popular superstition, corpses are tender which mourners die
after. He threw fire-wreaths into Rabette's heart, but she had not,
like him, streams of words to quench them withal. She could only sigh,
only embrace; and men fall into sin most easily from weariness of good,
but tedious hearts. More swiftly did laughter and weeping, death and
drollery, love and wantonness, spring over into each other; moral
poison makes the tongue as light as physical makes it heavy. Poor girl!
the maidenly soul is a ripe rose, out of which, so soon as one leaf is
plucked, all its mates easily fall after. His wild kisses broke out the
first leaves; then others fell. In vain the good genius wafts holy
tones from the harp of death, and sends up angry murmurs in the
orcus-flood of the catacomb,--in vain! The darkest angel, who loves to
torture, but rather innocent ones than the guilty, has already torn
from heaven the star of love, to bear it as a murder-brand into the
cavern. The poor, narrow little life-garden of the defenceless maid,
wherein but little grows, stands over the long mine-passage which runs
away under Roquairol's wide-extended pleasure-camp; and the darkest,
angel has the lint-stock already lighted. With fiery greediness the
spark-point eats its way onward; as yet her garden stands full of
sunshine, and its flowers wave; the spark gnaws a little into the black
powder. Suddenly it tears open a monstrous flame-throat; and the green
garden reels, then flies, blown up, scattered to atoms, falls in black
clods out of the air down upon far distant places; and the life of the
poor maiden is all smoke and ruin.
But Roquairol's wide-spread and jointly rooted pleasure-parks withstood
the earthquake much more vigorously. Both then came up out of the
mine-passage sorrowfully, for the Captain had lost a little arbor in
the explosion; but they found no more the blind girl, who, in her
search for them, had lost herself. They encountered only the roving
Albano, who himself was sorely wailing and raving, although he this
evening had lost nothing but--pleasures.
Let us lead up the deluded maiden and her million companions with some
words before a mild judge! This is not the only thing which that judge
will weigh, that she, stupefied by the blossom-dust of a reeking spring
season of joys, smothered into dumbness with the virgin's veil,
prostrate before the storm of fancy (as women fall so much the more
easily before another's fancy and a poetic one, the seldomer their own
blows upon them, and accustoms them to standing firmly), suffered the
reward of a whole virgin life to die; but this is what most strongly
mitigates the sentence, that she bore love in her heart. Why, then, do
not the male sex recognize that the loving female, in the hour of love,
will really do nothing less than all for her beloved, that woman has
all power _for_ love, _against_ which she has so little, and that she,
with the same soul and at the same moment, would just as readily
sacrifice her life as her virtue, and that only the demanding and
taking party is bad, deliberately and selfishly?
The last or seventh chapter of his robber romance is very short and
contradictory. The third day he visited her in her garden, was
delicate, rational, temperate, reserved, as if he were a married man.
As he found her full of trouble, which she, however, only half
expressed, he accordingly, out of anxiety for her health, came again
several times; and, when he found that she had not suffered in the
least, he stayed--away. Towards Albano, during the aforesaid anxiety,
he behaved meekly, and, after it, he was the same as ever, but not
long; for when his sister, whom of all human beings he perhaps loved
most purely, became blind through Albano's wildness, he then, even on
account of a similarity of guilt, flung at him a real hatred, and
something like it at all his (Albano's) relations. Rabette got nothing
from him now but--letters and apologies, short pictures of his wild
nature, which must, he said, have free play-room, and which, fastened
to another, must beat and bruise and gall that one with the chain quite
as much as itself. All objections of Rabette's he knew how to remove so
well, as they consisted only in words, and not in looks and tears, that
he at last himself began to perceive he was right; and almost nothing
was left to the poor May-flower, crushed by the fall of this smooth
May-pole, than the real last word,--namely, the mute life, which is not
the first thing to announce to the murderer that he has smitten and
destroyed a heart.
88. CYCLE.
Here is Roquairol's letter to Albano:--
"It must once be, and be over; we must see each other as we are, and
then hate each other, if it must be so. I make thy sister unhappy; thou
makest mine unhappy and me too; these things just balance each other.
Thou distortedst thyself out of an angel to me more and more
passionately into a destroying angel. Strangle me, then, but I grapple
thee too.
"Now look upon me, I draw off my mask, I have convulsive movements on
my face, like people who live after drinking sweet poison. I have made
myself drunk with poison, I have swallowed the poison-pill, the great
poison globule, the earth-globe. Out with it freely! I exult no more, I
believe nothing more, I do not even lament right valiantly. My tree is
hollowed out, burnt to a coal by fantastic fire. When, occasionally, in
this state, the intestinal worms of the soul, exasperation, ecstasy,
love, and the like, crawl round again, and gnaw and devour each other,
then do I look down from myself to them; like polypuses, I cut them in
twain and turn them wrong end foremost and stick them into each other.
Then I look again at my own act of looking, and as this goes on _ad
infinitum_, what then comes to one from it all? If others have an
idealism of faith, so have I an idealism of the heart, and every one
who has often gone through with all sensations on the stage, on paper,
and on the earth, is in the same case. What boots it? If thou shouldst
die at this moment, I often say to myself, then, as all radii of life
run together into the minute point of a moment, all would verily be
wiped out, invisible; to me, then, it is as if I had been nothing.
Often I look upon the mountains and floods and the ground about me, and
it seems to me as if they could at any and every moment flutter asunder
and melt away in smoke, and I with them. The future life (as even the
present is hardly to be called a life), and all that hangs thereupon,
belongs to the ecstasies which one winks at; especially it belongs to
the ecstasy of love.
"As thou so readily assumest every difference from thyself to be
enervation, so do I say to thee outright: Only ascend farther, only
knead thyself more thoroughly, only lift thy head higher out of the hot
waves of the feelings, then wilt thou no longer lose thyself in them,
but let them billow on alone. There is a cold, daring spirit in man,
which nothing touches at all,--not even virtue; for it alone chooses
that, and is its creator, not its creature. I once experienced at sea a
storm, in which the whole element furiously and jaggedly and foamingly
lashed itself into commotion, and flung its waters pell-mell through
each other, while overhead the sun looked on in silence;--so be thou!
The heart is the storm; self is the heaven.
"Believest thou that the romancers and tragedians, that is, the men of
genius among them, who have a thousand times aped, and aped their own
apings of everything, divine and human, are other than I? What keeps
them and the world's people still real is the hunger after money and
praise; this eating gastric-juice is the animal glue, the salient
point in the soft floating and fleeting world. The apes are geniuses
among beasts; and the geniuses are--not merely before higher beings,
as Pope says of Newton, but even here below--apes, in aesthetic
imitation, in heartlessness, malignity, malicious pleasure, sensuality,
and--merriment.
"The last and last but one I reserve for myself. Against the
_longueurs_ (lengthy passages) in life's book,--a book which no man
understands,--there is no remedy except some merry passages, of which I
think no more so soon as I have read them. In order only to get over
this cold, hobbly life, I will surely sooner scatter below me rose-cups
than thistles. Joy is of itself worth something, if only that it crowds
out something worse before one lays down his heavy head and sinks into
nothingness.
"Such am I; such was I; then I saw thee, and would be thy _Thou_--but
it serves not, for I cannot go back; thou, however, goest forward, thou
becomest my very self one day,--and then I _would_ have loved thy
sister! May she forgive me for it! Here drink pure wine! I know best
how one fares with the women,--how their love blesses and robs,--how
all love, like other fire, _kindles_ itself with much better wood than
that which _feeds_ it,-and how, universally, the Devil gets all he
brings.
"O, why then can no woman love but just so far as one will have her,
and no further,--absolutely none? Hear me now: everywhere lazy
preachers would fain hold us back from all transitory pleasure by
telling us of the discomfort that comes after. Is not then the
discomfort transitory too? Rabette meant well with me, on the same
ground of desire upon which I meant well with her and myself. But does
any one know, then, what purgatorial hours one wades through with a
strange heart, which is full, without making full, and whose love one
at last hates,--_before_ which, but not _with_ which, one weeps, and
never about the same thing, and to which one dreads to unveil any
emotion, for fear of seeing it transmuted into nourishment of
love,--from whose anger one imbibes the greater wrath, and from its
love the lesser! And now to have absolutely the more joyous relations
screwed down forever to this state of torment, when they ought rather
to exalt us above the tormenting ones, the long wished for gods'-bliss
of life perverted forever into a flat show and copper-plate
engraving,--the heart into a breast and mask,--the marrow of existence
into sharp bones,--and yet, as to all reproaches of coldness, chained
only to silence, bound innocent and dumb to the rack,--and that, too,
without end!
"No, sooner give me the frenzy which one draws from the temple of love
as well as from that of the Eumenides! Better burn up in a real flame
of misery, without hope, without utterance, even to paleness and
madness, than be so loving and not loved! He who has once burned in
this hell, Albano, continues to frequent it forevermore: that is the
last misery. Can I not worry down life and death, and wounds and stings
beforehand?--and certainly I am not weak. Nevertheless, I am not the
man to put restraints upon a sentimental discourse, or harpsichord
fantasy, or reading or singing, not though sorrow in person should hold
before me a menace, undersigned by all the gods, that a female listener
whom I cannot endure would immediately thereupon become my lover, and
from that my mistress and my hell.
"The Greeks gave Love and Death the same form, beauty, and torch; for
me it is a murderous torch; but I love Death, and therefore Cupid. Long
has life been to me a tragic muse; willingly to the dagger of a muse do
I offer my breast; a wound is almost half a heart.
"Hear further! Rabette has a fine nature, and follows it; but mine is
for her a cloud of empty, transitory form and structure; she does not
understand me. Could she, then would she be the first to forgive me. O,
I have indeed treated her hardly, as if I were a destiny, and she I.
Resent, but hear![31] On the night of the Illumination her longing and
my emptiness brought us in the fiery rain of joy more warmly together;
among the shiningly mailed and smoothly polished court-faces her
ingenuous one bloomed lovely and living as a fresh child on the stage
or at court; we happened into Tartarus,--we sat down in the place where
thou didst swear to me thy resignation of Linda; in my senses wine
glowed, in hers the heart. O, why is it that, when one speaks and
streams, she has no other words than kisses, and makes one sensual from
ennui, and forces one to speak her speech? My mad boldness, which fancy
and intoxication breathe into me, and which I see coming on and yet
await, seized me and drove me like a night-walker. But always is there
in me something clear-seeing, which itself weaves the drag-net of
delusion, throws it over me, and carries me away entangled in its
meshes. So behold me on that night with the burning net-work about my
head; the rivulet of death murmurs to me, the skeleton sweeps across
the harp-strings,--but, enveloped, imprisoned, darkened, dazzled with
the fiery hurdle-work of pleasure, I heed neither annihilation nor
heaven, nor thyself and _that_ evening, but I drag all together and
into the hurdle,--and so sank thy sister's innocence into the grave,
and I stood upright on the royal coffin, and went down with it.
"I lost nothing,--in me there is no innocence; I gained nothing,--I
hate sensual pleasure. The black shadow, which some call remorse, swept
broadly along after the vanished motley-colored pleasure-images of the
magic-lantern; but is the black less optical than the motley?
"Condemn not thy poor sister; she is now more miserable than I, for she
was happier; but her soul remains innocent. Her innocence lay treasured
up in her heart as a kernel in the stony peach; the kernel itself burst
its mail-coat in the warm, nourishing earth, and forced a way for its
green leaves to the light.
"I visited her afterward. All her soul's pangs passed over into me; for
all actions and sacrifices on her account, I felt myself ready; but for
no feelings. Do what you will, thou and my father, I will positively,
in this stupid stubble-field of life, where one reaps so little in
freedom, not banish myself into the narrow thirty-years' hedge of
marriage. By Heaven! for the miserable, forced intoxication of the
senses, and under it, I have already endured more than it is worth.
"Not that which I yesterday read in thy presence gives me this
resolution,--as to that, ask Rabette about it,--and my frankness toward
thee is a voluntary offering, since the mystery between two might, but
for me, have remained a mystery still: but I will not be misapprehended
by thee,--by thee, the very one who, with so little reflection upon thy
inner being, so easily makest unfavorable comparisons, and dost not
perceive that thou didst sacrifice my sister in Lilar precisely so,
only with more spiritual arms, and didst cast her eyes and joys into
Orcus. I blame thee not; fate makes man a sub-fate to woman. The
passions are poetic liberties, which the moral liberty takes to itself.
Thou didst not, I assure thee, have too good an opinion of me; I am all
for which thou tookest me, only, however, still _more too_; and the
_more too_ is still wanting to thyself.
"O, how much swifter my life flies since I know that _she_[32] is
coming! Fate, which so oft plays weight and wheels, and swings the
pendulum of life with its own hand, heaves off mine, and all wheels
roll unrestrainedly to meet the blissful hour. _She_ is my first love;
before _her_ I tore up all my blooming years, and flung them to her on
her path as flowers; for _her_ I sacrifice, I dare, I do all, when she
comes. O, whoso fears nothing in the empty froth-and-sham-love, what
should he dread or decline in the real, living sun-love? Thou angel,
thou destroying angel, thou camest flying down into my stale, flat
life, thou fleest and appearest, now here, now there, on all my paths
and pastures: O tarry only long enough for me to dig my grave at thy
feet, while thou lookest down upon me!
"Albano, I behold the future and anticipate it; I see full clearly the
long net stretched over the whole stream which is to catch, entangle,
and strangle thee; thy father and others, too, are drawing you both
toward one another therein, God knows for what. It is for that _she_
comes now, and thy tour is only show. My poor sister is soon conquered,
that is, murdered; particularly, as one needs for the purpose, with her
belief in spirits, no other voice than that incorporeal one, which over
the old Prince's heart pointed out to thine its limits!
"What lights burn in the future, between dark situations and bushes, in
murderous corners! Be it as it may, I march forward into the caverns; I
thank God, that this impotent _cold-sweating_ life gains again a
pulsation of the heart, a passion; and then or now do to me, who
_could_ act safely and secretly and dishonestly, what thou choosest.
Fight with me to-day or to-morrow. It shall rejoice me, if thou layest
me on my back in the last, long sleep. O the opium of life makes one in
the beginning lively, then drowsy, how drowsy! Willingly will I love no
more, if I can die. And so without a word further, hate or love me, but
farewell!
"Thy Friend, Or Thy Foe."
89. CYCLE.
"My foe!" cried Albano. The second hot pain darted from Heaven into his
life, and the lightning-flash blazed up fiercely again. As a heartless
carcass of the former friendship, Roquairol had been thrown at his
feet; and he felt the first hatred. That poison-mixing of sensual and
spiritual debauchery, that fermenting-vat of the dregs of the senses
and the scum and froth of the heart,--that conspiracy of lust and
bloodthirstiness, and against the same guiltless heart,--that spiritual
suicide of the affections, which left behind only an airy, roaming
spectre, ever changing its forms of incarnation, upon which there no
longer remains any dependence, and which a brave man already begins to
hate for the very reason that he cannot lay hold of this yielding
poison-cloud and give it battle,--all this seemed to the Count, who,
without the transitions and mezzotintos of habit and fancy, had
been ushered over out of the former light of friendship into this
evening-twilight, still blacker than it was. Beside the superficial
wound which his family pride received in the maltreatment of his
sister, came the deep, poisonous one that Roquairol should compare him
with himself, and Liana's ruin with Rabette's. "Villain!" said he,
gnashing his teeth; even the least shadow of resemblance seemed to him
a calumny.
Most assuredly Roquairol had miscalculated upon him, and set out his
poetic self-condemnation too much on the reckoned strength of a poetic
sentence from the judge. As in an uproar one unconsciously speaks
louder, so he, when fancy with her cataracts thundered around him, did
not justly know what he cried and how strongly. As he often, to be
sure, found less that was black in himself than he depicted, so he
presumed that another must find even still less than he himself. He
had, too, in his poetic and sinful intoxication, made for himself at
last the moral dial-plate itself movable, so that it went with the
index; in this confusion it was never indicated to him where innocence
was.
Had he foreseen that his epistolary confessions would bound and rebound
in more hostile corners than his oral ones did aforetime, he would have
prepared them otherwise.
For agitation Albano could not directly write the short
parting-letter--not a challenge--to the abandoned one, but delayed, in
the certainty that the Captain would not come himself,--when all at
once he came. For procrastination he could not bear; bodily and
spiritual wounds he received as theatrical ones; too much accustomed to
win men, he too easily brought himself to lose men. A terrible
apparition for Albano; it was but the long coffin of his murdered
favorite set upright!--that now over that powerfully-angular face, once
the stronghold of their souls, furrows of weeds should wind, that this
mouth, which friendship had so often laid upon his, should have become
a plague-cancer, a concealing rose to the tongue-scorpion for the good
Rabette when she approached so trustingly,--to see and think of _that_
was clear anguish.
Hardly audible were greeting and thanks; silently they walked up and
down, not beside but against each other. Albano sought to get the
mastery over his wrath, so as to say nothing but the words: "Begone
from me, and let me forget thee!" He meant to spare Liana in her
brother, who had reproached him with being sacrificial-knife to her;
unjust suspicions keep us better in the time immediately following,
because we are not willing to let them grow into just ones. "I am
candid, thou seest," Roquairol began, with moderation, because his
ebullitions had been half distilled and dropped away from the point
of his pen; "be thou so, too, and answer the letter." "I was thy
friend,--now, no more," said Albano, choking. "I have not surely done
anything to _thee_," was the reply.
"Heavens! Let me not say much," said Albano. "My miserable sister,--my
innocence of the coming of the Countess,-my wretched, abandoned sister!
O God! drive me not to frenzy,--I respect thee no more, and so go!"
"Then fight!" said the Captain, half drunk with emotion and half with
wine. "No," said Albano, drawing in a long breath, as if for a sigh of
indignation; "to thee nothing is sacred, not so much as a life!" This
pupil of death so easily threw after his own life-days and joys and
plans all those of another into the tomb with them; that was what
Albano meant, and thought of the sick Liana, so easily dying of others'
wounds; love (_instead of friendship_) had passed along like a soothing
woman before his provoked soul; but the foe misunderstood him.
"Thou must," said the Captain, wildly mocking; "thine shall be precious
to me!"
"Heaven and Hell! I meant a better one," said he; "slanderer, toward
thy sister I have _not_ acted as thou hast against mine,--I have not
wished to make her miserable, _I am not as thou!_--and I shall not
fight; I spare _her_, not thee." But the hell-flood of wrath, which he
through Liana had wished to turn off into a flat land, and make more
shallow, swelled up thereby as if under an enchanter's hand, because
Roquairol's lie about her being sacrificed came so near home in that
connection.
"Thou art afraid," said the exasperated Roquairol, and still took down
two swords from the wall. "I respect thee not, and will not fight,"
said Albano, only stimulating him and himself the more, while he meant
to control himself.
Just then Schoppe stepped in. "He is afraid," repeated Roquairol,
weapon in hand. Albano, reddening, gave, in three burning words, the
history. "You must fight a little before me!" cried the Librarian, full
of his old hatred for Roquairol's dazzling and juggling heart. Albano,
thirsting for cold steel, grasped at it involuntarily. The fight began.
Albano did not attack, but parried more and more furiously; and as,
while so doing, he beheld the angry ape of his former friend with the
dagger in his hand, which had been ploughed up out of the blooming
garden-beds of the loveliest days, and upon which he had trodden with
his wounds: and as the Captain with increasing storminess flashed away
at him like lightning, unavailingly: then did he see on the grim face
that dark hell-shadow standing again, which had stood and played
thereon, when he had strangled Rabette struggling in his grasp;--the
drawbridge of countenances, whereupon once the two souls met, stood,
suddenly raised high in the air. More fiery grew Albano's glance; more
drunk with indignation, he set upon the were-wolf of devoured
friendship;--suddenly he severed his weapon from him like a claw: when
Schoppe, indignant at the unequal forbearing and fighting, would fain
invoke vengeance with Rabette's name, and cried, "The sister, Albano!"
But Albano understood by that Charles's sister, and hurled one sword
after the other, and fiery drops stood in his eye, and hideously
distorted the face of the foe before him. "Albano!" said Roquairol, his
wrath exhausted, relying on the tear-built rainbow of peace,--"Albano?"
he asked, and gave him his hand. "Farewell; live happily, but go; I am
still innocent,--go!" replied Albano, who felt bitterly the tempest of
the first wrath overhead, which having settled down, between his
mountains, continued to beat upon him. "In the Devil's name, go! I too
shall be roused at last," said Schoppe, interfering. "In such a name
one goes willingly!" said the Captain, whose tongue-muscles always
stiffened in Schoppe's presence, and silently departed; but Albano had
for some time ceased to look upon him, because he could never endure
another's humiliation, but, like every strong soul, felt himself bowed
down at the same time with any abasement of humanity, just as great
thrones tolerate no distinguishing marks of servility in their
neighborhood.[33]
Schoppe began now to remind him of his own earliest predictions about
Roquairol, and to name himself the Great Prophet-Quartette,--to
denounce the fellow's incurable scurvy of mouth and heart,--to compare
his theatrical firmness with the Roman marble and porphyry, which has
on the outside a stone rind, but inwardly only wood,[34]--to remark how
his internal possession might be said to be, like that of the German
Order, only a _tongue_,--and in general to declare himself so
vehemently against self-decomposition through fancy, against all
poetical contempt of the world, that any other but Albano might well
have taken his zeal for a defence of himself against the slight feeling
of a similarity.
Schoppe had strong hopes Albano would listen to him believingly, and
would grow angry, laugh and answer; but he became more grave and
silent;--he looked at the honest Librarian--and fell passionately and
silently on his neck--and speedily dried his heavy eye. O, it is the
gloomy day of mourning, the burial-day of friendship, when the outcast,
orphan heart goes home alone, and it sees the death-owl fly screaming
from the death-bed of old feeling over the whole creation.
Albano had, in the beginning, inclined to go this very day to
Blumenbühl and lead his forsaken sister to the mausoleum of truth; but
now his heart was not strong enough to sustain his own words to his
sister or her immeasurable and inconsolable tears.
TWENTY-FIRST JUBILEE.
The Trial-lesson of Love.--Froulay's Fear of Fortune.--The
Biter Bit.--Honors of the Observatory.
90. CYCLE.
Since the extinction of the engagement, and since Gaspard's letters,
Albano's eye had been directed toward the fairest ruins of
time,--unless one excepts the earth itself,--to Italy; and his injured
vision held fast to this new portal of his life, which was to usher him
into the presence of the fairest and greatest which nature and man can
create. How did the fire-mountains, and Rome's ruins, and her warm,
golden-blue heavens, already unfold to him their splendor, when in
fancy he led the suffering Liana before them, and her holy eyes
refreshed themselves with measuring the heights! A man who travels with
his beloved to Italy has in the very fact that he might do without one
of the two, both double. And Albano hoped for this felicity, since all
testimonies which he met with of Liana's restoration to health promised
as much. As to Dr. Sphex,--the only one who opened a pit for her, and
in it cast a death-bell, and swore to everybody, she would fall with
the leaves of autumn,--him he saw no more. He wished, however,--he said
to himself,--in this whole joint-tour, only her happiness, not at all
her love. So did he see himself always in his self-mirror, namely, only
veiled; so did he regard himself often as too stern, although he was so
little of that; so did he take himself to be conqueror of his own
heart, when his fair countenance already wore pale, sickly hues.
The present stood as yet dark above him, but its neighboring times, the
future and the past, lay full of light. What a journey, in which a
beloved, a father, a friend, a female friend, are of themselves, on the
very road, the curiosities which others find only when they reach the
end!
The Princess was the female friend. Since Gaspard's letters to her and
to him, since the hope of a longer and nearer enjoyment of his society,
she found more and more pleasure in subduing all clouds round about
her, so as to smile and shine upon her friend only out of a blue
heaven. She alone at court seemed to take mildly and rightly the blunt
youth, whose proud frankness so often ran against the disguised pride
of the Count, and particularly against the open pride of the Prince;
she alone seemed--as nothing is seldomer guessed in and by _circles_
than fair sensibility, especially by courtly ones and especially manly
sensibility--softly to spy out his, and to increase its warmth by her
sympathy. She alone honored him with that strict, significant attention
which mankind so seldom give, as well as can so seldom appreciate,
because they never have occasion but for love and passion, in order
to--render justice, incapable, otherwise than by comet-light, by
warm-flames and fires of joy, to read the best hand. All that he was,
she simply presupposed in him; his pre-eminent qualities were only her
demands and his passports; she made his individuality neither her model
nor her reflection; both were painters, no pictures. He heard often,
indeed, that she had a masculine severity, especially in her
dictatorial capacity, but not, however, that she was womanishly
inhuman. To the customary vermin of courtlings, which gives itself
elevation on its worm-rings only by crawling, she was repulsive and
torturing; although, as a new-comer, she should, it would seem, have
been a new-born child, that brings with it raisins to the older
children. On Sunday, when at courts, as on the stage in Berlin,
spiritual popular pieces are always brought out, she was (among the
Sunday-born-children, who see more spirits than they have) a Monday's
child, which wishes to find for itself one, who, whether he has
ever been dubbed noble or not, at all events knows how to distinguish
an original from the copy, as well in his own self as in a
picture-gallery. On that account many lords, and still more ladies,
thanked God, if they had occasion to say nothing more to her than "God
bless you!"
In this way she appeared to the Count every day more worthy of his
father. As into a warm spring sunshine did he enter for the first time
into the flattering magic circle of female friendship, which even here
cast and moulded two wings for love out of the wax-cells of the enjoyed
honey; it was, however, with him love for Liana, to whom the friend
could most easily give wings for Italy. He felt that soon an hour of
overflowing esteem would strike, when he could confidingly open the
high-walled cloister-garden of his former love. For she made room for
him to be near her as often as the narrow compass of a throne and the
all-betraying height of its location would admit. But something
disturbed, watched, beset both,--a rival neighbor, as it seemed. It was
the singular Julienne, who always, when things were getting on, stepped
out of her box on to the stage of the Princess, and confounded the
play. Frequently she came after him; sometimes he had gotten
invitations from her just the moment before others from the Princess
followed, which hers, therefore, as it seemed, must have anticipated.
What did she mean? Would she possibly win from a youth whom she had so
often provoked by her contempt of men, and by the lightning-like
dartings of her indignation, his love, merely, perhaps, because he had
always so warmly reciprocated her friendly glances, as those of so dear
a--friend of his beloved? Or did she want of him only hatred for the
honored Princess, and that indeed out of envy and the usual resemblance
of women to ivory, whose _white_ hue so readily becomes _yellow_, and
which only by a thorough warming gets the fair color again?
These questions were rather repeated than answered by an evening which
he and Julienne spent at the Princess's. A good reading was to give the
picture-exhibition of Goethe's Tasso. Fine art, and nothing but art,
was with the Princess the art of Passau[35] against court- and
life-wounds; and, in general, the world-system was to her only a
complete picture-gallery and Pembroke cabinet and gallery of antiques.
The reading parts were so distributed by the manager, the Princess,
that she herself got the Princess, Julienne the _confidente_ Leonore,
Albano the Poet Tasso, a youthful-cheeked Chamberlain the Duke, and
Froulay Alphonso. This latter, who had learned to prefer works of
artifice to works of art, and the princely cabinet to any cabinet of
art, in spite of his heart stood ready there for a journey to the
mountain of the muses, arrayed for that purpose by the Princess in a
mountain-habit. Thus forced more and more every day into the poetical
fashion, he looked, of course, like any other abortion, which has
come into the world with pantaloons, queue, and the like all born on
him, on purpose to condemn the modish way of the world, just like a
street-sweeper in Cassel.
Albano read with outward and inward glow, not toward the reading
Princess, but toward the Princess she personated, from a habit of his
heart which life always set a-glow; and the Princess read the _rôle_ of
her _rôle_ very well, of course. Her artistic feeling told her, even
without the prompting of tender sensibility, that in Goethe's
Tasso,--which, for the most part, is related to the Italian Tasso, as
the heavenly Jerusalem to the Jerusalem delivered,--the Princess is
almost Princess of Princesses. Never did the god of the muses and of
the sun pass more beautifully through the constellation Virgo than
here. Never was veiled love more radiantly unveiled.
The Minister read off the powerful proser Alphonso, as he scolds at
Tasso and Albano, as well as a trumpeter of cavalry reads the notes
which are affixed to his sleeve; in fact, he found the man quite
sensible.
The younger[36] Princess might, in the general poetic concert, have
done her share of the talking some quarter of an hour, more or less,
when she suddenly threw down, in a lively manner, the beautiful volume
of Goethe's works, of which there were three copies there, and said,
with her impetuosity, "A stupid part! I cannot abide it!" All the world
was silent. The senior[37] Princess looked at her significantly; the
junior Princess looked at _her_ still more significantly, and went out,
without coming back again. A court dame took up the reading, and went
calmly on.
To most of those present this interlude was properly the most
interesting; and they willingly continued to think of it during the
reading of the latter part. The Princess, who had long believed the
Princess loved the Count, was delighted with the inconsiderateness of
her adversary. Albano, although her warm eye had struck him of old,
explained to himself the absconding on the ground of chagrin at the
subordinateness of her part in the reading, and the general
incompatibility of the two women; for while Julienne, at her own
expense, slighted the Princess, and took little pains to conceal her
opinion, so also did that of the Princess appear involuntarily. So soon
as one party manifests its hatred, the second can hardly conceal its
from the third.
When Albano came home, he found the following leaf on his table:--
"The P---- decoys thee; she loves thee. With _éclat_ she will send in
the next place the M---- back, in order to give bold relief to her
virtue, and produce an imposing effect upon thee. Shun her! I love
thee, but differently and eternally.
"_Nous nous verrons un jour, mon frère_."
Who wrote it? Not even as to the admission-ticket of this cartel could
the servant make any deposition. Who wrote it? Julienne; to this point,
at least, all roads of probability converged; only in that case
mysteries lay round about him. Significant was the French subscription,
which stood in like manner exactly under the picture of his sister,
which his father had given him on Isola Bella;[38] but that might
be a coincidence. He investigated now these new silver-veins of his
Diana-[39] and family-tree by the touchstone of his whole history. His
mother and Julienne's had gone to Italy with his father in one and the
same year; both had been uncommon women and mutual friends, and his
father the friend of both. There was the possibility of a false step on
the part of his father, which had been concealed. Quite as easily might
the traces of this error have been shown to Julienne. Then, further,
the hypothesis of her sisterly love would throw light on her whole
previous winding course; her affectionate interest in Albano; her
love-race with the Princess; her correspondence with his father; her
enlisting of the Count's affection for Romeiro, which, as it seemed,
heated her quite as much against the Princess as it chilled her toward
Liana; above all, the singularity of her love for him, which never
unfolded itself further and more openly;--all this gave ground to
suspect that it might be only a sister's kindred blood which blazed so
often on her round cheeks, when she had unconsciously gazed at him too
long. After this step he made forthwith the leap; he now suspected,
also, that she alone had sought to dazzle and delude him into the love
of her Linda with the magic mirror of spiritual existences.
As respects the relation of the Princess to the Minister, every word
upon that subject was to him a lie. He was quite as reluctant to let
himself part with a good opinion of others as a bad one. Ordinary men
readily give the good opinion away and hold the bad one fast; weaker
ones are easily reconciled, and hardly parted. He was unlike either.
Hitherto he had so easily ascribed in his own mind the Princess's
friendship for the Minister, her visitation journeys with him through
the land, and the like, to her manly prudence and foresight, which
would fain at once keep watch over the future hereditary land of her
brother and hold the key to it; and to this probability, as the
Minister accommodated himself equally well to the related parts of a
cicerone and an overseer, he still adhered.
The following week brought along a circumstance, which seemed to throw
a greater light into the dark billet.
91. CYCLE.
The promised circumstance has its root again in older circumstances
which occurred between the Princess and the Minister; these I here
premise.
The Minister had been very soon furnished by his friend Bouverot--whose
clammy woodpecker's tongue licked off unseen the vermin of all
mysteries out of all musty cracks in the throne--with a description of
all that the Princess concealed in herself in the shape of Phoenix
ashes and rubbish: he had instructed him that she, cold as a piece of
ice ground into a convex lens, never would melt herself, but only
others; that she was one of those more rare coquettes who, like sweet
wines, become sour through warmth, and only sweeter by cold; and that
she therefore had about her one of the worst habits,--which made the
most grievous jobs for every one. It was, namely, the following: She
had a heart, and would never suffer it to lie in her bosom as dead
capital; but it must pay interest, and circulate. So the lover became,
in the beginning, more wide awake and gay from day to day, then from
hour to hour; he knew all by-ways through wood and hollow, all thieves'
paths and shorter cuts in this love-garden regularly by heart, and
would foretell the critical[40] quarter of an hour on his repeating
watch when he should arrive at the summer-house. It was not by any
means unknown to him (but comical) what it signified, that the said
lover would pass with her from sentences to glances, from these to
kissing of the hand, then to kissing of the mouth, whereupon he would
find himself caught, entrapped, and imprisoned in the Whistonian
comet's-train of her ell-long (or mile-long) hair as in a bird-net (in
which, however, the noose was also the berry-bait), and bent up in his
prison to such a degree as to know what o'clock it had struck on his
repeater. But just then, when all clouds seemed fallen from heaven, he
himself would fall out of both into a basket from her;--that was the
bad point. In fact, German princes of the oldest houses, who had made
all other experiments, saw themselves made immoral, ay, ridiculous, and
knew not at all what to think about it; for the Princess openly
wondered at such monsters, gave all the world a copy of her challenge,
showed all the world the redness and the loftiness of her
turkey-hen's-neck, and suffered such an old tempter of a Prince, or
whoever it was, never more in her haughty presence.
As princes (in such cases) know what they want, so of course they
spread it about that she knew not what _she_ would have; and often not
till long after an hereditary prince came the apanaged brother of the
same court, and later the legitimated one. However, the thing remained
the same; namely, she remained like the spherical concave mirror, which
indeed images behind itself what stands close before it, as large and
upright, but so soon as it comes into its focus, makes it invisible, and
then out beyond that point hangs it quite diminished and topsy-turvy
in the air. Her love was a fever of debility, in which Darwin, Weikard,
and other Brownists, by _stimulating_ means--wine, for instance--produce
a _slower_ pulse, and even promise therefrom a cure. So far Bouverot to
the Minister!
But to the Minister came thereby an inexpressible favor. For princes'
sins jumped not at all with his professional studies and trade. When,
therefore, she had decided upon having his understanding and powerful
physiognomy near her, and had named him Minister of her most intimate
relations in Haarhaar, then was it solemnly laid down and sworn to
within him, never, though she were kindness itself, to be the robber of
her honor to her straw-widower. In the beginning, like all his
predecessors, he got on easily with mere pure feelings and discourses;
as yet there was nothing desired of him, except that he should
sometimes unexpectedly dart at her a sly look full of loving
tenderness; and he must also have a longing. He darted the look; he
also got up longings; and so he felt himself comfortably enough insured
for such a successful love affair.
But it stopped not here. Hardly had her Albano appeared, when the
thorn-girdle and hair-shirt of the pure Minister was made
disproportionately more rough and thorny, and the strongest
requirements, namely, gifts, redoubled, in order that the poor Joseph
might the more speedily assail her honor and therefore run into his
ruin, which should be bait for the Count. By this time he had
been already brought along so far that he wove and knotted in her
flying hair (to him poisonous snake-hair),--he must needs blow out
soap-bubbles of sighs from his pipe,--he must needs quite often be
beside himself; yes, he must even (if he would not see himself chased
away as a hypocritical rascal) be half-sensual, although still decent
enough. Meanwhile he was not to be tempted into a temptation by the
Devil himself. Whenever he even thought of the subject, shuddering, how
the least misstep might hurl him from his ministerial post, then he
would as soon have let himself be impaled and quartered as bewitched.
For a third party, not for these two,--they were the sufferers,--it
would perhaps have been a feast, to have seen how they (if I may use a
too low comparison) resembled a pair of silk stockings drawn over each
other, which for and by each other, when one keeps them distended[41]
at a certain distance, ethereally blow themselves and fill, but
immediately collapse, flat and flabby, when they touch each other.
Of course, in the long run, it fell heavily upon the old statesman to
have to leap along before the dancing pageantry of love-gods as their
arch-master, tackled into the triumphal car of the Cyprian,--a
flower-garland on his state-peruke, in his eyes two Vauclusa fountains,
the cavity of his breast a choked-up Dido's cave, wearing in his
button-hole an arrow in a heart, or a heart on an arrow, and faring
toward the capitol, in order there, after the Roman fashion, not so
much to sacrifice as to be sacrificed. Nothing except the tin boxes
which the government officers and exchequer messengers stowed away for
him at home could fan fresh and cool again the stalemated man, who
would fain be a checkmated one.
He read with her Catullus, she with him the better pictures out of the
Prince's cabinet; it was allowed him to reward her by his Latinity for
her artistic favors: but he remained, nevertheless, as he was.
When women wish to carry a point, and find hindrances constantly
recurring, they grow at last blind and wild, and dare anything
and everything. The tour to Italy approached so fast; still the
Minister was no nearer to letting go his high consideration for his
beloved,--although from just her own motive, that of the tour, with the
nearness of which he animated himself to a cheerful endurance of so
short a flame. Her passion for the Count increased with the Count's
tranquillity, because coldness strengthens strong love, just as
physical coldness makes strong people more vigorous and weak ones more
puny. Froulay, as an old man, was, as it seemed, capable of creeping
along so for a whole age to his object, without making one unnecessary
leap, since old people, like ships, always move slower the longer they
have been going, and on similar grounds, namely, that both, by the
adhesion of filth, weeds, barnacles, and the like, have become
unwieldy. In short, the Princess at last ceased to ask for anything,
but matters went thus:--
The Prince had gone a journey, the Princess had been invited as
god-mother out into the country. The castellain on one of her country
castles, who had already the year before invited the Minister, had not
been restrained by bashfulness from making his way still farther up on
this rope-ladder, with his descendant under his arm, and up there on
the throne laying his child of the land in the arms of her, the
Princess herself. Princes love to let themselves down--on thin
silk-worm threads--(as well as up); they value the good-natured, stupid
people, and would fain in this way raise somewhat the poor creeping
dwarf-beans,--for they well know how little it matters,--and, so to
speak, pole them and boot them by means of the leg of the princely
chair. Beside this, the Minister had been invited as grand-god-father
(so called). The autumn day was only a brighter, more perfect spring,
and the autumnal night stood under a brilliant full moon. Courts always
long so exceedingly to be away in the country, among the idyls of
murmuring rivulets, sighing branches, and tree-tops, and bleating
Swisseries, and farmers; Courts--that is, courtiers, court-dames and
official chamberlains'-staves, and others--yearn so for the society of
human beings; as beasts are driven by the December hunger, so does a
noble hunger drive them down from the throne-mountains into the flat
plains; not that they would fly from _ennui_, but they desire only a
different kind, as their very pastime consists in the abbreviation and
alternation of their _ennui_.
Hardly had the Court appeased its first longing for the people with
whom it stood for half a quarter of an hour on a confidential,
conversational footing, when it came to itself again, and dispersed
itself through the princely garden, in order to consume full as long a
time in satisfying its longing after nature. A sponsoress of the
sponsoress promised Christianity in the stead of Princess and child.
The Princess herself attached the Minister to her as a chamberlain. The
grand-god-father looked out into the prospect of a d--d long evening,
in which he should be obliged to parade round her procession-banner.
For the enjoyment of the evening there was a concert, and for the
enjoyment of the concert card playing had been arranged; and for the
enjoyment of the latter, the Princess had seated herself alone with
Froulay, in order, during the general playing of cards and instruments,
to have some inaudible conversation with him. Suddenly the two pounds
which were hung up in his breast--for no heart, according to the
anatomists, weighs more than that--became two hundred-weight heavier,
when she asked him whether he was steadfast and could confide in her
and dare for her. He swore that, if only as Princess, she might expect
of his two-pounder any and every sacrifice and mark of veneration. She
went on: she had some weighty things to intrust him with to-day about
herself and the Prince; she wished, when the _Foule_ was gone, to speak
with him alone; he need only go up the little stairway from the side of
the garden to the door of the library-chamber; this was open; in the
poetical bookcase on the left side was a spring in the wall, the
pressure of which would open to him the tapestry door of the apartment,
where he was to await her.
Immediately she rose, presuming upon an affirmative. How it fared now
with the two pounds of his sixty-four-ounce-heart can gratify none but
his deadly enemy to realize. So much lay written before him with long,
thick, stony letters, as on an epitaphium, namely, that after a few
hours, when the other lords, in other respects still greater sinners
than he, could snore away quietly in the pleasant ministerial houses
which formed the court of the Palace, that then for him, innocent
knave, the wolf-hour, that is to say, the shepherd's hour,[42] would so
soon strike, when he on the most flowery meadow must kneel beneath the
butcher's knife. But he--angry that his faith in female and princely
impudence should prove a soothsayer--made silently all kinds of oaths
to himself, that, even if as much were imposed upon him as on the
greatest saints and universal philosophers, he would nevertheless
behave like both, for instance, like old Zeno and Franz.
The Princess sought him all the evening less than usual. At last he
took his respectful leave of the whole court, but with the prospect
of creeping, not, like them, under silk quilts, but under cold
bowers. He even marched--sure of himself--up the stairway, opened the
library-chamber, found the spring, touched it, and stepped through the
tapestry door into the princely--bedchamber. "It is certain, then,"
said he, and cursed about him inwardly to his heart's content, lying
prostrate and crushed quite flat beneath the love-letter weight. In the
side chamber on the left hand he already heard her and a chambermaid,
who was undressing her. On the right the door of a second but lighted
chamber stood ajar. He stood long in doubt whether he should step into
that, or stay where he was under the light-screen of a dark corner. At
last he laid hold of the protection of night. During his suspense and
her disrobing, he had time to rehearse or read over his part; now he
came to an agreement with himself, in case of necessity,--and if he
should find himself pushed too hard--and all the more, as the place
would speak more against _her_ than against _him_, inasmuch as every
one must needs ask, whether he could otherwise have possibly gained
admission,--in such a case of necessity, where only the choice between
a satire and a satyr was left him, he determined to transform himself
on the spot into a respectful--Faun.
Directly the Princess strode in, but in the direction of the
illuminated chamber. "I have no further occasion for thee," she called
back to the chambermaid. "_Diable!_" screamed she, in the bedchamber,
spying out the tall Minister; "who stands there? Hanna, a light!
_Ciel!_" she continued, recognizing him, but continuing to speak
French, because Hanna understood nothing of that. "_Mais, Monsieur! Me
voila donc compromise! Quelle méprise! Vous vous etes trompé de
chambres! Pardonnéz, Monsieur, que je sauve les déhors de mon sexe et
de mon rang. Comment avez-vous-pu_--" She uttered all this, perhaps,
by way of blinding the German witness, with an angry accent. The
grand-godfather--who, after all previous gratifications, felt like a
cock, who has gulped down many live chafers, and is now threatened with
his life by their sticking in his distressed crop--kept not silence,
but replied in German, opening the tapestry door, meanwhile, that he
had, even as she commanded, laid the books out of the library in the
lighted chamber, and had been caught _in transitu_. He went immediately
through the tapestry; but she could hardly contain herself for terror,
had the physician called in the morning, and sent back her retinue.
Froulay--however much like the Spanish he found his romances, among
which, according to Fisher's assertion, the thieves' literature is the
best--at last did not know, himself, what to make of it.
The chambermaid had to make profession with the vow of silence, which
she kept as strictly as she could, but not more so. Next morning very
few alighted before their own doors, most before the doors of others,
in order to land the news together with the injunction of the Princess
not to make the thing _éclatant_, because in that case the Prince would
hear of it.
If ever the nobility of Pestitz was happy _en masse_, it was this very
morning. Nothing was wanting to universal joy but a chambermaid who
should have only understood as much French as a hunting-dog.
92. CYCLE.
Albano heard the report; the Minister had long appeared to him
contaminating, like a cold corpse of a soul; now he hated him still
more as a tormenting, blood-sucking dead man. For the Princess his
heart had hitherto stood security to him. She was to him a blue
day-sky, wherein to others only a hot sun blazes, wherein he, however,
through the mysterious depths of the soul and of friendship, had found
soft constellations beaming. But now since the rumor, which, like the
magicians in the presence of Moses, threw soot into her heaven, she
stood, to his eyes, shining under new lights. The hatred which he by
his very nature, i. e. from pride, had of all rumor, because it
controls and is not to be controlled, worked in him with fresh fire; he
resolved, even because Liana must be the daughter either of her
hereditary foe or of her lover, and the Princess _her_ rival, to
venture freely on the strength of his heart and what it knew, and at
this very juncture to communicate openly to the Princess his prayer for
her mediation in favor of Liana's company upon the journey,--in other
words, of his heaven.
On the morning after, the Prince came back,--the Princess immediately
had her carriage tackled,--toward evening she came with one carriage
more into town. The report ran through all card-tables that the Spanish
Countess Romeiro had arrived at the Palace. Reports are polypuses;
wounding and mutilating only multiplies them; only sticking them into
each other makes one out of two: the report of Linda's arrival
swallowed up the report of Froulay's disgraceful attempt.
But Albano! Like the discovery of a new world, this turned his old one
topsy-turvy. Linda, that foreign tropical bird, came flying in advance
of his approaching father, who rose before him like a rich land out of
the distance,--the soil where he had found so many thorns and flowers
soon sank behind him, with all its treasures and days, below the
horizon. Only Liana could not vanish with it; that muse of his youth
must he lead with him into the land of youth. By those usual magic arts
of the heart had Linda's nearness awakened in him an insuperable
longing for Liana.
He was now decided to remind the Princess of her earlier promise to
pour the life-balsam of a southern tour upon Liana's sick nerves, and
through her now, betimes, before the confusion of the last pressing
moments should prostrate anything, to put the Minister's lady in tune,
and gain her over, who, like all court people, would certainly hardly
resist a princely wish and a happy prospect.
If, however, Liana, from any fault of her own or of others, stayed
behind, then was it his sworn determination, for no power, not even his
father's, to stir from the native land of his eternal bride; but to
root himself before her sick-cloister, until she either passed out
therefrom free and cheerful again into open life, or buried herself,
darkly veiled, in the gloomy nun-choir of the dead. O, to come back to
seek her in the romantic grounds of olden time, and to find her nowhere
but behind the speech-grating of the hereditary vault,--this was a
thought his heart could not endure!
The Princess herself furnished him an opportunity of making his
request; she sent him an invitation to an astronomical party at the
observatory, through her faithful court-dame Haltermann: "I have to
write to you, verbally, merely the following," wrote she. "Come this
evening to the observatory; I and my good Haltermann are going
thither." This Haltermann, a Fraülein of few charms of spiritual
flag-feathers, but of many dogmas and premature wrinkles, had already
for years hung indissolubly upon the Princess, keeping everything
secret, and favoring all her "make-your-appearances" (_rendez-vous_) by
merely saying, "My princess is as pure as gold, and only few know her
as I do."
Nothing could happen more propitious to Albano's wishes. He stood
earliest of all on the noble observatory, in the midst of the lovely
night. It was some days after the full moon; that shining world was as
yet hidden behind the earth, but the let-on jets of its rays shot up by
fits and starts. On all mountain-peaks glimmered even now a pale light,
as if the distant morning of super-terrestrial worlds were falling upon
them. Through the valleys the light-shunning, black, earthly beast,
Night, still stretched himself out, and reared himself up against the
mountains. The mountain-castle of Liana was invisible, and showed, like
a fixed star, only a light. Suddenly the autumnal purple upon all
summits around the castle was bedewed with silver by the moon, and a
shower of light came down on the white walls and along the white
avenues of the garden; at last, a strange, pale morning, glimmering
through all bowers, lay in the garden, as it were the tender gleaming
of a high, perfectly pure spirit, who only in the holy, silent night
trod the low earth, and then and there sought nothing but the pure,
still Liana.
As Albano looked and dreamed and longed, the Princess came up, with her
Haltermann. The Professor almost broke himself in two with his salam
before them, and allowed the fixed suns no astrological influence upon
his erect posture. Albano and the Princess met each other again with an
increase of reciprocal warmth. But the first question of the Princess
was, whether he had seen the Spanish countess. Indifferently he said,
he had been invited by the Princesse since her arrival, but had not
gone. "_Ma belle sœur_ admires her most," continued the Princess;
"but she deserves it somewhat. She is majestically built, taller than
I, and fair, especially her head, her eye, and her hair. She is,
however, more plastically than picturesquely beautiful, rather
resembling a Juno or Minerva than a Madonna. But she has her
peculiarities. She cannot endure any women, except such as are simple,
straightforward, and blindly good; hence her chamber-women live and die
for her. Men she holds to be poor creatures, and says she should
despise herself if she should ever become the wife or slave of a man;
but she seeks them for the sake of information. To the Prince she has
unnecessarily, though she was in the right as to the matter of fact,
said bitter things. He laughs at it, and says there is nothing she does
love, not even children and lap-dogs. You must see her. She reads much;
she lives only with the Princesse, and seems, if one may judge by her
dress, to count little upon any conquests, at least at our court."
Albano said, many of these traits were truly grand, and broke short
off. During the conversation the Professor had diligently arranged and
screwed up everything, and was now ready to commence. He remarked upon
the bright, bland, summer-like night,--proceeded, after some
introductory observations, into the moon, in order to lead the six eyes
to the most considerable lunar spots,--foreshadowed, in a preliminary
way, several shadows overhead there,--introduced them to the Crater of
Bernoulli ("I make use of Scröter's nomenclature," said he),--the
highest mountain range Dörfel ("it consists, of course, of three
summits," said he),--the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel ("Hevel, however,
calls it Mount Horeb," said he),--then Mont Blanc, and the
ring-mountains in general; and concluded with the sly assurance, that
the observatory was, to be sure, still very deficient in instruments.
The Haltermann longed indescribably after the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel
in the moon, and endeavored to get at the telescope. "It is only a spot
in the planet, my child!" said the Princess. "And is the Mont Blanc
overhead, then, nothing but a spot, too?" asked she, disappointed. The
Princess nodded, and looked into the telescope; the magic moon hung
like a piece of day-world close to the glass. "How its fair, pale light
and all its magic passes away when it is brought near! as when the
future becomes present!" said she, to the astonishment of the
Professor, who could never make anything out of the planet excepting
precisely when it _was_ near. She interrogated him about Saturn's ring.
"There are properly two, your Highness; but the observatory just at
this time wants an instrument to see it," said he, and aimed again in
the direction of the former shot.
Albano saw his life-gardens sparkling round about him with the warm
glimmer of an after-spring; and his inner being trembled sweetly and
sadly. He took a comet-seeker, and flew round among the stars, towards
Blumenbühl, into the city, up the mountains, only not to the white
castle with the illuminated corner-chamber and the little garden. His
whole heart turned backward for shame and love before the gate of
Paradise.
At this moment, the Haltermann, at a hint to retire, led the way down
with the astronomer, in order to favor the Princess with a moment free
from witnesses. Albano stood before her, noble in the moonlight; his
eye was radiant; his features showed emotion. She grasped his hand, and
said, "We certainly do not misunderstand each other, Count?" He pressed
her hand, and his eyes gushed full. "No, Princess!" said he, softly.
"You give me your friendship. I do not deserve it, if I do not trust it
entirely. I give you now the proof of my open confidence. You know,
perhaps, the history of my fortunes and my loss; you know the
Minister." "Alas, alas!" said she; "even your hard history, noble man,
has become familiar to me."
"No!" replied he, passionately; "I was more cruel than my fate. I
tormented an innocent heart; I made an obedient daughter miserable,
sick, and blind. But I have lost her," he continued, with rising
emotion, and turned sidewise, in order not to see the glimmering
heights of Liana's residence, "and bear it as I can, but without any
secret way to repossession. Only the victim cannot be permitted to
bleed to death over yonder, with her stern, narrow-hearted mother. O,
the honey-drops of the pleasures, they and Italy's heaven, might well
heal _her_. She dies if she stays, and I stay to look on. Friend, O how
great is the favor I ask!"
"Gladly shall it be granted you! Day after to-morrow I visit the mother
and daughter, and certainly will decide the latter for the journey, in
so far as it depends upon me. I do it, however,--to be frank,--merely
out of genuine friendship for you; for the girl does not please me
entirely with her mysticism, and certainly does not love as you do. She
does everything for people merely from love to God; and that I do not
like."
"Ah, so thought I, too, once; but whom should the pious love, except
God?" said he, absorbed in himself and the night, and in too
hyberbolical a style for the taste of the Princess. His glimmering eye
hung fast on the white mountain-palace, and spring-times floated down
from the moon, and glided to and fro on the illuminated track of his
vision; and the beautiful youth wept and pressed ardently the hand of
the Princess, without being conscious of either. She respected his
heart, and disturbed it not.
At last, they both came down the high stairway, where the astronomer
joyfully awaited them, and confessed to both how very much, to speak
freely, their attachment and devotion to astronomy not only gladdened,
but even animated and inspired him.
"Day after to-morrow, certainly!" With these words, the Princess
departed, in order to grant the pensive, full-hearted youth consolation
and dreams.
TWENTY-SECOND JUBILEE.
Schoppe's Heart.--Dangerous Spiritual Acquaintances.
93. CYCLE.
Albano was now again lashed to the Ixion's wheels of the clock. The
setting off of the Princess and her answer were to suddenly set up
lights in the dark, wide cavern in which he had so long travelled,
without knowing whether it harbored frightful formations and venomous
beasts, or whether it was vaulted, and filled with glistening
arches and subterranean pillared halls. Over Liana's condition two
hands--Augusti's and that of the Minister's lady--had hitherto held
fast the veil. Both were persons who never liked to answer the
question, How do you do? However, he now let his whole soul rest upon
the Princess, since the astronomical evening, in remembering which, he
could hardly comprehend how it was that he was able at that time to
speak to a female friend about his love as much and more than ever to a
friend of his own sex. But man does not love to speak of his feelings
before a man, and does love to before a woman. A woman, however, loves
best to do so before a woman. Meanwhile, the Princess held him in bonds
by the finest flattery which can be,--by decided and silent attention.
He was as sick and sated of verbal praise as he was partial and
tributary to that which came in a practical shape.
Pending the arrival of the decision, a confused time elapsed; like a
man who travels in the night, he heard voices and saw lights; and it
needed morning to decide upon their hostile or friendly significance.
Rabette lay sick and bleeding away her faint heart; for not he had
drawn out of it the astringent dagger,--namely, Charles's love,--but
the latter had himself anticipated him with bitter-sweet tears over the
bitterest.
Charles had met him once, with his hat drawn down over his brows, and
grimly-stinging look, without a greeting. Everywhere he heard that
Charles in vain besieged and blockaded Linda's and Julienne's double
gate. This and Liana's illness made the tropical savage like a grownup
wild boy of the woods. Even in the present state of separation,--on the
death-field of _friendship_,--Albano felt it as a wound to _humanity_,
that Charles did not take for granted--for to the contrary presumption
he imputed the street-grimness--that he would not seek to see the
Countess.
Even in the Librarian, for several days, a mystery seemed to have been
lurking. He, however, since it had been growing lighter and lighter to
Alban in Schoppe's depths, and he had looked in behind his comic mask,
even to the honest eye and loving lips, became very near to his heart,
especially after so many partings; for even the Lector,
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/36403