Chapter C: T. B (6)

He had, perhaps, to thank his noble form for it, that the beautifully built, straight-nosed, and magnificently slender Dian--with his raven hair and black, eagle eye, who in every pliant motion showed a higher freedom of carriage than is gained in ball-rooms and court-saloons--came up to him warmly, and, with very few glances, saw to the green bottom of the deep but clear sea of the young man, and discerned the pearl-banks there. Albano, with his too loud, vehement voice,--with his respectful but sharply-moving eyes,--with his rooted posture,--expressed an agreeable mixture of inward culture and ascendency with external rustic modesty and mildness, like a tulip-tree not as yet cut up for a tulip-bed,--a rural hermitage and log-house with golden furniture. He had the faults of youth in its recluseness; but men and winter radishes must be sowed _far apart_, in order that they may grow _large_: men and trees that stand near together have, it is true, a more slender and tapering trunk, but no power to brave the tempest, nor such a rich crown and branching as those that stand free. With the most unembarrassed heartiness, the architect disclosed to the glowing youth, "They should from this time forth see each other every week, since he was to come daily to oversee the building of the church."

The whole Wehrfritz household is now peeping out after the majestic procession, even to the last disappearing chariot-wheel, and is, of course, eager to say three words upon the lavender-water of joy that leaves such a fragrance behind it, which the procession had sprinkled into all corners and upon all pieces of furniture. From the Master of exercises--who, with the compression-machines on his feet, stood only so far as the excrescences in Purgatory, but from there up to the crown of his head in heaven (because the affable Princess had remembered very well his five positions)--even to the modest Rabette, the eulogist of her victorious rival,--and even to Albina, who was agreeably impressed with such warm, motherly love in a Fürstinn toward the Princess,--and even to the Director, who looked back with pleasure on the nobly sustained blade- and anchor-proof of his foster-son and the universal probity of this converted portion of the great world, because the man never observed that Princes and Ministers, just as they have in their wardrobes mountain- and mining-habits, so also carry about in their dressing-chamber Directorate-dresses, furred gowns of justice, consistorial sheep-skins, and women's opera-dresses;--from all these, even to the Director, the glad echo swelled, to die away in Zesara with an alarm-cannon. His ambition took arms; his liberty-tree shot forth into blossoms; the standards of his youthful wishes were consecrated and flung to the breeze of heaven; and on the myrtle crown he covered a heavy helm with a glittering, high-waving, plumed crest....

The following Cycle is composed merely for the purpose of showing how all this is to be taken.

25. CYCLE.

It is also my opinion that the antiphonious double choir of the two educational colleagues, Wehmeier and Falterle, had hitherto trained our Norman, as well as two similar gymnasiarchs, Governess England and domestic French instructress France, have actually educated the charity-school-girl Germany according to the best school-books, so that now we, in our turn, are in a condition to school the Poles, and, with the ferule, from the desk of our princely schools, to kantschu them down as much as is necessary.

But now too much had waked up in Albano. He felt overswelling energies which found no teacher. His father, roving round through Italy, seemed to be neglecting him. That seat of the muses, Pestitz,--which now had _one_ more muse added to its number,--seemed to be unjustly barred against him. Often he knew not how to stay away. Fancy, heart, blood, and ambition were at boiling heat. In such a case, as in every fermenting cask, nothing is more dangerous than an empty space, whether from a want of knowledge or of occupation.

_Dian filled up the cask._

He came each week from the city, as if he had to arrange the hammer-work of the church, according to plans, as well as the building of its walls. A youth who sees his first Greek cannot, at the outset, rightly believe it at all; he takes him for a classic glorification,--a printed sheet out of Plutarch. And if his heart burns like that of my hero, and if his Greek is of Spartan descent, like Dian,--namely, an unconquered _Mainotte_, who has been brought up in the classic double choir of the æsthetic singing-schools in Atiniah (Athens) and Rome,--then is it natural that the inspired youth should stand every day in the dust-and rubbish-clouds of the falling church-walls, and wait to see his commander come forth from behind the cloudy pillar.

Dian accompanied his beloved in his walks, often read half the night with him, and took him with him on the architectural journeys which he had constantly to make into the country. He introduced him with inspired reverence into the holy world of Homer and of Sophocles, and went with him among the loftier beings of this twin Prometheus, those nobly formed, completely developed men, yet unperverted by a partial provincial culture, who, like Solomon, had a time for everything human,--for laughing, weeping, eating, fearing, and hoping,--and who shunned merely rude immoderateness; who sacrificed on the altars of all gods, but on that of Nemesis first of all. And Dian, whose inner man was a whole, from which no member is torn away, no one swollen, and all fully grown, himself went round with his darling as such a Greek of Homer and Sophocles. While Wehmeier and the foster-parents were always running after him with a pulpit and a pew, at every passionate expression of anger, or desire, or exultation, he, on the contrary, with fair, liberal freedom, made room for him to unfold himself to his full breadth and height. He respected in the youth the St. Elmo's or St. Helena's fire, as he did frost in an old man: the heart of vigorous men, he thought, must, like a porcelain vase, in the beginning, be turned too large and too wide; in the furnace of the world it would soon enough shrink up to a proper size. I too require of youth, at first, intolerance, then, after some years, tolerance,--that as the stony, sour fruit of a strong young heart, this as the soft winter-fruit of an older head.

But while the Architect drew with him, and with him examined casts of the antiques and works of art, he at the same time made manifest most beautifully to the youth his love for the artistical _sign of the Balance_ in man (who ought to be his own work of art), and his aversion to every paroxysm, which breaks the outward beauty as well as the inward into folds and wrinkles, and his desire to regulate his form and his heart after the lofty pattern of repose on the antiques.

The Architect, as artists often do, and the Swiss still oftener, preserved European culture and rural _naïveté_ and simplicity side by side, like his beloved profession, wherein, more than in other arts, beauty and surveying reason border upon each other; he therefore at first let Albano look in and listen at the window of the philosophical lecture-hall from without, standing in the open air. He led him, not into the stone-quarry, lime-pit, and timber-yard of metaphysics, but directly into the ready-made, beautiful oratory, formed of the materials thence collected, otherwise called Natural Theology. He did not let him forge and solder ring after ring of any iron chain of reasoning, but showed such a one to him as a deep-reaching well-chain, whereby Truth, sitting at the bottom, is to be drawn up; or as a chain hanging from heaven, whereby the lower gods (the philosophers) are to draw Jupiter down. In short, the _skeleton_ and _muscle-preparation_ of metaphysics he concealed in the _God-man_ of religion. And so it should be (in the beginning); grammar is learned from language more easily than the latter from the former; criticism from works of art, the skeleton from the body, more easily than the reverse; although we always do reverse it. Unfortunate is it for the youth of our day, that they are obliged to shake the drops and the insects from the tree of knowledge, before the fruit.

And now he boldly threw open to him all the chamber-doors of the philosophical schools, i. e. the three heavens; for in this youthful season one still takes the wick of every learned light of the world for asbestos, as Brahmins dress themselves in asbestos; and the masses of ice around the poles of our spiritual world represent, at this early age, like the actual ones in the visible world, cities and temples on azure-blue columns.

Now when Albano had read himself to the flaming point upon some great idea or other, as Immortality or Deity, he had then to write upon it; because the Architect believed, and I too, that in the educational world nothing goes beyond writing,--not even reading and speaking; and that a man may read thirty years with less improvement than he would gain by writing a half. It is just in this way that we authors mount to such heights; hence it is that even the worst of us, if we hold out, become somewhat, at last, and write ourselves up from Schilda to Abdera, and from there away up to Grub Street.

But what a glowing hour then came on for our darling! What are all Chinese lantern-festivals to the high festival for which an inflamed youth lights up all the chambers of his brain, and in this illumination throws out his first essays?

In the forepart, and on the very threshold of the essay perhaps, Albano still crept along step by step, and made use merely of his head; but as he got further on, and his heart quivered with wings, and like a comet he must needs sweep along before only shimmering constellations of great truths, could he then restrain himself from imitating the rosy-red Flamingo, who, in his passage towards the sun, seems to paint himself into a flying brand, and to clothe himself in wings of fire? When at length he reached the practical application, verily every one was like the others; in each he formed and sowed an Arcadia full of human angels, who in three minutes could cross over on a Charon's pontoon thrown in for the purpose, and land in the Elysium which floated so near: in every one of these practical applications all men were saints, all saints beatified; all mornings blossoms, and all evenings fruit; Liana perfectly well, and he not far from it--her lover;--all nations ascended more easily the noonday heights; and he upon his own, like men upon mountains, saw everything good nearer to him. Ah! the whole boggy present, full of stumps and blood-suckers, had he kicked aside, and was now encircled only with floating green worlds, full of pastures, which the sun-ball of his head had projected into the ether.

Blissful, blissful time! thou hast long since gone by! O, the years in which man reads and makes his first poems and systems, when the spirit creates and blesses its first worlds, and when, full of fresh morning-thoughts, it sees the first constellations of truth come up bringing an eternal splendor, and stand ever before the longing heart, which has enjoyed them, and to which time, by and by, offers only astronomical newspapers and refraction-tables on the morning-stars, only antiquated truths and rejuvenated lies! O, then was man, like a fresh, thirsty child, suckled and reared with the milk of wisdom; at a later period he is only cured with it, as a withered, sceptical, hectic patient! But thou canst, indeed, never come back again, glorious season of _first love_ for the truth, and these sighs can only give me a warmer remembrance of thee; and if thou ever shouldst return, it certainly could not be down here in the low mine-shaft of life, where our morning splendor consists of the little flames that play upon the quartz crystals, and our sun is a mine-lamp,--no; but it may happen then, when death reveals us, and tears away from over the heads of the pale-yellow workmen the coffin-lid of the mine-shaft, and we now again stand as first men on a new, full earth, and under a fresh, immeasurable heaven!

Into this golden age of his heart fell also his acquaintance with Rousseau and Shakespeare, of whom the former exalted him above his century, and the latter above this life. I will not say here how Shakespeare ruled, sovereign, in his heart,--not through the breathing of living characters, but by lifting him up out of the loud kingdom of earth into the silent realm of infinity. When one dips his head at night under water, there is an awful stillness round about him; into a similar supernatural stillness of the under-world does Shakespeare introduce us.

What many schoolmasters may blame in Dian is this, that he gave the youth all books indiscriminately, without any exact course of reading. But Alban asked, in later years: "Is such a course anything but folly? Is it possible? For does Fate ever arrange the appearance of new books, or systems, or teachers, or outward circumstances, or conversations, so according to paragraphs, that one needs nothing more than to transcribe all that passes upon the memory, and he shall have the order into the bargain? Does not every head need and make its own? And does more depend on the order in which the meats follow each other, or on the digestion of them?"

26. CYCLE.

While Dian was causing a nobler temple to go up in the heavens than the stone one in the village, the Princess, whose _castrum doloris_ this was to be, died; they had, therefore, to deposit her remains for a time in the accommodations of a Pestitz church. This changed one or two thousand things. The Crown-prince of Hohenfliess, Luigi, must now, will he nill he, come back from Italy, to the princely chair, in which the old man, bent up with years, had, for a long time, diminutive and speechless, been rather lying than sitting,--although the Minister standing behind the princely arm-chair took off his figure and voice in a sufficiently lively manner. Don Gaspard, who had not listened to any of the previous letters of Albano, now despatched to him the following orders, which rushed like fiery wine through his veins: "On my way back from Italy we meet, in thy birthplace, _Isola Bella_. Thou wilt be sent for." Even readers who have not had a week's practice in folding and sealing letters of a diplomatic corps, will easily observe that the Knight of the Fleece is thinking to bring his son acquainted with the young prince, and to establish and insure their first Pestitz connections.

But I beg the world now to measure the Paradise of a man, who after so long seafaring at last sees the long shores of the new world stretch out into the ocean. Was not life at this moment open to him in a hundred directions? Laurel-wreaths, ivy-wreaths, flower-wreaths, myrtle-wreaths, wheat-garlands,--all these crowns overhung the great gate of Pestitz and its house-doors. Thou brother, thou sister, (I mean Roquairol and Liana,) what a full, yearning soul was marching to meet you! and what a dreaming and innocent one! Homer and Sophocles, and the ancient history and Dian, and Rousseau, that magus of youth,--and Shakespeare and the British weeklies (wherein a higher and more human poesy speaks than in their abstract poems),--all these had left behind in the happy youth an everlasting light, an unparalleled purity, wings for every Mount Tabor, and the fairest but most difficult wishes. He resembled, not the urbane French, who, like ponds, reflect the hue of the nearest bank, but those loftier men, who, like the sea, wear the color of the boundless heavens.

In fact, now was the ripest, best point of time for his change. Through Dian and his journeys, even Albano's _exterior_ man had been trained to grace in fashionable saloons. Men, like bullets, go farthest when they are smoothest; besides, there remained sticking on Zesara diamond-points enough at which mediocrity stumbles and is wounded, and even uncommon worth is an uncommon fault,--as _high_ towers, for that very reason, appear _bent over_. Zesara learned, even outside the circle of country youngsters, a readiness of ideas and words, which formerly stood at his service only in a state of enthusiasm; for wit, generally a foe of the latter, was with him merely a servant and child thereof. He did not, like witty sucklings, coquette with all ideas, but he was either beset by them or not touched at all; hence came that silent, slow, unostentatious ripening of his power; he resembled mountains of a gradual ascent, which always yield more booty than those which rise abruptly. With great trees, the seed is smaller and in spring the blossoms later than in the case of small bushes.

The time ere Gaspard's messenger came to take him away was to the detained youth an eternity, and the village a prison; it shrivelled up to the household-buildings of a convent. The hidden plan of his life, written, however, by encaustic into his brain, was, as with all such young men, this, to be and do nothing more than--everything; that is to say, to bless, to glorify, and to enlighten at once himself and a country,--to be a Frederick II. upon the throne; in other words, a storm-cloud, which should contain thunders of excommunication for the sinner, electrical light for the deaf, blind, and lame, showers for the insects, and warm drops for thirsty flowers, hail for enemies, an attraction for everything, for leaves and dust, and a rainbow for the end. Now, as he could not succeed Frederick II., he proposes to be hereafter minister at least,--especially as Wehrfritz made so much out of this by-sceptre,--this offshoot and chip of the mother sceptre,--and in his spare hours a great poet and philosopher withal.

I shall be delighted, Count, if thou shouldst become a second Frederick, the second and only; my book will profit by it and I myself mould my future thereby as a rare historiographer, compounded of Zenophon, Curtius, and Voltaire!

27. CYCLE.

Zesara will never forget the spring evening, on which he saw a passenger in a greatcoat,--a little limping and covered with brown travelling-paint, to which his white eyeballs formed a shining contrast,--wade across the shallow brook beside the high bridge, and how, further, the passenger took with him a watch-man's cane which the then Lieutenant of the Beggar's Police had just leaned against his house-door, a vicarious fellow-laborer, and handed the said cane, on his way, to a cripple, with the words: "Old man, I have nothing by me smaller than the stick. If anybody asks you about it, just tell them you are keeping guard in the village against the confounded beggar tribe, but have not eyes enough." At the same time our pilgrim reached out to a rector's little son, who needed it for about three minutes, his pocket-handkerchief.

It was of course our old Librarian by title, Schoppe, whom Don Gaspard had despatched with the note of invitation for Isola Bella. Albano's delight was so great, that only some days later did the youth mistake the odd humorist, whereas the latter soon correctly weighed the light, ardent, still wildling. Did it not fare still worse with the old Provincial Director, who, merely because he rated the _body_ politic of the Empire as high as if he were the installed _soul_ therein, upon Schoppe's sallies against the constitution, came out in a patriotic fury: "Sir," said he, in an excited manner, "even if there were a flaw anywhere, still a true German would be bound to maintain a profound silence on the subject, unless he can help the matter, especially in such cursed times."

The finest of all was, that, at Luigi's request, the Architect had to set out at the same time, for the purpose of fetching casts of antiques from Rome.

And now march on, that soon ye may come back again, and we may at last for once fairly enter Pestitz! It may well be expected that thou, good child (I should rather say, wild-bee), wilt take thy flight from the rural honey-tree into the glass beehive of the city, with deeper pangs than thou hadst imagined beforehand,--has not even the old foster-father gone off on his journey without saying his farewell, only to escape thine?--and, as to thy good mother, it seems to her as if one of the angry Parcæ were tearing a son from her breast, as if his tender love-bond, woven only of childish familiarity, would not stretch out into the far future,--and thy sister locks herself up in the attic, her rustic heart raging with fiery torments, and cannot say anything to thee, nor give thee anything, but a letter-case previously and privately worked by her with the silken circumscription: "Remember us!" and even on thy laurel-seeking head will the triumphal arch or rainbow of leave-taking, when thou passest under it, fling down heavy, heavy drops, (ah, they will continue to hang longer on the eyes that look after thee!) thy honest old teacher Wehmeier will pour out upon thee the last stream of his words and tears, and say, and thy tender heart will not smile at it: "He is a worn out, old fellow, and has now nothing before him but the hole (the grave); thou, on the contrary, art a fresh, young blood, full of languages and antiquities and magnificent, god-given talents,--of course he shall not live to see thee make a famous man, but his children well may; and these poor worms,--thou must one day adopt them, young master!"

Thou pure soul, on every familiar house, on every dear garden and valley will sorrow, indeed, sharpen her clasp-knife, and tear open therewith softly gushing wounds in thy glowing, tender heart. What do I say? even from thy friendly morning- and evening-heights, the nunnery-gratings of thy holiest hopes, and from Liana herself, thou wilt seem to be stealing away.

But cast thy weeping eyes over the broad, blue Italy, and dry them in the spring breezes. Life begins,--the signals for the martial exercises and tournaments of manly youth are given, and, in the midst of the Olympic battle-games, thou wilt hear the music of neighboring concert- and dancing-halls magnificently pealing around thee.

What phantasies are these I am playing here? What! is it not more than too well known to all of us, that he has been gone this long time, ever since the very first Jubilee-period,--yes, and come back again, and has already, ever since the second--and we are now counting the fourth--been sitting in company with the Librarian and the Lector, on horseback, before Pestitz, unable to get in, on account of the barricade of the----

FOOTNOTES:

[38] In Catania, the veil of St. Agatha is the only antidote to Etna.

[39] Allusion to the torches, before which the Colosseum and the Antiques and the glaciers, which are both, are seen magically gleaming.

[40] As the Queen of Heaven, Juno is always, by the ancients, clothed in a blue veil.--_Hagedorn on Painting._

[41] An old machine that fires many shots at once.

[42] In Italy the stars look not silvery, but golden.

[43] In a tempestuous atmosphere, little flames are emitted by orange-lilies, gold-flowers, sunflowers, Indian pinks, &c.

[44] Probably on fluttering gold plates after the birds.

FIFTH JUBILEE?

GRAND-ENTRY.--DR. SPHEX.--THE DRUMMING CORPSE.--THE LETTER OF THE KNIGHT.--RETROGRADATION OF THE DYING-DAY.--JULIENNE.--THE STILL GOOD-FRIDAY OF OLD AGE.--THE HEALTHY AND BASHFUL HEREDITARY PRINCE.--ROQUAIROL.--THE BLINDNESS.--SPHEX'S PREDILECTION FOR TEARS.--THE FATAL BANQUET.--THE DOLOROSO OF LOVE.

28. CYCLE.

When he came to the fork of the road, of which the right prong points to Lilar, Albano, with a somewhat heavy heart, spurred his horse across, and flew up the hill, till the bright city, like an illuminated St. Peter's dome, blazed far and wide in this spring night of his fancies. It lay, like a giant, with its shoulders (the upper city) resting on the heights, and stretched its other half (the lower city) down into the valley. It was noon, and not a cloud in heaven; at noonday a city stands before you in full, white disk, whereas a village does not, until evening, come out of its first quarter into full light. It was well fortified, not by Rimpler or Vauban, but by a blooming palisade of lindens. The long wall of the palaces of the mountain-city gleamed from above a welcome to our Albano, and the statues, on their Italian roofs, directed themselves towards him as way-guides and criers of joy; over all the palaces ran the iron framework of the lightning-rods, like a throne-scaffolding of the thunder, with golden sceptre-points; down along the side of the mountain lay camped the lower city, by the side of the stream between shady avenues, with its gay façades towards the streets, and its white back turned toward Nature; carpenters were hammering away like a forge on the green-sward among the peeled trunks of trees, and the children were clattering round with the birch-bark; cloth-makers were stretching out green cloths like bird-nets in the sun; from the distance came white-covered carriers'-wagons jogging along the country-road, and by the sides of the way shorn sheep were grazing under the warm shadow of the rich, bright linden-blossoms,--and over all these groups the noonday chime of bells from the dear, familiar towers (those relics and light-houses that gleamed out of the dusk of his earlier days), floated like one all-embracing and animating soul, and called together the friendly throngs of people.

Contemplate the heated face of my hero, who at last is riding into the open streets, built up in his fancy of temples of the sun, where, who knows but that at every long window, on every balcony, Liana may be standing? where the lying or prophetic riddles of Isola Bella must be unravelled,--where all household gods and household fates of his nearest future lie hid,--where now the Mont Blanc of the Court and the Alps of Parnassus, both of which he has to climb, lie with their feet stretching close before him. All this would have oppressed me not a little; but in the young man, especially before the chandelier of the sun, a shower of light gushed down. O, when the morning-wind of youth blows, the inner mercury-column stands high, even though the external weather be not of the best.

Few of us, when we have gone on horseback to the academy, may have happened into such a refreshing stir as met my hero: chimney-sweeps were singing away overhead out of their pulpits and black holes to the passers below, and a building-orator,[45] on the ridgepole of a new house, was exorcising the future conflagration, and quenching one in his own breast, and slinging the glass fire-bucket far over the scaffolding; yes, when we have ridden with our hero through the laughing congregation of the roof-preacher, and through the ranks of blooming sons of the Muses,[46] who stand arm in arm, among whom Alban sent round his fiery eye to find his Roquairol,--after all this, when we reach his future residence, a new clamor salutes our ears.

It came from the Land-physicus[47] Sphex, his future landlord, who is to resign to him half his palace (for the Doctor is made wealthy by his cures), because the house lies exactly in the highest part of the upper city, or the Westminster of the Court; while in the lower town are domiciled the students and the _city_. The short, thick-set Dr. Sphex was standing, as our trio rode up, by the side of a tall man, who sat upon a stone bench, and held in readiness two drum-sticks upon a child's drum. At a signal from Sphex, the tall man beat a faint roll upon his drum, and the Doctor said to him, calmly, "Vagabond!" Although Sphex had turned round a little toward the loud, approaching horsemen, still he soon made him go on with his tattooing, and said, "Scoundrel!" but during the last beat he just hastily slipped in, "Scamp!"

The horsemen dismounted; the Doctor led them, without ceremony, into the house, after he had given the drummer a hint, with his hand, not to stir. He opened them their four (or twelve) walls, and said, coldly, "Step into your three cavities." Albano marched out of the warm splendor of day into the cool, purple Erebus of the red-hung chamber, as into a picture-hall of painting dreams, into a silver-hut, as it were, for the dark mine-work of his life. He recognized therein the open hand of his rich father, from the pictures of the carpet to the alabaster statues on the wall; and in the cabinet he found, among the gifts of his foster-parents, all his poetical and philosophical text-books, which had been sent after him,--fair reflections from the still land of youth, left far behind him by his journey, in whose flower-vases only concordias had hitherto bloomed, whereas now wild rockets must be planted in them. Then (not the goddess of night her mantle, but) the goddess of twilight threw her veil over his eye, and, in the clare-obscure, made the forms of youth--many of them armed, many crowned, a troop of fates and graces--beset his heart, which had hitherto been so calm, with their arms and levers, until it became soft and languid _for three minutes_; verily, to a youth, especially this one, the sea-storms, those favorites of the painter, the laboring volcanoes of the natural philosopher, and the comets of the astronomer, are full as precious, in the moral world, as they are to them in the physical.

Albano, now separated from Liana only by streets and days, almost feared his dreamy raptures might betray their object. "Any letters?" inquired the Lector, in his short manner, abbreviated for the sake of adaptation to citizens. "Bring it up, Van Swieten!" said Sphex, to a little son, who, with two others, named Boerhave and Galen, had hitherto been acting as a corresponding deciphering-chancery to the new guests behind a curtain. "Our old Lord," added Sphex, at once, as if it had some connection with the letter, "has done lording it at last; for five days he has been dead as a mouse, as I long ago predicted." "The old Prince?" asked Augusti, with astonishment. "But why have I not yet remarked anything of funeral bells, knockers hung with black, bottles of tears, and lamentation in the city?" inquired Schoppe.

The Physicus explained. Namely, he had, as physician in ordinary, prophesied, with sufficient boldness, the third day's dying of the old prince, and happily hit it. Only as, exactly one day after the mournful event, his successor, Luigi, proposed to make his entrance into Pestitz, and, as the announcement of the high death would have extinguished, with lachrymal-vessels, the whole oil-fed illumination in honor of the son, and hung the flowery triumphal arches with mourning-weeds, the people had not been willing, although to the greatest disadvantage of the prophetic Sphex, to let matters get wind before the new prince had had his reception, just as that Greek, at the news of his son's death, postponed mourning till after the completion of his thanksgiving sacrifice. Sphex protested that he had many years before fixed, in the case of the illustrious deceased, the nativity of his consumption by his white teeth,[48] and never had he hit a death-hour better than at that time; he would, however, leave it to any and every man to decide whether a physician, who has made his prophecy everywhere known, can spin much silk in a period of such political embezzlement. "But," replied Schoppe, "if people continue to carry along their deceased monarchs, like their dead soldiers, as if they were alive, in the ranks; still they can hardly do otherwise; for as in the case of great men it is generally so plaguy hard to prove that they are living, so is it also no easy thing to make out when they are dead; coldness and stiffness and corruption prove too little. To be sure, one may, perhaps, conceal royal death-beds for the same reason which led the Persians to hide royal graves, in order to abridge as much as possible for the poor children, the people, the bitter interval between the death and the new inauguration. Yes, as according to a legal fiction the king never dies, we have to thank God that we ever learn the fact at all, and that it does not fare with his death as with the death of the quite as immortal Voltaire, which the Paris journalists were not permitted, by any means, to announce."

Van Swieten and Boerhave and Galen, after staying out a long while, brought in a letter for Albano, with Gaspard's seal; he tore it open, with the unsuspecting eagerness of youth, without a glance at the cover; but the Lector took that into his hand and turned it over and over like a Post-Office Clerk, Doctor of Heraldry, and Keeper of the Seal, as was his custom at the inquest of sphragistic wounds, and gently shook his head over the badly renewed and patched patent of nobility, namely, the impression of the arms on the wax. "Have the youngsters done any injury to the seal?" said Sphex. "My father, also," said Albano, reading to conceal an agitation which reached even to the outer man, and which a flight of heavy thoughts had suddenly occasioned among all his inner twigs, "has already heard of the Prince's death." At that Augusti shook his head still more; for as Sphex had previously jumped at once from the subject of the letter to that of the Prince's death, this leap almost presupposed the reading of the same. Let my reader deduce from this the rule, to take the distance of two tones, from one to the other of which people jump in his presence, and to infer from that the intermediate and connecting tone between the two, which they wish to conceal.

At present it was very well for the Count that the Doctor showed the tutors their apartments; ah, his soul, already staggering with the events of the past day, was now so intensely tossed by the contents of the letter!

29. CYCLE.

When Sphex opened the Librarian's room for him, the said room was already occupied with a box of vipers (also arrived from Italy), with three-quarters of a hundred weight of flax, a white hoop-petticoat, and three silk shoes, with the holes punched, belonging to the doctoress, and a supply of camomile. The medical married couple had thought the pedagogical couple nested together; but Schoppe replied admirably well, and almost with some irony toward the more politely treated Augusti: "The more powerful and intellectual and great two men are, so much the less can they bear each other under one ceiling, as great insects, which live on _fruits_, are unsocial (for example, in every hazel-nut there sits only one chafer), whereas the little ones, which only live on _leaves_,--for instance, the leaf-lice,--cleave together nest-wise." Zesara would by all means have been glad to hold to his insatiable heart the friend whom fate had placed thereupon, constantly in every situation and season as a brother-in-arms; but Schoppe has the right of it. Friends, lovers, and married people must have everything else in common, but not a chamber. The gross requisitions and trifling incidents of bodily presence gather as lamp-smoke around the pure, white flame of love. As the echo is always of more syllables the farther off our call starts, so must the soul from which we desire a fairer echo not be too near ours; and hence the nearness of souls increases with the distance of bodies.

The Doctor caused his noisy children to run like a cleansing stream through the Augean stable; but he went down again to the drummer, with whom, according to his own story, his connection stood thus: Sphex had already, several years before, ventured certain peculiar conjectures upon the secretion of fat and the diameter of the fat-cells, in a treatise which he would not publish till he could append to it the anatomical drawings thereunto appertaining, for which he was awaiting the dissection and injection of the drummer that sat there. This sickly, simple, flabby man, named _Malt_, he had a year since, when certain symptoms of the fat-eye attached to him, taken to board gratis, on condition that he should let himself be dissected when he was dead. Unfortunately Sphex has found, for a considerable time, that the corpse daily falls away and dries up from the likeness of an eel to a horned-snake; and he cannot possibly make out what does it, since he allows him nothing emaciating, neither thinking, nor motion, nor passions, sensibility, vinegar, nor anything else.

As to the drum, the corpse is obliged--since he is full as hard of hearing as he is of comprehending, and never can adopt a reason, for the very reason that he never hears one--to carry that round, strapped to him, because during its vibration he can better apprehend what his employer and prosector has to censure in him.[49] The Doctor now began to scold at him down below--Schoppe stood listening at the window--in the following wise: "I would the Devil had taken your cursed father of blessed memory before he had died. You shrink up like army-cloth under your lamentation, and yet never wake him up, though you cried your nose away. Drum better, church-mouse! Don't you know, then, scrub, that you have made a contract with another, to grow into fat as well as you can, and that it's expensive maintaining a fellow that steals his wages in this way, till he becomes available? Others would gladly grow fat, if they had such a chance. And you! speak, rope!" Malt let the drum-sticks clatter down under his thighs, and said: "Thou hast hit the true secret of thy trouble with me,--there is no real blessing upon our grease,--and one of us silently wears away at the thought. As to my blessed father, verily, I send him out of my head, let him happen in when he will."

30. CYCLE.

The paternal letter, which shook Albano's soul in all its joints, runs, when translated, thus:--

"Dear Albano: I regret to say, that in the Campanian vale I received a letter informing me of the continued recurrence and increasing violence of thy sister's asphyxias; it was written on Good Friday, and looked forward to her death as a settled thing. I, too, am prepared for the event. So much the more am I struck with thy account of the juggler of the Island, who would play the prophet. Such a prediction presupposes some circumstance or other, which I must trace out more nearly in Spain. I think I already know the impostor. Be thou, on thy birthday, watchful, armed, cool, and bold, and, if possible, hold the _jongleur_ fast; but bring no ridicule upon thyself by speaking of the subject. Dian is in Rome, working away right bravely. Put on court-mourning for the dear old Prince, out of courtesy. Addio!

"G. DE C."

"Ah, precious sister!" he sighed inwardly, and drew out her medallion, and looked through his tears upon the features of an old age which was denied her, and read with dim eyes the refuted subscription: "We see each other again." Now, when life was opening before him broad and smiling, it came home to him much more nearly, that fate laid its hand so darkly and heavily upon his sister; to which was added, too, the melancholy question, whether he was not guilty of her disappearance and decline, since on his account the frightful Zahouri of the Island had carried on perhaps a sacrificing jugglery: even the circumstance that she was his weakly twin-sister was a pang. But now his feelings stood contending against each other in his mind, as on a battle-field. "What destiny is on its way to meet me!" thought he. "Take the crown!" that voice had said. "What one?" his ambitious spirit rose up and asked, and boldly conjectured whether it consisted of laurels or thorns or metals. "Love the beautiful one!" it had said; he asked not, however, in this case, "What one?" only he feared, since the father of Death seemed terribly to certify his name and credentials, that the voice announced for the ascension- and birth-night might name some other name than the most beloved.

In the evening, after the three new-comers had fairly got through their household arrangements,--which, however, had never yet been able to efface from Albano's undulating soul the multiplied magic splendor of the Linden-city,--the Lector introduced the Count to the hereditary prince, Luigi. That individual was engaged half an hour every day copying in the picture-gallery; and appointed the two to attend him there. They went in. Any other than myself would have set before the world a bill of fare _raisonné_ of all the show-dishes in the gallery; but I cannot so much as present it with the seventeen pictures, over whose charms those silken shame-aprons or veils hung, which a Paris dame would gladly take off from her own, merely for the sake of modestly covering therewith works of art. One may easily conceive that our Alban, in this picture-gallery, must have been vividly reminded of that one of his mother's,[50] and that he would gladly have pressed every nail, had no one been there.

But the Princess Julienne was there, whom he (as we all do) still recognized right well as a Blumenbühl acquaintance, as she also did him. She was truly full of youthful charms, but one did not find these out till one had been for two days violently in love with her; that made her every minute afterward prettier, as in fact love is rather the father than the son of the goddess of grace, and his quiver the best casket of jewels and the richest toilet-box, and his bandage the best _mouchoir de Venus_ and beauty-patch that I know.

She was just sketching the gypsum-cast of a noble old head, which seemed to the Count as if it must have been drawn from the antique-cabinet of his memory, and toward which his swelling heart flowed out right lovingly; but he could not recall the original. At last Julienne, in despite of etiquette, said, looking up most kindly, "Ah, dear Augusti, my father lies dead in Lilar." The word Lilar suddenly colored, in Albano, the pale image of recollection,--perfectly like this white bust had the old man in the moonshine looked, who, in that poetical summer-night, pressed Zesara's hands together on the mountain for prayer, and said, "Go home to sleep, dear son, ere the storm comes." Now another would have inquired after the name of the bust, and then, and not till then, have disclosed the nocturnal history; but the Count, in his warmth, did merely the latter, after waiting a short time for the conversation to run out. Augusti, when Albano began the history--to _him_ a foreign one--of his acquaintance with the original, was on thorns to interrupt him; but Julienne gave him a nod, to let him go on, and the youth true-heartedly communicated to the sympathizing soul the beautiful meeting, with a tenderness of emotion and fire, both of which increased when her eyes flowed over into her smiles. "It was my father,--that is his cast," said Julienne, weeping and glad. Albano, after his manner, clasped his hands together, with a sigh, before the bust, and said, "Thou noble, heartily-beloved form!" and his large eye gleamed with love and sorrow.

The good female soul was carried away by a sympathy so uncourtly, and she gave herself up completely to her inborn fire. Female and court life is truly only a longer _punishment of bearing arms_ (as, according to the model of the yes-sirs, there are no-sirs, so royal governesses are true no-ma'ams); the seven-colored cockade of gay, dancing liberty is there torn off, or runs into the black of court-mourning; every female pleasure-grove must be an unholy one; I know nothing more fatal,--but the curly-haired Julienne, in spite of you and me, broke through the eternal imprisonment (with sweet bread and strong water), some twelve times a day, and laughed to the free heavens, and offended (herself and others never) the royal governess always. She now related to the Count (while from nervous weakness and vivacity she continued to smile more brightly and speak more rapidly) how her dear, feeble father, more childlike than childish, whose old lips and disabled thoughts could not possibly any longer do more than lisp a response to prayers, had shut himself up with a snowy-headed mystical court-preacher in an oratory at Lilar (a gray head loves to hide itself before it disappears forever, and seeks, like birds, a dark place for going to sleep),--and how she and Fräulein von Froulay (Liana) had alternately read prayers before the half-blind old man, and, as it were, tolled the evening-bell of devotion to the weary, sleep-drunken life. She painted how, in this antechamber of the tomb, he had outlived or forgotten all that he had once loved; how he had kept always asking after her mother, whose death was ever slipping again from his memory; and how the dimmed eye had taken every hour of the day for evening, and accordingly every one who went out as one going to bed.

We will not look too long at this late time of life, when men again, like children, shrink up for the more lasting cradle of the grave; and when, like flowers sleeping at evening, they become _undistinguishable_, and grow all alike, even before death makes them so.

The Lector, like all courtiers, was particularly ill-suited with these funereals; he would also fain heal the Job's malady of her lamentation by changing the current of discourse, and bringing it nearer to Liana. But in the very act of describing the sympathy and sacrifices of this friend, and when memory brought back to her the long, tearful embrace in which Liana had locked her and pain at once as it were fast to her bosom, then came back into her heart anew every dark, heavy drop of blood which her powerful arteries had sent forth, and she ceased to portray either this history or the head upon which she had been engaged.

The two female friends were none of those who send a kiss to each other through two thicknesses of veil, or who know how to hug each other without wounding or bruising a curl, or whose love-feast every year, as the sacramental bread every century, breaks lighter and thinner; but they loved each other intensely,--with eyes, lips, and hearts,--like two good angels. And if hitherto joy had taken her harvest-wreath and made it a wedding-ring of friendship, so now did grief seek to do the same with his girdle of thorns. You good souls! to me it is very easily imaginable how such a pure, bright linking of souls should at once painfully distend and blissfully exalt the heart of your friend Albano, as the aerostatic ball at once destructively swells and soars. For Liana's entry, there stood besides beautifully decorated triumphal gates to the highest heavens in his innermost being!

Meanwhile a stranger would not, without this pen of mine (nor I myself without the fee-provost Hafenreffer), have been able to observe anything in the Count, while speaking, except a mild, wandering glow in his face, and rapidity of utterance.

31. CYCLE.

Into the midst of these delineations and enjoyments the successor, or rather the _afterwinter_ of the cold old man, Luigi, suddenly entered. With a flat, carved work of spongy face, on which nothing expressed itself but the everlasting discontent of life-prodigals, and with a little full-grown miniver[51] on his head (as forerunner of the wisdom-teeth), and with the unfruitful superfetation of a voluminous belly, he came up to Albano with the greatest courtliness, in which a flat frostiness towards all men stood prominent. He immediately began to dust about him with the bran of empty, rapid, disconnected questions, and was constantly in a hurry; for he suffered almost more ennui than he caused; as in general, there is no one with whom life drags so disagreeably as with him who tries to make it shorter. Luigi had run over the earth as quickly as through a powdering room, and had, as in such a room, become decently gray; the milk-vessels of his outer and inner man had, because they were to be converted into cream-pots and custard-cups, for that very reason, perverted themselves into poison-cups and goblets of sorrow. As often as I pass along before a painted prince's-suite in a corridor, I always fall upon my old project, and say, with entire conviction: "Could we only contrive for once, like the Spartans and all the older nations, to get a regent to the throne in a _healthy_ state, then we should have a _good_ one into the bargain, and all would go well. But I know these are no times for such a thing. It is a sin, that only at torture do surgeons and physicians assist, not at joy, to point out nicely the degree of pleasure as they do of the rack, and to indicate the innocent conditions."

Albano, a stranger in the company and in the eyes of this class of men, looked upon the gulf between himself and Luigi as much less deep than it was; it was merely annoying and uncomfortable to him, as it is to certain people, when, without their knowledge, a cat is in the chamber. The progress of moral enervation and refinement will yet so cleanse and equalize all our exteriors,--and according to the same law, indeed, by which _physical weakness_ throws back the _eruptions of the skin_ and drives them into the _nobler_ parts,--that verily an angel and a satan will come at last to be distinguishable in nothing except in the heart. Alban had already brought with him from Wehrfritz, whom he always heard contending for the right of the province against the prince, an aversion to his successor; so much the more easily flamed up in him a moral indignation, when Luigi turned toward the pictures and drew aside the curtains or aprons from several of the most indecent, in order, not without taste and knowledge, to appraise their artistic worth. A copied Venus of Titian, lying upon a white cloth, was only the forerunner. Although the innocent hereditary prince made his _voyage pittoresque_ through this gallery with the artistical coldness of a gallery inspector and anatomist, and sought more to show than to enrich his knowledge, still the inexperienced youth took it all up with a deaf and blind passionateness, which I know not how to vindicate in any way, not even by the presence of the princess, and so much the less, because in the first place she busily divided her soul only between the gypsum-bust and its copy, and because, secondly, in our day, ladies' watches and fans (if they are tasty) have pictures on them which Albano would want other fans to hide. The two flames of wrath and shame overspread his face with a glowing reflection; but his awkward honesty of scorn contrasted with the ease of the Lector, who with his cold tone, quite as precise as it was light, preserved independence and protected purity. "They please me not, one of them," he said, with severity: "I would give them all away for a single storm of Tempesta's." Luigi smiled at his scholar-like eye and feeling. When they stepped into the second picture-chamber, Albano heard the Princess going away. As this apartment threatened him with still more rent veils of the _un_holiest, he took his leave without special ceremony, and went back without the Lector, who had to-day to give a reading.

Never did Schoppe grasp his throbbing hand more heartily than this time; the aspect of an abashed young man is almost fairer (especially rarer) than that of an abashed virgin; the former appears more tender and feminine, as the latter appears more strong and manly, by a mixture of the indignation of virtue. Schoppe, who, like Pope, Swift, Boileau, forced into combination a sacred reverence for the sex with cynicism of dress and language, emptied the greatest vials of wrath upon all libertinage, and fell like a satirical Bellona upon the best free people; this time, however, he rather took them under his protection, and said, "The whole tribe love the blush of shame in others decidedly, and defend it more willingly than shamelessness, just as (and on the same kind of grounds) blind persons prefer the _scarlet_ color. One may liken them to _toads_, who set the costly toad-stone (their heart) on no other cloth as they do upon a _red_ one."