Chapter III: Part 3

"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.