"The last and last but one I reserve for myself. Against the _longueurs_ (lengthy pa.s.sages) in life's book,--a book which no man understands,--there is no remedy except some merry pa.s.sages, 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 trans.m.u.ted 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 G.o.ds'-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 h.e.l.l, 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 G.o.ds, that a female listener whom I cannot endure would immediately thereupon become my lover, and from that my mistress and my h.e.l.l.

"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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sions are poetic liberties, which the moral liberty takes to itself.

Thou didst not, I a.s.sure 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 antic.i.p.ate 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, G.o.d 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 G.o.d, that this impotent _cold-sweating_ life gains again a pulsation of the heart, a pa.s.sion; 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 carca.s.s 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 sc.u.m and froth of the heart,--that conspiracy of l.u.s.t 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 a.s.suredly 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 G.o.d! 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 pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l! 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 h.e.l.l-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 h.e.l.l-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 abas.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sionately 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 Blumenbuhl and lead his forsaken sister to the mausoleum of truth; but now his heart was not strong enough to sustain his own words to his sister or her immeasurable and inconsolable tears.

TWENTY-FIRST JUBILEE.

The Trial-lesson of Love.--Froulay's Fear of Fortune.--The Biter Bit.--Honors of the Observatory.

90. CYCLE.

Since the extinction of the engagement, and since Gaspard's letters, Albano's eye had been directed toward the fairest ruins of time,--unless one excepts the earth itself,--to Italy; and his injured vision held fast to this new portal of his life, which was to usher him into the presence of the fairest and greatest which nature and man can create. How did the fire-mountains, and Rome's ruins, and her warm, golden-blue heavens, already unfold to him their splendor, when in fancy he led the suffering Liana before them, and her holy eyes refreshed themselves with measuring the heights! A man who travels with his beloved to Italy has in the very fact that he might do without one of the two, both double. And Albano hoped for this felicity, since all testimonies which he met with of Liana's restoration to health promised as much. As to Dr. Sphex,--the only one who opened a pit for her, and in it cast a death-bell, and swore to everybody, she would fall with the leaves of autumn,--him he saw no more. He wished, however,--he said to himself,--in this whole joint-tour, only her happiness, not at all her love. So did he see himself always in his self-mirror, namely, only veiled; so did he regard himself often as too stern, although he was so little of that; so did he take himself to be conqueror of his own heart, when his fair countenance already wore pale, sickly hues.

The present stood as yet dark above him, but its neighboring times, the future and the past, lay full of light. What a journey, in which a beloved, a father, a friend, a female friend, are of themselves, on the very road, the curiosities which others find only when they reach the end!

The Princess was the female friend. Since Gaspard's letters to her and to him, since the hope of a longer and nearer enjoyment of his society, she found more and more pleasure in subduing all clouds round about her, so as to smile and shine upon her friend only out of a blue heaven. She alone at court seemed to take mildly and rightly the blunt youth, whose proud frankness so often ran against the disguised pride of the Count, and particularly against the open pride of the Prince; she alone seemed--as nothing is seldomer guessed in and by _circles_ than fair sensibility, especially by courtly ones and especially manly sensibility--softly to spy out his, and to increase its warmth by her sympathy. She alone honored him with that strict, significant attention which mankind so seldom give, as well as can so seldom appreciate, because they never have occasion but for love and pa.s.sion, in order to--render justice, incapable, otherwise than by comet-light, by warm-flames and fires of joy, to read the best hand. All that he was, she simply presupposed in him; his pre-eminent qualities were only her demands and his pa.s.sports; she made his individuality neither her model nor her reflection; both were painters, no pictures. He heard often, indeed, that she had a masculine severity, especially in her dictatorial capacity, but not, however, that she was womanishly inhuman. To the customary vermin of courtlings, which gives itself elevation on its worm-rings only by crawling, she was repulsive and torturing; although, as a new-comer, she should, it would seem, have been a new-born child, that brings with it raisins to the older children. On Sunday, when at courts, as on the stage in Berlin, spiritual popular pieces are always brought out, she was (among the Sunday-born-children, who see more spirits than they have) a Monday's child, which wishes to find for itself one, who, whether he has ever been dubbed n.o.ble or not, at all events knows how to distinguish an original from the copy, as well in his own self as in a picture-gallery. On that account many lords, and still more ladies, thanked G.o.d, if they had occasion to say nothing more to her than "G.o.d bless you!"

In this way she appeared to the Count every day more worthy of his father. As into a warm spring sunshine did he enter for the first time into the flattering magic circle of female friendship, which even here cast and moulded two wings for love out of the wax-cells of the enjoyed honey; it was, however, with him love for Liana, to whom the friend could most easily give wings for Italy. He felt that soon an hour of overflowing esteem would strike, when he could confidingly open the high-walled cloister-garden of his former love. For she made room for him to be near her as often as the narrow compa.s.s of a throne and the all-betraying height of its location would admit. But something disturbed, watched, beset both,--a rival neighbor, as it seemed. It was the singular Julienne, who always, when things were getting on, stepped out of her box on to the stage of the Princess, and confounded the play. Frequently she came after him; sometimes he had gotten invitations from her just the moment before others from the Princess followed, which hers, therefore, as it seemed, must have antic.i.p.ated.

What did she mean? Would she possibly win from a youth whom she had so often provoked by her contempt of men, and by the lightning-like dartings of her indignation, his love, merely, perhaps, because he had always so warmly reciprocated her friendly glances, as those of so dear a--friend of his beloved? Or did she want of him only hatred for the honored Princess, and that indeed out of envy and the usual resemblance of women to ivory, whose _white_ hue so readily becomes _yellow_, and which only by a thorough warming gets the fair color again?

These questions were rather repeated than answered by an evening which he and Julienne spent at the Princess's. A good reading was to give the picture-exhibition of Goethe's Ta.s.so. Fine art, and nothing but art, was with the Princess the art of Pa.s.sau[35] against court- and life-wounds; and, in general, the world-system was to her only a complete picture-gallery and Pembroke cabinet and gallery of antiques.

The reading parts were so distributed by the manager, the Princess, that she herself got the Princess, Julienne the _confidente_ Leonore, Albano the Poet Ta.s.so, a youthful-cheeked Chamberlain the Duke, and Froulay Alphonso. This latter, who had learned to prefer works of artifice to works of art, and the princely cabinet to any cabinet of art, in spite of his heart stood ready there for a journey to the mountain of the muses, arrayed for that purpose by the Princess in a mountain-habit. Thus forced more and more every day into the poetical fashion, he looked, of course, like any other abortion, which has come into the world with pantaloons, queue, and the like all born on him, on purpose to condemn the modish way of the world, just like a street-sweeper in Ca.s.sel.

Albano read with outward and inward glow, not toward the reading Princess, but toward the Princess she personated, from a habit of his heart which life always set a-glow; and the Princess read the _role_ of her _role_ very well, of course. Her artistic feeling told her, even without the prompting of tender sensibility, that in Goethe's Ta.s.so,--which, for the most part, is related to the Italian Ta.s.so, as the heavenly Jerusalem to the Jerusalem delivered,--the Princess is almost Princess of Princesses. Never did the G.o.d of the muses and of the sun pa.s.s more beautifully through the constellation Virgo than here. Never was veiled love more radiantly unveiled.

The Minister read off the powerful proser Alphonso, as he scolds at Ta.s.so and Albano, as well as a trumpeter of cavalry reads the notes which are affixed to his sleeve; in fact, he found the man quite sensible.

The younger[36] Princess might, in the general poetic concert, have done her share of the talking some quarter of an hour, more or less, when she suddenly threw down, in a lively manner, the beautiful volume of Goethe's works, of which there were three copies there, and said, with her impetuosity, "A stupid part! I cannot abide it!" All the world was silent. The senior[37] Princess looked at her significantly; the junior Princess looked at _her_ still more significantly, and went out, without coming back again. A court dame took up the reading, and went calmly on.

To most of those present this interlude was properly the most interesting; and they willingly continued to think of it during the reading of the latter part. The Princess, who had long believed the Princess loved the Count, was delighted with the inconsiderateness of her adversary. Albano, although her warm eye had struck him of old, explained to himself the absconding on the ground of chagrin at the subordinateness of her part in the reading, and the general incompatibility of the two women; for while Julienne, at her own expense, slighted the Princess, and took little pains to conceal her opinion, so also did that of the Princess appear involuntarily. So soon as one party manifests its hatred, the second can hardly conceal its from the third.