When, at length, the three sons of joy were about to seat themselves in
the dining-hall of a laurel grove before their meat-and-drink offering,
which Schoppe had stored away in the provision ship at Sesto, at that
moment, a genteel stranger, elegantly dressed in one color, came through
the twigs, with slow, stately steps, up to the reclining company, and
addressed himself, forthwith, without inquiry, to Cesara, in slow, soft,
and precisely pronounced German: "I am intrusted with an apology to Sir
Count Cesara."--"From my father?" asked he quickly. "Beg pardon,--from
my prince," replied the stranger; "he forbade your noble father, who
arose ill, to travel in the cool of the morning, but towards evening he
will meet you. In the mean time," he added, with a gracious smile and a
slight bow, "I sacrifice something on the noble Knight's account, in
commencing the pleasure of being longer with you hereafter, Sir Count,
by bringing you disappointment." Schoppe, who was neater at guessing
than at speaking, immediately broke out,--for he never let himself be
imposed upon by any man: "We are then pedagogic copartners and
confederates. Welcome, dear Gray-leaguesman!"[7] "It gives me pleasure,"
said the stranger, coldly, who was dressed in gray.
But Schoppe had hit it; the stranger was hereafter to occupy the place
of chief tutor to Cesara, and Schoppe was collaborator. To me this seems
judicious; the electric-sparkling Schoppe could serve as the cat's-skin,
the fox-tail, the glass cylinder, which should completely charge our
youth, composed as he was of conductors and non-conductors; the chief
tutor, as principal, being the operator and spark-taker, who should
discharge him with his Franklin's-points.
The man was named Von Augusti, was Lector to the prince, and had lived
much in the great world; he seemed, as is the case with all of this
court-stamp, ten years older than he really was, for he was in fact only
just thirty-seven.
One would have to suffer for it from the inverted ink-pots of the
reviewing Xanthippes, if one should leave the reviewers or Xanthippes in
any uncertainty as to who the prince really was of whom we have all made
mention above. It was the hereditary Prince of Hohenfliess, in whose
village of Blumenbühl the Count had been brought up, and into whose
chief city he was next to remove. The Hohenfliess Infante was hurrying
back, in a great dust and all out of breath, from Italy, wherein he had
left much spare coin and land-scrip, to Germany, in order there to coin,
upon his own account, allegiance-medals, because his reigning father was
going down the steps into the hereditary sepulchre, and was even now
within a few paces of his coffin.
During dinner the Lector Augusti spoke of the lovely scenery with true
taste, but with little warmth and impulse, preferring it by far to some
Tempestas[8] in the Borromæan palace. Thence he passed on, in order to
have occasion of mentioning the Knight as often as possible, to the
personalities of the Court, and confessed that the German gentleman, M.
de Bouverot, stood in especial favor,--for with courtiers and saints
everything goes by grace,--and that the Prince was uncommonly afflicted
in his nerves, &c. Courtiers, who, for the most part, cut their very
souls according to the pattern of another's, do, however, draw up their
ministerial reports of court so copiously and seriously for the
uninitiated, that the reader of their gazettes must needs either laugh
or go to sleep; a court-man and the book _Des Erreurs et de la Verité_
call the general of the Jesuits God, the Jesuits men, and the
non-Jesuits beasts. Schoppe listened with a dreadful pucker and twist of
feature; he hated courts bitterly. Young Albano thought not much better
of them; nay, as he was fond of venture, and liked much better to work
and fight with the arm than with the fingers of the inner man, and
delighted in tackling to the snow-plough and harrow and sowing-machine
of life war-horses and thunder-steeds, instead of a team of clever
home-and field-horses, of course people who went carefully and
considerately to work, and would rather do light, lacquered work, and
delicate ladies' work, than Hercules'-labors, he did not particularly
fancy. However he could not but feel a respect for the modesty of
Augusti, (based as it was upon a noble self-reliance,) which never let
him say a word about himself, as well as for the knowledge he had gained
by travel.
Cesara,--by the way I shall continue through this Cycle to write it with
a C, agreeably to the Spanish orthography; but in and after the 4th,
since I am not used to that letter in my orthography, and cannot be
forever misrepresenting myself through a long book, it will be written
with a Z,--Cesara could not hear enough from the Lector about his
father. He related to him the last act of the Knight in Rome, but with
an irreligious coldness which produced in the youth a chill of a
different kind. Don Gaspard, namely, had laid a wager with a German
Nuncius, picture against picture, that he would take a certain German
(Augusti would not name him), whose life was only one prolonged, moral
filth-month in the princely stable of Epicurus, and in two days, without
seeing him, would convert him for as long a time as the Nuncio should
desire. The latter accepted the wager, but caused the German to be
secretly watched. After two days the German locked himself up, became
devout, pale, still, bed-ridden, and in conduct came near to a true
Christian. The Nuncio watched the mischief for a week, then demanded the
sudden retransformation, or the Circe's wand, which should bring back
again the beastly shape. The Knight touched the German with the wand,
and the Epicurean swine stood there perfectly sound and well. I know not
which is the more inexplicable, the miracle, or the cold-bloodedness of
the thing. But the Lector could not say with what menstrua Gaspard
forced these rapid solutions and evaporations and precipitations.
At length the Lector, who had long been _frappé_ with the vocation and
the collaboratorship of the singular Schoppe, came, by polite
circumlocutions, upon the question, how the Knight had become acquainted
with him. "Through the Pasquino," he replied. "He was just stepping
round the corner of the Palazzo degli Ursini, when he saw some Romans
and our hereditary prince standing round a man who was on his knees
(they were my knees) before the statues of Pasquino and Marforio, and
offering to them the following prayer: Dear Castor and Pollux! why do ye
not secularize yourselves out of the ecclesiastical estate, and travel
through my Germany _in partibus infidelium_, or as two diligent vicars?
Could you not go round among the cities of the empire as missionary
preachers and referendaries, or post yourselves as _chevaliers
d'honneur_ and armorial bearers on either side of a throne? Would to God
they might at least vote thee, Pasquino, royal high-chaplain and master
of ceremonies in the court chapels, or let thee down from the roof by a
rope at the christening as baptismal angel! Say, could not you twins,
now, once come forward and speak as petition-masters-general in the
halls of the Diet, or, as _magistri sententiarum_, oppugn one another
within the walls of the universities on Commencement days? Pasquino, can
no Delia Porta[9] restore thee, were it only so far that thou mightest,
at least, at Congresses and treaty-makings of the diplomatic corps, play
the _silhouetteur_ as the figure-head of the stove, or must you serve at
the highest only in university libraries, as the busts of critical
editors? Ah, gay pair, would that Chigi, who stands here beside me,
might only model you into a portable pocket edition for ladies, I would
put you by, and not take you out of my pocket till I reached Germany! I
can, however, do it even here on the island," said Schoppe; whereupon he
drew forth the satirical work of art; for the renowned architect and
modeller, Chigi, who heard him, had really cast a copy of it. Schoppe
went on to tell how Don Gaspard then seriously stepped up to him, and
asked him, in Spanish, who he was. "I am (he answered also in Spanish)
actual Titular librarian to the Grand Master at Malta, and a descendant
of the so-called grammatical dog, the toothed humanist, Scioppius
(German Schoppe); my baptismal name is Pero, Piero, Pietro (Peter). But
many here call me, by mistake, Sciupio or Sciopio (extravagance)."
Gaspard had an impartial, deep-reaching eye for every spirit, even
though it were most unlike his own; and, least of all, did he seek a
repetition of himself. He therefore took the librarian home with him.
Since, now, the latter seemed to live solely by portrait-painting, and
was besides just meaning to go back to Germany, he accordingly proposed
to this rich, many-eyed, rough spirit, Albano's society, which only the
present fellow-laborer, Augusti, was to share with him. But there were
four things which the librarian demanded beforehand, as
preliminaries,--a sitting from the Count, his profile, and--when both
these had been granted--yet a third and a fourth, in the following
terms: "Must I suffer myself to be _calendered_[10] by the
three estates, and forced to take on gloss and smoothness by
polishing-presses? I will not; whithersoever else, be it to
heaven or hell, I will accompany your son, but not into the
stamping-washing-roasting-melting-and-forcing-works of great houses."
This was granted easiest of all; besides, the second Imperial vicegerent
of the paternal supremacy, Augusti, was appointed to the business in
question. But upon the fourth point they came near falling out. Schoppe,
who would rather be an outlaw than a slave or a freedman, and whose
ground, no less imperially free than fruitful, would not endure a hedge,
could accommodate himself only to accidental, undetermined services, and
felt obliged to decline the _fixum_ of a salary. "I will," said he,
"deliver occasional sermons, but none of your weekly sermons; nay, it
may be, oftentimes, I shall not enter the desk for a half-year
together." The Knight considered it beneath him to be under obligations,
and drew back, till Schoppe hit upon the diagonal road, and said he
would give his society as a _don gratuit_, and should expect of the
Knight, from time to time, a considerable _don gratuit_ in return. As
for the rest, Schoppe was now full as dear to the Knight as the
first-best Turk of the Court who had ever helped him up his
carriage-steps; his trial of a man was like a post-mortem examination,
and after the trial he neither loved nor hated more cordially; to him,
as he looked into the show-piece of blustering life, the manager and the
first and second mistresses, and the Lears and Iphigenias and heroes
were no friends, nor were the Kasperls and the tyrants and
supernumeraries foes, but they were simply different actors in different
parts. Ah, Gaspard, standest thou, then, in the front box, and not also
on the stage of life itself? And dost thou not in the great drama
recognize, like Hamlet, a lesser one? Ay, does not every stage imply,
after all, a twofold life,--a copying and a copied?
Either the glass or two (or more) of wine, or else his annoying contrast
to the elegant, sedate Lector, set Schoppe's winnowing-mill with all its
wheels in motion, though this humor of his found small scope on the
enchanting island; and when Augusti expressed a wish that Schoppe might
go to Germany under happier auspices than other painters, the latter
drew forth a pack of gilded pictures of German patron saints, and said,
shuffling them: "Many a one would here lay a papal miserere on the desk
and sing it off, particularly if, like me, he had to go into winter
quarters among the German ice and fog-banks in the middle of
spring;--and it is with reluctance, I am free to confess, I leave the
Harlequin and Pulzinella and Scapin, and the whole _comedia dell' arte_
behind. But the gentlemen saints whom I here shuffle have brought the
lands under their charge into high and dry condition, and one passes
through them with comfort. Mr. Architect, you laugh, but you know
altogether too little of what these painted heavenly advowees hourly
undertake in behalf of the German circles. Mr. Architect, show me, after
all, a country anywhere, in which so many cudgels, programmes,
professors, _Perukes-allongées_, learned advertisements, imperial
notices, cits and surburbans, ceremonies, coronations, and Heidelberg
tubs, but without indwelling Diogeneses, are to be mustered together as
in the aforementioned? Or I appeal to you, Mr. Von Augusti! Point out to
me, I pray, one single territory which is provided with such a _Long
Parliament_, namely, a most lengthy Diet of the Empire, as it were, an
extraordinarily wholesome _pillula perpetua_[11] which the patient is
incessantly swallowing, and which as incessantly purges him; and who is
not reminded, as well as myself, in this connection, of the _capitulatio
perpetua_, and in general of the body politic of the Empire, that
_perpetuum immobile_,--and on good grounds?" Here Schoppe drank. "The
body of the Empire becomes thereby, like the first principle of morals,
or like virgin earth, altogether insoluble; nay, supposing one of us
were to take an electoral sword, and cut it in two therewith, as if it
were an earwig, still the half with the teeth would, like the cloven
earwig, turn round and eat the latter half clean up,--and then there
would be the whole continuous earwig rejoined and well fed into the
bargain. It is not by any means to be regretted as a consequence of this
close _nexus_ of the Empire, that the corpus can devour and digest its
own limbs, as the brook-crab does its stomach, without any real harm to
itself, so that the corpus, like a Homeric god, can only be wounded, but
not killed. Take this bunchy polypus-stalk, I often say, mash it to a
pulp with Rösel,--turn it wrong side outward like a glove,--like
Lichtenberg, cut the polypus in two dexterously with a hair,--like
Trembley, stick and incorporate several severed limbs into one another,
as other naturalists do imperial cities, abbeys, small provinces into
greater, or the reverse,--and then examine after some days; verily,
magnificent and whole and well, thy polypus will be found sitting there
again, or my name is not Schoppe."
The Count had heard him again and again on this subject, and could
therefore more easily and properly smile; the Lector, however, was
learning all this for the first time, and even the comic actor is not
such to his new hearers. But amidst all these diversions there still
sounded on in Albano's soul a confused tumult, like the murmuring of
the waterfall of the coming times. He peered longingly through the
wavering seams of the laurel-foliage, out toward the shining hills, when
Dian said, in his painter's-language: "Is it not as if all the gods
stood, with thousands of cornucopias, on the mountains around Lago
Maggiore, and poured down wine and cascades, till the lake, like a
goblet of joy, foams over and gushes down with the brimming juice?"
Schoppe replied: "Pleasures of exceeding flavor, like pineapples, have
the misfortune, that, like pineapples, they make the gums bleed." "I
think," said Augusti, "that one ought not to reflect much upon the
pleasures of life, any more than upon the beauties of a good poem; one
enjoys both better without counting or dissecting them." "And I," said
Cesara, "would calculate and dissect from very pride; whatever came of
it I would abide, and I should be ashamed to be unhappy about it. If
life, like the olive, is a bitter fruit, then grasp both with the press,
and they will afford the sweetest oil." Here he rose to remain alone on
the island till evening; he asked indulgence, but gave no excuse. His
lofty, ambitious soul was incapable of descending to the smallest lie,
even towards an animal. In Blumenbühl he used daily to entice the tame
pigeons near him by holding out food; and his foster-sister often begged
him to catch one; but he always said, "No," for he would not betray the
confidence even of a brute creature.
While they followed him with their eyes, as he slowly retired through
the laurel shades, with the shadows dancing after him and stray sunbeams
gliding down over him, and, as in a dream, gently bent the branches
apart with his hands extended before him, Dian broke forth: "What a
statue of Jupiter!" "And the ancients," said Schoppe, joining in,
"believed, moreover, that every god dwelt in his own statue." "A
magnificent, threefold breadth of brow, nasal bridge, and breast!"
continued Dian. "A Hercules planting olive-trees on Olympus!" "It struck
me very much," said the Lector, "that, after considerable study, I could
read in his countenance what I wished and what was mutually
contradictory,--coldness, warmth, innocence and gentleness, most readily
defiance and force." Schoppe added: "It may be still harder for himself
to compel such a congress of warring powers within him to become a
peace-congress." "How beautifully," said the humanly feeling Dian, "must
love sit upon so mighty a form, and how sublimely must anger!" "Those
are two poetic beauties," replied Schoppe, "out of which two
Pedagogiarchs and Zenophons, like us, can make little with their Cyrus
in their Cyropædia."