Our Zesara, on entering into the years when the song of poets and
nightingales flows more deeply into the softened soul, became suddenly
another being. He grew stiller and wilder at once, more tender and more
impetuous, as, for instance, he once flew in the highest rage to the
help of a dog yelping under the blows of the cudgel. Heaven and earth,
which hitherto in his bosom, as in the Egyptian system, had run into
each other, that is to say, the ideal and the real, worked themselves
free from each other, and Heaven ascended and receded, pure and high and
brilliant,--upon the inner world rose a sun and upon the outer a moon,
but the two worlds and hemispheres attracted each other and made one
whole,--his step became slower, his bright eye dreamy, his
athlete-gymnastics less frequent,--he could not now help loving all
human beings more warmly, and feeling them more near to him; and often
with closed eyes he fell trembling upon the neck of his foster-mother,
or out in the open air bade his foster-father, at his starting on his
journeys, a more lonely and heartfelt farewell.
And now before such clear and sharp eyes the Isis-veil of Nature became
transparent, and a living Goddess looked down into his heart with
features full of soul. Ah, as if he had found his mother, so did he now
find Nature,--now for the first time he knew what spring was, and the
moon, and the ruddy dawn, and the starry night.... Ah, we have all once
known it, we have all once been tinged with the morning-redness of
life!... O, why do we not regard all _first_ stirrings of human emotion
as holy, as firstlings for the altar of God? There is truly nothing
purer and warmer than our first friendship, our first love, our first
striving after truths, our first feeling for Nature: like Adam, we are
made mortals out of immortals; like Egyptians, we are governed earlier
by gods than by men; and the ideal foreruns the reality, as, with some
trees, the tender _blossoms_ anticipate the broad, rough _leaves_, in
order that the latter may not set before the dusting and fructifying of
the former.
When, as often happened, Albano came home from his inner and outer
roamings, at once intoxicated and thirsty,--with senses at the same time
_shut_ and _sharpened_, but dreaming like sleepers who feel the more
painfully the putting out of the light,--at such times of course it
needed only a few cold drops of cold words to make the hot, flowing
soul, upon the contact of the strange, cold bodies, scatter in zigzag
and globules; whereas a warm mould would have rounded the fluid mass
into the loveliest form.
Circumstances being such, of course no one will wonder at what I am
presently to report. The dancing-, music-, and fencing-master, who
boasted little of his steps, touches, and thrusts, but so much the more
of his (Imperial Diet-) Literature,--for he had the new names of the
months, the orthography of Klopstock, and the Latin characters in German
letters sooner in _his_ letters than any one of us,--would fain show the
house of Wehrfritz that he understood a little more of literature and
knew a thing or two better than other Viennites (the more so since he
read absolutely nothing, not even political newspapers and novels,
because he preferred real, living men); he therefore never came into the
house without two pockets full of romance and verse for Rabette and
Albano. He was encouraged in this by his endless officiousness, and his
emulous race-running with his colleague Wehmeier in education, and the
interest which he took in the youth now growing so silent, whom he
wished to help out of the sweet _dreams_ which the _ruby_[36] of his
glittering young life inspired with the exegetic _dream-books_, the
works of the poets. The revolution which had taken place in the youth,
who now mowed away whole romantic glades of Everdingen, and plucked
whole poetical flower-borders of Huysum, I have now neither time nor
wish even so much as tolerably to portray, on account of the
above-promised wondrous circumstance; suffice it, that Albano, so
situated,--the heaven of the poetic art open before him, the promised
land of Romance spread out before his eyes,--resembled a planet,
assailed by several whizzing comets, and blazing up with them into a
common conflagration.
But what further? The Vienna master--this I must still premise--was a
vain fool (at least in matters of humility, for example, his pigmy feet,
his literature, his success with women), and particularly loved, by
familiar pictures of great ones and ladies, to have inferred his
confederation with the originals. The poor devil was, to be sure, poor,
and believed, with many other authors, that he--unlike Solomon, who
prayed for wisdom and received gold--had inversely had the misfortune
while supplicating for the latter to receive only the former. In short,
on such grounds as these he would have been very glad, let it be
observed in passing, to know that the belief prevailed in the house of
Wehrfritz that he stood on very good terms with his former pupil, the
Minister's daughter,--_Liana_, I think it was, if I read Hafenreffer's
handwriting correctly,--and that he quite often saw her, and spoke with
her mother. Add to this, that there was not one word of truth in the
whole: through the temple in which Liana was there was no door-way for
him. But so much the less could he let the Director get ahead of him,
who often saw her, and always praised her more warmly at home, merely
for the sake of scolding the rude innocence of Rabette, who had never
been educated by anybody. The Vienna master wished also, of course, to
draw the Count--to whom he only showed the coasts of Roquairol's isle of
friendship afar off, but no point for landing--cunningly away from the
brother through the sister (he had found it impossible longer to deceive
and hold him back); for why did he paint it out before him at such
length, how poisonously, some years before, the night-and death-chill
brought on by that parting shot of a brother whom she too devotedly
loved had fallen upon those tender, white leaves of her heart?
Quite often would he, during a meal, hang up broad merit-tables,
countersigned by Wehrfritz, of Liana's progress in music and painting,
in order, seemingly, to stimulate his pupil on the harpsichord and in
drawing to greater achievements. For if it was not for appearance' sake,
why did he paste up such very long altar-pieces of Liana's charms before
Rabette, that impartial one, who, vying only with parsons' daughters,
and not with those of ministers, heard almost as gladly the praise of
_city_ beauties as we do of _Homer's_, and in whose presence only a
windy fool, that would fain hold himself upright in the saddle before
women by singing the praises of other women, could intone such eulogies
as his were of Liana? Verily, before such a resigned and unenvious soul
as Rabette,--especially as her complexion and hands and hair were none
of the softest, at least harder than Falterle's,--I would not for any
prize-medal in the world have undertaken, as he however did, to bring
near, in high colors, the happy results with which the Minister, in
order to bring over Liana's uncommonly youthful beauty, by proper
training, into her present years, had done his best by means of delicate
and almost meagre fare, by tight lacing, by shutting up his orangery,
whose window he seldom lifted off from this flower of a milder
clime,--still less would I have cared to be able to describe, like him,
how she had thereby become a tender creature of pastil-dust, which the
gusts of fate and the monsoons of climate could almost blow to
pieces,--and that she actually could only wash herself with spirits of
soap, and only with the softest linen dry herself without pain, and
could not pluck three gooseberries without making her finger bleed.
The shallow Viennite, who, if he spied a man of rank standing up on the
cupola of a mountain, could never take off his hat before him, down in
the marsh, without saying, in a low tone, at the same time, "Your most
profoundly obedient servant!" and who spoke of distinguished people, at
the farthest, only in familiar or satirical tones (to show his
connection), but never in earnest criticism, was, of course, as became
him, not the man to call old Froulay a stiff, sharp gravestone, under
which two such tender flowers as his lady with the ivy (Liana) twining
round her, crooked and crowded, had to wind their way out into light.
Mr. Von Hafenreffer, to his honor,--in respect that he is a
Legation's-Counsellor and Fee-Court-Provost,--makes here the quite
different but more feeling observation, that the hard strata of such
connections as those through which Liana's life-rill must needs filter
and force its way, make it purer and clearer, just as all hard strata
are filtering-stones of water,--and all her charms become, indeed,
through her father's tyranny, torments, but also all her torments
become, through her own patience, charms....
But, good Zesara, supposing now thou art compelled, daily, to hear all
this,--and supposing the master of accomplishments forgets not to
depict, besides, how she has never grieved him with a disobedient look,
or a tardiness, how cheerfully she always brought him the paper-marks of
the lessons, and, at the end, her schooling-money or an invitation,--and
how carefully, mildly, and courteously she behaved toward her servants,
and how one must have thought her heart could not be warmer than her
very philanthropy made it, if one had not seen her still more ardent
filial affection for her mother;--good Zesara, I say, what if thou
hearest all this in addition to thy romances, and that, too, of the
sister of thy Roquairol; for every one, if it is only half practicable,
loves to spin himself into one chrysalis with the sister of his
friend,--and beside all this, of a maiden in the consecrated
Linden-city, about which Don Gaspard, as the old Prussians[37] did about
their sacred groves, draws additional mystic curtains; and, what is
harder than all, just after the turning-point of thy seventeenth year,
Zesara, when the monsoons and spring winds of the passions already sweep
over the waves of the blood! For, of course, at an earlier period, in
the midst of the learned club of so many linguists,--i. e. books of
linguists, of eclectics, upper-rabbins,--of ten wise men from the East
and from Greece, and, by reason of the uncommonly dazzling
_Epictetus'-lamps_ which the said Decemvirate of wise men had lighted at
the day-star of the wise ones,--at such a time, I say, it was hardly to
be expected of thee that love's little Turin-lantern, which he kept as
yet unopened in his pocket, should strike thy eye very strongly! But
now, my dear, now, I say! Truly, nowhere could any of us find less
fault, if we are uncommonly attentive to it, with what he does in the
21st Cycle, than in this 20th.