In Albano another spirit spoke than in Schoppe, but the two soon met. To
the Count the night-like forms of crape, the still funeral banners, the
dead-march, the creeping sick-man's-walk, and the tolling of the bells,
opened wide all earth's charnel-houses, especially as before his
blooming eyes these death plays came for the first time: but one thing
more loudly than all--one will hardly guess what--proclaimed before him
the partings of life,--namely, the beat of the drum stifled by the
funeral cloth; a muffled drum was to him a broken reverberation of all
earthly catacombs. He heard the dumb, strangled complainings of our
hearts,--he saw higher beings looking down from above on the lamentable
three hours' comedy of our life, wherein the ruddy child of the first
act fades in the fifth to the old man in jubilee, and then, grown up and
bowed down, vanishes behind the falling curtain.
As, in spring, we think more of death, autumn, and winter than in
summer, so also does the most fiery and energetic youth paint out to
himself in _his_ season of life's year, the dark leafless one oftener
and more vividly than the man in that stage which is nearest to it; for
in both springs the wings of the ideal unfold widely and find room only
in a future. But before the youth, Death comes in blooming, Greek form;
before the tired, older man, in Gothic.
Schoppe generally began with _comic_ humor, and ended with _tragic_; so
also now did the empty mourning-chest, the crape of the horses, their
emblazoned caparisons, the Prince's contempt of the heavy German
Ceremonial; in short, the whole heartless mummery, lead him up to an
eminence, to which the contemplation of a multitude of men at once
always impelled him, and where, with an exaltation, indignation, and
laughing bitterness hard to describe, he looked down upon the eternal,
tyrannical, belittling, objectless and joyless, bewildered and oppressed
frenzy of mankind, and his own too.
Suddenly a gay, shining knight broke the dark chain: it was Roquairol,
on the parading gala-horse, who agitated our two men, and none besides.
A pale, broken-down face, glazed over with long inward fire, stripped of
all youthful roses, lightening out of the diamond-pits of the eyes under
the dark, overhanging eyebrows, rode along in a tragic merriment, in
which the lines of the veins were redoubled under the early wrinkles of
passion. What a being, full of worn-out life! Only courtiers or his
father could have set down this tragic exultation to an adulatory
rejoicing over the new regency; but Albano took it all into his heart,
and grew pale with inward emotion, and said, "Yes, it is he! O, good
Schoppe, he will certainly become our friend, this distracted youth. How
painfully does the noble one laugh at this gravity, and at crowns, and
graves and all! Ah, he too has, indeed, once died." "There the rider is
right," said Schoppe, with quivering eyes, and suddenly tapped Albano's
hand and then his own head; "my very skull here appears to me like a
close _bonsoir_, like a light-extinguisher, which death claps upon
me,--we are neat silvered figures, kept up in an electrical dance, and
we leap up with the spark; fortunately I am still alive and
kicking,--and there is our good Lector creeping along, too, and
trailing his long crape,"--in which respect Augusti's citizenly-serious
mood contrasted very strongly with the humanly-serious one of the
Librarian.
All at once Schoppe, out of patience with this general emotion, said:
"What a masquerade for the sake of a mask! Rag and tag for a piece of
rag-paper! Throw a man quietly into his hole, and call nobody to see. I
always admire London and Paris, where they toll no alarm-bells, nor set
the neighborhood stirring, when the undertaker carries one, who has
fallen asleep, to bed." "No, no," said Zesara, full of capacity for
grief, "I admire it not: to whomsoever the holy dead are of no
consequence, to him the living are so too;--no, I will gladly let my
heart break into one tear after another, if I can only still remember
the dear being."
O, how did the neighborhood accord with his heart! In a cistern, before
which the coffin of the coffin passed by, there stood a bronze statue of
the old man on horseback, who saw pass by below him the unsaddled
mourning-horses, and the mounted festive-steed; a deaf and dumb man was
stopping from door to door, and making, with his bell, a begging jingle,
which neither he nor the buried one could hear: and was not the
forgotten Prince laid in the earth all unseen, and more lonesome than
any one of his subjects? O Zesara! it sank into thy heart, how easily
man is forgotten, whether he lies in the urn or in the pyramid; and how
our immortal self is regarded, like an actor, as _absent_, so soon as it
is once behind the scenes, and frets and fumes no longer among the
players on the stage.
But had not the gray hermit, Spener, laid upon the sunken breast of that
deeper hermit a double youth? O, in this frosty hour of pomp and
pageantry, counts not the faithful Julienne every tone of the funeral
bell with the beads of her tears,--that poor daughter whom sickness has
exempted from the ceremonials, not from pain, who now has lost her _last
but one_, perhaps her _last_ relative, since her brother is hardly one?
And will not Liana, in her Elysium, guess the farce of sorrow which is
acted so near to her over behind the high trees in Tartarus? And if she
suspects anything, O how profoundly will she mourn!
All this the noble youth heard in his soul, and he thirsted hotly after
the friendship of the heart: it was to him as if its mountain- and
life-air floated down from eternity, and blew the grave-dust away from
his life-path, and he saw, up yonder, the Genius place his inverted
torch upon the cold bosom, not to extinguish the immortal life, but to
enkindle the immortal love.
He could not now do otherwise than go forth into the open air, and, amid
the flying tones of spring and the deep, hollow murmur of the receding
dead march, write the following words to Liana's brother, in which he
said to him, after a youthful style, Be my friend!
"TO CHARLES.
"Stranger! At this hour, when, in the dead sea and through
our tears, the triumphal columns and thrones of men and
their bridge-posts appear to us _broken_, a true heart puts
a question to thee frankly, and let thine answer it
willingly and in truth!
"Has the longest prayer of man been answered to thee,
stranger, and hast thou thy friend? Do thy wishes and nerves
and days grow together with his, like the four cedars on
Lebanon, which can bear nothing around them but eagles?
Hast thou two hearts and four arms, and livest thou twice
over, as if immortal, in the battling world? Or standest
thou solitary and alone upon a frosty, dumb, slender,
glacier-point, having no human being to whom thou canst show
the Alps of creation, and with the heavens arching far above
thee and abysses yawning below? When thy birthday comes,
hast thou no being to shake thy hand, and look thee in the
eye and say, We still cleave together faster than ever?
"Stranger: if thou hast had no friend, hast thou deserved
one? When spring kindled into life, and opened all her
honey-cups, and her serene heaven, and all the hundred gates
of her Paradise, hast thou, like me, bitterly looked up and
begged of God a heart for thine? O when, at evening, the sun
went down like a mountain, and his flames departed from the
earth, and now only his red breath floated upward to the
silvery stars, hast thou beheld the brotherly shadows of
friendship which sank together on battle-fields, like stars
of one constellation, stealing forth through the bloody
clouds out of the old world, like giants; and didst thou
think of _this_,--how imperishably they loved each other,
and thou, like me, wast alone? And, solitary one, when
night--that season at which the spirit of man, as in torrid
climes, _toils_ and _travels_--reveals her cold suns above
thee in a sparkling chain, and when, still, among all the
distant forms of the ether there is no dear loved one, and
immensity painfully draws thee up, and thou feelest, upon
the cold earth, that thy heart beats against no breast but
only thine own,--O beloved! weepest thou then, and most
bitterly?
"Charles, often have I reckoned up, on my birthday, the
increasing years,--the feathers in the broad wing of
time,--and thought upon the sounding flight of youth: then I
stretched my hand far out after a friend, who should stick
by me in the Charon's skiff wherein we are born, when the
seasons of life's year glide by along the shore before me,
with their flowers and leaves and fruits, and when, on the
long stream, the human race shoots downward in its thousand
cradles and coffins.
"Ah, it is not the gay, variegated shore that flies by, but
man and his stream: forever bloom the seasons in the gardens
up and down along the shore; only _we_ sweep by once for all
before the garden, and never return.
"But our friend goes too. O, if thou at this hour of death's
juggleries art contemplating the pale Prince, with the
images of youth on his breast, and thinking of the gray
friend who secretly bewails him in Tartarus, then will thy
heart dissolve, and in soft, warm flames run round through
thy bosom, and softly say: 'I will love, and then die, and
then love--O Almighty, show me the soul which longs and
languishes like mine!'
"If thou say'st that, if thou art thus, then come to my
heart: I am as thou. Grasp my hand, and hold it till it
withers. I have seen thy form to-day, and on it the marks of
life's wounds: hasten to me; I will bleed and struggle at
thy side. I have long and early sought and loved thee. Like
two streams will we mingle and grow, and bear our burdens,
and dry up together. Like silver in the furnace, we will run
together with glowing light, and all slags shall lie cast
out around the pure shimmering metal. Laugh not, then, any
longer so grimly, to think what _ignes-fatui_ men are; like
_ignes-fatui we_ burn and fly away in the rainy storm of
time. And then, when time is gone by, we find each other
again, and it will be again in the spring.
"ALBANO DE CESARA."