Not toward the years of childhood, but toward the season of youth,
should we revert the most longingly, if we came forth out of the latter
as innocent as out of the former. It is the festival day of our life,
when all avenues are full of music and finery, and all houses are hung
round with golden tapestries, and when Existence, Art, and Virtue, like
gentle _goddesses_, still woo us with caresses; whereas, in after years,
they summon us, like stern _gods_, with commands! And at this period
Friendship dwells as yet in a serenely open Grecian temple, not, as
later, in a narrow Gothic chapel.
Richly and majestically did life now glitter around Albano, covered with
islands and ships; he had his whole breast full of friendship and youth,
and could now let the impetuous energy of love, which on Isola Bella had
rebounded from a statue, from his father, burst freely and joyously
upon a man who appeared to him fully as his youthful dream had sketched
him. He could not let go Charles for a day; he laid bare to him his soul
and his whole life--(only Liana's name retired deeper and deeper into
his heart); all models of friendship among the ancients he was fain to
copy and renew, and do and suffer everything for his loved friend; his
being was now a double-choir; he drank in every joy with two hearts; a
double heaven embosomed his life in pure ether.
When, on the following day, he met the form of the new friend,--which
was all that remained to him of the nightly show-piece of the
spirit-world, as a pale moon is left by the extinguished stars of
night,--and when he found him so bald-headed and white, as the fiery
smoke-column of an Ætna ascends gray in the daytime, he seemed to see
the whilom suicide standing before him, the more freely, but all the
more warmly, did he stretch his hand across to the solitary being, who,
after his leap over life, dwelt now only on his grave, as on a remote
island. Others, for this very reason, would draw their hand away: the
baffled self-murderer, who has made a rent in this fair, firm life,
comes back from his death-hour as a strange, uncomfortable ghost, whom
we can trust no longer, because in his ungovernableness he may at any
moment play again the give-away game with the human form.
Therefore Albano saw in the chaotic life of the Captain only the
disorder of a being who is packing up and marching away. When he stepped
for the first time into his friend's summer-chamber, he saw, of course,
a servant's livery wardrobe, a theatrical green-room, and an officer's
tent before him at once. On the table lay confused tribes of books, as
on a battle-field, and on Schiller's Tragedies the Hippocratic face of
the masquerade, and on the Court Almanac a pistol; the book-shelf was
occupied by the sword-belt, together with its wash-ball of chalk, a
chocolate-mill, an empty candlestick, a pomatum-box, matches, the wet
hand-towel and the dried mouth-napkin; the glasshouse of a run-down
hour-glass, and the washing-and the writing-table stood open, on which
latter I, to my astonishment, look in vain for any support whatever, or
writing-sand on it; the comb-cloth, or powder-mantle, leaned back on the
ottoman, and a long neck-cloth rode on the stove-screen, and the antlers
on the wall had two hats with feathers shoved over the right and left
ears; letters and visiting-cards were impaled like butterflies on the
window-curtains. I should not have been capable of writing a billet
there, much less a Cycle.
Is there not, however, a sunny-bright, free-fluttering age, when one
loves to see everything which announces roving unrest, striking of
tents, and nomadic liberty, and when one would be thankful to keep house
in a travelling-carriage, and write and sleep therein? And does not one
in those years look upon precisely such a students' chamber as this as a
spiritual students' endowment of genius, and every chaos as an
infusorial one full of life? Forgive my hero this truant time; there was
still something noble in his nature, that kept him back from becoming an
imitator of what he eulogized.
As, after the melting away of a late winter, all at once the green
garment of earth flutters up high in flowers and blossoms, so in the
warm air of friendship and fancy did Albano's nature start up at once
into luxuriant verdure and bloom. Charles had and understood all states
of the heart; he created them dramatically in himself and others; he was
a second Russia, which harbors all climates, from France even to Nova
Zembla, and wherein, for that very reason, every one finds his own: he
was everything to everybody, although for himself nothing. He could
throw himself into any character, although for that very reason it
sometimes took his fancy only to carry out the most convenient. The
girths, belly-bands, cruppers, and saddle-straps of court, town, and
city life, his Bucephalus had long since cleared; and if the Count was
vexed every day at the lingual leading-string of the Lector, who
pronounced everything correctly.--Kanaster instead of Knaster, Juften
instead of Juchten, Fünfzig instead of Füfzig, and Barbieren (the _r_ in
which I myself take to be a stupid barbarism),--Roquairol was a
free-thinker, even to the degree of being a hectoring free-speaker; and
spoke, according to an expression of his own, which was at the same time
an example of the fact, "right out of his liver and jaw." He was annoyed
that there should still cleave to the Count a certain epic dignity of
speech acquired from books. They often thought over and cursed with one
another the pitiful bald life which one would lead, who, like the
Lector, should live as a well-bred citizen of extraction, have conduite
and a nice dress, and a tolerable dapper knowledge of several
departments, and for refreshment his table-wine, and taste for excellent
masters in painting and other arts, and should advance to higher posts
merely as stepping-stones to still higher, and yet, after all this, have
to stretch himself out, all frizzled and washed, in his coffin, in order
that the gigantic body-world might, forsooth, hand over its Pestitz
representative also to the sublime world of spirits. No, said Albano,
rather throw a dark mountain-chain of sorrows into the dead level of
life, that one may, at least, have a prospect and something great.
But Roquairol was not the man that he seemed to him;--friendship has its
deceptions as well as love;--and often, when he had long looked upon
this love-drunken, high-hearted youth, with his chaste maiden-cheeks and
proud, manly brow, who reposed such a confidence upon _his_ wavering
soul, and whose heart stood so wide open, and the holiness of whose
fancy even he envied, then did the delusion of the noble one move him
even to pain, and his heart struggled to break forth, and longed to say
to him, with tears: Albano, I am not worthy of thee! But in that case I
lose him, he always added; for he shunned the moral orthodoxy and
decision of a man, who was not, like a maiden, to be provoked and
repelled and won back again, all in sport. And yet the day came--the
momentous day for both--when he did it. How could he ever have resisted
_Fancy_, when he only resisted _by and through_ Fancy? I do him half
injustice: hear the better angel, who opens his mouth.
Roquairol is a child and victim of the age. As the higher youth of our
times are so early and richly overhung with the roses of joy that, like
the inhabitants of spice-islands, they lose their smell, and by and by
put under their heads a Sybarite-pillow of roses, drink rose-sirup and
bathe themselves in rose-oil,[122] until nothing more is left them
thereof for a stimulus except the thorns, so are most of them--and often
the very same ones--stuffed full in the beginning, by their
philanthropic teachers, with the _fruits_ of knowledge, so that they
come soon to desire only the honey-thick extracts, then the cider and
perry thereof, until at last they ruin themselves with the brandy made
of that. Now if, in addition to this, they have, like Roquairol, a fancy
that makes their life a naphtha-soil, out of which every step draws
fire, then does the flame, into which the sciences are thrown, and the
consumption become still greater. For these burnt-out prodigals of life
there is then no new pleasure and no new truth left, and they have no
old one entire and fresh; a dried-up future, full of arrogance, disgust
with life, unbelief and contradiction, lies round about them. Only the
wing of fancy still continues to quiver on their corpse.
Poor Charles! Thou didst still more! Not merely truths, but feelings
also, he anticipated. All grand situations of humanity, all emotions to
which Love and Friendship and Nature exalt the heart, all these he went
through in poems earlier than in life, as play-actor and theatre-poet
earlier than as man, earlier on the sunny side of fancy than on the
stormy side of reality; hence, when they at last appeared, living, in
his breast, he could deliberately seize them, govern them, kill them,
and stuff them well for the refrigeratory of future remembrance. The
unhappy love for Linda de Romeiro, which, at a later period, would
perhaps have steeled him, opened thus early all the veins of his heart,
and bathed it warmly in its own blood; he plunged into good and bad
dissipations and amours, and afterward represented on paper or on the
stage everything that he repented or blessed; and every representation
made him grow more and more hollow, as abysses have been left in the sun
by ejected worlds. His heart could not do without the holy
sensibilities; but they were simply a new luxury, a tonic, at best; and
precisely in proportion to their height did the road run down the more
abruptly into the slough of the unholiest ones. As in the dramatic poet
angelically pure and filthy scenes stand in conjunction and close
succession, so in his life; he foddered, as in Surinam, his hogs with
pine-apples; like the elder giants, he had soaring wings and creeping
snakes'-feet.[123]
Unfortunate is the female soul which loses its way, and is caught in one
of these great webs stretched out in mid-heaven; and happy is she, when
she tears through them, unpoisoned, and merely soils her bees'-wings.
But this all-powerful fancy, this streaming love, this softness and
strength, this all-mastering coolness and collectedness, will overspread
every female Psyche with webs, if she neglects to brush away the first
threads. O that I could warn you, poor maidens, against such condors,
which fly up with you in their claws! The heaven of our days hangs full
of these eagles. They love you not, though they think so; because, like
the blest in Mahomet's paradise, instead of their lost arms of love,
they have only wings of fancy. They are like great streams, warm only
along the shore, and in the middle cold.
Now enthusiast, now libertine in love, he ran through the alternation
between ether and slime more and more rapidly, till he mixed them both.
His blossoms shot up on the varnished flower-staff of the Ideal, which,
however, rotted, colorless, in the ground. Start with horror, but
believe it,--he sometimes plunged on purpose into sins and torments, in
order, down there, by the pangs of remorse and humiliation, to cut into
himself more deeply the oath of reformation; somewhat as the physicians,
Darwin and Sydenham, assert that _strengthening_ remedies (Peruvian
bark, steel, opium) work more powerfully when _weakening_ ones
(bleeding, emetics, &c.) have been previously prescribed.
External relations might, perhaps, have helped him somewhat, and the vow
of poverty might have made the two other vows lighter for him; had he
been sold as a negro slave, his spirit would have been a free white, and
a work-house would have been to him a purgatory. It was for this reason
the early Christians always gave those who were possessed some
occupation or other, e. g. sweeping out the churches,[124] &c. But the
lazy life of an officer wrought upon him to make him only still more
vain and bold.
So stood matters in his breast, when he came to Albano's,--hunting like
an epicure after love, but merely to play with it; with an untrue heart,
whose feeling was more lyric poetry, than real, sound being; incapable
of being true, nay, hardly capable of being false, because every truth
assimilated to the poetic representation, and this again to that; able
much more easily on the stage and at the tragic writing-desk to hit the
true language of passion than in life, as Boileau could only imitate
dancers, but never a dance; indifferent, contemptuous, and decided
against the exhausted, worthless life, wherein all that is settled and
indispensable--hearts and joys and truths--melted down and floated
about; with reckless energy, capable of daring and sacrificing anything
which a man respects, because he respected nothing, and ever looking
round after his iron patron-saint, Death; faint-hearted in his
resolutions, and even in his errors fluctuating, and yet devoid only of
the _tuning-hammer_, and not of the _tuning-fork_, of the finest
morality; and, in the midst of the roar of passion, standing in the
bright light of reflection, as the victim of the hydrophobia knows his
madness, and gives warning of it.
Only _one_ good angel had not flown with the rest,--Friendship. His so
often blown-up and collapsed heart could hardly soar to love; but
friendship it had not yet squandered away. His sister he had hitherto
loved as a friend,--so fraternally, so freely, so increasingly! And now
Albano, splendidly armed, had come to his embrace!
In the beginning he played with him, too, lyingly, as he had with
himself at the masquerade and in Tartarus. He soon observed that the
country youth saw him falsely, dazzled by his own rays, but he chose
rather to verify the error than to correct it. Men--and he--are like the
fountain of the sun near the Temple of Jupiter Ammon, which in the
morning only was cold; at noon, lukewarm; in the evening, warm; and at
midnight, hot: now he depended so much on the seasons of the day, as the
sound and vigorous Albano did so little, who accordingly imagined a
great man was great all day, from the time of getting up to the time of
lying down, as the heralds always represent the eagle with outspread
wings, that he seldom went in the morning, but mostly in the evening, to
Albano, when the whole girandole[125] of his faculties and feelings
burned in the wine-spirit which he had previously poured upon it out of
flasks.
But do you know the medicine of example, the healing power of
admiration, and of that soul-strengthener, reverence? "It is shameful of
me," said Roquairol, "when he is so credulous and open and honest. No, I
will deceive the whole world, only not his soul!" Such natures would
fain make good their devastation of humanity by being true to one.
Humanity is a constellation, in which _one_ star often describes half
the figure.
From this hour forth, his resolution of the heartiest confession and
atonement stood fixed; and Alban, before whom life had not yet run down
into a jelly of corruption, but was capable of being analyzed as a sound
and well-defined organism, and who did not, like Charles, complain that
nothing would take right hold of him, but everything played round him
like air,--_he_ it was who was to bring back youth to his sick wishes,
and with the help of the pure youth's unwavering perceptions and the
danger of losing his friendship, Roquairol proposed forcing himself to
keep with _him_ the word of fruit-bearing repentance, which to himself
he had too often broken.
Let us follow him into the day, when he tells everything.