Even before the Captain disclosed to his friend Augusti's probable
treachery, Albano was almost entirely at variance with his two tutors.
In a circle full of young hearts which beat for one another, and still
more fondly fight for one another, two always take an indissoluble hold
of each other, and become one at others' expense.
Albano boldly broke with every one whom Charles displeased. Besides,
Schoppe had long been loved by few, because few can endure a perfectly
free man; the flower-chains hold better, they think, when galley-chains
run through them. He, therefore, could not bear it, when one "with too
close a love clambered up round him so tightly that he had the freedom
of his arms no more than if he wore them in bandages of eighty
heads."[164] The sarcastic liveliness of his pantomime chilled the
Captain, by having the appearance of a somewhat stricter observation,
more than did the composed face of the Lector, who from that very
circumstance took everything more sharply into his still eye.
The good Schoppe had one fault which no Albano forgives, namely, his
intolerance toward the "female saintly images of isinglass," as he
expressed it,--toward the tender errors of the heart, the sacred
excesses by which man weaves into this short life a still shorter
pleasure. On one occasion Charles walked up and down with arms akimbo
and drooping head, as on a stage, and said, accidentally, so that the
Titular-librarian overheard him, "O I was very little understood by the
world in my youth." He said nothing further; but let anybody shake, in
jest, a baker's dozen[165] of hornets, a basket of crabs, a mug of
wood-pismires, all at once over the Librarian's skin, and take a flying
observation of the effect of the stinging, nipping, biting; then can
one, in a measure at least, conceive what a quivering, swelling, and
irritation there was in him, so soon as he heard the above-mentioned
phraseology. "Mr. Captain!" he began, drawing in a long breath, "I can
stand through a good deal on this rusty, stupid earth,--famine,
pestilence, courts, the stone, and fools from pole to pole; but your
phraseology surpasses the strength of my shoulders. Sir Captain, you
may, most certainly, use this rhetoric with perfect justice, because
you, as you say, are not understood. But, O heavens! O devils! I hear,
in fact, thirty thousand young men and maidens, from one
circulating-library to another, all with inflated breast, saying and
groaning round and round, that nobody understands them, neither their
grandfather nor their god-parents, nor the conrector, when, in fact, the
wrapping-paper,[166] commonplace pack does not itself understand. But
the young man means by this merely a maiden, and the maiden a young man;
these can appreciate each other. Out of love will I undertake, as out of
potatoes, to serve up fourteen different dishes; let one just shear off,
as they do off of the bears in Göttingen, its beastly hair, and no
Blumenbach would any longer recognize it.
"Mr. Von Froulay, I have somewhat often compared this cursed exaltation
of souls, merely from low motives, with the English horsetails, which
also always stand pointing to heaven, only because their sinews have
been cut. Must not one be mad, when one hears every day, and reads every
day, how the commonest souls, the very doggerels and trumpeters' pieces
of Nature, think themselves exalted by love above all people, like cats
that fly with hogs' bladders buckled on to them; how they rendezvous in
the hare's form and emporium of love, the other world, as on a
Blocksberg, and how, on this finch-ground, in this theatrical green-room
(or dressing-room, which then becomes the opposite), they drive their
business until they are coupled. Then it's all over; fancy and poesy,
which now should be to them for the first time serviceable, are caught!
They run away from them like lice from the dead, although on these the
hair continues to sprout out. They shudder at the next world; and when
they become widowers and widows, they do their courting very well
without the hogs' bladders, and without the decoy-feathers, and the
folding screen of the next world. Such a thing as this now, Sir Captain,
provokes one, and then, in the heat, the just must suffer with the
unjust, as your ears unfortunately attest!"
Alban, who never light-mindedly forgave, silently separated himself from
a heart, which, as he unjustly said, quenched the flames of love with
satiric gall.
In the chain of friendship with Augusti, one ring after another
absolutely broke in twain. The Count found in the Lector a spirit of
littleness which was more revolting to him than any bad spirit. The
elegance of a good courtier, his propensity to keep the smallest secrets
as faithfully as the greatest, his passion for starting up behind every
action a long plan, his thirsty curiosity for genuine historical
sources, at court and in the city, and his coldness toward philosophy,
so dried up the overstrained image which Albano had formed of him, that
it wrinkled up and grew full of rents. Such dissimilarities never rise
among cultivated men to open feuds; but they secretly put upon the inner
man one piece of armor after another, till he stands there in solid
mail, and strikes out.
Now, in addition to all this, the Lector bore the Captain a hearty
grudge, because he cost the Minister's lady many anxious hours, and
Liana, and even the Count, much money, and because he seemed to him to
pervert the youth. The otherwise directly ascending flame of Albano was
now, by the obstacles thrown in the way of his love, bent on all sides,
and, like soldering fire, burned more sharply; but this sharpness
Augusti ascribed to the friend. Albano appeared to those whom he loved
warmer, to those whom he endured colder, than he was, and his
earnestness was easily confounded with defiance and pride; but the
Lector imagined that Albano's love was stolen from him by Charles.
He undertook, with equal refinement and frankness, to play off on the
Count a good map-card of the spots which were thickly sown in the
heavenly body of this Jupiter. But he tore every map. Charles's painful
confessions on that night extinguished all additions by other hands. And
Albano's grand faith, that one must shield a friend entirely, and trust
him entirely, warded off every influence. O it is a holy time, in which
man desires offerings and priests, _without fail_, for the altar of
friendship and love, and--beholds them; and it is a too cruel time, in
which the so often cheated, belied bosom prophesies to itself, on
another's bosom, in the midst of the love-draught of the moment, the
cold neighborhood of bankruptcy!
As the Lector saw perfectly that Alban, at many of his charges against
Charles,--for instance, of his wildness and disorder,--remained cold,
for the reason that he might deem himself to be reproached over
another's shoulders, as the French (according to Thickness) give
strangers praise over their own; he now, instead of the point of
similarity, took hold of an entire dissimilarity of the Captain, his
light-mindedness toward the sex. But this only made the matter worse.
For, in matters of love, Charles was to him the higher fire-worshipper,
and the Lector only the one whom the coal of this fire blackens. Augusti
cherished, in regard to love, pretty nearly the principles of the great
world, which, merely for honor's sake, he never coined into action, and
he assigned only the cloud-heaven near the earth to love. The Captain,
however, spoke of a third heaven, or heaven of joy, as belonging
thereto, wherein only saints are the blest. Augusti, after the manner of
the great world, spoke much more freely than he acted, and sometimes as
openly as if he were dining in the hall of a watering-place. Charles
spoke like a maiden. The virgin ear of Albano, which was mostly closed
in good visiting-parlors, and which in study-chambers remained open,
united to his want of the experience that a cynical tongue is often
found in the most continent men, for instance, in our buffoonery-loving
forefathers, and an ascetic one in modest libertines,--these two things
must naturally have involved the pure young man in a double error.
Thus did Augusti start up within him more and more storm-birds. Both
came often to the verge of a complete feud and challenge; for the Lector
had too much honor to fear any one thing, and dared in cold blood as
much as another in hot.
Now, at length, did Charles disclose fully to his friend, though with
all the tenderness of friendship, Liana's acquaintance with that
Tartarus-night. "The otherwise reserved Lector must be after nearer
advantages with his tattling," Albano concluded, and now the toad of
jealousy, which lives and grows in the living tree without any visible
way in or out, nursed itself to full size in his warm heart. Unanswered
love is besides the most jealous. God knows whether he is not
scenery-master of these ghost scenes working in and through each other
with so many wheels. All these are Albano's private conclusions; open
accusations were forbidden by his sense of honor. But his warm heart,
always expressing itself, demanded a warmer society, and this he found
when he followed the pious father, and went to Lilar into the
Thunderhouse, into the midst of the flowers and summits, in order, lying
nearer to the heart of Nature, to dream and enjoy more sweetly.
There was only one warm, sun-bright spot for him in Charles's historical
picture; namely, the hope that perhaps only the mistakes about his
relation to the Countess, out of which Liana had been helped by her
brother, had dictated to her the evenly cold deportment which she had
hitherto maintained towards him. On this sunny side Rabette threw a
billet, in which she wrote him that she was going back to her parents on
Saturday, because the Minister was coming. That hope, this intelligence,
the prospect of less favorable circumstances, his going to Lilar,--all
this decided him in the purpose of snatching to himself a solitary
moment, and therein casting off before Liana the veil from his soul and
hers.