Whoever thinks that Schoppe, on the way, was to Albano a flying
field-lazaretto of consolation,--an _antispasmodicum_,--a Struve's
table of ailments and remedies,--a pulverized _Fox's lung_ for the
hectic of the heart, &c., and that at every milestone he delivered a
consolatory sermon,--whoever thinks so, Schoppe himself laughs him to
scorn.
"What then," said he, "if misfortune does knead a young man thoroughly
and soundly in her kneading-trough? The next time, he, who is now in
the power of grief, will have her in his power. Whoso has never borne
anything, never learns to bear up under anything."[21] As regards
weeping, he, as a Stoic, was, as may well be imagined, an enemy to it
at least; Epictetus, Antonine, Cato, and several such, men made less of
ice than of iron, would very willingly, as he so often said, have
allowed the body these extreme unctions of sorrow, provided only the
spirit beneath and behind all had kept itself dry. The true
disconsolateness is to desire and to accept consolation; why will not
one then for once just go through with the pang out and out without any
physic?
But his view of things and his actual life became, without his express
intention, powerful over the Count, whom everything great only
enlarged, as it belittles others. Schoppe sat like a Cato upon ruins,
but, to be sure, upon the greatest of all; if the wise man ought to be
a barometer-tube at the Equator, in which even the tornado produces
little displacement, he was a wise man. Accidentally he tore open the
Count's glued-up wings at an inn by means of the _Hamburg Impartial
Correspondent_, which he found lying there. Schoppe read aloud out of
it two extensive battles, wherein, as by an earthquake, lands instead
of houses were buried, and whose wounds and tears only the evil genius
of the earth could be willing to know; thereupon he read,--after the
death-marches of whole generations, and the rending open of the craters
of humanity,--with uninterrupted seriousness, the notices, under the
head of Intelligence, where one solitary individual mounts upon an
unknown little grave and announces and asseverates to the world, which
surely condoles with him,--"Frightful was the blow which laid our child
of five weeks--"; or, "In the bitterest anguish which ever--"; or,
"Overwhelmed with the loss of our father in the eighty-first year of
his age," &c.
Schoppe said, he pronounced that to be right; for every distress, even
a universal one, after all, housed itself only in one individual
breast; and were he himself lying on a red battle-field full of fallen
sheaves, he would sit up among them, if only he could, and deliver to
those lying around him a short funeral sermon upon his shot-wound. "So
has Galvani observed," he said, "that a frog which stands in electrical
relations quivers as often as thunder rolls over the earth."
He adhered to this position, also, out of doors. He cited with
disapprobation what Matthison remarks,--as a traveller's note by the
way,--that in the modern town, _Avenches_, in Switzerland, on the site
of the Helvetian capital, _Aventicum_, which was laid in ruins by the
Romans, the plan of the streets and walls may be traced by the thinner
strips of grass; whereas, in fact, the same stereographic projections
of the past lay manifestly all about in every meadow,--every mountain
was the shore of a deluged old world; every spot here below was
actually six thousand years old and a relic; all was churchyards and
ruins on the earth, particularly the earth itself; "Heavens!" he
continued, "what is there, in fact, which is not already gone
by,--nations, fixed stars, female virtue, the best Paradises, many just
men, all Reviews, Eternity a _parte ante_, and just now even my feeble
description of all this? Now, if life is such a game of nothingness,
one must prefer to be _card-painter_ rather than _king of cards_."
A vigorous, high-minded man, like Albano, will hardly, then, in the
midst of thirty-years' wars, last days, emigrating nations, crumbling
suns, strip off his coat, and exhibit to himself or the universe the
ruptured vein which bleeds on his breast.
So stood matters, when the two friends at evening climbed a half-open
woodland height, from which they saw below them a wonderful glory-land,
so friendly and foreign, as if it were the remains of a time when the
whole earth was still warm, and an ever-green orient land. It seemed,
so far as they could see for the trees and the evening-sun, to be a
valley formed by the angle of mutually approaching mountains, and
stretching away immeasurably toward the west. A party-colored windmill,
flinging round its broad wings before the sun, confused the eye, which
would fain analyze the throng of evening lights, gardens, sheep,
and children; on both steeps white-clad children, with long, green
hat-ribbons flowing behind them, were keeping watch; a motley Swissery
ran through the meadow-green along the dark brook; on a high-arched
hay-wagon there drove along a peasant-woman, dressed as if for a
marriage festival, and at the side went country-people in Sunday
finery; the sun withdrew behind a colonnade of round, leafy
oaks,--those German liberty-trees and temple-pillars,--and they
soared aloft, transfigured and magnified in the golden blue. At this
moment the surprised travellers saw the shaded Dutch village near
below,--composed, as it were, of neat, painted garden-houses clustered
together, with a linden-circle in the middle, and a young, blooming
hunter not far off, or an Amazon, who with one hand took off her hat,
stuck full of twigs, and with the other let the crossbeam with the
bucket mount high over the well.
"My friend," inquired Schoppe of an official messenger who came behind
them with tin-plate and knapsack, "what do you call this village?"
"Arcadia," was the reply. "But to speak without any poetic white-heat
or culminating of fancy, my poetic friend, how is that canton down
below there properly named?" asked Schoppe again. Petulantly the
official messenger answered, "Arcadia, I say, if you cannot retain
it,--it is an old crown-domain; our Princess Idone (Idoine) keeps
herself there year in and year out for constancy, and does everything
there at her own pleasure; what will you have more?" "Are you, too, in
Arcadia?"[22] "No, in Sowbow," answered the messenger, very loud, over
his shoulders, for he was already five steps ahead.
The Librarian, who saw his friend in great commotion at the messenger's
discourse, put to him joyfully the question, whether they could have
found better night-quarters than these, except these very same in the
moon of May. But how was he astounded at Albano's plunging back into
the limbo which conscience and his love had kindled! Idoine's illusive
resemblance to Liana had suddenly flashed across his thoughts. "Know'st
thou," said he, continuing to tremble more violently in his agitation
by reason of the magic of evening, "wherein Idoine is unlike her? She
_can_ see," he himself added, "for she has not seen _me_ yet. O
forgive, forgive, firm man! truly I am not always so. She is dying at
this moment, or some calamity or other draws near to her; like a smoke
before a conflagration, it mounts up duskily and in long clouds within
my soul. I must absolutely go back."
"Believe me," said Schoppe, "I shall one day tell you all that I now
think; for the present, however, I will spare you." Neither did this,
however, produce any effect; he turned about; but through the whole of
the next day's journey his cup of sorrow, which Schoppe had scoured so
shiny, continued to be stained with moisture and blackness. They could
not arrive till evening, when a magic mist of twilight, moonlight,
smoke, vapor, and cloud-red made the city a somewhat strange place.
Albano's eagle eye clove the smoke in twain, and it vanished. He saw
only the blind Liana, on the high Italian roof, run against the
statues, or headlong down over the edge. Wildly, and without uttering a
sound, he ran through the deep streets,--lost sight of the Palace
buried in buildings, and ran so much the more furiously; he imagined to
find her crushed to atoms on the pavement,--he sees the white statues
again, she holds one entwined within her arms, and the old gardener, he
of the _Cereus serpens_, stands with his hat on his head before her.
When, at length, he arrived directly under the walls of the Palace,
there stood overhead a strange maiden beside her, and below women,
running together, looked up, asking one another, "God, what is the
matter now?" Liana looked (so it seemed) to the heavens, wherein only a
few stars burned, and then for a long space into the moon, and then
down upon the people; but directly she stepped back from the statues.
The gardener came out of the court, and said, as he passed, to his
inquiring wife, "She can see." "O my good man," said Albano, "what do
you say?" "Only just go up there!" he replied, and strode busily away.
At this moment came Bouverot on foot,--Albano, with a short bow and
greeting, stepped across his path. Bouverot looked at him a moment: "I
have not the honor of your acquaintance," said he, wildly, and hurried
off.