On the morrow, Albano received a singular letter from Roquairol, for
the understanding of which some notices of his connection with Rabette
must be prefixed.
Nothing is harder, when one really loves one's friend, than scarcely to
look at that friend's sister. Nothing is easier (except only the
converse) than, after being disenchanted by city hearts, to be
enchanted by country hearts. Nothing is more natural for a general
lover, who loves all, than to love one among them. It needs not be
proved that the Captain had been in all three cases at once, when he,
for the first time, told Rabette she had his heart, as he was pleased
to call it. She, of course, should not have worshipped, at such a
nearness, the Hamadryad in such a Upas-tree, with whose sap so many of
Cupid's arrows are poisoned; but she and most of her sisters are so
dazzled by men's advantages as not to see men's misuse of them.
In the beginning many things went well; the pure innocence of his
sister and his friend threw a strange magic light upon the unnatural
union. The prominent advantage was, that he, as concert-master of his
love, needed little more of Rabette than her ears; loving was with him
talking, and he looked upon actions merely as the drawing of our soul;
words being the colors. There is a twofold love,--love of the feeling
and love of the object. The former is more man's love; it wishes the
enjoyment of its own being, the foreign object is to it only the
microscopic object-bearer, or much rather subject-bearer, whereupon it
beholds its "I" magnified; it can therefore easily let its objects
change, if only the flame into which they are thrown as fuel continues
to blaze up high; and it enjoys itself less through actions, which are
always long, tedious, and troublesome, than by words, which picture and
promote it at the same time. The love of the object, on the contrary,
enjoys and desires nothing but its welfare (such is for the most part
female and parental love), and only deeds and sacrifices give it peace
and satisfaction; it loves for the sake of blessing, whereas the other
only blesses for the sake of loving.
Roquairol had long since devoted himself to the love of the feeling.
Hence it was that he must make so many words; at the Rhine-fall of
Schaffhausen he would not have been in the best, that is, the most
excited mood, merely because he could not--since the flood out-thunders
everything--have delivered anything himself in praise thereof, on
account of the sublime uproar.
His Romance with Rabette after the declaration of love was divided into
distinct chapters.
The first chapter he sweetened for himself in her society, by the
consideration that she was new and belonged to him and yielded him an
admiring obedience. He painted for her therein great pieces of
beautiful nature, mixed therewith some nearer emotions, and thereupon
kissed her; so that she really enjoyed his lips in two forms, that of
action and that of speech; from her, as has been said, he wanted only a
pair of open ears. In this chapter he assumed also some possibility of
their marriage; men so easily confound the charm of a new love with the
worth and duration of it.
He set himself about his second chapter, and swam therein blissfully in
the tears with which he sought to write it out. In fact, this ocular
pleasure afforded him more true joy than almost the best chapters.
When, in such mood, he sat and drank by her side,--for, like a dead
prince's heart, he loved to bury his living one in cups,--and then
began to describe his life, particularly his death, and his sorrows and
errors in the interval, and his suicide and infanticide at the
masquerade, and his rejected and spurned love for Linda: who was
then more moved to tears than himself? No one but Rabette, whose
eyes,--having been, through her father and brother, as little
acquainted with men's tears as with elephants', stags', or crocodiles'
tears,--so much the more richly, but not so sweetly as bitterly,
streamed over into his sorrow and love. This poured fresh oil again
into his flame and lamp, until he at last, like that pupil of Goethe's
master wizard, with the brooms that carried water, could no longer
govern his spirits. Poetic natures have a sympathetic one; like
justice, they keep a surgeon in their pay near the rack, who
immediately sets again the broken limbs, yes, even regulates beforehand
the places for the crushing fractures.[26]
A man should never weep on his own account, except for ecstasy. But
poets and all people of much fancy are magicians who--exact
counterparts of the burnt enchantresses--weep more easily, although
more at images, than at the rough, sore calamity itself, in order to
put the poor enchantresses to the worst water-ordeal. Trust them not!
On the machinelle-poison-tree the rain-drops are poisonous which roll
from its leaves.
Meanwhile it must never be concealed, that the Captain in this second
chapter strengthened his resolution of really marrying the good and so
tender Rabette. "Thou knowest," he said to himself, "what upon the
whole there is in and about women, one or two deficiencies, more or
less, make little difference; thy man-like folly of requiring her, as
they do hired animals, to be warranted without fault, may surely be
regarded as gone by, friend."
Now he set himself down to dip into the ink for his third chapter,
wherein he merely sported. His lip-omnipotence over the listening heart
refreshed him to such a degree, that he made frequent experiments to
see whether she could not laugh herself almost to death. Women in love,
by reason of weakness and fire, take the laughter-plant most easily;
they hold the comic heroic-poet still more as their hero, and prove
therewith the innocence of their laughing at him. But Roquairol loved
her less when she laughed.
In his fourth chapter,--or sector, or Dog-Post-day, or letter-box,[27]
or in whatever other way I have (ludicrously enough) made my divisions,
instead of using the Cycle,--in his fourth Jubilee, I say, it went, so
to speak, harder with him. Rabette grew at last sated and sick of his
eternally jumping off and opening the pot of the lachrymal glands that
hung between the wheels, to grease his mourning-coach. Deep emotion was
every day made more disagreeable and bitter to him; he must be ever
giving longer and more vivid tragedies. Then he began to perceive
that the tongue of the country maiden is not the very greatest
landscape-painter, soul-portrayer, and silhouettiste, and that she
hardly knew how to say much more to him than, "Thou, my heart!" He
made, on that account, in the fourth chapter, rarer visits; that again
helped him considerably, but only for a short time. Fortunately, the
half-mile from Pestitz to Blumenbühl counted in with Rabette's lines
and rays of beauty; in the city, in the same street, or in fact under
the same roof, he would have remained too cold from very nearness.
The most natural consequence of such a chapter is the fifth, or the
chapter of alternations, which still blows up some flames by the
ever-swifter interchange of reproaches and reconciliations, so that the
two, as electrical bodies do little ones, alternately attract and repel
each other. Sometimes he drank nothing, and merely treated her harshly.
Sometimes he took his glass, and said to her: "I am the devil, thou the
angel." The greatest offence to his love his father gave, by the
approbation which, most unexpectedly, he bestowed upon it. It was to
the Captain exactly as if he should realize the silver-wedding if he
ever solemnized the golden one. In the service of the goddess of love
one more easily grows bald than gray; he was already morally bald
toward the silver-bride. Fortunately, a short time before the
illumination Sunday in Lilar,[28] he carried all sins of omission and
commission so far, that on Sunday he was in a condition to curse them;
only after scolding and sinning could he with comparative ease love and
pray, as the grovelling spring-scarabee snaps up only when turned over
on his back. It has probably slipped, or at least escaped, the memory
of few readers, among the events of that Sunday, that Roquairol sat in
the morning with Rabette in the flute-dell, that Rabette sang there in
a depressed and lonesome mood, and how he, dissolved thereby,
encountered his friend glorified by love. The dell affair is
natural; after so long coolness (not coldness) on this breezy, free
Otaheite-day, with all that he had in his hands (another's hand--and a
flask) beside that heart of hers, as warm and yet as tranquil as the
sun in the heavens,--and then the solitary orphan flute which he made
play its call,--and with his most hearty wish to profit somewhat by
such a day and sky,--under these circumstances he found himself
actually compelled to draw upon his genuine emotions, to give himself
vent on the subject of his past life (he resembled the old languages,
which, according to Herder, have many Preterites and no Present),--yes,
even on the subject of his death (also a fragment of the past),--and
then as on a heavenly way to move forward. Of course he went not far;
he let his blood of St. Januarius, namely, his eyes, become fluid
again, (his own blood having previously become so,) and then demanded
of the enraptured soul, whirled about in the fairest heaven nothing
less than--since she was mute before the pocket-handkerchief thrown to
her as the canary-bird is under the one thrown over him,--a faint
singing. Rabette could not sing; she said so, she declined, at last she
sang; but during the empty singing she thought of nothing save him and
his wild, wet face.
The most miserable chapter of all, which he brought out in his Romance,
may well be the sixth, which he wrote down on the night of the
illumination in Lilar. In the beginning he had left Rabette to stand
alone a mute, inglorious[29] spectator, while he ran, jumping up behind
the car of Venus full of strange goddesses. Gradually one pleasure
after another crept along toward him and gave him the Tarantula bite,
which was followed by a sick raving. As moderation is a true
strengthening medicine of life, so did he uncommonly seldom resort to
this powerful medicine, in order not to be obliged to use it in
stronger and stronger doses, and he did not accustom himself to it at
all. At last, when he was full, forms appeared in him as in Chinese
porcelain;[30] he stepped sympathizingly and lovingly to Rabette, and
fancied, as she did, that he was tender or affectionate towards her,
when he merely was so towards all.
He would fain draw her away from the hostile array of eyes, to seek
from her the kiss to which interdiction and privation lent honey again;
but she refused, because there, where the eye stops, suspicion begins,
when he unfortunately caught sight of the blind girl from Blumenbühl,
and could call her as a pretended guard of Rabette, in order to lead
her out of the temptation among men to the temptation in the
wilderness. Pressing her to him with such a passionate impetuosity of
love as he had never showed before,--so that the poor soul who had been
so forsaken and forlorn this evening wept over the return of all her
joys,--and speaking to her like an angel, who acts like none, he
involuntarily arrived with her at the silent Tartarus, where all was
blind and dumb.
Rabette had not suffered the blind girl to leave her; but when they
entered the catacomb-avenue, which holds only two persons, unless the
third will creep along in the water, the eyeless maid was stationed at
the gate, and so much the more, because he would not willingly let
himself be checked by a superfluous listener. And besides, what then
was there to fear in the very raree-show of the grave?
Within there he spoke about the everywhere stretched-out index-finger
of death,--how "it indicated that life, stupid as it is, should not be
made by us more stupid, but joyous." He seated himself by her side,
caressing her,--as the destroying angel sits invisible beside the
blooming child that plays in the old masonry, and into whose tender
hands he presses the black scorpion. It was the very spot where he had
sat in that first covenant-night, with Albano, opposite the skeleton
with the Æolian-harp, when his friend swore to him his renunciation of
Linda. His tongue streamed like his eye. He was tender, as, according
to the popular superstition, corpses are tender which mourners die
after. He threw fire-wreaths into Rabette's heart, but she had not,
like him, streams of words to quench them withal. She could only sigh,
only embrace; and men fall into sin most easily from weariness of good,
but tedious hearts. More swiftly did laughter and weeping, death and
drollery, love and wantonness, spring over into each other; moral
poison makes the tongue as light as physical makes it heavy. Poor girl!
the maidenly soul is a ripe rose, out of which, so soon as one leaf is
plucked, all its mates easily fall after. His wild kisses broke out the
first leaves; then others fell. In vain the good genius wafts holy
tones from the harp of death, and sends up angry murmurs in the
orcus-flood of the catacomb,--in vain! The darkest angel, who loves to
torture, but rather innocent ones than the guilty, has already torn
from heaven the star of love, to bear it as a murder-brand into the
cavern. The poor, narrow little life-garden of the defenceless maid,
wherein but little grows, stands over the long mine-passage which runs
away under Roquairol's wide-extended pleasure-camp; and the darkest,
angel has the lint-stock already lighted. With fiery greediness the
spark-point eats its way onward; as yet her garden stands full of
sunshine, and its flowers wave; the spark gnaws a little into the black
powder. Suddenly it tears open a monstrous flame-throat; and the green
garden reels, then flies, blown up, scattered to atoms, falls in black
clods out of the air down upon far distant places; and the life of the
poor maiden is all smoke and ruin.
But Roquairol's wide-spread and jointly rooted pleasure-parks withstood
the earthquake much more vigorously. Both then came up out of the
mine-passage sorrowfully, for the Captain had lost a little arbor in
the explosion; but they found no more the blind girl, who, in her
search for them, had lost herself. They encountered only the roving
Albano, who himself was sorely wailing and raving, although he this
evening had lost nothing but--pleasures.
Let us lead up the deluded maiden and her million companions with some
words before a mild judge! This is not the only thing which that judge
will weigh, that she, stupefied by the blossom-dust of a reeking spring
season of joys, smothered into dumbness with the virgin's veil,
prostrate before the storm of fancy (as women fall so much the more
easily before another's fancy and a poetic one, the seldomer their own
blows upon them, and accustoms them to standing firmly), suffered the
reward of a whole virgin life to die; but this is what most strongly
mitigates the sentence, that she bore love in her heart. Why, then, do
not the male sex recognize that the loving female, in the hour of love,
will really do nothing less than all for her beloved, that woman has
all power _for_ love, _against_ which she has so little, and that she,
with the same soul and at the same moment, would just as readily
sacrifice her life as her virtue, and that only the demanding and
taking party is bad, deliberately and selfishly?
The last or seventh chapter of his robber romance is very short and
contradictory. The third day he visited her in her garden, was
delicate, rational, temperate, reserved, as if he were a married man.
As he found her full of trouble, which she, however, only half
expressed, he accordingly, out of anxiety for her health, came again
several times; and, when he found that she had not suffered in the
least, he stayed--away. Towards Albano, during the aforesaid anxiety,
he behaved meekly, and, after it, he was the same as ever, but not
long; for when his sister, whom of all human beings he perhaps loved
most purely, became blind through Albano's wildness, he then, even on
account of a similarity of guilt, flung at him a real hatred, and
something like it at all his (Albano's) relations. Rabette got nothing
from him now but--letters and apologies, short pictures of his wild
nature, which must, he said, have free play-room, and which, fastened
to another, must beat and bruise and gall that one with the chain quite
as much as itself. All objections of Rabette's he knew how to remove so
well, as they consisted only in words, and not in looks and tears, that
he at last himself began to perceive he was right; and almost nothing
was left to the poor May-flower, crushed by the fall of this smooth
May-pole, than the real last word,--namely, the mute life, which is not
the first thing to announce to the murderer that he has smitten and
destroyed a heart.