Albano, like a world, was wonderfully changed by Rome. After he had
thus, for several weeks, lain encamped among Rome's creations and
ruins; after he had drunk out of Raphael's crystal magic goblet, whose
first draughts only cool, while the last send an Italian fire through
all the veins; after he had seen the mountain-stream of Michael Angelo,
now as a succession of cataracts, now as a mirror of the ether; after
he had bowed and consecrated himself before the last greatest
descendants of Greece, before her gods, who, with calm, serene
countenance, stand looking into the inharmonious world, and before the
Vatican Apollo, who is indignant at the prose of the age, at the abject
Pythonian serpent, which is ever renewing its youth;--after he had
stood so long in splendor before the full moon of the past, all at once
his whole inner world was overcast, and became one great cloud. He
sought solitude; he ceased to draw or to practise music; he spoke
little of Rome's magnificence. By night, when the daily rain ceased, he
visited alone the great ruins of the earth, the Forum, the Colosseum,
the Capitol; he became more passionate, unsocial, sharp; a deep,
brooding seriousness reigned on the lofty brow, and a sombre spirit
burned through the eye.
Gaspard, unobserved, kept his eye upon all secret unfoldings of the
youth. A mere sorrow for Liana did not seem to be his case. In the
northern winter this wound would only have frozen up, and not healed
up; but here, in the temple of the world, where gods lie buried, a noble
heart gathered strength, and beat for older graves. The Princess, who,
under the mask of friendship for the father, aspired after the son, he
sought less than the old, cold Lauria and the fiery Dian.
At this same period, he longed sadly for his Schoppe; on that breast,
he thought, would the secret of his own have found the right place and
comfort. It was to him as if he had, since this separation, lived with
him uninterruptedly, and become bound to him by a faster fraternal
bond. Thus do spirits dwell and melt together in the invisible land;
and when the bodies again meet each other in the visible, the hearts
find each other again mutually more acquainted. Unfortunately, among
all the letters that his father received from Pestitz, he heard not one
sound from his friend over the mountains, whom he had left behind in
the dark relations of a strange, perplexing passion. He never reckoned
silence as a fault against Schoppe, whose hatred and spite against all
letter-writing he well knew. However, his own heart could not bear it
any longer, and he wrote to him as follows:--
"We were torn from each other sleeping, Schoppe. That time has veiled
itself, and remains so. Very wide awake will we be when we look on each
other again. Of thee I know nothing; if Rabette does not write to me, I
shall have to bear about with me and endure this burning impatience
till our meeting in summer. Of myself what is there to write? I am
changed even to my innermost being, and by an ingrasping giant-hand.
When the sun passes over the zenith of countries, they all wrap
themselves in a deep cloud; so am I now beneath the sun at its highest
point, and I am also shrouded. How a man in Rome, in actual Rome, can
merely enjoy and weakly melt away before the fire of art, instead of
starting up red with shame, and striving and struggling for power and
exploits, is what I cannot comprehend. In painted Rome, in the Rome of
poetry, there laziness may luxuriate; but in the real Rome, where
obelisks, Colosseum, Capitol, triumphal arches, incessantly behold and
reproach thee,--where the history of ancient deeds, all day long, like
an invisible storm-wind, sweeps and sounds through the city, and impels
and lifts thee,--O, who can stretch himself out in inglorious ease and
contemplation before the magnificent stirring of the world? The spirits
of saints, of heroes, of artists, follow after the living man, and ask,
indignantly, 'What art thou?' With far other feelings dost thou go down
out of the Vatican of Raphael, and over the steps of the Capitol, than
thou comest out of any German picture-gallery or antique cabinet. There
thou seest, on all hills, old, eternal majesty. Even a Roman woman is,
in shape and pride of stature, still related to her city. The dweller
beyond the Tiber is a Spartan, and thou wilt no more find a Roman than
a Jew stupid; whereas in Pestitz thou must become impatient with the
very contrast of the mere form. Even the calm Dian maintains that the
odious masks of the ancients look like the faces in the German streets,
and their Fauns and other bestial gods like nobler court-faces, and
that their copy-pictures of Alexander, of the philosophers, of the
Roman tyrants, however pointedly and prosaically they stand out in
contrast to their poetical statues of the gods, resemble the present
ideals of the painters.
"Is it enough, here, to creep around the giants with eyes full of
astonishment and folded hands, and then languidly and pusillanimously
to lie pining at their feet? Friend, how often in the days of
discontent did I pronounce the artists and poets happy, who at least
may appease their longing by light and joyous creations, and who with
beautiful plays celebrate the mighty dead,--Archimimes of the heroic
age. And yet, after all, these voluptuous plays are only the jingling
of the bells on the lightning-conductor: there is something higher;
action is life; therein the whole man bestirs himself, and blooms with
all his twigs. Not of the narrow, timid achievements of littleness
on the oar-bank and the lolling-bank of the times are we speaking
here. There still stands a gate open to the coronation-city of the
spirit,--the gate of sacrifice, the door of Janus. Where else on earth
than on the battle-field is the place to be found in which all
energies, all offerings, and virtues of a whole life, crowded into an
hour, play together in divine freedom with thousand sister powers
and offerings? Where else do all faculties--from the most rapid
sharp-sightedness even to all bodily capacities of despatch and of
endurance, from the highest magnanimity down to the tenderest pity,
from all contempt of the body even up to the mortal wound--find the
lists so freely open for a covenant-rivalry? although, for the very
same reason, the play-room of all the gods stands open also to the
mask-dance of all the furies. Only take war in a higher sense, where
spirits, without relation of gain and loss, only by force of honor and
of object, bind themselves over to destiny, that it shall select from
among their bodies the corpses, and draw the lot of victory out of the
graves. Two nations go out on the battle-plain, the tragic stage of a
higher spirit, in order to play against one another, without any
personal enmity, their death-parts; still and black hangs the
thunder-cloud over the battle-field; the nations march on into the
cloud and all its thunders; they strike, and gloomily and alone burns
the death-torch above them; at last it is light, and two triumphal
gates stand built up,--the gate of death and the gate of victory,--and
the host has divided and passed through both, but through both with
garlands of honor. And when it is over, the dead and the living stand
exalted in the world, because they had not cared for life. But when the
great day is to be still greater, when the most costly thing is to come
to the spirit which can hallow life, then does God place an
Epaminondas, a Cato, a Gustavus Adolphus, at the head of the
consecrated host, and freedom is at once the banner and the palm. O,
blessed he who then lives or dies at once for the god of war and for
the goddess of peace!
"Let me not profane this by speaking of it. But take here my softly
spoken but firmly meant word, and lay it up in thy bosom, that so soon
as the probable war of Gallic freedom breaks out, I take my part
decidedly in it, for it. Nothing can hold me back, not even my father.
This resolution belongs to my peace and existence. Not from ambition do
I form it; though I do from an honorable self-love. Even in my earlier
years I could never enjoy the flat praise of an eternal domestic
felicity, which certainly beseems women rather than men. Of course
hardly any one else has _thy_ strength or disposition to take
everything great quietly, and silently to melt down the world into an
internal dream. Thou gazest upon the coming clouds and along the
milky-way, and sayest coldly, Cloudy! But dost thou not, prithee, allow
thyself too deeply in this feeling, in this cold vault? It is true, the
poison of this feeling will, in all parts of Rome particularly, that
churchyard of such remote nations, such opposite centuries, consume one
more sweetly than anywhere else; but couldst thou know the changeable,
except by contrast with the unchangeable, standing side by side with
it? and where does death dwell but in life? Let decay and dust reign!
there are, after all, three immortalities; although in the first, the
superterrestrial, thou dost not believe; then the subterranean, for the
universe may decay, but not its dust; and the immortality which ever
worketh therein, namely, this, that every action becomes more certainly
an eternal mother than it is an eternal daughter. And this union with
the universe and with eternity encourages the ephemera, in their
flying-moment, to carry and sow still farther abroad the blossom-dust,
which in the next thousand years will perhaps appear as a palm-grove.
"Whether I disclose myself to my father is to me still a matter of
doubt, because I am still in doubt on the subject, whether I am to take
his previous expressions against the modern French for sharp earnest,
or only as another instance of the sportive coldness wherewith he was
formerly wont to treat his very divinities,--Homer, Raphael, Cæsar,
Shakespeare,--from disgust at the mimicking idolatry which the vulgar
show to true elevation and to false. Greet my brave, manly Wehrfritz,
and remind him of our union-festival on the day when the news comes of
the demolition of the Bastille. Farewell, and stay by me!
"Albano."
On the evening of writing this letter he went with his father to a
_Converzatione_ in the _Palazzo Colonna_; here they found the dark
marble gallery, full of antiques and pictures, perverted from a chamber
of art and a parlor into a fencing-school; all arms and tongues of
Romans were in commotion and in conflict about the latest developments
of the French Revolution, and most in its favor. It was at the time
when almost all Europe forgot for some days, what it had been for
centuries learning from the political and poetic history of France,
that this same France could more easily become a magnified than a great
nation. The Knight alone gave himself up rather to the works of art
than to the sham-fight in his neighborhood. At length, however, he
heard distant words which announced how Albano, like all the youth of
that day, was marching exultingly after the _Queen of Heaven_,
_Liberty_, following on in the train of eternal freemen and eternal
slaves after the _equality_ of the times; then he drew nearer and
remarked, in his manner, "That the Revolution was something very great;
but that he found, however, in great works, e. g. in a Colosseum or
obelisk, in the bloom of a science, in war, in the heights of
astronomy, of physics, less to admire than others, for it was merely a
mass in time or space that created it, a considerable multitude of
_little_ forces. But only great ones a man should respect.[83] In
revolution he saw more of the former than of the latter. Freedom was as
little gained as lost in _one_ day; as weak individuals in a state of
intoxication were exactly the opposite of themselves, so too there was
a sort of intoxication of the multitude by multitude."
Hereupon Bouverot replied, "That is exactly my sentiment, too." Albano
made answer, and very visibly only to his father, because he profoundly
despised the German gentleman, and held him utterly unworthy of
enjoying high works of art, for which he had brought with him an
eminent _taste_, although no sense, and said: "Dear father, the twelve
thousand Jews did not design the Colosseum which they built, but the
idea was, after all, at some time or other, entirely in _one_ man, in
Vespasian; and so universally must there preside over the concentric
directions of little forces some great one, and though it were God
himself." "To that source," said Gaspard, "to which everything godlike
is referred, thou mayst transfer it if thou wilt." Bouverot smiled.
"The Gallic intoxication," replied Albano, warmly, "is surely and
verily no accidental one, but an enthusiasm grounded at once in
humanity and in time, for whence otherwise the universal interest in
it? They may perhaps sink, but only to soar higher. Through a red sea
of blood and war humanity wades toward the promised land, and the
wilderness is _long_; with gashed hands, gluing themselves in their
own blood, they, like the chamois-hunters, climb upward." "The
chamois-hunters themselves," said the Knight, "do the same still more,
when they undertake to come _down from the Alps_; meanwhile such hopes
are charming, and we will gladly wish their fulfilment." "_Signor
Conte_," added Bouverot, "was very happy in naming the outbreak a fit
of intoxication. One sleeps it out; but in the morning there is a great
deal broken and to pay." "Intoxication?" said Albano; "what best thing
has not occurred in a state of enthusiasm, and what worst thing has not
been done in cold blood? Say, Herr von Bouverot? Yes, there is a grim,
dreadful frost of the soul, as well as a similar physical frost, which,
like the greatest heat, makes one black and blind and sore;[84]
something like French tragedy, _cold_, and yet _barbarous_."
"Thou approachest the tragic, son," said Gaspard, interrupting him, and
reinforcing the German gentleman; "we may expect of the French very
much political sagacity, especially in distress; that is their forte.
Therein they match women. They are, too, like women, either uncommonly
tender, moral, and humane, when they are good, or, like them, quite as
cruel and rough, when they are beside themselves. It may be predicted,
that, in a liberation-war, if one should break out, they will, in
valor, take precedence of all parties. That will dazzle exceedingly,
since, after all, nothing is rarer than a cowardly people. One learns
to estimate military courage very moderately, when one sees that the
Roman Legions, precisely when they were mercenary, bad, slavish, and
half freedmen, namely, under the Triumvirate, fought more courageously
than ever. The citizens fought and died to the very last man for that
insignificant incendiary, Catiline, and only slaves were made
prisoners."
This speech set a hot seal upon Albano's mouth; it seemed exactly as if
his father had found him out, and took his old pleasure in damping,
like a fate, all enthusiasm, and giving all expectations, even gloomy
ones, the lie. The offended, self-inflaming spirit remained now fast
covered from Gaspard and Bouverot.
But to his Dian he showed all on the morning after. He knew how this
friend, with the arm of an artist and a youth at once, bore and waved
the banner of freedom, and therefore he broke before him the dark seal
of his previous melancholy. He confessed to his most beloved teacher
his full-grown purpose, so soon as the unholy war against Gallic
liberty, which now hung out its pitchy torch in all streets of the city
of God, burst into flames, to repair to the side of freedom, and to
fall himself sooner than see her fall. "Truly, you are a brave man,"
said Dian. "Had I not child and profession hanging upon my neck, by
Heaven, I myself would join you. An old fellow like that yonder sees
much and hears badly. He shall not nose out anything, nor his beast of
a _Barigello_ neither." He meant the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdörfer,
whom he, with an artist's obstinacy, eternally abominated, because the
Counsellor painted worse and criticised better than himself. "Dian,
your word is finely said; yes, indeed, age makes one physically and
morally _far-sighted_ for one's self, and _deaf_ to others," said
Albano. "Have I spoken well, Albano? But truly such is the fact," said
he, very much pleased, in his diffidence with respect to his language,
at the praise of its beauty.
After some time, the Knight, just as if he saw away through the seal,
uttered some words which took hold of the youth on all sides. "There
are," said he, "some vigorous natures which stand exactly on the
boundary-line of genius and talent, fitted out, half for active, half
for ideal effort, and, withal, of burning ambition. They feel forcibly
all that is beautiful and great, and would fain create it again out of
themselves; but they succeed only very feebly in doing so. They have
not, like genius, one direction toward the centre of gravity, but they
stand themselves at the gravitating point, so that the directions
destroy each other. They are now poets, now painters, now musicians;
most of all do they love in youth bodily courage, because in that
strength most easily and expeditiously expresses itself through the
arm. Hence, in early life, everything great which they see enraptures
them, because they think to create it anew, but later in life quite
annoys them, because, after all, they have not the power. They should,
however, perceive that it is just they, if they know early how to guide
their ambition, who have drawn the finest lot of various and
harmonizing powers. They seem to be rightly fitted for the enjoyment of
all that is beautiful, as well as for moral development and for the
care of their being, for _whole_ men,--something like what a prince
must be, because in that office one must have for his all-sided
destination all-sided directions of effort and kinds of knowledge."
They stood, as he said this, just on Mount Aventine; before them the
Pyramid of Cestius, that epitaphium of the Heretics' Churchyard,
wherein so many an undeveloped artist and youth sleeps, and, near by,
the lofty potshard mountain[85] (_monte testaccio_), before which
Albano always passed along with a miserable, sickly feeling of stale
dreariness. The shock which his father's ideas gave his own, and the
relationship of the potshard mountain to the strangers' churchyard,
caused Albano to answer rather himself than his father, with a melted
ice-drop of displeasure in his eye: "Such a nameless mountain of pots
is, upon the whole, also the history of nations. But one would much
rather kill one's self on the spot than, after a long life, to bury
one's self so namelessly and ingloriously in the mass at last."
After his union with himself, he grew more happy. Already he began with
zeal to set himself to work, agreeably to his nature, which, as in the
seed-corn, put forth out of one seed-point stem and root, thoughts and
actions.
He threw all other pursuits away, and studied the art of war, ancient
and modern, for which Dian borrowed and supplied him the books and the
study-chamber. With unspeakable delight and exaltation, he ran over
again the sun-charts of the Roman history, here on the very body of the
burnt-out sun itself, and often, when he read descriptions of its
volcanic eruptions, he stood in the very craters where they had
occurred.
Dian gave, into the bargain, his knowledge of the small service, and
gladly gave himself for bodily exercises, when he had previously
ushered him up to divine service under the heaven of Raphael's art,
where graces, like constellations, walk in the lofty ether; for with
Dian body and soul were _one_ casting; the most delicate ocular nerve
and the hardest brachial muscle were _one_ band. At last, as a word was
much more disagreeable to him than an action, and as he had much rather
bestir the whole body than the tongue, he introduced to the Count an
oratorical brother-in-arms, a young Corsican, all alive, as if formed
out of the clear marrow of life.
The two young men loved and exercised each other for a time in romantic
freedom, without so much as asking each other's name. They fought,
read, swam. The Corsican almost idolized Albano's form, strength, head,
and soul, and poured his whole heart into one which he could not wholly
comprehend; as many maidens do only when in love, so did he only when
playing war show soul and sense. Albano's clear gold complacently
reflected back the strange form, without, like glass, annihilating its
own at the same time.
On one occasion the glow of the Corsican grew into a flame, which
showed up the whole character of his life to his friend in a bright
illumination, and his peculiar aim and thirst, namely, for Frenchmen's
blood, "which," he said, "he hoped to quench in the approaching war."
Had Albano been like him, then would they, like fighting stags, have
mortally entangled themselves in each other's antlers; for the
obstinate, inflexible courage of the Corsican--more a sensual courage
as Albano's was more a spiritual--could not endure a contradiction.
Like his class, he desired of Albano a right strong backing word to his
speech; but Albano said: "This is the very greatness in war, that one
can and dare do without exasperated passion, without personal enmity,
all that which the weakling can do only by such means; verily it were
nobler," said he, "to kill in battle a loved than a hated one." "Silly
chimeras!" said the Corsican, angrily; "what? Thou wilt kill the French
and yet love them?" Albano's magnanimity threw off at once every timid
mask, and he said: "In one word, I shall some time fight _for_ the
French and with them." "Thou, false one?" said the Corsican,
"impossible! Against me?" "No," replied Albano, "I pray God that we may
never meet in that hour!" "And I will supplicate Him right earnestly,"
said the Corsican, "that we never may meet again at all except one day
at the point of the bayonet. Adio!" So saying, he turned on his heel in
a fury and never came back again.