Most of the spectators had in the beginning come more for the sake of
the spectators and performers than of the play; but soon they were
attracted by the mystery and by the extraordinary stage itself. The
scene was laid on the so-called Island of Slumber in the Prince's
garden, which was covered with a wild, thick tangle of flowers, bushes,
and high trees. Its eastern side showed an open, free foreground, on
which the performance was to take place, with a white Sphinx on an
empty tomb farther in among the green. The wings of the scenes were the
dark leafy parts; pit and boxes the shore opposite, which was separated
from the island by a lake, about as broad as a moderate-sized ship.
From two trees of the two opposite shores hung down like a lantern out
over the middle of the lake the cage of the jay or chorus, suspended
there by way of bringing her deep, dull voice nearer to the spectators.
"I am, to tell the truth, 'curious," said the Knight to his son, "to
know whence you will draw the tragical." "Leave me alone for that!"
said Roquairol, who had hitherto been walking backward and forward
silently and uneasily, with his eyes on the ground; "only I must make a
general request of the company to be pardoned the delay. When I address
the moon in the fifth act, I can very well use the real one, if I only
begin just so that her rising shall coincide with the last scene."
At length he embarked, with a face that was growing pale, in the
Charon's boat, as he said, and ferried over alone. Then the other
players sailed over one after another. All were lost behind the trees;
and now, from behind in the embowered western parts of the island,
the immortal overture from Mozart's Don Juan rose like an invisible
spirit-realm slowly and grandly into the air.
"_Diablesse!_" cried thereupon the brother of the Knight to the jay,
and clapped his hands at the same time as a signal.
"Open the coffin," the creature began, in a hollow voice, accompanied
by single, lugubrious, tones of the orchestra,--"open the coffin in the
churchyard, and show for the last time the breast of the corpse and his
dry eyelid, and then shut it to forever."
At this moment Lilia (Chariton) and Carlos (Dian) stepped forth,--two
lovers yet in the earliest time of the first love. No sad rain of tears
yet swept away the golden morning dew, they are so true to each other.
Lilia rejoices with him that her brother Hiort is just coming back from
his travels to find his youthful friend Carlos her eternal one.
"Perhaps he, too, is right fortunate," said Lilia. "O, certainly so,"
said Carlos; "he is indeed that, and everything else." At times both
were silent in happy contemplation of each other; then tones went up
out of the veiled west of the island and bore the mute joy into the
ether, and showed it to them hovering and glorified. A sweet sympathy
diffused itself among the spectators for Dian's and Chariton's
imitation of their own fair reality, so delicate, yet mingled with
southern glow; they heard and saw Greeks. All at once Lilia fled behind
the flower-bushes, for her enemy, _Salera_, Carlos's father, came,
personated by Bouverot.
Salera angrily announced to his son the arrival of his bride,
_Athenais_. Carlos made known to him now the mystery of his earlier
love, and showed himself armed against a whole future. Salera cried,
with exasperation, "Would that she were not, as she is, beautiful, so
that I might have the pleasant duty of forcing and punishing thee! But
thou wilt see her, and obey me, and yet I shall hate thee." Carlos
replied, "Father, I have already seen Lilia." Salera went off with
angry repetitions, and Carlos wished now still more ardently for
Hiort's return, in order with him more easily to abduct his sister
through his persuasion and attendance. Here closed the first act.
The brother of the Knight called to the jay, "_Diablesse!_" and scraped
with his foot, as a signal.
"Appear, pale man!" spake the creature; "the clock vibrates the hour;
man of sorrow, land upon the still island!"
Hiort stepped forth, with his cheeks painted pale, with open breast,
looked upon the tomb, and said, from his innermost soul, "At last!" The
music played a dance. "Yes, indeed, island of slumber thou may'st well
be called; our days end with a sleep," he added. Now came his Carlos.
"Hiort, art thou dead?" cried he, in terror, over the corpse. "I am
only pale," said he. "O, how dost thou come back so out of the
beautiful, gay earth?" said Carlos. "Exhausted, Charles, with stillborn
hopes; my present is disinherited by the past; the foliage of the
sensual is fallen off; not even beautiful nature do I longer fancy, and
clouds like mountains are more dear to me than real mountains. I have
truly reaped the bitter weeds of life, and yet must I, in this empty
breast, carry about with me a destroying angel, who eternally digs and
writes, and every letter is a wound. No advice! You call it conscience.
But bring me a little sleep-draught hither on the island of sleep,
Charles!"
They brought wine. He now gave his friend an account of his life,--his
faults, among which he adduced the very one in which he was just
persisting, namely, drinking; his self-reproducing vanity, even with
its self-acknowledgment; his conquests of women, which made him a
magnetic mountain, full of the attracted nails from ships that had
thereby fallen to pieces; his propensity, like Cardan, to offend his
friends, to break in upon his own or another's good fortune, as, even
when a child, he longed to interrupt the preacher,[128] or in the midst
of the finest tune to smash the harpsichord, and in a fit of enthusiasm
to think the most licentious thoughts.
"Once I had still, after all, two distinct and different selves,--one
that promised and lied, and one that believed the other; now they both
lie to each other, and neither believes." Carlos answered, "Horrible!
But thy sorrow is verily itself a help and a gift." "Ah, what!" he
replied. "Man condemns less his iniquity than the past situation
wherein he committed it, while, in a fresh situation, he finds it new
and sweet again, and loves it as much as ever. What lies cold yonder,
that is my image [pointing to the Sphinx], that stirs itself, living,
in my bloody breast. Help me! draw out the rending monster!"
Albano fired with rage in his innermost soul at the guilty repetition
of that tender confessional night with him.[129] "He is bold enough,"
said Gaspard, in a whisper to Albano, "because, as I hear, he is really
to personate himself; but when he sees himself so, he is surely better
than he sees himself." "O," said Albano, "so I thought once! But is,
then, the contemplation of a bad condition itself a good condition? Is
he not so much the worse that he bears this consciousness, and so much
the weaker that he sees an incurable cancer-sore growing upon him? The
highest thing he has, at all events, lost,--innocence." "A fleeting
cradle virtue! He has, after all, a bright, bold, reflecting faculty,"
said Gaspard. "Only effeminate, shameless, double-meaning, many-sided
debility of heart he has; talks of power, and cannot tear through the
thinnest mesh of pleasure," said Albano.
"Charles," said Hiort, tenderly, as if answering him, "yes, there is
yet one help. When on the ground of life one fresh color after another
fades,--when existence is now nothing, neither comedy nor tragedy, only
a stale show-piece,--still is there one heaven open to man, which shall
receive him,--love. Let this close against him, and he is damned
forever. Carlos, my Carlos, I could still be happy, for I have seen
_Athenais_; but I can be still more unhappy than I am, for she loves me
not. In my heart lies this blazing, but continually sharp-cutting
diamond, upon which it bleeds as often as it beats." Everywhere now did
Roquairol let Linda's image play in. At this crisis, Carlos at first
threw his friend into an internal uproar, with the intelligence that
Athenais had been selected by his father for _his_ bride, and was
coming soon; but he calmed him, when his sister Lilia appeared, by
quickly taking her hand, and saying, "This one only do I love." They
spoke of the obstacles on the part of old Salera, whom Carlos called a
glacier, which bore fruit under no sun, and could not be built upon.
"Stand by me, Charles," said Hiort; "think what thou wrotest to me:
'Like two streams will we blend together, and grow, and bear, and dry
up together.'"[130] Thus did the three beings mutually understand,
bind, elevate each other; all had one end,--their common welfare.
Carlos swore eternal rebellion against his father; Hiort, to protect
his sister, and cried, "At last the empty cornucopia of Time, which
hitherto has given out nothing but hollow sounds, pours out flowers
again." "O, the women! How common and commonplace are almost all men!
But almost every woman is new." Gaspard said, with a smile, "Women say
the reverse of us and themselves." The second act closed in gladness
and peace.
"_Diablesse!_" cried the Spaniard, and stretched his right hand high in
the air.
"Fleeting," began the black jay, amid tones of music, "is man, more
fleeting is his bliss, but earlier than all dies the friend with his
word."
The third act followed immediately upon the heels of the preceding, and
broke up, by the uninterrupted continuance of the artistic enchantment,
which should belong to every play and every work of art that is to be
read, all cold, prosaic astonishment, even that which arose from the
wonderful speaking of the jay on the lake. A great, beautiful, proud
lady appeared,--Athenais (personated by the merchant's wife,
Roquairol's by-mistress), full of hope in her old friend Lilia, who
called herself "the little Athenais," and, sweetly dreaming over the
dream of former days, Lilia sinks into her arms with twofold tears;
Athenais does indeed bear in her hand three heavens and three hells.
"How beautiful thou returnest! My poor brother!" said Lilia softly.
"Name him not," said she proudly, "he can die for me, but I cannot live
for him." Here Carlos flies in to his Lilia,--stops and stiffens in his
flight,--collects himself, and approaches Lilia. She says, "Count
Salera,--Athenais--" He grew pale, she red. A constraining, painful
confusion entangled them all three; every honey drop was taken from a
thorn-hedge. Lilia, with a shudder, is made more and more strongly
aware of Athenais's sudden victory over her fortune and love. Athenais
went away. The two lovers look upon each other for a long time with
trembling. "Am I right?" asked Lilia. "Am I in fault?" said Carlos.
"No," said she, "for thou art a mortal, and, what is still worse, a
man." "What shall I do, then?" replied Carlos. "Thou shalt," said she,
solemnly, "after one year go into a garden on a hill, and look around
thee and seek me in the garden,--in the garden--under the beds,--deep
below one,--I know not how deep." She hastened away, as if frantic, and
sang, "All over, all over with loving and living!"
Carlos stood some minutes with his wild look on the ground, and said,
in a low, hollow tone, "God, it is thy work!" and went off,--met his
friend, who called out impetuously and joyfully, "She is here!" but he
hastened on proudly, and only called back, "Not now, Hiort!" To him
came Lilia, weeping, and led him onward. "Come," said she, "do not look
upon the tomb; we are both too unhappy."
Then came out old Salera with Athenais,--seized on ice for fire, and
took his cold coin for warm,--praised her like a man, and his son like
a father,--and said, as in a play, There comes himself. "Here, son,"
said he, "I set before thee thy happiness, if thou canst deserve it."
Carlos had lost Lilia's heart,--his father's wish, the might of beauty,
the omnipotence of loving beauty, stood before him, his longing and the
thought of cruelty toward this goddess, and finally a world within him,
which stood so near to her sun, prevailed over a double fidelity;--he
sank on his knee before her, and said, "I am guiltless, if I am happy."
The pair go off on one side; Salera on the other, and encounters Lilia,
whose hand he takes, with the words, "You, as a friend of my house and
son, certainly take the deepest interest in his latest happiness as the
possessor of Athenais." So ended the third act, which, by its unjust,
all-distorting allusions, filled and fired Albano with an exasperated
desire for the end, merely that he might call Roquairol to account for
this assassin-like brandishing of the tragic dagger. "The old
fellow,"[131] said Gaspard, laughing, "fancies he is painting me too
herein; I wish, however, he would take stronger colors."
Before the fourth act commenced, the Spaniard threw up his left hand,
and the black jay spoke immediately: "Sin punishes sin, and the foe the
foe; untamable is love, untamable also vengeance. See, now comes the
man whom they no more love, and brings with him his wounds and his
wrath." There stood Hiort, as if before his grave, which drew down his
head,--weeping and drinking enormously,--soft evening tones of music
melted away with his dissolving life. "Ah, so it is," cried he, out of
a deep, agonized breast,--"only throw them away at length, the two
last roses of life:[132] too many bees and thorns lurk in them; they
draw thy blood and give thee poison-- O, how I loved! thou Almighty One
on high, how I loved!--but ah, not thee! And so now I stand empty and
poor and old: nothing, nothing is left me,-not a single heart,--no, not
my own: that is already gone down into the grave. The wick is drawn out
of my life, and it runs away in darkness. O ye children of men! ye
stupid children of men! why do ye then believe that there is still any
love here below? Look at me, I have none. An airy colored ribbon of
love, a rainbow, draws itself out and winds itself around under us
shifting clouds, as if it would bind the clouds and bear them.
Ridiculous! it is itself cloud and mere falling weather,--in the
beginning glisten gay drops of gladness, then dash down black drops of
rain!"
He was silent,--went slowly up and down,--looked seriously at a
war-dance and masquerade of internal spectres,--then stopped. The
shadows of dark deeds played through each other around him: suddenly he
started up; a lightning-flash of a thought had darted into his heart;
he ran to and fro, cried, "Music! let me have horrible music!" and the
wedding music from Don Juan, which had hitherto accompanied him, raised
the murder-cry of terror. "Divine!" said he; and only single words,
only tiger spots, appeared and vanished on the monster as he passed by.
"Devilish! the rose's being, the blossom's being,--aye, well! I will
bury myself in the avalanche, and roll down; and then I die beautifully
on my slumber-island," he concluded, in a soft, faint voice.
"O Lilia! insure me one prayer!" cried he, going to meet his
approaching sister. "Any one which hinders not my dying," said she. He
laid before her the prayer, that she would this very night persuade her
friend Athenais into the "night-arbor" of the island, under the pretext
that her bridegroom, Carlos, wished to show her to-day two mysteries
about Lilia. "I have," he added, "Carlos's voice; with it I can declare
to her my loving heart, and then, if she loves me, I will call myself
Hiort." "Is thy request sincere?" asked the sister. "As true as that I
will be still alive to-morrow," said he. "Then is it soon fulfilled,
for Athenais expects me even in the night-arbor; only follow me after
seven minutes." She went; he looked after her, and said to himself,
"Hasten, arrange the heaven! Fair slumber-island, at once the
sleeping-place for the bridal-chamber and for the eternal sleep. O, how
few minutes stand between me and her heart!"
"Thou art still here, surely?" said he, and looked for his pistol.
"Now," cried he, solemnly, in departing, "is the time for the
_clear-obscure_ deed, then the bier-cloth is thrown over it," and went
swiftly into the arbor.
The Spaniard threw a twig into the water, and the black jay spake, in a
low tone, "Silent is bliss; silent is death."
"The man," said Gaspard, "has something through the whole play like
real earnest. I will not answer that he does not shoot himself dead
before us all." "Impossible!" said Albano, alarmed; "he has not the
force for such a reality." Nevertheless, he could not, after all,
properly free himself from the anxious thought of this possibility.
Disturbed, impetuous, with dishevelled hair, Hiort came back, and said,
in a low voice, "It is done; I was blest; no one will be so after me."
"With that yellow one,[133] and now in the night-hour, I will answer
for nothing," said Gaspard. Albano reddened with shame at the impudent
presumption, and still more at Roquairol's crime of dishonoring and
seducing, even in the play, his holy beloved. "Music, but tender and
good!" he cried, and let himself be fanned by the zephyr of harmony,
and drank incessantly "funeral draughts," or wine,--both to the
annoyance of the Knight, who abhorred drinking, and shunned music,
because this or both made one weak.
He laid himself down on the turf, and the pistol beside him, and said,
stammering, "So, then, I lie in the warm ashes of my burnt-out life,
and my cold ashes will be added soon." He put his double opera-glass
close to his eyes, and cast sparkling looks over at Linda. "I have had
her on my heart, the divine beauty, my eternal love,--my tulip, which
at evening closes at length over the bee, that he may die in the
flower-cup. On the roses of my life I rest and die; I still look with
bliss on the sweet one; I cannot repent. Only forgive, poor Carlos; I
wipe away the crime with blood, but with tears of penitence I cannot.
Should that which time has washed away from this shore cleave again to
the shore of eternity, then it must fare badly with me there: I can
change there as little as here."
At this moment a cannon-shot was fired in the city to announce a
deserter. He took his pistol into his hand. "Yes, yes, a shot signifies
a fugitive,--a fugitive out of the world, too. O, when shall the sharp
sickle lift itself in the east, and cut life in twain? I am so weary!"
He looked toward the eastern heavens, but a cloud, which already
faintly thundered, overcast the gateway of the moon. He smiled
bitterly.
"Even this little, last joy also destiny begrudges me! I shall see the
moon no more. Well, I shall, perhaps, mount higher than it or its
storm-cloud,--only my dear spectators and auditors of my death are
driven away from me by the rain. Yes, if thou art out, then am I out!"
He pointed to the flask.
"Wild, awful tones, come up from the deep! Bring me my bloody bridal
dress! It is time; declining joy casts behind a long, lengthening
shadow." Albano and Julienne recognized with a shudder, in the little
coat which they brought him, the blood-sprinkled one which he had worn
at the masquerade, when, as a boy, he had meant to murder himself
before Linda. "You must lay it on my cold breast," said he, as he
received it from Falterle. The thunder rolled nearer, the lightnings
became more glowing, and one cloud after another swelled the tempest.
He drank the glasses fast. "Nothing can now harm me," said he;
"even the lightning not specially, although I lie under trees; in this
tube there is a lightning that defies all lightnings,--a real
lightning-rod." The hastening storm drove him, on the spectators'
account, to the conclusion, and he was roused to indignation at the
mockery of Providence over his theatrical preparations.
"Nothing is more pleasant and timely than this tempest," said Gaspard;
"however, talking and waiting seem to gratify him tolerably." The other
spectators were agonized by the scene, and yet not one tore himself
away. Orders had been given to the fellow-performers to take the
shot as the signal-word, and not to come before it. He said, "The
death-snake rattles in the neighborhood; yonder, on the wave of the
future, the corpse comes swimming on." They perceived that he spoke at
random and extempore, vexed by the storm. He looked upon the pistol. "A
glance at thee! So is the look at life taken, and again hidden under
the eyelid. A spark, a single spark, and the theatre-curtain blazes up,
and I see the spectators stand, spirits, or even nothing at all, and
the eternal, heavy cloud fills the wide ether of the world. So stand I,
then, by the dead sea of eternity; so black, still, wide, deep it lies
below me; one step, and I am in there, and sink forever. Let it come! I
swam therein even before my birth. Now, now," said he, while it
sprinkled, and he took the last glass, "the rain will chill the poor
wretch already sinking into the chill of death. Play now something soft
and beautiful, good people!"
Thereupon he cocked his weapon, stood up, said, weeping, "Farewell,
beautiful and hard life! Ye two fair stars, ye that still look down
from above, may I come nearer to you? Thou holy earth, thou wilt still
often quake, but no more shall he quake with thee who sleeps in thy
bosom; and ye good, far-off beings who loved me, and ye near ones whom
I so loved, may you fare better than I, and condemn me not too harshly!
I do verily punish myself, and God immediately judges me. Farewell, my
dear, offended, but very hard Albano, and thou, thou even unto death
ardently loved Liana, forgive me, and weep for me! Liana, if thou still
livest, then stand by thy brother in the last hour, and pray for me
before God!" Here he suddenly pointed the weapon at his forehead,
fired, and fell headlong; some blood flowed from the cloven skull, and
he breathed yet once, and then no more.
Bouverot flew out, according to his part, and began it: "Even now, my
dear Hiort, my Carlos bethinks himself"; but he started back before the
corpse, stammering, "_Mais! mon Dieu! il s'est tué re vera! Diable! il
est mort! Oh! qui me payera?_" Linda sank powerless on Julienne's
bosom, and the latter stammered, "O, the sinner and suicide!" The
Princess exclaimed, indignantly, "_Oh, le traitre!_" Albano cried, "Ah,
Charles! Charles!" and plunged into the lake, and swam over, threw
himself upon the shattered form, and groaned, weeping, "O, had I known
this! Brother and sister dead! and I am to blame! O, had I remained
unsuccessful! Ah, my Charles, Charles, forgive! I was not thy foe. How
deplorably shattered it lies there,--the great temple!" "Be more calm,
I pray," said Gaspard, who had at last come over in the boat, and who
bore every mutilation with an anatomical coldness and curiosity; "he
had his regiment debts also, and feared the investigation which a new
administration would bring about. Now, one can, after all, have respect
for him; he has actually carried through his character."
Albano raised himself up erect, and said, in the deafness of anguish,
"Who spake that? you, miserable Bouverot? you know nothing but debts!"
"Monsieur le Comte!" said he, defyingly. "I said it," said Gaspard to
his son. "O my Dian!" cried Albano, and stretched out his hand toward
him, who, himself weeping, held his weeping Chariton, "come thou
hither; let us bandage him; there may yet be help for it."
The Counsellor of Arts Fraischdörfer stepped up to the astounded
Princess, who remained upon her side of the lake, with the words, by
way of diverting her attention, "Viewed on the side of art merely, it
were a question whether this situation was not borrowed with effect.
One must, as in that wonderful creation of Hamlet, weave a play into
the play, and in that make the pretended death a real one; of course it
were then only a show of show, playing reality in real play, and
thousand-fold, wonderful reflex! But how it rains now!" Something was
whispered in the ear of the Princess by her Haltermann. She flung up
her arms, and cried, "O, monster! homicide! My poor, innocent Gibbon!
Thou monster!" She had heard of the ape's murder, and departed
inconsolable.
All at once the naked moon emerged into the deep blue, and every one
remarked it; but the rain previous no one but Fraischdörfer had been
aware of. Albano saw now full clearly the dead eyes and white, stiff
lips. "No, they stir not," said he. Then it sounded as if out of
Roquairol's breast and iron mouth, "Be still; I am judged!" And
immediately began the jay, as concluding chorus of the last act, "The
poor man now lies fast asleep, and you can cover him up!"
Gaspard looked very earnestly at his brother. "By heavens!" replied the
latter, "it is written so in his part."
The whole starry sky cleared up. The company went homeward. Albano and
Dian, with Chariton, stayed by the corpse.