Part 12

The following night deserves its Cycle. Soon after Whitsuntide he was tormented with weekly medical notes upon a new malady of poor Liana, which had begun, just as if he had guessed right, on Sacrament-day. He heard that she was living or suffering in _Lilar_, the pleasure- and residence-garden of the old Prince, in company with her brother, of whose silence the Vienna master had just got up to his thousand and first reason. Now, around Lilar, although not far from Pestitz, his father had drawn no chains of prohibition. Liana's night-lamp might, perhaps, glimmer a welcome, or at all events her harmonica sound one,--yes, her brother might haply be still walking round in the garden,--the June night was, besides, serene and magnificent. Ah, in short, he started.

It was late and still; far out of the sleeping village, of which all the lights were extinguished, he could still catch the flute-pieces of the clock in the castle upon the Pestitz mountain. It was a quickener to him, that his road lay for some distance along the Linden-city causeway. He fixed his eyes steadily on the western mountains, where the stars seemed to fall to _her_ like white blossoms. Up on the distant height, the Hercules' cross-way, the right arm ran downward and wound along through groves and meadows to the blooming Lilar.

March on, drunk with joy, full of young, light images, through the Italian night, which glimmers and breathes its fragrance around thee, and which, as over Hesperia, not far from the warm moon, hangs out a golden evening-star[42] in the blue west, as if over the dwelling of the beloved soul! To thee and thy young eyes the stars as yet only shed down hopes, no remembrances; thou hast in thy hand a plucked, stiff apple-twig, full of _red_ buds, which, like unhappy beings, become too _pale_ when they bloom out; but thou makest not, as yet, any such applications thereof as we do.

Now he stood glowing and trembling in a dell before Lilar, which, however, a singular round wood, of walks lined with trees, still hid from his view. The wood grew up in the middle to a blooming mount, which was embosomed and encircled so curiously with broad sunflowers, festoons of cherries, and glancing silver-poplars and rose-trees, that it seemed, by the picturesque _ignes-fatui_ of the moon, to be a single, enormous kettle-tree, full of fruits and blossoms. Albano was fain to ascend its summit, and be, as it were, on the observatory of the heaven, or Lilar, spread out below; he found at last in the wood an open alley.

The foliage, with its spiral alleys, wound him round into a deeper and deeper night, through which not the moon, but only the heat lightnings, could break, with which the warm, cloudless heavens were overcharged. The magic circles of the mount rose ever smaller and smaller out of the leaves into the blossoms,--two naked children, among myrtles, had twined their arms caressingly about each other's bent head,--they were statues of Cupid and Psyche,--rosy night-butterflies were licking, with their short tongues, the honey-dew from the leaves, and the glowworms, like sparks struck off from the glow of evening, went trailing like gold threads around the rose-bushes; he climbed amid summits and roots behind the aromatic balustrade toward heaven; but the little spiral alley running round with him hung before the stars purple night-violets, and hid the deep gardens with orange summits; at length he sprang from the highest round of his Jacob's-ladder, with all his senses, out into an uncovered, living heaven; a light hill-top, only fringed with variegated flower-cups, received and cradled him under the stars, and a white altar gleamed brightly beside him in the moonlight.

But gaze down, fiery man, with thy fresh heart, full of youth, on the magnificent, immeasurable, enchanted Lilar! A second twilight-world, such as tender tones picture to us, an open morning-dream spreads out before thee, with high triumphal arches, with whispering labyrinthine walks, with islands of the blest; the pure snow of the sunken moon lingers now only on the groves and triumphal gates, and on the silver-dust of the fountain-water, and the night, flowing off from all waters and vales, swims over the Elysian fields of the heavenly realm of shadows, in which, to earthly memory, the unknown forms appear like Otaheite-shores, pastoral countries, Daphnian groves, and poplar-islands of our present world,--wondrous lights glide through the dark foliage, and all is one lovely, magic confusion. What mean those high, open doors or arches, and the pierced groves and the ruddy splendor behind them, and a white child sleeping among orange-lilies and gold-flowers, from whose cups delicate flames trickle,[43] as if angels had flown too near over them? The lightnings reveal swans, sleeping on the waves under clouds drunk with light, and their flaming trains blaze like gold after them in among the thick trees,[44] as goldfishes turn their burning backs out of the water,--and even around thy summit, Albano, the great eyes of the sunflowers turn on thee their fiery looks, as if kindled by the sparks of the glowworms.

"And in this kingdom of light," thought Albano, trembling, "the still angel of my future hides himself and glorifies it, when he appears. O where dwellest thou, good Liana? In that white temple? or in the arbor between the rose-fields? or up there in the green Arcadian summer-house?" If love makes even pangs to be pleasures, and exalts the shadowy sphere of the earth into a starry sphere, O what an enchantment will it lend to delight! Albano could not possibly, in this outer and inner splendor, think of Liana as sick; he represented to himself just now only the blissful future, and with a yearning embrace knelt down at the altar; he looked toward the glittering garden, and pictured to himself how it would be when he should one day tread with _her_ every island of this Eden,--when holy Nature should lay his and her hands in one another upon these altar-steps,--when he should sketch to her on the way the Hesperia of life, the pastoral land of first love, and then its holy exultation and its sweet tears, and how he should not then be able to look round into the eyes of that most tender heart, because he should already know that they were overflowing with bliss. Just then he saw, in the moonshine above the triumphal arches, two illuminated forms move like spirits; but his glowing soul went on with its painting, and he imagined to himself how, when the nightingales trilled in this Eden, he should look up to her and say, in a delirium of love, "O Liana, I bore thee long ago in my heart,--once upon that mountain, when thou wast sick."...

This startled him, and he came to himself; he was indeed on the mountain,--but he had forgotten the sickness. Now, kneeling, he threw his arms around the cold stone, and prayed for her whom he so loved, and who, also, surely had prayed here; and his head sank, weeping and darkened, upon the altar. He heard human steps approaching down below on the winding hill, and, with trembling joy, he thought it might be his father; but he boldly remained on his knees. At last there stepped in across the flowery border a tall, bent old man, like the noble bishop of Spangenberg; his calm countenance smiled full of eternal love, and no pains appeared upon it, and it seemed to fear none. The old man, in mute gladness, pressed the youth's hands together as a sign that he should pray on, knelt down beside him, and that ecstasy to which frequent prayer transfigures one spread its saintly radiance over that form full of years. Singular was this union and this silence. The fragment of the moon, which was all that yet jutted above the earth, burned darklier, and at last went down; then the old man rose, and, with that easiness of transition which comes from being habituated to devotion, put questions about Albano's name and residence; after the answer, he merely said, "Pray on thy way to God, the all-gracious,--and go to sleep before the storm comes, my son!"

Never can that voice and form pass away out of Albano's heart; the soul of the old man peered, like the sun in an annular eclipse, shining, full circle, out over the dark body, which strove to hide it with its earth-mould. Deeply struck, to the very roots of his nerves, Albano rose, and the broadening flashes of the lightning showed him now, down below near the enchanted garden, a second dark, entangled, horrible one, a sort of Tartarus to the Elysium. He departed with singular and conflicting emotions,--the future, and the beings therein, appeared to him, on his way, to stand very near, and already to run to and fro like theatre lights behind the transparent curtain,--and he longed for some weighty enterprise as a refreshment for his inflamed heart; but he had to rest his head, full of this heath-fire, on the pillow, and the high thunder, like a god of the night, mingled with its first claps in his dreams.

24. CYCLE.

THE unknown old man lingered many days in Albano's soul, and would not stir. In fact, the channel of his life now needed a bend, to break the stress of the stream. Fate can educate men like him only by a change of circumstances, just as it can weak ones only by a continuance of the same. For if it went on much longer in this way, and the chandelier in his temple should, by inner earthquakes, be thrown into ever increasing vibrations, the consequence would be, at last, that no candle could any longer burn therein. What Imperial-Diet-grievances did not Wehrfritz and Hafenreffer already jointly present on the subject, when the shipmaster Blanchard, in Blumenbühl, went up with his aerostatic soap-bubbles, and Zesara could hardly, by almost the absolute despotism of the Director, be kept back from embarking! And how divine a thing does he not imagine it would be, not only to hurl down to the earth its iron rings and arrest warrants, and soar away, perpendicularly, above all its market-rubbish and boundary-trees and Hercules'-pillars, and sweep around it as a constellation, but also to hover above the magic Lilar and the hermetically-sealed Linden-city with devouring eyes, and to lift a whole, full, heavy world to his thirsty heart, by the handle of a single look!

But fate broke the fall of this swift stream. Namely, as good luck would have it, the Blumenbühl church had this long time been daily threatening to tumble down,--and I was wishing the Whitsuntide lightning had gone in there, and had made ears and legs for the building committee,--when by still greater good luck the old Prince was taken sick. Now in the church was the hereditary sepulchre of the Prince, which could not conveniently serve, on the other hand, as the hereditary sepulchre of the church.

About this time it must needs happen that the old Princess, with the Minister Froulay, passed through the village. The two had long since commissioned themselves as Imperial vicars, business-agents, and sceptre bearers of the State, because the feeble old gentleman had been glad to give up the amusements and burdens, the glitter and weight of the crown, and admit those two feudal guardians into the hereditary office of the sceptre. In short, the age of the church, together with that of the princely couple, decided the building of a new roofing and covering for the vault.

The Provincial-Director was one of the inspecting committee, and invited the distinguished company to his house; among whom, the Provincial architect, Dian, and the Counsellor of Art, Fraischdörfer, as artists, and the little princess as naturalist, are particularly to be noticed.

The poor dancing-master got wind of the procession through a telescope, just as he was stretching his feet, full of _pas_, into a warm foot-bath. It will not gratify anybody, that the Vienna gentleman had but one thing in common with the old Magister,--what the Devil shares with the horse, namely, the foot, which measured its good foot and a half, Paris measure, and that, therefore, his double root, in the narrow forcing-pots of shoes, shot out into a fruit-bearing, knotty-stock, full of inoculating eyes, i. e. corns. To-day he would have cut these gordian knots in a foot-bath; but, as it was, he must, on occasion of such a visit,--although he had never stretched them,--put on his tightest children's shoes, for effect. Thus are men often caught with too tight shoes, as monkeys are with too heavy ones.

Albano, on the contrary, stood in buskins. In general, every one who simply came from Pestitz, had, in his eyes, consecrated holy earth on his soles; and here he looked with the loving reverence of a village youth upon a somewhat oldish, but red-cheeked and tall-built princess, whose chin was bent up by time, and whose friendly face--perhaps, by way of hiding the many wrinkles--was buried deep in a whole bush of millinery. She kept this head moving to and fro with a smiling comparison, as of brother and sister, between him and Rabette; for mothers always look, in mothers, for the children first. He should have further known that he had before him a friend of Liana in the frizzle-headed _little_ princess, who, although already of his age, yet with a friendly liveliness, which can never be subscribed to by the court-marshalship, looked up at all, and even took Rabette by the hand, and drew from her an indescribably good-natured and stiff smile. The formidable one of the party was to him the Minister, a man full of strong parts, both of body and soul, full of furious, murderous passions, only that they lay bound with flowery chains, and with respect to whom, although his hard face was written over only out of courtliness with the twelve friendly signs of the zodiac of love, it would not be specially apparent how one could be father and guide to the weak-nerved Liana, when the iron parts, of which man carries more in his blood than any other animal, had settled, not as in the case of Götz of Berlichingen, into his hand, but into his brow and heart.

I give merely a flying glance at the only member of the company who was intolerable to Albano,--the art-counsellor, Fraischdörfer, who had thrown off his face, like the drapery of the ancients, into folds of simple and noble greatness. This man, I must explain, had wanted for many years to have our bashful little hero sit to him, even to the very pit of his stomach, in order to represent, whether in a crayon likeness or a medallion I know not, his face, and the broad, high, Plato-like breast shining out from his shirt-frills. But the bashful child played about himself with his hands and feet so lustily, that nothing could possibly be caught and copied except the naked face without the pedestal, the thorax. Before me, on the contrary, dear academy, must thou now for years keep thyself on the model-stand, like a stylite, and expose to my drawing-pen thy head and thy breast, together with its cubic contents, not to mention the groupings at all.

He had, perhaps, to thank his noble form for it, that the beautifully built, straight-nosed, and magnificently slender Dian--with his raven hair and black, eagle eye, who in every pliant motion showed a higher freedom of carriage than is gained in ball-rooms and court-saloons--came up to him warmly, and, with very few glances, saw to the green bottom of the deep but clear sea of the young man, and discerned the pearl-banks there. Albano, with his too loud, vehement voice,--with his respectful but sharply-moving eyes,--with his rooted posture,--expressed an agreeable mixture of inward culture and ascendency with external rustic modesty and mildness, like a tulip-tree not as yet cut up for a tulip-bed,--a rural hermitage and log-house with golden furniture. He had the faults of youth in its recluseness; but men and winter radishes must be sowed _far apart_, in order that they may grow _large_: men and trees that stand near together have, it is true, a more slender and tapering trunk, but no power to brave the tempest, nor such a rich crown and branching as those that stand free. With the most unembarrassed heartiness, the architect disclosed to the glowing youth, "They should from this time forth see each other every week, since he was to come daily to oversee the building of the church."

The whole Wehrfritz household is now peeping out after the majestic procession, even to the last disappearing chariot-wheel, and is, of course, eager to say three words upon the lavender-water of joy that leaves such a fragrance behind it, which the procession had sprinkled into all corners and upon all pieces of furniture. From the Master of exercises--who, with the compression-machines on his feet, stood only so far as the excrescences in Purgatory, but from there up to the crown of his head in heaven (because the affable Princess had remembered very well his five positions)--even to the modest Rabette, the eulogist of her victorious rival,--and even to Albina, who was agreeably impressed with such warm, motherly love in a Fürstinn toward the Princess,--and even to the Director, who looked back with pleasure on the nobly sustained blade- and anchor-proof of his foster-son and the universal probity of this converted portion of the great world, because the man never observed that Princes and Ministers, just as they have in their wardrobes mountain- and mining-habits, so also carry about in their dressing-chamber Directorate-dresses, furred gowns of justice, consistorial sheep-skins, and women's opera-dresses;--from all these, even to the Director, the glad echo swelled, to die away in Zesara with an alarm-cannon. His ambition took arms; his liberty-tree shot forth into blossoms; the standards of his youthful wishes were consecrated and flung to the breeze of heaven; and on the myrtle crown he covered a heavy helm with a glittering, high-waving, plumed crest....

The following Cycle is composed merely for the purpose of showing how all this is to be taken.

25. CYCLE.

It is also my opinion that the antiphonious double choir of the two educational colleagues, Wehmeier and Falterle, had hitherto trained our Norman, as well as two similar gymnasiarchs, Governess England and domestic French instructress France, have actually educated the charity-school-girl Germany according to the best school-books, so that now we, in our turn, are in a condition to school the Poles, and, with the ferule, from the desk of our princely schools, to kantschu them down as much as is necessary.

But now too much had waked up in Albano. He felt overswelling energies which found no teacher. His father, roving round through Italy, seemed to be neglecting him. That seat of the muses, Pestitz,--which now had _one_ more muse added to its number,--seemed to be unjustly barred against him. Often he knew not how to stay away. Fancy, heart, blood, and ambition were at boiling heat. In such a case, as in every fermenting cask, nothing is more dangerous than an empty space, whether from a want of knowledge or of occupation.

_Dian filled up the cask._

He came each week from the city, as if he had to arrange the hammer-work of the church, according to plans, as well as the building of its walls. A youth who sees his first Greek cannot, at the outset, rightly believe it at all; he takes him for a classic glorification,--a printed sheet out of Plutarch. And if his heart burns like that of my hero, and if his Greek is of Spartan descent, like Dian,--namely, an unconquered _Mainotte_, who has been brought up in the classic double choir of the æsthetic singing-schools in Atiniah (Athens) and Rome,--then is it natural that the inspired youth should stand every day in the dust-and rubbish-clouds of the falling church-walls, and wait to see his commander come forth from behind the cloudy pillar.

Dian accompanied his beloved in his walks, often read half the night with him, and took him with him on the architectural journeys which he had constantly to make into the country. He introduced him with inspired reverence into the holy world of Homer and of Sophocles, and went with him among the loftier beings of this twin Prometheus, those nobly formed, completely developed men, yet unperverted by a partial provincial culture, who, like Solomon, had a time for everything human,--for laughing, weeping, eating, fearing, and hoping,--and who shunned merely rude immoderateness; who sacrificed on the altars of all gods, but on that of Nemesis first of all. And Dian, whose inner man was a whole, from which no member is torn away, no one swollen, and all fully grown, himself went round with his darling as such a Greek of Homer and Sophocles. While Wehmeier and the foster-parents were always running after him with a pulpit and a pew, at every passionate expression of anger, or desire, or exultation, he, on the contrary, with fair, liberal freedom, made room for him to unfold himself to his full breadth and height. He respected in the youth the St. Elmo's or St. Helena's fire, as he did frost in an old man: the heart of vigorous men, he thought, must, like a porcelain vase, in the beginning, be turned too large and too wide; in the furnace of the world it would soon enough shrink up to a proper size. I too require of youth, at first, intolerance, then, after some years, tolerance,--that as the stony, sour fruit of a strong young heart, this as the soft winter-fruit of an older head.

But while the Architect drew with him, and with him examined casts of the antiques and works of art, he at the same time made manifest most beautifully to the youth his love for the artistical _sign of the Balance_ in man (who ought to be his own work of art), and his aversion to every paroxysm, which breaks the outward beauty as well as the inward into folds and wrinkles, and his desire to regulate his form and his heart after the lofty pattern of repose on the antiques.

The Architect, as artists often do, and the Swiss still oftener, preserved European culture and rural _naïveté_ and simplicity side by side, like his beloved profession, wherein, more than in other arts, beauty and surveying reason border upon each other; he therefore at first let Albano look in and listen at the window of the philosophical lecture-hall from without, standing in the open air. He led him, not into the stone-quarry, lime-pit, and timber-yard of metaphysics, but directly into the ready-made, beautiful oratory, formed of the materials thence collected, otherwise called Natural Theology. He did not let him forge and solder ring after ring of any iron chain of reasoning, but showed such a one to him as a deep-reaching well-chain, whereby Truth, sitting at the bottom, is to be drawn up; or as a chain hanging from heaven, whereby the lower gods (the philosophers) are to draw Jupiter down. In short, the _skeleton_ and _muscle-preparation_ of metaphysics he concealed in the _God-man_ of religion. And so it should be (in the beginning); grammar is learned from language more easily than the latter from the former; criticism from works of art, the skeleton from the body, more easily than the reverse; although we always do reverse it. Unfortunate is it for the youth of our day, that they are obliged to shake the drops and the insects from the tree of knowledge, before the fruit.

And now he boldly threw open to him all the chamber-doors of the philosophical schools, i. e. the three heavens; for in this youthful season one still takes the wick of every learned light of the world for asbestos, as Brahmins dress themselves in asbestos; and the masses of ice around the poles of our spiritual world represent, at this early age, like the actual ones in the visible world, cities and temples on azure-blue columns.