Part 21

A maiden with the harp looked in through the entering-thicket of the vale, and Liana saw the sign, and rose up. As she was on the point of raising her veil and departing, the great-hearted youth bethought him of his confession: "I have read your to-day's letter,--by heaven, I must say it now!" said he. She drew the veil no higher, and said, with trembling voice, "You surely have not read it! you could not have been in my chamber?" and looked at Chariton. He replied, he had not read it all, but yet a good deal of it; and related in three words a much milder history than Liana could have hoped. "The naughty Pollux!" Chariton kept saying. "O God, forgive me, I pray you, this sin of ignorance!" said Albano. She threw back the dark veil for a second, and said, with heightened color and downcast look, appeased, perhaps, by her joy at the agreeable disappointment of her worse expectation: "It belonged merely to a female friend; and you will perhaps, if I ask you, not read anything again." And during the fall of the veil her eye looked up soothingly and forgivingly, and with her beloved she slowly departed from him.

O thou holy soul, love my youth! Art thou not the first love of this heart of fire, the morning-star in the early dawn of his life, thou, this good, pure, and tender one? O, the first love of man, the Philomel among the spring-tones of life, is always indeed, because we so err, so hardly treated by Fate, and always killed and buried, but now, if for once, two good souls, in the white-blossomed May of life, bearing the sweet tears of spring in their bosoms, with the glistening buds and hopes of a whole youth, and with the first, unprofaned longing, and with the firstling of life as well as of the year, the forget-me-not of love in their hearts,--if such kindred beings could meet each other and trust each other, and in the blissful month swear a union for all the wintry months of this earthly time; and if each heart could say to the other,--"Hail to me, that I found thee in the holiest season of life, before I had erred; and that I can die and not have loved anyone like thee!"--O Liana! O Zesara! how fortunate must your beautiful souls be!

The youth lingered a few minutes longer in the magic world that was working around him, whose tones and fountains murmured like the waters and machines in the solitary mine; but at last there was something violent in the solitary monotone and glimmer of the valley, wherein he had been left so alone. He hurried on by the nearest way, sprinkled occasionally with veins of water, through the curtain of foliage, and stepped out once more into the free morning earth of Lilar. How strange! how distant! how changed was all! Into his wide open inner world the outer world poured in with full streams. He himself was changed; he could not go into the night of the oak-grove, to the rocky emblem of his father. When he was over the bridge that stands in the twigs, he saw the gentle company slowly walking over the broad silver-white garden-path, and he blessed Liana, who could now press to her agitated heart the heart of a mother. The little one often whirled round dancing, and perhaps saw him, but no one turned back. The harp, carried along after them, was swept by the eastern breeze, and it snatched tones from the awakened strings as from an Æolian harp, and bore them onward with it; and the youth listened with melancholy to the receding murmur, as of swans that hasten away over the lands, while behind him the empty vale continued to speak lonesomely in the fluting pastoral-songs of love, and hovering tones, gliding along after him, came faintly and dimly to his ear. But he went back up the mountain of the altar; and as he looked over the bright region, and saw still the white forms moving in the distance, he let his whole, beautiful soul dissolve itself in weeping. And here close we the richest day of his youthful life!

But, ye good beings, who have a heart, and find none, or who have the loved objects only _in_, and not _on_, your bosoms, am I not, like the Greeks, drawing all these pictures of bliss, as it were, on the marble sarcophagi of your changed, slumbering past? Am I not the _Archimime_, who, following after, mimics before you the mouldering forms which your soul has buried? And thou, younger or poorer man, to whom time, instead of a past, has only given a future,--wilt thou not one day say to me, I should have concealed from thee many blessed forms, like holy bodies, for fear thou wouldst worship them? and wilt thou not add, that, had it not been for these Phœnix-portraits, thou mightst have cherished lighter wishes, and had many fulfilled? And how much pain have I then caused you all! But myself, too; for how could it fare better with me than with the rest of you?

Your conclusion would, accordingly, be this: since you can never really live pleasant days so pleasantly as they shine afterward in _memory_, or beforehand in _hope_, you would, therefore, rather have the present day without either; and since only at the two poles of the elliptic arch of time one can catch the low music of the spheres, and in the centre of the present nothing, you would, therefore, rather stay and listen in the middle; but as to the past and the future,--neither of which can any man live to see, because they are only two different poesy-gardens of our heart, an Iliad and Odyssey, a Milton's Paradise Lost and Regained,--you will not listen to them at all, or have anything to do with them, in order that you may nestle down, deaf and blind, in an animal present.

By Heaven! sooner give me the finest, strongest poison of ideals, so that I may at least not snore away my moment, but dream it away, and then die on it! But the very dying would be my own fault; for whoso would fain translate _poetic_ dreams into waking reality[91] is more foolish than the North American, who realizes his _nightly_ ones: he proposes, like a Cleopatra, to pervert the splendor of the pearls of dew into a refreshing drink, and the rainbow of fancy to a permanent arch, bridging over the rain-waters. Yes, O God, Thou wilt and canst give us one day a reality, which shall embody and redouble and satisfy our present ideals,--as thou hast, indeed, already proved to us, in our love here below, which intoxicates us with moments in which the inner becomes the outer, and the Ideal, Reality; but _then_--no, for the Then of the life hereafter, this little _Now_, has no voice; but if, I say, here below fiction could become fact, and our pastoral poetry pastoral life, and every dream a day,--ah, even then would desire still remain enhanced only, not fulfilled: the higher reality would only beget a higher poetry, and higher remembrances and hopes;--in _Arcadia_ we should pine after _Utopia_; and on every sun we should see an unfathomable starry heaven retiring before us, and we should--sigh as we do here!

FOOTNOTES:

[82] They have a whole room for winter quarters, of which in summer the windows are merely thrown open.

[83] Such was the general title of the secluded Emeritus, the court preacher, Spener, who resided there, and who was related to the noble old pious Spener, not only on the paternal side, but also on the spiritual.

[84] They had these names as twins.

[85] The grammar seems to require "a still almost maidenly looking woman of seventeen years," but the translator did not dare to think Jean Paul could have meant that, consistently with the ages of the three children, though, as an Oriental, Chariton may have married _very_ young.

[86] The Tartarus with Julienne's father's heart.

[87] Such is the name of that mount which Albano found in the well-known spring night.

[88] Linda de Romeiro.

[89] The reason is, that after her recovery she was still short-sighted, and to a short-sighted person the dew is so much the more brilliant.

[90] This proposition, that pure music, without text, cannot represent anything immoral, deserves to be more investigated and developed by me.

[91] It cannot be objected to me, that in fact the scenes of my book have been actually experienced, and that no one would wish to experience any better; for in the representation of fancy reality assumes new charms, charms with which every other faded present magically glimmers through the memory. I appeal here to the sensations of the very characters who figure in _Titan_, whether they would not in my book--in case they should ever light upon it--find in the pictured scenes, which, however, are their own, a higher enchantment, which has gone from the real, and which, to be sure, might produce such an effect--but altogether illusorily--that my characters could wish to live _their own life_.

NINTH JUBILEE.

PLEASURE OF COURT-MOURNING.--THE BURIAL.--ROQUAIROL.--LETTER TO HIM.--THE SEVEN LAST WORDS IN THE WATER.--THE SWEARING OF ALLEGIANCE.--MASQUERADE.--PUPPET MASQUERADE.--THE HEAD IN THE AIR, TARTARUS, THE SPIRIT-VOICE, THE FRIEND, THE CATACOMB, AND THE TWO UNITED MEN.

46. CYCLE.

Ripening love is the stillest: the shady flowers in this spring, as in the other, shun sunlight. Albano spun himself deep into his Sunday-dreams, and drew, as well as he could, the green poppy-leaf of reality into his web,--namely, the Monday, which was to show him, at the state-burial of the Prince, the brother of his maiden-friend.

This day of festive sadness, at which the third but greatest princely coffin was to be conveyed to its repose, at last broke, and had been made momentous already by the preparatory festival, at which the two first coffins, together with the old man, had been interred, somewhat as virtues are buried in the very beginning of a century, and not till its end their empty names and wrappages and half-bindings. At the rehearsal- and prefiguring-burial of the illustrious deceased, the old pious Father Spener too, his last friend, had gone down with him into the vault, in order to have opened the wooden and tin casing of the run-down wheel-work, and to cover over upon the still breast of the dear sleeper his youthful portrait and his own with the colored side down, without speaking or weeping; and the court made much of this morning- and evening-offering of friendship.

Everything swells up monstrously for man, of which they are obliged to talk a long while,--all Pestitz societies were auxiliary funeral societies, and full of burial-marshals,--every scaffolding of the neighboring future was a mausoleum, and every word a funeral sermon or an epitaph upon the pale man. Sphex, as his physician in ordinary, rejoiced in his part of the sorrow and the procession,--the Lector had already tried on the court mourning, in the place of his cast-off winter-garb, and found it to fit,--the court-marshal had not a minute's rest, and the last day, which opens all graves and closes none, had come to him now before its time,--the Minister, Von Froulay, whom the cold Luigi willingly left to do everything, was, as a lover of old princely pomp, and as convoking director of the present occasion, as much in heaven himself as was the illustrious deceased,--the women had risen from their beds this morning as to a new life, because to these busy _drapery-paintresses_ a long chain of coats and of their wearers probably weighs as much as a span of blood-related horses does to their husbands.

Albano waited impatiently at the window for Liana's brother, and loved the invisible one more and more ardently; like two connected wings, Friendship and Love stirred and lifted each other within him. The mourning-spool, namely, the empty coffin, had been fixed in Tartarus, and was gradually wound off, and now the dark mourning-ribbon would soon be ready to be stretched to the upper city. Already, for an hour and a half before the arrival of the procession, the saltpetre of the female crowd had been crystallized on the walls and the windows. Sara, the Doctor's wife, came up with the children and the deaf Cadaver into Schoppe's chamber, the second door of which stood open into Albano's, and, with an ogling, amorous look, spoke in to the Count: "Up here one can overlook the whole much better, and his excellency will pardon it." "You just stay together there, and don't you trouble M. the Count," said she, turning back to the children, and was on the point of entering the Count's chamber, at whose threshold Schoppe, just coming from Albano, caught and stopped her.

Now Sara was one of those common women who are more carried away themselves by their own charms than successful in carrying others away therewith. She would merely set her face in the chair, and let it kindle and singe and burn, while she on her part (relying on her _lazy Jack_[92] of a visage) quietly and coolly worked away at other things, either simple trash or vile scandal; and then when she had been a _clothes'-rod_ of women, as Attila was a Heaven's rod of nations, she looked round and surveyed the damage which the fire of her face had done in the male tinder-boxes. Particularly on the rich and beautiful Count had she an eye,--under Cupid's bandage. Her head was full of good physiognomical fragments; and Lavater's objection, that most physiognomists unfortunately study nothing in the whole man but the face, could not hit in any point her pure physiognomical sense.

Schoppe, readily divining that with this female soul-dealer the walk or _gang_ was a press-gang,[93] the white linen, hunting-gear, the shawl, a bird-net,[94] and the neck, a swan's-neck for any fox that happened to be near, caught her by the hand at the threshold of the two chambers, and asked her, "Do you, also, take as much interest as I in the universal joy of the land, and the long-desired court-mourning? Your eyes indicate something like it, Mrs. Provincial Physician." "What interest do you mean?" said the medical lady, struck quite stupid. "In the pleasure of the courtiers, who, in general, are distinguished from monkeys, as the orang-outangs are, by the fact that they seldom make leaps of joy; at least, like young performers on the piano-forte, they drum away, without the smallest emotion, their most mournful and their merriest pieces one after the other. O, if only nothing bitter should spoil the mourning of the court-household! Do you wish the dear ones to have arrayed themselves in vain in the black robes of joy, wherein, like the grandsons of those who were left behind in the battle of Leuctra, they go to meet the jubilee of a new prince? What!" Unluckily she replied, in a sarcastic tone: "Black is, in these parts, the mourning-color, Mr. Schoppe." "Black, Mrs. Doctor!" (he bounced back with astonishment.) "Black?--black is a travelling-color, and bridal-color, and gala-color, and, in Rome, a princely-children's color; and, in Spain, it is a law of the empire that the courtiers, like the Jews in Morocco,[95] shall appear in black.

"Pestalozzi, madam--but there's Malt, does he understand me?" Schoppe turned round to the man, who had his drum on, and meant secretly to tap it during the procession, so as to catch something of the muffled funeral drums, and exhorted him to give a beat or two, in order that he might profit by the discourse. "Malt," said he, louder, "Pestalozzi remarks very justly, that the great ones of our time, in face, dress, posture, image-worship, superstition, and love for charlatans, approach daily nearer and nearer the Asiatics; it speaks in favor of Pestalozzi, that they borrow of the Chinese, who dress themselves in black for joy, and in white for mourning, not merely temples and gardens and caricatures, but also this very black of joy."

Among the children,--of whom the uneducated alone were not ill-bred,--Boerhave, Galen, and Van Swieten made themselves most prominent by the inlaid work and designs of the present company, which they were engraving on their bread and butter; and Galen showed his satirical projection of Mama, saying, "Only see what a long nose I have made Mama have!"

The Librarian, who was turning something similar, arrested her, as she offered to go in, assuring her he would not let her pass till she surrendered to his views: the funeral column of march could hardly have got an acre's distance out of Tartarus, and would give him time enough. He continued:--

"Genuine mourning, on the contrary, my dear, always, like anger, makes one party-colored, or, like terror, white; e. g. the creatures of a dead Pope mourn violet, so does the French king, his lady chestnut brown, the Venetian Senate, for their Doge, red. But to a regent you cannot, more than I, allow any mourning whatever; to the high-priest and a Jewish king[96] it was wholly forbidden; why should we allow the household more than the master? And must not a sovereign, my best one! who should permit the expensiveness of public mourning, manifestly open afresh the closed wounds of private sorrow? And could he, when, like Cicero,[97] he had, by his exile, thrown twenty thousand people into mourning weeds, answer it to his conscience, that his last act was a _Droit d'Aubaine_, a robbery, and that the dying-bed, whereupon one formerly bequeathed clothing to servants and the poor, should now strip them thereof? No, madam, that does not look like regents at least, who often, even by their dying, as Marcion[98] asserted of Christ's journey to hell, bring up a Cain, Absalom, and several others of the Old-Testament culprits out of hell into the heaven of the new administration.

"You do not yet give in, and the Cadaver looks at me like a cow; but consider this: peruke- and stuff-weavers have frequently besought crowned heads to wear their manufactures, in order that they might get a sale for them;--an hereditary and crown-prince, on the first happy consecration- and regency-day, when he deposes, that is, deposits his predecessor in the ground, puts on coal-black, because the black wool is not good for much, and does not sell well, and such an example at once strikes the whole metropolis,--even cattle, drums, pulpits, black. Only one word more, love: I assure you there is nothing coming yet but the company of choristers. For this very reason has the princely corpse, which might easily spoil the whole pleasure of the funeral, been previously disposed of, and only a vacant box is carried along, in order that the procession may have no other _pensées_ than _Anglaises_[99].... O dearest, one last word: What can you see, then, in the corps of equerries and pages? Well, go now! I too rejoice to see at once so many people, and the prince so happy in the midst of his children."

But the longer he saw the procession growing, that loose juggler's thread, by which they were letting down the empty but figured chest of Cypselus[100] into the family vault, so much the more indignant became his mockery. He applied his hypothesis to every sable member of the dark chain. He praised them for opening the _bal masqué_ of the new administration with these slow minuet steps, and preparing themselves for the waltz of the wedding and the grandfather's-dance of the allegiance-day. He said, as one loved on festive days to make everything easy for himself and his beast, as, accordingly, the Jews, on the Sabbath, would not allow themselves or their cattle to carry anything, not even the hens to carry the rags sticking to them; so he saw with pleasure, that in the ceremony-carriages, and in the parade-box, and on the mourning-horses, nothing was suffered to lie or sit; yes, that even the trains of the mourning-mantles were borne by pages, and the four points of the bier-cloth by four stout gentlemen. The only fault he found was, that the soldiery in their joy had seized their guns upside down, and that precisely the persons of the highest rank, Luigi, Froulay, Bouverot, as they came from a hasty funeral potation at once into the open air, were obliged, by reason of their staggering, to be led along and held up on both sides.

47. CYCLE.

In Albano another spirit spoke than in Schoppe, but the two soon met. To the Count the night-like forms of crape, the still funeral banners, the dead-march, the creeping sick-man's-walk, and the tolling of the bells, opened wide all earth's charnel-houses, especially as before his blooming eyes these death plays came for the first time: but one thing more loudly than all--one will hardly guess what--proclaimed before him the partings of life,--namely, the beat of the drum stifled by the funeral cloth; a muffled drum was to him a broken reverberation of all earthly catacombs. He heard the dumb, strangled complainings of our hearts,--he saw higher beings looking down from above on the lamentable three hours' comedy of our life, wherein the ruddy child of the first act fades in the fifth to the old man in jubilee, and then, grown up and bowed down, vanishes behind the falling curtain.

As, in spring, we think more of death, autumn, and winter than in summer, so also does the most fiery and energetic youth paint out to himself in _his_ season of life's year, the dark leafless one oftener and more vividly than the man in that stage which is nearest to it; for in both springs the wings of the ideal unfold widely and find room only in a future. But before the youth, Death comes in blooming, Greek form; before the tired, older man, in Gothic.

Schoppe generally began with _comic_ humor, and ended with _tragic_; so also now did the empty mourning-chest, the crape of the horses, their emblazoned caparisons, the Prince's contempt of the heavy German Ceremonial; in short, the whole heartless mummery, lead him up to an eminence, to which the contemplation of a multitude of men at once always impelled him, and where, with an exaltation, indignation, and laughing bitterness hard to describe, he looked down upon the eternal, tyrannical, belittling, objectless and joyless, bewildered and oppressed frenzy of mankind, and his own too.

Suddenly a gay, shining knight broke the dark chain: it was Roquairol, on the parading gala-horse, who agitated our two men, and none besides. A pale, broken-down face, glazed over with long inward fire, stripped of all youthful roses, lightening out of the diamond-pits of the eyes under the dark, overhanging eyebrows, rode along in a tragic merriment, in which the lines of the veins were redoubled under the early wrinkles of passion. What a being, full of worn-out life! Only courtiers or his father could have set down this tragic exultation to an adulatory rejoicing over the new regency; but Albano took it all into his heart, and grew pale with inward emotion, and said, "Yes, it is he! O, good Schoppe, he will certainly become our friend, this distracted youth. How painfully does the noble one laugh at this gravity, and at crowns, and graves and all! Ah, he too has, indeed, once died." "There the rider is right," said Schoppe, with quivering eyes, and suddenly tapped Albano's hand and then his own head; "my very skull here appears to me like a close _bonsoir_, like a light-extinguisher, which death claps upon me,--we are neat silvered figures, kept up in an electrical dance, and we leap up with the spark; fortunately I am still alive and kicking,--and there is our good Lector creeping along, too, and trailing his long crape,"--in which respect Augusti's citizenly-serious mood contrasted very strongly with the humanly-serious one of the Librarian.