Part 4

The sparkling chain of his order, made of steel and precious stones, betrayed him. He had been seized with the catalepsy, his old complaint. "O father!" said Albano, with terror, and embraced the immovable form; but it was as if he clasped cold death to his heart. He tasted the bitterness of a hell,--he kissed the rigid lip, and cried more loudly,--at last, letting fall his arm, he started back from him, and the exposed wound bled again without his feeling it; and gnashing his teeth with wild, youthful love and with anguish, and with great ice-drops in his eyes, he gazed upon the mute form, and tore its hand from its heart. At this Gaspard, awaking, opened his eyes, and said, "Welcome, my dear son!" Then the child, with overmastering bliss and love, sank on his father's heart, and wept, and was silent. "Thou bleedest, Albano," said Gaspard, softly holding him off; "bandage thyself!" "Let me bleed; I will die with thee, if thou diest! O, how long have I pined for thee, my good father!" said Albano, yet more deeply agitated by his father's sick heart, which he now felt beating more heavily against his own. "Very good; but bandage thyself!" said he; and as the son did it, and while hurrying on the bandage, gazed with insatiable love into the eye of his father,--that eye which cast only cold glances like his jewelled ring; just then, on the chestnut-tops which had been to-day the throne of the morning sun, the soft moon opened soothingly her holy eye, and it was to the inflamed Albano, in this home of his childhood and his mother, as if the spirit of his mother were looking from heaven, and calling down, "I shall weep if you do not love each other." His swelling heart overflowed, and he said softly to his father, who was growing paler in the moonlight, "Dost thou not love me, then?" "Dear Alban," replied the father, "one cannot answer thee enough: thou art very good,--it is very good." But with the pride of a love which boldly measured itself with his father's, he seized firmly the hand with the mask, and looked on the Knight with fiery eyes. "My son," replied the weary one, "I have yet much to say to thee to-day, and little time, because I travel to-morrow,--and I know not how long the beating of my heart will let me speak." Ah, then, that previous sign of a touched soul had been only the sign of a disordered pulse. Thou poor son, how must thy swollen sea stiffen before this sharp air,--ah, how must thy warm heart cleave to the ice-cold metal, and tear itself away not without a skin-peeling wound!

But, good youth! who of us could blame thee that wounds should attach thee as it were by a tie of _blood_ to thy true or false demigod,--although a demigod is oftener joined to a demi-beast than a demi-man,--and that thou shouldst so painfully love! Ah, what ardent soul has not once uttered the prayer of love in vain, and then, lamed by the chilling poison, like other poisoned victims, not been able any longer to move its heavy tongue and heavy heart! But love on, thou warm soul! like spring-flowers, like night-butterflies, tender love at last breaks through the hard-frozen soil, and every heart, which desires nothing else than a heart, finds at last its bosom!

5. CYCLE.

The Knight took him up to a gallery supported by a row of stone pillars, which lemon-trees strewed all over with perfumes and with little, lively shadows, silver-edged by the moon. He drew two medallions from his pocket-book,--one represented a remarkably youthful-looking female face, with the circumscription, "Nous ne nous verrons jamais, mon fils." "Here is thy mother," said Gaspard, giving it to him, "and here thy sister"; and handed him the second, whose lines ran into an indistinct, antiquated shape, with the circumscription, "Nous nous verrons un jour, mon frère." He now began his discourse, which he delivered in such a low tone and in so many loose sheets (one comma often coming at one end of the gallery and the next at the other), and with such an alternation of quick and slow paces, that the ear of any eavesdropping inquisitor keeping step with them, under the gallery, had there been one down there, could not have caught three drops of connected sound. "Thy attention, dear Alban," he continued, "not thy fancy, must now be put on the stretch. Thou art, unhappily, to-day too romantic for one who is to hear so many romantic things. The Countess of Cesara ever loved the mysterious; thou wilt perceive it in the commission which she gave me a few days before her death, and which I was obliged to promise I would execute this very Good-Friday."

He said further, before beginning, that, as his catalepsy and palpitation of the heart increased critically, he must hasten to Spain to arrange his affairs, and, still more, those of his ward, the Countess of Romeiro. Alban made one brotherly inquiry about his dear sister, so long separated from him; his father gave him to hope he should soon see her, as she intended to visit Switzerland with the Countess.

As I do not perceive what people will gain by it, if I insert those (to me) annoying geese-feet[13] with the everlasting "said he," I will relate the commission in person. There would, at a certain time (the Knight said), come to him three unknown persons,--one in the morning, one at noon, and one in the evening,--and each one would present him a card, in a sealed envelope, containing merely the name of the city and the house wherein the picture-cabinet, which Albano must visit the very same night, was to be found. In this cabinet he must touch and press all the nails of the pictures till he comes to one behind which the pressure makes a repeating-clock, built into the wall, strike twelve. Here he finds behind the picture a secret arras-door, behind which sits a female form with an open souvenir and three rings on her left hand, and a crayon in her right. When he presses the ring of the middle finger, the form will rise amidst the rolling of the internal wheel-work, step out into the chamber, and the wheel-work, which is running down, will stop with her at a wall whereon she indicates, by the crayon, a hidden compartment, in which lie a pocket-perspective glass and the waxen impression of a coffin-key. The eye-glass of the perspective arranges by an optical anamorphosis the snarl of withering lines on the medallion of his sister, which he had to-day received, into a sweet, young form, and the object-glass gives back to the immature image of his mother the lineaments of mature life. Then he is to press the ring-finger, and immediately the dumb, cold figure will begin to write with the crayon in the souvenir, and designate to him, in a few words, the place of the coffin, of whose key he has the waxen impression. In the coffin lies a black marble slab, in the form of a black Bible; and when he has broken it he will find a kernel therein, from which is to grow the Christmas-tree of his whole life. If the slab is not in the coffin, then he is to give the last ring of the little finger a pressure,--but what this wooden Guerike's weather-prophet of his destiny would do, the Knight himself could not predict.

I am fully of opinion that from this bizarre testament the repeating-work and half of the wheel-work might easily be broken out, (just as clocks are now made in London with only two wheels,) without doing the dial-work or the movement of the hands the least injury.

Upon Albano all this testamentary whirl and whiz had, contrary to my expectation, almost no effect; excepting to produce a more tender love for the good mother who, when she already beheld, in the stream of life below, the swift image of the pouncing hawk of death, thought only of her son. Upon the fixed, iron countenance of his father he so gazed during this narrative with tender gratitude for the pains he had taken to remember and relate, as almost to lose the thread of the discourse, and in the moonshine and to the eye of his fancy the Knight grew to a Colossus of Rhodes, hiding half the horizon of the present, a being for whom this testamentary memory-work seemed almost too trivial.

Thus far Don Gaspard had spoken merely as a genuine man of the world, who always excludes from his speech (into which no special, intimate relations enter) all mention or flattery of a person, of others as well as of himself, and regards even historical persons merely as conditions of things, so that two such impersonalities with their grim coldness seemed to be only two speaking logics or sciences, not living beings with beating hearts. O, how softly did it flow, like a tender melody, into Albano's lovesick heart, which the pure and mild moon, and the glimmering island-garden of his early days, and the voice of his mother sounding on and echoing in his soul, all conspired to melt, when at length the _father_ said: "So much have I to tell of the Countess. Of myself I have nothing to say to thee but to express my constant satisfaction hitherto with thy life." "O, give me, dearest father, instruction and counsel for my future government," said the enraptured man, and as Gaspard's right hand twitched convulsively toward his more hurriedly beating heart, he followed it with his left to the sick spot and pressed intensely the hysterical heart as if he could arrest by grasping at the spokes this down-hill-rolling wheel of life. The Knight replied: "I have nothing more to say to thee. The _Linden City_ (Pestitz) is now open to thee; thy mother had shut it against thee. The hereditary Prince, who will soon be Prince, and the minister, Von Froulay, who is my friend, will be thine. I believe it will be of service to thee to cultivate their acquaintance."

The sharp-sighted Gaspard saw at this moment suddenly flit across the pure, open countenance of the youth strange emotions and hot blushes, which nothing immediate could explain, and which instantly passed away, as if annihilated, when he thus continued: "To a man of rank, sciences and polite learning, which to others are final ends, are only means and recreations; and great as thy inclination for them may be, thou wilt, however, surely, in the end give actions the preference over enjoyments; thou wilt not feel thyself born to instruct or amuse men merely, but to manage and to rule them. It were well if thou couldst gain the minister, and thereby the knowledge of government and political economy which he can give thee; for in the sketch of one country as well as of one court thou hast the grand outlines of every greater one to which thou mayest be called, and for which thou wilt have to educate thyself. It is my wish that thou shouldst be even a favorite of the Prince and the Court, less because thou hast need of connections than because thou needest experience. Only through men are men to be subdued and surpassed, not by books and superior qualities. One must not display his worth in order to gain men, but gain them first, and then, and not until then, show his worth. There is no calamity like ignorance; and not so much by virtue as by understanding is man made formidable and fortunate. Thou hast at most to shun men who are too like thee, particularly the noble." The corrosive sublimate of his irony consisted here, not in his pronouncing "noble" with an accented, ironical tone, but in his pronouncing it, contrary to what might have been expected, coldly and without any tone at all. Albano's hand, still on his, had for some time slipped down from his father's heart along the sharp-edged steel chain of his order to the golden, metal-cold lamb that hung from it. The youth, like all young men and hermits, had too severe notions of courtiers and men of the world: he held them to be decided basilisks and dragons,--although I can still excuse that, if he means by basilisks only what the naturalists mean,--wingless lizards,--and by dragons, nothing but winged ones, and thus regards them only as amphibia, hardly less cold and odious than Linnæus defines such to be. Besides, he cherished (so easily does Plutarch become the seducer of youth whose biographer he might have been, like me) more contempt than reverence for the _artolatry_ (loaf and fish service) of our age, always transubstantiating (inversely) its _god_ into _bread_,--for the best bread-studies or bread-carts,--for the making of a _carrière_,--for every one, in short, who was not a dare-devil, and who, instead of catapultas and war machines, operated with some sort of invisible magnetic wands, suction-works, and cupping-glasses, and took anything in that way. Every young man has a fine season in his life when he will accept no office, and every young woman has the same in hers, when she will accept no husband; by and by they both change, and often take one another into the bargain.

As the Knight advanced the above propositions, certainly not offensive to any man of the world, there swelled in his son a holy, generous pride,--it seemed to him as if his heart and even his body, like that of a praying saint, were lifted by a soaring genius far above the race-courses of a greedy, creeping age,--the great men of a greater time passed before him under their triumphal arches, and beckoned him to come nearer to them: in the east lay Rome and the moon, and before him the Circus of the Alps,--a mighty Past by the side of a mighty Present. With the proud and generous consciousness that there is something more godlike in us than prudence and understanding, he laid hold of his father, and said: "This whole day, dear father, has been one increasing agitation in my heart. I cannot speak nor think rightly for emotion. Father, I will visit them all; I will soar away above men; but I despise the dirty road to the object. I will in the sea of the world rise like a living man by _swimming_, and not like a drowned man by _corruption_. Yes, father, let Fate cast a gravestone upon this breast, and crush it, when it has lost virtue and the divinity and its own heart."

What made Albano speak so warmly was that he could not avoid an irrepressible veneration for the great soul of the Knight; he continually represented to himself the pangs and the lingering death of so strong a life, the sharp smoke of so great a coldly quenched fire, and inferred from the emotions of his own living soul what must be those of his father, who in his opinion had only gradually thus crumbled upon a broad bed of black, cold worldlings, as the diamond cannot be volatilized except on a bed of dead, burnt-out, blacksmith's coals. Don Gaspard, who seldom, and then only mildly, found fault with men,--not from love, but from indifference,--patiently replied to the youth: "Thy warmth is to be praised. All will come right in good time. Now let us eat."

6. CYCLE.

The banquet-hall of our Islanders was in the rich palace of the absent Borromæan family. They conceded to the lovely island the prize-apple of Paris and the laurel-wreath. Augusti and Gaspard wrote their eulogies upon it in a clear, easy style, only Gaspard used the more antitheses. Albano's breast was filled with a new world, his eye with radiance, his cheeks with joyous blood. The Architect extolled as well the taste as the purse of the hereditary Prince, who by means of both had brought with him to his country, not artistic masters indeed, but still masterpieces, and at whose instance this very Dian was going to Italy to take casts for him there of the antiques. Schoppe replied: "I hope the German is as well supplied with painters' academies and painters' colics as any other people; our pictures on goods, our illuminated Theses in Augsburg, our margins of newspapers, and our vignettes in every dramatic work, (whereby we had an earlier _Shakespeare Gallery_ than London,) our gallows-birds hung in effigy,--are well known to every one, and show at first sight how far we carry the thing. But I will even allow that Greeks and Italians paint as well as we; still we tower far above them in this, that we, like nature and noble suitors, never seek isolated beauty, without connected advantage. A beauty which we cannot also roast, sell at auction, wear, or marry, passes with us only for just what it is worth; beauty is with us (I hope) never anything else but selvage and trimming to utility, just as, also, at the Diet of the Empire, it is not the side-tables of confectionery, but the session-tables, that are the proper work-tables of the body politic. Genuine Beauty and Art are therefore with us set, painted, stamped only on things which at the same time bring in something; e. g. fine Madonnas only in the journals of fashion,--etched leaves only on packages of tobacco-leaves,--cameos on pipe-bowls,--gems on seals, and wood-cuts on tallies; flower-pieces are sought, but on bandboxes,--faithful Wouwermanns, but in horses' stalls before the stallions,[14]--bas-reliefs of princes' heads, either on dollars or on Bavarian beer-pitcher covers, but both must be of unalloyed pewter,--rose-pieces and lily-pieces, but on tattooed women. On a similar principle, in Basedow's system of education, beautiful painting and the Latin vocabulary were always linked together, because the Institute more easily retains the latter by the help of the former. So, too, Van der Kabel never painted a hare to order, without requiring for himself one freshly-shot model after another to eat and copy. So again, the artist Calear painted beautiful hose, but painted them immediately on to his own legs."

The Knight heard such talk with pleasure, though he neither laughed at nor imitated it; to him all colors in the prism of genius were agreeable. Only to the Architect it was not enough in Greek taste, and not courtly enough for the Lector. The latter turned round to the departing Dian, with a somewhat flattering air, while Schoppe was recovering breath for renewed detraction of us Germans, and said: "Formerly Rome took away from other lands only works of art, but now artists themselves."

Schoppe continued: "So also our statues are no idle, dawdling citizens, but they all drive a trade;--such as are caryates hold up houses; such as are angels bear baptismal vessels; and heathen water-gods labor at the public fountains, and pour out water into the pitchers of the maidens."

The Count spoke warmly for us, the Lector brilliantly: the Knight remarked, that the German taste and the German talent for poetic beauties made good and explained their want of both for other beauties (on the ground of climate, form of government, poverty, &c.). The Knight resembled a celestial telescope, through which the planets appear larger and the suns smaller; like that instrument, he took away from suns their borrowed lustre, without restoring to them their true and greater glory; he cut in twain, indeed, the noose of a Judas, but he extinguished the halo on a Christ's head, and in general he sought to make out ingeniously a parity and equality between darkness and light.

Schoppe was never silenced (I am sorry that in his toleration-mandate for Europe the German Circles should have been left out). He began again: "The little which I just brought forward in praise of the serviceable Germans has, it seems, provoked contradiction. But the slight laurel-crown which I place upon the holy body of the Empire shall never blind my eyes to the bald spots. I have often thought it commendable in Socrates and Christ, that they did not teach in Hamburg, in Vienna, or in any Brandenburg city, and go through the streets with their disciples; they would have been questioned, in the name of the magistrates, whether they could not work; and had both been with families in Wetzlar, they would have extorted from the latter the _negligence-money_.[15] Touching the poetic art, Sir Knight, I have known many a citizen of the Empire who could make but little out of an ode unless it were upon himself: he fancied he could tell when poetic liberties infringed upon the liberty of the Empire: such a man, who certainly always marched to his work regularly, composedly, and considerately in Saxon term-times, was exceedingly pained and perplexed by poetic flights. And is it, then, so unaccountable and bad? The worthy inhabitant of an imperial city binds on in front a napkin when he wishes to weep, in order that he may not stain his satin vest, and the tears which fall from his eyes upon a letter of condolence he marks as he would any darker punctuation: what wonder, if, like the ranger, he should know no fairer flower than that on the posteriors of the stag, and if the poetical violets, like the botanical,[16] should operate upon him as a mild emetic. Such were, according to my notion, one way at least of warding off the reproach which is flung at us Germans."

7. CYCLE.

What a singular night followed upon this singular day! Sleepy with travelling, all went to rest; only Albano, in whom the hot eventful day still burned on, said to the Knight that he could not now, with his breast full of fire, find coolness and rest anywhere but under the cold stars and the blossoms of the Italian spring. He leaned against a statue on the upper terrace, near a blooming balustrade of citrons, that he might sweetly shut his eyes beneath the starry heaven, and still more sweetly open them in the morning. Even in his earlier youth had he, as well as myself, wished himself upon the Italian roofs of warm lands, in order, not as a night-walker, but as a regular sleeper, to wake up thereon.

How magnificently there does the eye open upon the radiant hanging gardens full of eternal blossoms above thee, whereas on thy German sweltry feather-pillow thou hast nothing before thee, when thou lookest up, but the bed-tail!

While Zesara was thus traversing waves, mountains, and stars with a stiller and stiller soul, and when at last garden and sky and lake ran together into one dark Colossus, and he sadly thought of his pale mother, and of his sister, and of the announced wonders of his future life, a figure dressed all in black, with the image of a death's-head on its breast, came slowly and painfully, and with trembling breath, up the terraces behind him. "Remember death!" it said. "Thou art Albano de Zesara?" "Yes," said Zesara, "who art thou?" "I am," it said, "a father of death.[17] It is not from fear, but from habit, I tremble so."

The limbs of the man continued to quake all over, in a frightful and almost audible manner. Zesara had often wished an adventure for his idle bravery; now he had it before him. Meantime, however, he kept a sharp watch with his eye, and when the monk said, "Look up to the evening star and tell me when it goes down, for my sight is weak," he threw only a hasty glance upwards. "Three stars," said he, "are still between it and the Alps." "When it sets," the father continued, "then thy sister in Spain gives up the ghost, and thereupon she will speak with thee here from Heaven." Zesara was hardly touched by a finger of the cold hand of horror, simply because he was not in a room, but in the midst of young Nature, who stations her mountains and stars as watchmen around the trembling spirit; or it may have been because the vast and substantial bodily world, so near before us, crowds out and hides with its building-work the world of spirits. He asked, with indignation: "Who art thou? What knowest thou? What wilt thou?" and grasped at the folded hands of the monk, and held both imprisoned in one of his. "Thou dost not know me, my son," said the father of death, calmly. "I am a Zahouri,[18] and come from Spain from thy sister; I see the dead down in the earth, and know beforehand when they will appear and discourse. But their apparition above ground I do not see, and their discourse I cannot hear."