Part 22
He became through her more nearly acquainted with himself than even with her. He called her the Uranide, because she seemed to him, like the heavens, at once so near and so far off; and she had no objection to this full laurel-wreath. There is a heavenly unfathomableness, which makes man godlike, and love toward him infinite; so did the ancients make Friendship the daughter of Night and of Erebus. When Albano thus looked out over the broad, rich spirit of Linda,--at once living for her love, and harboring every other's love, and yet, as it were, intoxicated with the thirst for knowledge; at once a child, a man, and a virgin; often hard and bold with the tongue for and against religion and womanhood, and yet full of the tenderest, most childlike love toward both; melting in her glow before the beloved, and quickly stiffening at a cold assault; without any vanity, because she always stood before the throne of a divine idea, and man is never vain before God, but entirely confiding in herself and submissive to no one, without, however, any comparison of herself or others; full of bold, manly uprightness, and full of respect for talent and for shrewd understanding of the world; so perfectly free from selfishness, and with such a childlike delight in others' gladness, without special anxiety or respect for persons; so inconstant and inflexible, the one in wishing, the other in willing; but with her eye and life ever directed toward the sun and moon of the spiritual kingdom, character and love, toward her own and toward a beloved heart;--when Albano saw all this playing and flitting before him, then did he live, as it were, on the single and yet immense, the movable and yet almighty sea, whose limit is only the clear sky, which has itself none.
In the heaven of the three loving ones appeared at length the dawn of the day of departure. It was determined by the two friends that Albano might accompany them only as far as Naples, where their people waited for them, then find them once in Rome accidentally, then on Isola Bella for the last time accidentally,--a very unfriendly subjection to worldly appearance, upon which Linda, however, insisted as strongly as Julienne, and to which Albano himself, who by his birth was more hardened to the constraints of rank than a plebeian youth of like soul, easily yielded up the bitter yes, under the heavy veil which hung over all his connections. Julienne decided upon all lesser ways and means; she had been during the whole tour the business-agent of the Countess, who, as she said, had not head enough to buy herself a hat for it, so impetuous, absent in money matters, and dreamy was she. The sister was so lively, and entirely restored, but said, all the five and thirty hot springs of the island could not have done half so much for her recovery as the same number of tears of joy which she had fortunately shed.
Singular did all around them appear on the morning of departure. A bright, warm cloud dropped silvery drops; the sun looked in between two mountains; the enraptured islanders sang a new popular song, amidst the rain-harvest or drop-gleaning; while their friends were hastily borne away by the waves out of their circle of joy. Agata stood, in order to cool herself, on the shore, with a snake in her hand, and Albano felt a pain at the sight which he knew not how to explain to himself.[104] At this moment Epomeo parted the cloud-heaven, and shining fragments of cloud sailed slowly along before them toward the Apennine to the north, the heavenly dwelling-place of the mist, and swiftly and lightly glided the shadows of the sky over the swarming peaks of the waves.
"Ever mayest thou," said Albano, looking toward the island, which was swimming backward to the west, "stand fast with thy mountain; never may a calamity tear the fairest leaf out of the book of the blest!" "How will it be with us all," said Linda, "when we meet again, and seek again the lovely soil?" Just then they espied a high-arched rainbow; that stood half on the island and half on the waves, which seemed to fling it out as a gay, arching water-column upon the shore. "We are going," said Julienne, delighted, "to pass under the arch of peace." At this word the rain and the wreath of colors disappeared, and the sun alone shone behind them.
The passage ran through the torch-dance of the waves. The distances shone and smoked magnificently. "Why do distances take so mighty a hold of the soul, although painted with the same colors as what is nearer?" said Albano. "That is the very question," said Dian. Mightily lay the sea like a monster along the coasts stretched out over their whole way to Rome, and tossed up and down the scales of waves. Albano said, "When I saw on Vesuvius the mountain and the sea, I thought how pettily and falsely narrow man sunders the two Colossi of the earth into little, familiar members, and acts as if the same sea did not stretch round the whole earth."
His friends were too deeply and sadly moved to make any reply, and before strange eyes neither words nor hardly looks were at their command. When Albano saw again more nearly the battle-field of time,--the ruin-coasts, which ever grasp and lift the man; the old temples and Thermæe, like old ships, dying on the land; here a crushed and crumbling giant temple, there a city street down on the bottom of the sea;[105] the holy memorial-columns and light-houses of former greatness deserted and extinguished amidst the eternally youthful beauty of ancient nature,--he forgot the neighborhood of his own transitoriness, and said to Linda, whose eye he saw directed thither, "Perhaps I can guess what you are now thinking of,--that the ruins of the two greatest times, the Greek and the Roman, remind us only of a _strange_ past, whereas other ruins, like music, only admonish us of our _own_. That was perhaps your thought." "We think of nothing at all here," said Julienne; "it is enough, if we weep that we are obliged to go away." "Truly the Princess is right," said Linda, and added, as if displeased at Albano and everything, "and what is life, more than a glass door to heaven? It shows us what is fairest and every joy, but it is, after all, not open."
By the accident of strangers' company they were compelled to leave each other with cold show, and, according to the custom of teasing, tantalizing fate, to conclude a great past with a little present.
Albano travelled as hastily as his sensibility would allow over the sublime world round about him. When he arrived in Mola, he heard the singular intelligence that they had found in Gaeta a whole leathern dress, with a mask, swimming far out to sea, which must have belonged to the ascended monk, and in respect to which they found nothing so inexplicable as the empty casing, without the dead body. In Mola, the fair island of Ischia at length breathed out its last fragrance; the high citadel of heaven and the ascending pole hid among other southern constellations this warm one also, which had so long gleamed over him with suns of bliss; and the last star of the short spring went down.
Such is life; such is bliss. Like the playing moon, it consists of first and last quarters, and slowly waxes and slowly wanes. In its hope, in its fear, a brief flash is the full moon of the deepest rapture; a short invisibility the new moon of the deepest desolateness;--and always is the light game, like the moon, beginning its circle anew.
THIRTEENTH JUBILEE.
Tivoli.--Quarrel.--Isola Bella.--Nursery of Childhood. --Love.--Departure.
116. CYCLE.
Albano alighted again at the Prince Lauria's, who had hitherto swum in such a flood-tide of new incidents, that he had hardly been conscious of the absence, and was disposed to wonder at the return. Meanwhile the German war against France had been settled upon. This news he brought to his grandson, full of the joyful expectation what great scenes such a struggle must unfold. Even Albano was for a long time carried away with him by this high stream, before he thought that this intelligence would work otherwise and more dishearteningly on his sister than on him. But the heroic fire, into which he talked himself with the political Lauria, preluded to him easy victory over a sister's affection.
He was going to announce his arrival to his two friends, when he heard from the Prince that they had both, as he had heard from the Princess Altieri, with whom they resided, already gone to Tivoli. How happily he departed, guessing the friendly design of this episode journey, out of Rome, radiant as it was with love and spring, and looked quite as gayly towards the future, where his life opened so bloomingly before him, as toward Tivoli, where he hoped to press two hearts to one.
He found, when he arrived in the town of Tivoli, that the ardent maidens had already stolen away to the cascade. As a man in the Vale of Tempe, or before the Lake of Geneva, passes along only in a careless dream over the shore by the watery images of the heavens and the earth, because the blooming originals round about seize and kindle him,--even so the rocks of the thickly peopled landscape, and the round Temple of Vesta, and the vales dissolving into one another, from the Roman gate to the temple,--this shining procession glided by only as dream- and water-images before a heart, in which a living loved one bloomed, and crowded out a world with a world's fulness.
He roved around amidst the swarm of prospects, without finding the fairest, when a short, pale-yellow, richly dressed man eyed him with a shrivelled up face, and with a silken arm pointed unasked the way to the falls, saying if he were looking after the ladies, he would find them at the great cascade.
Albano said nothing, went onward, saw two, and recognized Linda by her tall form. At length the three friends saw, found, embraced each other, and the magnificent water-storm breathed into the delight. Linda spake tender words of love, and felt as if she were dumb, for the beautiful tempest of streams tore the tender syllables to pieces like butterflies. They had not heard each other, and stood before each other, pining for their sounds, encompassed with five thunders, with weeping eyes, full of love and joy. Holy spot, where already so many thousand hearts have sacredly burned and blissfully wept, and been constrained to say, Life is great! Serenely and steadily sparkles the city overhead in the sunshine down over the watery crater; proudly does the rent Temple of Vesta, garlanded with almond-blossoms, look down from its rock upon the whirlpools which undermine it; and opposite to it the tempestuous Anio preludes at once all that earth and heaven have of greatness,--the rainbow, the eternal lightning and thunder, rain, cloud, and earthquake.
They gave each other signs to go, and to seek the more quiet vale. How sounded to them therein the words, brother, sister, Linda, like new human tones in Paradise! Here, before ascending the hill full of new waterfalls, lightnings, and colors, they sought to report to each other their journeys and their news. Julienne made the happy report that her brother, the Prince, gave again hope of recovery, since he had, with waking eyes, as he insisted, seen his dead father, who had promised him a longer life. The fair Linda bloomed in the Paradise like a veiled goddess who had long been seeking and at last found her beloved on the earth. She took his hand often, and pressed it against her eyes and lips, and whispered, hardly audibly, when he spoke to her or Julienne, "Dear! friendly man!" As to the scenery she was silent, for she never spoke of any till she had once come out of it.
Julienne, so happy about her brother's recovery, began all manner of jokes,--said she regretted having sent to her Lewis, from Naples, a vain specific against his malady, and at length asked Albano, "Dost thou know a youth named _Cardito_? He wants to know thee." He said, "No," but related how a little stout man had seemed to know him hereabouts, and showed him the way to the cascade. Julienne started, and said it was decidedly the Haarhaar Prince, who so maliciously built his hopes upon Luigi's death and throne. He lived in Tivoli, in the house of the Duke of Modena, and was certainly going about as a spy upon them all. In order to tune herself again after this hated discord, she continued her question about _Cardito_, and said, "It is a very beautiful, sound Corsican (that living deformity is surely the Prince), and he declares very seriously war against thee."
"That shall he verily have," said Albano, who now comprehended all, and--related all. Cardito was that Corsican with whom he had formerly split on the subject of the Gallic war. "Brother, that is still thy serious meaning?" said Julienne, with protracted accent. "Now especially," said he, with decision, in order immediately to exclude all strife. Linda with intensity pressed his hand to her eyes, as if she would cover them with it. "Well, argue thy case with me, as reasonably as thou canst, and let's hear thy grounds of justification; but first let us ascend the hill, that one may have something to see at the same time," said the sister.
On the hill, before the green of the flashing vale, where the stream, like a wounded eagle, has beat its wings all about on the earth, before the three lesser cascades that leap down with their lightnings upon the flowers, Albano began, with emotion and inspiration: "I have only one reason, dear sister; I am not yet anything,--I am no poet, no artist, no philosopher,--but nothing, namely, a Count. I have, however, powers for much; why shall I not say so? Verily, if a Da Vinci is all things, or a Crichton, or if a Richelieu, though he asserts the political throne, will yet mount the poetic, also, shall not another be justified in lesser wishes? And, by Heaven! properly speaking, a man will, after all, be everything, for he cannot help it; he longs and aspires after that, and the inner, stifled heart weeps drops of blood, which no human hand can wipe away,--only the high iron barriers of necessity hold him back. Sister, Linda, what have I, after all, yet done upon the earth?"
"Thou hast made this question, and this is enough in the sight of God," said Julienne, moved by the proud, wounded modesty of the youth, and by his beautiful voice, which, when indignant, sounded as if he were tenderly touched. "Words! what are words?" said he. "O one surely may well be ashamed that one has even to think and speak of anything before he does it, although poor, imperfect man cannot otherwise, but every action, like a statue, must first be modelled in the miserable wax of words. Ah, Linda, do not here deeds lie everywhere around us, instead of words and wishes? Have not I, also, an arm, a heart, a beloved, and powers, as well as others, and shall I go out of the world with a musty, mouldy Spanish or German Count's life? O my Linda, do thou contend for me!"
"I am not," said she, looking sharply toward the principal little cascade, which stormed down from among the trees overhead,--"I am not of many or eloquent words; and, moreover, I do not quite understand you. I must always translate words for myself into ideas and truths, and I cannot always do it. In the case of your words, Count, I cannot form any idea at all. He whom love alone does not satisfy, cannot have been filled with it. Of course, so all-forgetting with their hearts as we, so concentrated upon one idea of life, men never are. Ah, and so little is man to man, an image of man is more to him, and every little future!"
"Thou, too, Brutus!" said Albano, astonished. "Would you," he continued, collecting himself, "lay out an eternity of that elysium-life in Ischia as adequate to a man? Would you send him as a youth into the cloister of the most blissful repose? Certainly only as an old man. The former would be like planting the tree top downward in the dark earth."
"There spoke the German again," said she; "for ever and ever real, indefatigable industry. The tranquil Neapolitans, the people on the Apennines or the Pyrenees, on the Ganges, in Otaheite, full of enjoyment and contemplativeness, are to this Spaniard an abomination. I should think, if a man were only somewhat for himself, not for others, that would be all-sufficient. What _great actions_ are I do not know at all; all I know is a _great life_; for something like them every sinner can do."
"Verily, that is true," said he; "there is nothing more pitiable than a man who will show himself by this or that, which appears to himself great, rare, and without relation to his being, and therefore does not belong to him at all. Every nature puts forth its own fruit, and cannot do otherwise; but its child can never seem great to it, but always only small, or just as it should be. If it be otherwise, then it must be that an entirely foreign fruit has been hung upon its branches."
"Albano, how true! But you had once never more than half a will; how is it?" said Linda. "Neither have I now," said he, without severity. "One is gentlest when one is strongest in a resolution." He endeavored now carefully to spare and avoid his own words,--which were the oil and wind to his fire,--and he did it the more because words, after all, are of no help against anything, but much rather blow up instead of blowing out the feelings of another. He was also mindful, in this connection, of the frequent cases in which he had, by a single word, with all innocence, excited Linda to a flame. They stopped, and he looked out over the divine land, when Linda, after a silent look into his face, in spite of her apparently calm philosophizing, at once passionately grasped his hand and cried, "No, thou canst not!--by my happiness, by all saints, by the holy Virgin, by the Almighty,--thou canst, thou must not!" There is a robbery against which man always protests with an irrepressible fire, and though a goddess committed it out of love, and offered him in compensation a world of paradises; it is the robbery of his freedom and free development. Yes, its being love,--despotic, however, at once exercising and robbing freedom,--only exasperates him the more, and out of the _cloud_ of error grows by and by the _tempest_ of passion. Linda repeated, "Thou canst not." He looked upon her excited, brilliant countenance, whose Southern intensity resembled more, however, an enthusiasm than indignation, and said, firmly, "O Linda, I shall indeed both dare and do!" "No! I say no!" cried she.
"Brother!" the sister began. "O sister," cried he, "speak softly; I am a man, and have violent faults." The sublime war of the water with the earth and with rocks, the intermingling storms of the flashing rain-constellations around him, drew him as on wings into the whirl,--the great cascade flung its shower out of high trees, and out of heaven sprinkled incessantly a glimmering world,--and in the east the sea showed itself afar in dark sleep, and the setting sun sank gleaming into the general splendor.
"Certainly I will speak softly," said the Princess, who, much more sensitive and resonant than Linda, had some trouble in tuning her tone of speech to her promise; "nothing further is needed than the consideration that our quarrel is premature; I make merely the request to adjourn it till October, and the promise that _then_ the issue will be quite different." "O let it be!" said Albano. Linda nodded softly and slowly, and, contrary to expectation, laid his hand with both hers on her heart, and looked upon him weeping, with her large eyes, to which fire was more usual than water. He was melted at beholding that this powerful nature had only intensity without hate or wrath, and infinitely was he refreshed by his former secret suppression of his passionate flames.
The sister was softened by both, and a minute of the tenderest love soon entwined the three beings in one embrace. The hyperboles of anger are never so serious with man as those of love; the former only the other party must believe, the latter he believes himself. All had been brightened and cleared up by this free expression.
If generally a cold past moment shuts up to lovers, as a cold night does to bees, the flowers out of which they take the honey, here, however, after the storm, the clear blue air of heaven had become purer and stiller, and the tranquillity became bliss, as the bliss tranquillity. Through Albano, although rapidly, the Fury of fear had passed, who holds an inverted telescope, and through it shows man a very distant, empty heaven, without stars. But not so through Linda; she had throughout spoken in love and hope, and for her glowing heart there were no icy places. Therefore was he now so happy and so blessed by the contemplation of that vigorous nature! A long, deep chain of valleys, wherein wine and oil flowed in the fragrance of blossoms, led them all towards the great Rome. For a space the youth could accompany them; at last, for a long separation, he must tear heart and eye away from the loved ones, when over the green, glistening vales the mighty dome of St. Peter's already sparkled, and the cypresses, proudly encircled only with cypresses, bore the gold of evening on their twigs without stirring them. All had their eyes on the fair Rome, but their hearts were only on Isola Bella, where they promised to find each other again.
117. CYCLE.
On the way to Isola Bella, he thought of his hour of contention with the vehement Linda, and the character of this war-goddess. He shuddered at the very recollection of the steep precipice upon which, within a few days, he had leaned so far over; for Linda is so decided, knows no alternative between passion and annihilation. And yet, in this time of cool reflection, he felt her imperious demand upon his liberty more severely than ever, and said to himself, firmly, "Woman must not be allowed to circumscribe or rule the holy domain of man's development." On the other hand, it was, to be sure, all love, and an excess of it; and the longer he journeyed and compared, so much the darker and lonelier was it on that spot of his life upon which she alone cast the great flame. She moved before him much more clearly and nearly in spirit by his still contemplation of her spirit, than in bodily presence, because the former presented her at once in harmony, the latter with the individual dissonances without the solution. Her power of all-sided impartiality towards all characters had appeared to him, for a woman, quite as rare as it was great, especially as he himself let this power work more in the shape of respect for her and in a glad, free appreciation of great, eccentric, poetical manifestations, but not of all, even the flat and the worthless.
Alike mighty and full-grown stood Love and Liberty within him, side by side. They were bound together and reconciled only by a new resolution to be gentle, not merely strong, to lay before her with all frankness his right of freedom and his loving soul, and to be to her the noble character which belonged to her. "Am I not such, if I really will it?" said he.
In the highest joy of life, in perfect oneness with himself and destiny, he made his journey to Isola Bella as rapidly as if he were going to find there a beloved, instead of merely awaiting one. How many a thing seemed now smaller along his road, to which he applied the Roman measure, and not the German, and before which he now, as his father had foretold him, passed along flying!
At last he saw the artificial Alp of Isola Bella standing in the waves, and disembarked joyfully with his teacher, Dian, in the garden of childhood, where he was to expect so much, and, with fresh Italian life-blossoms on his heart, bid farewell to the land of promise.