Part 6
In the beginning many things went well; the pure innocence of his sister and his friend threw a strange magic light upon the unnatural union. The prominent advantage was, that he, as concert-master of his love, needed little more of Rabette than her ears; loving was with him talking, and he looked upon actions merely as the drawing of our soul; words being the colors. There is a twofold love,--love of the feeling and love of the object. The former is more man's love; it wishes the enjoyment of its own being, the foreign object is to it only the microscopic object-bearer, or much rather subject-bearer, whereupon it beholds its "I" magnified; it can therefore easily let its objects change, if only the flame into which they are thrown as fuel continues to blaze up high; and it enjoys itself less through actions, which are always long, tedious, and troublesome, than by words, which picture and promote it at the same time. The love of the object, on the contrary, enjoys and desires nothing but its welfare (such is for the most part female and parental love), and only deeds and sacrifices give it peace and satisfaction; it loves for the sake of blessing, whereas the other only blesses for the sake of loving.
Roquairol had long since devoted himself to the love of the feeling. Hence it was that he must make so many words; at the Rhine-fall of Schaffhausen he would not have been in the best, that is, the most excited mood, merely because he could not--since the flood out-thunders everything--have delivered anything himself in praise thereof, on account of the sublime uproar.
His Romance with Rabette after the declaration of love was divided into distinct chapters.
The first chapter he sweetened for himself in her society, by the consideration that she was new and belonged to him and yielded him an admiring obedience. He painted for her therein great pieces of beautiful nature, mixed therewith some nearer emotions, and thereupon kissed her; so that she really enjoyed his lips in two forms, that of action and that of speech; from her, as has been said, he wanted only a pair of open ears. In this chapter he assumed also some possibility of their marriage; men so easily confound the charm of a new love with the worth and duration of it.
He set himself about his second chapter, and swam therein blissfully in the tears with which he sought to write it out. In fact, this ocular pleasure afforded him more true joy than almost the best chapters. When, in such mood, he sat and drank by her side,--for, like a dead prince's heart, he loved to bury his living one in cups,--and then began to describe his life, particularly his death, and his sorrows and errors in the interval, and his suicide and infanticide at the masquerade, and his rejected and spurned love for Linda: who was then more moved to tears than himself? No one but Rabette, whose eyes,--having been, through her father and brother, as little acquainted with men's tears as with elephants', stags', or crocodiles' tears,--so much the more richly, but not so sweetly as bitterly, streamed over into his sorrow and love. This poured fresh oil again into his flame and lamp, until he at last, like that pupil of Goethe's master wizard, with the brooms that carried water, could no longer govern his spirits. Poetic natures have a sympathetic one; like justice, they keep a surgeon in their pay near the rack, who immediately sets again the broken limbs, yes, even regulates beforehand the places for the crushing fractures.[26]
A man should never weep on his own account, except for ecstasy. But poets and all people of much fancy are magicians who--exact counterparts of the burnt enchantresses--weep more easily, although more at images, than at the rough, sore calamity itself, in order to put the poor enchantresses to the worst water-ordeal. Trust them not! On the machinelle-poison-tree the rain-drops are poisonous which roll from its leaves.
Meanwhile it must never be concealed, that the Captain in this second chapter strengthened his resolution of really marrying the good and so tender Rabette. "Thou knowest," he said to himself, "what upon the whole there is in and about women, one or two deficiencies, more or less, make little difference; thy man-like folly of requiring her, as they do hired animals, to be warranted without fault, may surely be regarded as gone by, friend."
Now he set himself down to dip into the ink for his third chapter, wherein he merely sported. His lip-omnipotence over the listening heart refreshed him to such a degree, that he made frequent experiments to see whether she could not laugh herself almost to death. Women in love, by reason of weakness and fire, take the laughter-plant most easily; they hold the comic heroic-poet still more as their hero, and prove therewith the innocence of their laughing at him. But Roquairol loved her less when she laughed.
In his fourth chapter,--or sector, or Dog-Post-day, or letter-box,[27] or in whatever other way I have (ludicrously enough) made my divisions, instead of using the Cycle,--in his fourth Jubilee, I say, it went, so to speak, harder with him. Rabette grew at last sated and sick of his eternally jumping off and opening the pot of the lachrymal glands that hung between the wheels, to grease his mourning-coach. Deep emotion was every day made more disagreeable and bitter to him; he must be ever giving longer and more vivid tragedies. Then he began to perceive that the tongue of the country maiden is not the very greatest landscape-painter, soul-portrayer, and silhouettiste, and that she hardly knew how to say much more to him than, "Thou, my heart!" He made, on that account, in the fourth chapter, rarer visits; that again helped him considerably, but only for a short time. Fortunately, the half-mile from Pestitz to Blumenbühl counted in with Rabette's lines and rays of beauty; in the city, in the same street, or in fact under the same roof, he would have remained too cold from very nearness.
The most natural consequence of such a chapter is the fifth, or the chapter of alternations, which still blows up some flames by the ever-swifter interchange of reproaches and reconciliations, so that the two, as electrical bodies do little ones, alternately attract and repel each other. Sometimes he drank nothing, and merely treated her harshly. Sometimes he took his glass, and said to her: "I am the devil, thou the angel." The greatest offence to his love his father gave, by the approbation which, most unexpectedly, he bestowed upon it. It was to the Captain exactly as if he should realize the silver-wedding if he ever solemnized the golden one. In the service of the goddess of love one more easily grows bald than gray; he was already morally bald toward the silver-bride. Fortunately, a short time before the illumination Sunday in Lilar,[28] he carried all sins of omission and commission so far, that on Sunday he was in a condition to curse them; only after scolding and sinning could he with comparative ease love and pray, as the grovelling spring-scarabee snaps up only when turned over on his back. It has probably slipped, or at least escaped, the memory of few readers, among the events of that Sunday, that Roquairol sat in the morning with Rabette in the flute-dell, that Rabette sang there in a depressed and lonesome mood, and how he, dissolved thereby, encountered his friend glorified by love. The dell affair is natural; after so long coolness (not coldness) on this breezy, free Otaheite-day, with all that he had in his hands (another's hand--and a flask) beside that heart of hers, as warm and yet as tranquil as the sun in the heavens,--and then the solitary orphan flute which he made play its call,--and with his most hearty wish to profit somewhat by such a day and sky,--under these circumstances he found himself actually compelled to draw upon his genuine emotions, to give himself vent on the subject of his past life (he resembled the old languages, which, according to Herder, have many Preterites and no Present),--yes, even on the subject of his death (also a fragment of the past),--and then as on a heavenly way to move forward. Of course he went not far; he let his blood of St. Januarius, namely, his eyes, become fluid again, (his own blood having previously become so,) and then demanded of the enraptured soul, whirled about in the fairest heaven nothing less than--since she was mute before the pocket-handkerchief thrown to her as the canary-bird is under the one thrown over him,--a faint singing. Rabette could not sing; she said so, she declined, at last she sang; but during the empty singing she thought of nothing save him and his wild, wet face.
The most miserable chapter of all, which he brought out in his Romance, may well be the sixth, which he wrote down on the night of the illumination in Lilar. In the beginning he had left Rabette to stand alone a mute, inglorious[29] spectator, while he ran, jumping up behind the car of Venus full of strange goddesses. Gradually one pleasure after another crept along toward him and gave him the Tarantula bite, which was followed by a sick raving. As moderation is a true strengthening medicine of life, so did he uncommonly seldom resort to this powerful medicine, in order not to be obliged to use it in stronger and stronger doses, and he did not accustom himself to it at all. At last, when he was full, forms appeared in him as in Chinese porcelain;[30] he stepped sympathizingly and lovingly to Rabette, and fancied, as she did, that he was tender or affectionate towards her, when he merely was so towards all.
He would fain draw her away from the hostile array of eyes, to seek from her the kiss to which interdiction and privation lent honey again; but she refused, because there, where the eye stops, suspicion begins, when he unfortunately caught sight of the blind girl from Blumenbühl, and could call her as a pretended guard of Rabette, in order to lead her out of the temptation among men to the temptation in the wilderness. Pressing her to him with such a passionate impetuosity of love as he had never showed before,--so that the poor soul who had been so forsaken and forlorn this evening wept over the return of all her joys,--and speaking to her like an angel, who acts like none, he involuntarily arrived with her at the silent Tartarus, where all was blind and dumb.
Rabette had not suffered the blind girl to leave her; but when they entered the catacomb-avenue, which holds only two persons, unless the third will creep along in the water, the eyeless maid was stationed at the gate, and so much the more, because he would not willingly let himself be checked by a superfluous listener. And besides, what then was there to fear in the very raree-show of the grave?
Within there he spoke about the everywhere stretched-out index-finger of death,--how "it indicated that life, stupid as it is, should not be made by us more stupid, but joyous." He seated himself by her side, caressing her,--as the destroying angel sits invisible beside the blooming child that plays in the old masonry, and into whose tender hands he presses the black scorpion. It was the very spot where he had sat in that first covenant-night, with Albano, opposite the skeleton with the Æolian-harp, when his friend swore to him his renunciation of Linda. His tongue streamed like his eye. He was tender, as, according to the popular superstition, corpses are tender which mourners die after. He threw fire-wreaths into Rabette's heart, but she had not, like him, streams of words to quench them withal. She could only sigh, only embrace; and men fall into sin most easily from weariness of good, but tedious hearts. More swiftly did laughter and weeping, death and drollery, love and wantonness, spring over into each other; moral poison makes the tongue as light as physical makes it heavy. Poor girl! the maidenly soul is a ripe rose, out of which, so soon as one leaf is plucked, all its mates easily fall after. His wild kisses broke out the first leaves; then others fell. In vain the good genius wafts holy tones from the harp of death, and sends up angry murmurs in the orcus-flood of the catacomb,--in vain! The darkest angel, who loves to torture, but rather innocent ones than the guilty, has already torn from heaven the star of love, to bear it as a murder-brand into the cavern. The poor, narrow little life-garden of the defenceless maid, wherein but little grows, stands over the long mine-passage which runs away under Roquairol's wide-extended pleasure-camp; and the darkest, angel has the lint-stock already lighted. With fiery greediness the spark-point eats its way onward; as yet her garden stands full of sunshine, and its flowers wave; the spark gnaws a little into the black powder. Suddenly it tears open a monstrous flame-throat; and the green garden reels, then flies, blown up, scattered to atoms, falls in black clods out of the air down upon far distant places; and the life of the poor maiden is all smoke and ruin.
But Roquairol's wide-spread and jointly rooted pleasure-parks withstood the earthquake much more vigorously. Both then came up out of the mine-passage sorrowfully, for the Captain had lost a little arbor in the explosion; but they found no more the blind girl, who, in her search for them, had lost herself. They encountered only the roving Albano, who himself was sorely wailing and raving, although he this evening had lost nothing but--pleasures.
Let us lead up the deluded maiden and her million companions with some words before a mild judge! This is not the only thing which that judge will weigh, that she, stupefied by the blossom-dust of a reeking spring season of joys, smothered into dumbness with the virgin's veil, prostrate before the storm of fancy (as women fall so much the more easily before another's fancy and a poetic one, the seldomer their own blows upon them, and accustoms them to standing firmly), suffered the reward of a whole virgin life to die; but this is what most strongly mitigates the sentence, that she bore love in her heart. Why, then, do not the male sex recognize that the loving female, in the hour of love, will really do nothing less than all for her beloved, that woman has all power _for_ love, _against_ which she has so little, and that she, with the same soul and at the same moment, would just as readily sacrifice her life as her virtue, and that only the demanding and taking party is bad, deliberately and selfishly?
The last or seventh chapter of his robber romance is very short and contradictory. The third day he visited her in her garden, was delicate, rational, temperate, reserved, as if he were a married man. As he found her full of trouble, which she, however, only half expressed, he accordingly, out of anxiety for her health, came again several times; and, when he found that she had not suffered in the least, he stayed--away. Towards Albano, during the aforesaid anxiety, he behaved meekly, and, after it, he was the same as ever, but not long; for when his sister, whom of all human beings he perhaps loved most purely, became blind through Albano's wildness, he then, even on account of a similarity of guilt, flung at him a real hatred, and something like it at all his (Albano's) relations. Rabette got nothing from him now but--letters and apologies, short pictures of his wild nature, which must, he said, have free play-room, and which, fastened to another, must beat and bruise and gall that one with the chain quite as much as itself. All objections of Rabette's he knew how to remove so well, as they consisted only in words, and not in looks and tears, that he at last himself began to perceive he was right; and almost nothing was left to the poor May-flower, crushed by the fall of this smooth May-pole, than the real last word,--namely, the mute life, which is not the first thing to announce to the murderer that he has smitten and destroyed a heart.
88. CYCLE.
Here is Roquairol's letter to Albano:--
"It must once be, and be over; we must see each other as we are, and then hate each other, if it must be so. I make thy sister unhappy; thou makest mine unhappy and me too; these things just balance each other. Thou distortedst thyself out of an angel to me more and more passionately into a destroying angel. Strangle me, then, but I grapple thee too.
"Now look upon me, I draw off my mask, I have convulsive movements on my face, like people who live after drinking sweet poison. I have made myself drunk with poison, I have swallowed the poison-pill, the great poison globule, the earth-globe. Out with it freely! I exult no more, I believe nothing more, I do not even lament right valiantly. My tree is hollowed out, burnt to a coal by fantastic fire. When, occasionally, in this state, the intestinal worms of the soul, exasperation, ecstasy, love, and the like, crawl round again, and gnaw and devour each other, then do I look down from myself to them; like polypuses, I cut them in twain and turn them wrong end foremost and stick them into each other. Then I look again at my own act of looking, and as this goes on _ad infinitum_, what then comes to one from it all? If others have an idealism of faith, so have I an idealism of the heart, and every one who has often gone through with all sensations on the stage, on paper, and on the earth, is in the same case. What boots it? If thou shouldst die at this moment, I often say to myself, then, as all radii of life run together into the minute point of a moment, all would verily be wiped out, invisible; to me, then, it is as if I had been nothing. Often I look upon the mountains and floods and the ground about me, and it seems to me as if they could at any and every moment flutter asunder and melt away in smoke, and I with them. The future life (as even the present is hardly to be called a life), and all that hangs thereupon, belongs to the ecstasies which one winks at; especially it belongs to the ecstasy of love.
"As thou so readily assumest every difference from thyself to be enervation, so do I say to thee outright: Only ascend farther, only knead thyself more thoroughly, only lift thy head higher out of the hot waves of the feelings, then wilt thou no longer lose thyself in them, but let them billow on alone. There is a cold, daring spirit in man, which nothing touches at all,--not even virtue; for it alone chooses that, and is its creator, not its creature. I once experienced at sea a storm, in which the whole element furiously and jaggedly and foamingly lashed itself into commotion, and flung its waters pell-mell through each other, while overhead the sun looked on in silence;--so be thou! The heart is the storm; self is the heaven.
"Believest thou that the romancers and tragedians, that is, the men of genius among them, who have a thousand times aped, and aped their own apings of everything, divine and human, are other than I? What keeps them and the world's people still real is the hunger after money and praise; this eating gastric-juice is the animal glue, the salient point in the soft floating and fleeting world. The apes are geniuses among beasts; and the geniuses are--not merely before higher beings, as Pope says of Newton, but even here below--apes, in aesthetic imitation, in heartlessness, malignity, malicious pleasure, sensuality, and--merriment.
"The last and last but one I reserve for myself. Against the _longueurs_ (lengthy passages) in life's book,--a book which no man understands,--there is no remedy except some merry passages, of which I think no more so soon as I have read them. In order only to get over this cold, hobbly life, I will surely sooner scatter below me rose-cups than thistles. Joy is of itself worth something, if only that it crowds out something worse before one lays down his heavy head and sinks into nothingness.
"Such am I; such was I; then I saw thee, and would be thy _Thou_--but it serves not, for I cannot go back; thou, however, goest forward, thou becomest my very self one day,--and then I _would_ have loved thy sister! May she forgive me for it! Here drink pure wine! I know best how one fares with the women,--how their love blesses and robs,--how all love, like other fire, _kindles_ itself with much better wood than that which _feeds_ it,-and how, universally, the Devil gets all he brings.
"O, why then can no woman love but just so far as one will have her, and no further,--absolutely none? Hear me now: everywhere lazy preachers would fain hold us back from all transitory pleasure by telling us of the discomfort that comes after. Is not then the discomfort transitory too? Rabette meant well with me, on the same ground of desire upon which I meant well with her and myself. But does any one know, then, what purgatorial hours one wades through with a strange heart, which is full, without making full, and whose love one at last hates,--_before_ which, but not _with_ which, one weeps, and never about the same thing, and to which one dreads to unveil any emotion, for fear of seeing it transmuted into nourishment of love,--from whose anger one imbibes the greater wrath, and from its love the lesser! And now to have absolutely the more joyous relations screwed down forever to this state of torment, when they ought rather to exalt us above the tormenting ones, the long wished for gods'-bliss of life perverted forever into a flat show and copper-plate engraving,--the heart into a breast and mask,--the marrow of existence into sharp bones,--and yet, as to all reproaches of coldness, chained only to silence, bound innocent and dumb to the rack,--and that, too, without end!
"No, sooner give me the frenzy which one draws from the temple of love as well as from that of the Eumenides! Better burn up in a real flame of misery, without hope, without utterance, even to paleness and madness, than be so loving and not loved! He who has once burned in this hell, Albano, continues to frequent it forevermore: that is the last misery. Can I not worry down life and death, and wounds and stings beforehand?--and certainly I am not weak. Nevertheless, I am not the man to put restraints upon a sentimental discourse, or harpsichord fantasy, or reading or singing, not though sorrow in person should hold before me a menace, undersigned by all the gods, that a female listener whom I cannot endure would immediately thereupon become my lover, and from that my mistress and my hell.
"The Greeks gave Love and Death the same form, beauty, and torch; for me it is a murderous torch; but I love Death, and therefore Cupid. Long has life been to me a tragic muse; willingly to the dagger of a muse do I offer my breast; a wound is almost half a heart.