Part 15

Dian could not comprehend it at all. He said, in Italian, "But it surely cannot be you; you look old." He thought he was speaking German all the time, till he heard Albano answer in Italian. Both gave and got only questions. Albano found the Architect merely browner, but there was the lightning of the eyes and every faculty in its old glory. With three words he described to him the journey and the company. "How does Rome strike you?" asked Dian, pleasantly. "As life does," replied Albano, very seriously; "it makes one too tender and too hard. I recognize here absolutely nothing at all," he continued; "do those columns belong to the magnificent Temple of Peace?" "No," said Dian, "to the Temple of Concord; of the other there stands yonder nothing but the vault." "Where is Saturn's Temple?" asked Albano. "Buried in St. Adrian's Church," said Dian, and added, hastily, "close by stand the ten columns of Antonine's Temple; over beyond there, the Baths of Titus; behind us, the Palatine Hill, and so on. Now tell me--"

They walked up and down the Forum, between the arches of Titus and Severus. Albano--especially beside the teacher who in the days of childhood had so often conducted him hitherward--was yet full of the stream which had swept over the world, and the all-covering water sank but slowly. He went on to say, "To-day, when he beheld the obelisk, the soft, tender brightness of the moon had seemed to him eminently unbecoming the giant city; he would rather have seen a sun blazing on its broad banner; but now the moon was the proper funeral torch beside the dead Alexander, who at a touch collapses into a handful of dust." "The artist does not get far with feelings of this kind," said Dian; "he must look upon everlasting beauties on the right hand and on the left." "Where," Albano went on asking, "is the old Lake of Curtius, the Rostrum, the _pila Horatia_, the Temple of Vesta, of Venus, and of all those solitary columns?" "And where is the marble Forum itself?" said Dian; "it lies thirty span deep under our feet." "Where is the great, free people, the senate of kings, the voice of the orators, the procession to the Capitol? Buried under the mountain of potshards. O Dian, how can a man, who loses a father, a beloved in Rome, shed a single tear, or look round him with consternation, when he comes out here before this battle-field of time, and looks into the charnel-house of the nations? Dian, one would wish here an iron heart, for fate has an iron hand!"

Dian, who nowhere stayed more reluctantly than upon such tragic cliffs, hanging over, as it were, into the sea of eternity, always leaped off from them with a jest. Like the Greeks, he blended dances with tragedy. "Many a thing is conserved here, friend," said he; "in Adrian's church yonder they will still show you the bones of the three men that walked in the fire." "That is just the frightful play of destiny," replied Albano, "to occupy the heights of the mighty ancients with monks shorn down into slaves."

"The stream of time drives new wheels," said Dian; "yonder lies Raphael twice buried.[77] How are Chariton and the children doing?" "They are blooming on," said Albano, but in a sombre tone. "Heavens!" cried Dian, with all a father's terror, "is it really so?"[78] "Verily, Dian!" said Albano, softly. "Does Liana," said Dian, "still come often to Chariton's? And how fares the sweet one?" Albano answered, in a low tone, "She is dead." "What! dead? Impossible! Froulay's daughter, Albano? The gold-rose? O speak!" he cried. Albano nodded affirmatively. "Ah! thou good maiden!" said he, piteously, with tears in his black eyes, "so friendly, so enchantingly lovely, so fine an artist! But how did it come to pass? Have you, then, not been acquainted at all with the lovely child?" "One spring only," said Albano, hurriedly. "My good Dian, I will now go back to my father, and I can answer no more questions." "O certainly! But I must learn more," Dian concluded. And so they climbed silently and speedily over rubbish and torsos of columns, and neither gave heed to the mighty emotion of the other.

TWENTY-SEVENTH JUBILEE.

St. Peter's.--Rotunda.--Colosseum.--Letter to Schoppe.--The War.--Gaspard.--The Corsican.--Entanglement with the Princess.--Sickness.--Gaspard's Brother.--St. Peter's Dome, and Departure.

104. CYCLE.

Rome, like the creation, is an entire wonder, which gradually dismembers itself into new wonders, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, St. Peter's Church, Raphael, &c.

With the passage through the Church of St. Peter the knight began the fair race through immortality. The Princess let herself be bound by the tie of art to the circle of the men. As Albano was more smitten with edifices than with any other work of art, so did he see from afar with holy awe the long mountain-chain of art, which again bore upon itself hills; so did he stand before the plain, around which two enormous colonnades run like Corsos, bearing a people of statues; in the centre shoots up the obelisk, and on its right and left an eternal fountain, and from the lofty steps the proud church of the world, inwardly filled with churches, rearing upon itself a temple toward heaven, looks down upon the earth. But how enormously, as they drew near, had its columns and its rocky wall mounted up and flown away from the vision!

He entered the magic church, which gave the world blessings, curses, kings, and popes, with the consciousness that, like the world-edifice, it was continually enlarging and receding more and more, the longer one remained in it. They went up to two children of white marble, who held an incense-muscle-shell of yellow marble; the children grew by nearness till they were giants. At length they stood before the main altar and its hundred perpetual lamps;--what a stillness! Above them the heaven's arch of the dome, resting on four inner towers; around them an overarched city, of four streets, in which stood churches. The temple became greatest by walking in it; and when they passed round one column, there stood a new one before them, and holy giants gazed earnestly down. Here was the youth's large heart, after so long a time, filled. "In no art," he said to his father, "is the soul so mightily possessed with the sublime as in architecture; in every other the giant stands in it and in the depths of the soul, but here he stands out of it and close before it." Dian, to whom all images were more clear than abstract ideas, said: "He is perfectly right." Fraischdörfer replied: "The sublimity here also lies only in the brain: for the whole church stands, after all, in something greater, namely, in Rome, and under the heavens, in the presence of which latter we certainly should not feel anything." He also complained, "That the place for the sublime in his head was very much narrowed by the innumerable volutes and monuments which the temple shut up therein at the same time with itself." Gaspard said, taking everything in a large sense: "When the sublime once really appears, it then, by its very nature, absorbs and annihilates all little circumstantial ornaments." He adduced as evidence the tower of the minster,[79] and nature itself, which is not made smaller by its grasses and villages.

The Princess, among so many connoisseurs of art, enjoyed in silence.

The ascent of the dome Gaspard recommended to defer to a dry and cloudless day, in order that they might behold the queen of the world, Rome, upon and from the proper throne; he therefore proposed very earnestly the visiting of the Pantheon, because he was eager to let this follow immediately after the impression of St. Peter's Church. They went thither. How simply and grandly the Hall opens upon one! Eight yellow columns sustain its brow, and majestically, as the head of the Homeric Jupiter, its temple arches itself! It is the Rotunda or Pantheon. "O the pygmies," cried Albano, "who would fain give us new temples! Raise the old ones higher out of the rubbish, and then you have built enough."[80] They stepped in; there reared itself around them a holy, simple, free world-structure with its heavenly arches soaring and striving upward, an odeum of the tones of the sphere-music, a world in the world! And overhead[81] the eye-socket of the light and of the sky gleamed down, and the distant rack of clouds seemed to touch the lofty arch over which it shot along! And round about them stood nothing but the temple-bearers, the columns! The temple of _all_ gods endured and concealed the diminutive altars of the later ones.

Gaspard questioned Albano about his impressions. He said he preferred the larger church of St. Peter. The Knight approved, and said that "youth, like nations, always more easily found and better appreciated the sublime than the beautiful, and that the spirit of the young man ripened from strength to beauty, as his body ripens from beauty to strength; however, he himself preferred the Pantheon." "How could the moderns," said the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdörfer, "build anything, except some little Bernini's towers?" "That is why," said the offended Provincial Architect, Dian, who despised the Counsellor of Arts, because he never made a good figure, except in the æsthetic hall of judgment as critic, never in the exhibition-hall as painter, "we moderns are, beyond contradiction, stronger in criticism, though in practice we are collectively and individually blockheads." Bouverot remarked, "The Corinthian columns might be higher." The Counsellor of Arts said, "After all, he knew nothing more like this fine hemisphere than a much smaller one, which he had found in Herculaneum, moulded in ashes--of the bosom of a fair fugitive." The Knight laughed, and Albano turned away in disgust, and went to the Princess.

He asked her for her opinion about the two temples. "Here Sophocles, there Shakespeare; but I comprehend and appreciate Sophocles more easily," she replied, and looked with new eyes into his new countenance. For the supernatural illumination through the zenith of Heaven--not through a hazy horizon--transfigured in her eyes the beautiful and excited countenance of the youth, and she took for granted that the saintly halo of the dome must also exalt her form. When he answered her: "Very good! But in Shakespeare Sophocles also is contained; not, however, Shakespeare in Sophocles; and on Peter's Church stands Angelo's rotunda!" Just then the lofty cloud all at once, as by the blow of a hand out of the ether, broke in two, and the ravished sun, like the eye of a Venus, floating through her ancient heavens,--for she once stood even here,--looked mildly in from the upper deep; then a holy radiance filled the temple, and burned on the porphyry of the pavement, and Albano looked around him in an ecstasy of wonder and delight, and said, with low voice: "How transfigured at this moment is everything in this sacred place! Raphael's spirit comes forth from his grave in this noontide hour, and everything which its reflection touches brightens into godlike splendor!" The Princess looked upon him tenderly, and he lightly laid his hand upon hers, and said, as one vanquished, "Sophocles!"

On the next moonlit evening Gaspard bespoke torches, in order that the Colosseum with its giant-circle might, the first time, stand in fire before them. The Knight would fain have gone around alone with his son dimly through the dim work, like two spirits of the olden time, but the Princess forced herself upon him, from a too lively wish to share with the noble youth his moments,--and perhaps, in fact, to have her heart and his own common property. Women do not sufficiently comprehend that an idea, when it fills and elevates man's mind, shuts it up against love, and crowds out persons, whereas with woman all ideas easily become human beings.

They passed over the Forum by the _Via Sacra_ to the Colosseum, whose lofty, cloven forehead looked down pale under the moonlight. They stood before the gray rock-walls, which reared themselves on four colonnades, one above another, and the flames shot up into the arches of the arcades, gilding the green shrubbery high overhead; and deep in the earth had the noble monster already buried his feet. They stepped in, and ascended the mountain full of fragments of rock, from one seat of the spectators to another; Gaspard did not venture to the sixth, or highest, where the men used to stand, but Albano and the Princess did. Then the youth gazed down over the cliffs, upon the round, green crater of the burnt-out volcano, which once swallowed nine thousand beasts at once, and which quenched itself with human blood; the lurid glare of the flames penetrated into the clefts and caverns, and among the foliage of the ivy and laurel, and among the great shadows of the moon, which, like recluses, kept themselves in cells; toward the south, where the streams of centuries and barbarians had stormed in, stood single columns and bare arcades,--temples and three palaces had the giant fed and lined with his limbs, and still, with all his wounds, he looked out livingly into the world.

"What a world!" said Albano. "Here coiled the giant snake five times about Christianity! Like a smile of scorn lies the moonlight down below there upon the green arena, where once stood the colossus of the sun-god. The star of the north[82] glimmers low through the windows, and the serpent and the bear crouch. What a world has gone by!" The Princess answered, that twelve thousand prisoners built this theatre, and that a great many more had bled in it. "O, we too have building prisoners," said he, "but for fortifications; and blood, too, still flows, but with sweat! No, we have no present; the past without it must bring forth a future."

The Princess went off to break a laurel-twig and pluck a blooming wall-flower. Albano sank away into musing,--the autumnal wind of the past swept over the stubble,--on this holy eminence he saw the constellations, Rome's green hills, the glimmering city, the Pyramid of Cestius; but all became past, and on the twelve hills dwelt, as upon graves, the lofty old spirits, and looked sternly into the age as if they were still its kings and judges.

"This in remembrance of the place and the time!" said the Princess, returning and handing him the laurel and the flower. "Thou mighty one, a colosseum is thy flower-pot; for thee nothing is too great, and nothing too small!" said he, and threw the Princess into considerable confusion, till she observed that he meant not her, but Nature. His whole being seemed newly and painfully moved, and as it were removed to a distance,--he looked down after his father and went to find him,--he looked at him sharply, and spoke of nothing more this evening.

105. CYCLE.

Albano, like a world, was wonderfully changed by Rome. After he had thus, for several weeks, lain encamped among Rome's creations and ruins; after he had drunk out of Raphael's crystal magic goblet, whose first draughts only cool, while the last send an Italian fire through all the veins; after he had seen the mountain-stream of Michael Angelo, now as a succession of cataracts, now as a mirror of the ether; after he had bowed and consecrated himself before the last greatest descendants of Greece, before her gods, who, with calm, serene countenance, stand looking into the inharmonious world, and before the Vatican Apollo, who is indignant at the prose of the age, at the abject Pythonian serpent, which is ever renewing its youth;--after he had stood so long in splendor before the full moon of the past, all at once his whole inner world was overcast, and became one great cloud. He sought solitude; he ceased to draw or to practise music; he spoke little of Rome's magnificence. By night, when the daily rain ceased, he visited alone the great ruins of the earth, the Forum, the Colosseum, the Capitol; he became more passionate, unsocial, sharp; a deep, brooding seriousness reigned on the lofty brow, and a sombre spirit burned through the eye.

Gaspard, unobserved, kept his eye upon all secret unfoldings of the youth. A mere sorrow for Liana did not seem to be his case. In the northern winter this wound would only have frozen up, and not healed up; but here, in the temple of the world, where gods lie buried, a noble heart gathered strength, and beat for older graves. The Princess, who, under the mask of friendship for the father, aspired after the son, he sought less than the old, cold Lauria and the fiery Dian.

At this same period, he longed sadly for his Schoppe; on that breast, he thought, would the secret of his own have found the right place and comfort. It was to him as if he had, since this separation, lived with him uninterruptedly, and become bound to him by a faster fraternal bond. Thus do spirits dwell and melt together in the invisible land; and when the bodies again meet each other in the visible, the hearts find each other again mutually more acquainted. Unfortunately, among all the letters that his father received from Pestitz, he heard not one sound from his friend over the mountains, whom he had left behind in the dark relations of a strange, perplexing passion. He never reckoned silence as a fault against Schoppe, whose hatred and spite against all letter-writing he well knew. However, his own heart could not bear it any longer, and he wrote to him as follows:--

"We were torn from each other sleeping, Schoppe. That time has veiled itself, and remains so. Very wide awake will we be when we look on each other again. Of thee I know nothing; if Rabette does not write to me, I shall have to bear about with me and endure this burning impatience till our meeting in summer. Of myself what is there to write? I am changed even to my innermost being, and by an ingrasping giant-hand. When the sun passes over the zenith of countries, they all wrap themselves in a deep cloud; so am I now beneath the sun at its highest point, and I am also shrouded. How a man in Rome, in actual Rome, can merely enjoy and weakly melt away before the fire of art, instead of starting up red with shame, and striving and struggling for power and exploits, is what I cannot comprehend. In painted Rome, in the Rome of poetry, there laziness may luxuriate; but in the real Rome, where obelisks, Colosseum, Capitol, triumphal arches, incessantly behold and reproach thee,--where the history of ancient deeds, all day long, like an invisible storm-wind, sweeps and sounds through the city, and impels and lifts thee,--O, who can stretch himself out in inglorious ease and contemplation before the magnificent stirring of the world? The spirits of saints, of heroes, of artists, follow after the living man, and ask, indignantly, 'What art thou?' With far other feelings dost thou go down out of the Vatican of Raphael, and over the steps of the Capitol, than thou comest out of any German picture-gallery or antique cabinet. There thou seest, on all hills, old, eternal majesty. Even a Roman woman is, in shape and pride of stature, still related to her city. The dweller beyond the Tiber is a Spartan, and thou wilt no more find a Roman than a Jew stupid; whereas in Pestitz thou must become impatient with the very contrast of the mere form. Even the calm Dian maintains that the odious masks of the ancients look like the faces in the German streets, and their Fauns and other bestial gods like nobler court-faces, and that their copy-pictures of Alexander, of the philosophers, of the Roman tyrants, however pointedly and prosaically they stand out in contrast to their poetical statues of the gods, resemble the present ideals of the painters.

"Is it enough, here, to creep around the giants with eyes full of astonishment and folded hands, and then languidly and pusillanimously to lie pining at their feet? Friend, how often in the days of discontent did I pronounce the artists and poets happy, who at least may appease their longing by light and joyous creations, and who with beautiful plays celebrate the mighty dead,--Archimimes of the heroic age. And yet, after all, these voluptuous plays are only the jingling of the bells on the lightning-conductor: there is something higher;

## action is life; therein the whole man bestirs himself, and blooms with

all his twigs. Not of the narrow, timid achievements of littleness on the oar-bank and the lolling-bank of the times are we speaking here. There still stands a gate open to the coronation-city of the spirit,--the gate of sacrifice, the door of Janus. Where else on earth than on the battle-field is the place to be found in which all energies, all offerings, and virtues of a whole life, crowded into an hour, play together in divine freedom with thousand sister powers and offerings? Where else do all faculties--from the most rapid sharp-sightedness even to all bodily capacities of despatch and of endurance, from the highest magnanimity down to the tenderest pity, from all contempt of the body even up to the mortal wound--find the lists so freely open for a covenant-rivalry? although, for the very same reason, the play-room of all the gods stands open also to the mask-dance of all the furies. Only take war in a higher sense, where spirits, without relation of gain and loss, only by force of honor and of object, bind themselves over to destiny, that it shall select from among their bodies the corpses, and draw the lot of victory out of the graves. Two nations go out on the battle-plain, the tragic stage of a higher spirit, in order to play against one another, without any personal enmity, their death-parts; still and black hangs the thunder-cloud over the battle-field; the nations march on into the cloud and all its thunders; they strike, and gloomily and alone burns the death-torch above them; at last it is light, and two triumphal gates stand built up,--the gate of death and the gate of victory,--and the host has divided and passed through both, but through both with garlands of honor. And when it is over, the dead and the living stand exalted in the world, because they had not cared for life. But when the great day is to be still greater, when the most costly thing is to come to the spirit which can hallow life, then does God place an Epaminondas, a Cato, a Gustavus Adolphus, at the head of the consecrated host, and freedom is at once the banner and the palm. O, blessed he who then lives or dies at once for the god of war and for the goddess of peace!