Part 26

Rabette found at last a lifting-screw to wind her polished and yet familiar brother out of the receiving-room up into her or his former apartment, so as to be alone on his breast. As they stepped in, she immediately began, as she said, "Dost thou still know the chamber, Albano?" to weep infinitely, with the tears which had been so long gathering; and Albano showed her in his own, his long-cherished sympathy, but tore open thereby all the wounds of the past. She herself seized upon the remedy, namely, the telling of her story,--however earnestly he persisted that he knew, and, indeed, could well guess all,--and drying her eyes, informed him how all stood,--and that Charles was a good deal with his mother in Arcadia; that the Minister still acted the old tyrant toward his only child, and did not dole out to him a farthing more than ever, although he was always heaping up greater and greater debts, especially since there was no longer any Liana silently to wipe them away; that he borrowed everywhere, only, however, he never would accept anything from her; that he still continued to desire and know nothing but the Countess, and that God knew what all this would come to. Anticipating all inquiry, she added: "He knows the whole already, all thy intercourse with that same person. He behaves quietly and pleasantly about it, but I know him as well as I want to. Ah!" she sighed, in the fulness of anguish, and added immediately, with the same voice: "Thou lookest at me; is it not true thou findest me very haggard to what I once was?" "Yes, indeed, poor girl!" "I drank much vinegar on his account, because Charles loves slender figures; and grief has much to do with it too," said she.

Albano would have consoled her with the nearer possibility of a union of Charles with her, since the impossibility of every other union had been decided, and readily tendered his services for any prefatory word or coercive measure. "Before God and us, he is thy husband," said he. "That he never could have been," replied she, blushing, "for he never could have been honest; and did I not write thee that I am now too proud for it, too?" "Then cast him off forever!" said he. "Ah!" said she, fearfully, "do I know, then, that he meditates no harm against himself? Then I should reproach myself with it eternally." Involuntarily he could not but compare with this loving, holy fear, the hardness of the Princess, who could relate so gladly and proudly how many a love-smitten life had fallen a victim to her prudish heart and coquettish face. "What wilt thou do now?" he asked. "I weep," said she. "Ah, Albano, that is enough, indeed, that thou hast given me hearing and counsel; I am cheerful again. But be once more his friend."

He was silent, a little angry at the naughtiness of women, which, under pretence of seeking advice, only desires a hearing. "What is that?" he asked, showing her a leaf. "That is perfectly my hand, and I never wrote it!" She looked at it, and said Charles was often trying experiments with her in this way at handwriting. He wondered, and said: "Nothing, but imitating and counterfeiting all the time! But how canst thou think of my forgiving him?" Some descriptions of travels on her table, formerly so poor in books, met his eye. "I wanted to know, of course," said she, "how you might probably be faring in this, that, and the other place, and that is why I read the long stuff." "Thou art still my sister!" said he, and kissed her heartily. She still asked him much and urgently about his new connection; but chary of words with his full heart, he hastened down stairs.

The first word down below to the Provincial Director was a request for the "deposed letter of Schoppe's." Wehrfritz brought the broad letter, which had been laid up in the little iron box of bonds, and delivered it he hoped, he said, in good order. Hardly could Albano keep back his tears, when he held the crinkled but precious traces of the beloved hand, which certainly never in its life had swerved or stained itself, in his own. As he did not break the seal, they all began good-naturedly to portray to him his friend Schoppe, according to the presumptions and views which man so boldly and complacently indulges upon every higher spirit, with all his actions or colors, as if actions or colors were strokes and outlines. Wehrfritz and Wehmeier deplored that he was growing mad, if not already so. The Magister held back with his main-proof, till the Provincial Director should have contributed the lesser auxiliary ones.

His life beneath this palace-roof was uncovered and showed up, but in a friendly spirit. "He had hitherto"--so went the reports--"had no real or solid aim." Wehrfritz swore he had himself seen him reading the Literary Gazette, just as it was folded together half-sheetwise, and said he of course ascribed it less to insanity than to absence of mind, because he knew with what pleasure the man always took into his hands and understandingly perused the Imperial Advertiser, which the same declared to be the gate-key to the great imperial city, Germany. In the midst of company the Librarian had looked upon his hands with the words: "There sits a gentleman here in bodily presence, and I in him, but who is the same?" Of work he had done very little, seldom looked into a book of any importance, as Herr Wehmeier knew, but got along more easily with the worst of all stuff, for instance, whole volumes of dream-interpretations. His dearest society had been his wolf-dog, with whom for whole hours he would carry on regular discourse, and of whose growling he seriously asserted it sounded like a very distant thunder. He had been fond of sitting before the looking-glass, and had entered into a long conversation with himself. Sometimes he had looked into the camera-obscura, then on a sudden out into the landscape again, to compare the two, and had asserted, unoptically enough, that the busy, gliding images of the camera were magnified by the outer world, but deceptively imitated. "It was a shy bird," added the Director, "for all that. Divers of my acquaintances in the neighboring estates let him paint them, because he did it cheap; he always knew, however, how to slip something into the face so that one's physiognomy should appear quite ridiculous or simple, and that he called his flattering. Of course after that, no one could expect in the long run anything _honnette_ from him."

"Were it permitted me," Wehmeier began, "I would now communicate to Mr. Count a fact in regard to Mr. Librarian, which, perhaps--such is at least my opinion--is as _frappant_ as many another. The school-house, as you certainly still well remember, stands close to the church." Thereupon he related, in a long narrative, the following: "Once, at dead of night, he heard the organ going. He listened at the church door, and distinctly heard Schoppe sing and play a short stanza of a popular hymn. Thereupon the said Schoppe came down, with a loud noise, from the choir, and mounted the pulpit, and commenced an occasional sermon to himself with the words: 'My devout hearer and friend in Christ.' In the exordium he touched upon the silent, but unhappily so fleeting bliss which one enjoyed _before_ life, although not according to correct Homiletic principles, since the second part almost repeated the introduction. Thereupon he sang a pulpit stanza to himself, and taking from the 3d chapter of Job, where the writer shows the happiness of non-existence, the 26th verse as his text, which reads thus: 'Was I not in safety, had I not rest, was I not quiet? Yet trouble came,'[111]--he proposed to himself as his theme the joys and sorrows of a Christian; in the first part the sorrows, in the second the joys. Thereupon he crowded together concisely, but in a droll style and speech, and yet with Scriptural expressions, too, all the misery and distress on earth,--under which he enumerated singular things: long sermons, the two poles, ugly faces, compliments, games, and the world's stupidity. Thereupon he passed over abruptly to the consolation in the second part, and described the future joys of a Christian, which, as he blasphemously said, consisted in a heavenly ascension into future nothingness, in the death after death, in an eternal deliverance from self. Then (shocking it was to hear it) he addressed the neighboring dead down below under the church and in the princely vault, and asked, whether they had aught to complain of? 'Arise,' said he; 'seat yourselves in the pews, and open your eyes, in case they are wet with weeping. But they are drier than your dust. O how still and lovely lies the infinite past world, swathed in its own shadow, softly laid on the bed of its own ashes, without a single remaining dream-limb upon which a wound can be inflicted. Swift, old Swift, thou who once in thy latter days wast not so very much in thy head, and didst read through, every birthday, the whole chapter from which the text of our harvest sermon is taken,--Swift, how contented thou now art and entirely restored, the hatred of thy bosom burnt out, the round pearl, thy Self, eaten up, at last, and dissolved in the hot tear of life, and the tear alone stands there sparkling! And thou, too, hadst once preached before the Sexton like me!' Here Schoppe wept, and excused himself for his emotion, God knows before whom. Thereupon he passed to the practical improvement, and sharply insisted on both hearer and preacher growing better; upon downright honest truthfulness; fidelity of friends; high-mindedness, bitter hatred of suavity, snake-like movements, and weak lasciviousness. Finally, he had concluded the devotions with a prayer to God, that, if it should be his lot some day to lose his health or understanding, or the like, he would still be pleased to let him die like a man, and darted at once out of the church door. He put me," added Wehmeir, "almost out of my senses for terror, when he all at once flew at me angrily; 'Mock corpse, why creepest thou about the grave?' and I, pale and hurried, made my way home without having made the least reply to him. But what says Mr. Count?"

Albano shook his head with vehemence without one enlightening word, with pain and tears on his face. He merely took a sudden leave of all, and begged them to pardon his haste; and sought the evening sun and freedom, in order to read the letter of the noble man, and learn the purpose of his journey. He struck into the old road to Lilar, where he hoped to find, on the joyous southern breast of his radiant Dian Southern gayety and Southern ways again; for his heart had been upheaved by an earthquake, because, after all, many a wild sign in this Schoppe, as it were an immoderate lightening and flashing of this star, seemed to him to announce a setting and doomsday, which to his extreme pain he was constrained to ascribe to the rising of the new star of love, which had kindled this world of his nature.

122. CYCLE.

He read the following letter from Schoppe:--

"Thy letter, my dear youth, came duly to hand. I praise thy tears and flames, which alternately sustain, instead of extinguishing each other. Only become something, much, too, but not everything, in order that thou mayest be able, in so extremely empty a thing as life is--(I should be glad to know who invented it)--to hold out for all the desolateness. A Homer, an Alexander, who have at length vanquished the whole world and got it under them, must needs be plagued often with the most tiresome and annoying hours, because their life, from being a bride, has now become a wife. Much as I had palisaded and fortified myself against that, in order not to mount over everybody's head, and sit up top as Factotum of the world; I nevertheless, after all, came out at last, unobserved and all standing, on the summit, merely because, under my long contemplation, the whole circle of the earth, full of foam-mountains and cloud-giants, had been melting down lower and lower and crawling together; and now I gazed alone and dry-shod down from my mountain-peak, wholly possessed with the bloodsuckers of disgust at the world.

"Brother, it has changed, however, during this year, and I am afloat. For that reason a long, and to me quite tiresome, letter is written thee here in February, which shall tell thee about my approaching grub- and chrysalis-state, where and how; for when I am once a shining chrysalis, then I can only feebly stir and show myself any longer.

"I will explain myself _more_ clearly,--the Germans add, when they have explained themselves clearly. It fits and hits most luckily--which I prize as much as another--that precisely the end of the year is the end of the paternal property upon which I have thus far lived, and consequently, if Amsterdam ceases to pay, I also fail, and have nothing more on hand than weak, chiromantic prophecies, and nothing in my body except my stomach. I would I could still live by my navel, as in my earlier times, and make myself such a soft bed.

"What, then, shall I do? As to accepting presents from my lords, men, year out and year in, I do not respect them enough for that; and the few, whom one does somewhat respect upon occasions, must in their turn respect me too highly to make such an offer. What! shall I be a flea, attached to the thinnest little golden chain, and a gentleman who has fastened me by it, that I may spring with him but not away from him, shall draw me up now and then upon his arm and say, 'Suck away, my little creature!' Devil! I will remain free upon so contemptible an earth,--no salary will I take, no orders in this great servants' apartment,--sound to the core, so as not to awaken any sympathy or any house-doctor,--yes, if one should knock off to me the heart of the Countess Romeiro on the condition of my kneeling down to it, I would take the heart, indeed, and kiss it, but immediately thereupon get up and run away (either into the new world or the next) before she had time to recapitulate the matter to herself and bring it before me.

"As to being something, and thereby earning in proportion, that I could, if one should propose it to me, of course undertake, without any special forfeiture of freedom and disparity. In fact, I see here from my centre three hundred and sixty roads radiate, and I hardly know how to choose among them, so that one would choose rather to flatten out the centre into a circumference, or to seek to draw the latter into the former, so as only to continue standing upon it. _Serving_, as the staff-officers of the regiments say, were, to be sure, next to commanding. Thou wilt thyself, as thou writest, take the field. (I have duly received thy letter, and found therein thy shyness and passion all right and good, and thyself entire.) And, in truth, if the Archangel Michael were to array a holy legion, a _legio fulminatrix_ of some weak Septuagints, against the commonwealth of the world,--were he to proclaim a giant war against the domineering populace, in order to drive four or five quarters of the world out of the world or into prison by a sixth (on an island there would be good room for it), and to make all spiritual slaves bodily ones,--be assured, in that happy case I would plant myself foremost in the van, and would bring on the cannon, with the short, flying remark, that, as Handel first introduced cannon into music, so here for the first time, inversely, they were bringing music into cannon. When we at length came back in a body,--when the holy militia again swept hitherward,--then would God's throne stand upon the earth, and holy men, with lofty fires in their hands, should go up, much less to rule therefrom the world's body than to sacrifice to the soul of the worlds.

"With the flower of France, then, thou wilt, as thou writest, for thy individual self, for one man, hereafter stand up. Of course it is hard for me to think highly of five and twenty millions, of which it is true the cubic root must have grown and run up freely, but stem and twig have, after all, for whole centuries, been drying and withering in a slave's dungeon. He who was not, before the Revolution, a silent Revolutionist,--somewhat as Chamfort was, against whose fire-proof breast I once in Paris struck fire with mine, or like Montesquieu and J. J. Rousseau,--let him not, with his silly spatterings, spread himself out far beyond his house-door. Freedom, like everything godlike, is not learned and acquired, but inborn. Of course, all over France and Germany there sit young authors and sons of the muses, who admire and proclaim their own sudden worth, only they are cursedly astonished that they had not earlier felt their sense of freedom,--soft, sickly knaves, who look upon themselves as complete blowing whales, because they have found some bone or other of the said fish, and buckled it to their ribs. I should always, in a war such as these dead times can furnish, believe that I was fighting against fools, indeed, but for fools too.

"The cynical, naive, free nature's-men of the present day--Franks and Germans--are almost like the naked honorables, whom I have seen bathing in the Pleisse, Spree, and Saale. They were, as was said, very naked, white, and natural, and savages, but the black cue-tail of culture fell down over their white backs. Some great, tall men, and fathers of their times, like Rousseau, Diderot, Sidney, Ferguson, Plato, have laid aside their worn-out breeches, and their disciples have taken them and worn them, and because they sat so wide, long, and open upon their diminutive bodies, have called themselves _sansculottes_ (men without breeches).

"Truly, instead of the sword, I could also very well grasp the penknife, and, as writing Cæsar, rise, to better the world, and be useful to it, and use it. I shall always remember the conversation which I once held upon this subject with a universal German librarian of Berlin, as we walked quietly up and down in the menagerie. 'Every one should surely enrich his native land with his talents, which else would lie buried,' said the German librarian. 'To constitute a native land, it is necessary, first and foremost, that there should be some _land_,' said I. 'The Maltese librarian, however, who here speaks, first saw the light at sea under a pitch-black storm. Of knowledge I possess, of course, enough, and know that one has it, like a glassful of cow-pock rationally taken, only to inoculate one's self withal. The scholar, for his part, only swallows it again, in order to give it out from himself, and so it goes on. Thus does the light, like the glimmering brand in the game, "Kill the Fox, and Sell the Skin," pass from hand to hand, until, however, to be sure, the brand goes out in one,--mine,--and there remains.'

"'Droll enough!' said the universal German librarian. 'With such a humor as this only connect the study of bad men and good models, and then you create for us a second Rabener, to scourge fools.' 'Sir,' replied I, in a rage, 'I should prefer to transfer the first blow to the backs of the wise ones and you. Philosophers suffer themselves to be enlightened and washed, have always their insight into things, and are good fools, and just my people. Let a man like a universal German farrier, who takes the pulse of the muses' horse, holds his out to me, and I will feel it with great pleasure. But the rest and refuse of the world, sir? Who can skim off the world sea, if he does not break away its banks? Is it not a sorrow and a shame that all men of genius, from Plato even to Herder, have become noisy, and die printed, and frequently read and studied by the learned rabble and custom-house, without having the least power to change them? Librarian, call and whistle out, I pray you, all that lies in the critical dog-kennels on the watch beside those temples, and ask the whole body of greyhounds, bulldogs, and boar-hounds whether anything else is stirring in their souls than a potentiated maw, instead of a poetic and holy heart? In the mountain-cauldron they see the pudding-pot and brewer's-kettle, in the leaves the spades[112] on the play-cards, and the thunder has for them, as a greater electric spark, a very sour taste, which it afterward infuses into the March beer.'

"'Do you mean any allusion?' he asked. 'Assuredly!' said I. 'But further, Librarian, suppose we too were so lucky as to turn on our heels, and, with one whirl of a breath, to blow over all fools, as if they were infected with an arsenical fume, and lay them dead as a mouse: I cannot see, for all that, where the blessing is coming out, because, besides that we are still standing before each other, and have to breathe on ourselves too, I see, in all corners round about, women sitting, who will hatch the slain world anew.'

"'My dear fellow, best pair of bellows,[113] full of fire,' I continued, 'can this, however, call and stamp one very strongly to be of the satirical handicraft? O no! This is genuine humor with me, perhaps strange madness, also, perhaps--but O, will not the rare joke-maker, even in your uncommon library, resemble the porcupine-man in London (the son) who had the office under the beast-dealer, Brook, of acting as Cicerone to the stranger among the wild stock and through the park of outlandish beasts, and who commenced on the threshold with the observation that he showed himself as one of the species man? Consider it coolly and first of all! I still swing my satirical horsetail loosely and merrily, and perhaps against an occasional horse-fly; but let a book be tied to it, as in Poland they tie a cradle to the cow's tail, and the beast shall rock the cradle of the readers and give pleasure; the tail, however, becomes a slave.'

"'To such images,' said the Librarian, 'sure enough, the cultivated world could never be accustomed by any Rabener or Voltaire, and I now perceive myself that satire is not your department.' 'O, most true!' replied I, and we parted on very good terms.