Part 27

"But to take things seriously, brother, what is there now left for a man (in the shape of prospects as well as of wishes) to whom the age is so over-salted and so bitter and briny as it is to me, and to whom life is made so by living men,--who is annoyed to death with the universal insipid hypocrisy and the glistening polish of the most poisonous wood,--and the horrible commonness of the German life-theatre, and the still greater commonness of the German theatre-life,--and the Pontine marshes of infamous and immoral Kotzebuean weakliness, which no Holy Father can drain and make into sound land,--and the murdered pride, together with the living vanity, that stalk about, so that I, only for the sake of drawing breath, can betake myself for whole hours to the plays of children and of cattle, because there I am assured, at least, that neither of them are coquetting with me, that, on the contrary, they have nothing in mind and are in love with nothing but their work,--what is there left, I asked at the top of this page, for one in whose nostrils, as was said, so many sorts of things stink, and especially this further particular, that improvement is hard, but deterioration not so by any means, because even the best do somewhat impose upon the worst, and thereby on themselves too, and because with their secret cursings of the age, and trimming and truckling to it, they dance at least for gold and glory, and in consideration thereof willingly let themselves be used by the more steady mass, as wine-casks are used for meat-barrels,--what is there, friend, I say, for a man in times when, as now, one makes in print, not _black white_, indeed, but yet gray, and where one, as good catechists must, always avoids precisely the question, yes or no,--what remains except hatred of tyrants and slaves at once, and indignation at the maltreated no less than at the maltreatment? And what shall a man to whom the armor of life in such situations is worked thin or worn thin, seriously resolve upon?"

I, for my part, if the question is about myself, resolved, half in joke, upon inserting a fine-spun, lucid demand in the Imperial Advertiser, which you perhaps have already read in Rome, without even guessing the author.

"'TO ALL WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.

"'It may well be taken for _granted_, that a sound _understanding_ and _reason_ (_mens sana in c. s._), _next_ to a clear conscience, holds among the prizeworthy goods of life the _highest_ place,--a proposition which I venture to assume as an axiom with the readers of this paper. As to what may further be said on the subject, as well by as against Kantners, (so Campe writes it, and much more correctly, instead of _Kantians_,) it does not certainly belong to an entirely _popular paper for the people_ like this present. The undersigned is now in the _sorry_ case that he is obliged here to consult the physicians of Germany and foreign parts. Have sympathy for suffering; send in your answers; say _when_ he is to be (out with it before all Germany!!) completely insane, for as to the beginning thereof the fact has already answered.

"'The _when_, but not the _whether_, it now lies with and upon noble philanthropists to answer. Here are my reasons, Germans! Leaving out of sight that many a reason might be deduced from the very publication of this request,--which, to be sure, decides little,--the following items are noticeable and sure:--1. The motley style of the author itself, which is to be known less from this insertion (composed at very considerable intervals) than from the similarity between his style and that of a very favorite and tasteless writer,[114] which, denoting a gay exuberance of the most wild and strange images in the head, betokens an approaching _crack_, as does a motley play of colors upon glass; 2. The prediction of a scamp,[115] of which he is always thinking,--a circumstance which must have bad effects; 3. His love and study of Swift, whose madness is no novelty to the learned; 4. His complete loss of memory; 5. His frequent bad trick of confounding things dreamed of with things really experienced, and _vice versa_; 6. His misfortune not to know what he writes till he has read it over afterward, because he now leaves out something bearing upon his subject, or again puts in something that has nothing to do with it, as the crossed and blotted manuscript unfortunately best proves; 7. His whole previous life, all his thinking and joking, the details under which head it would be tedious here to specify; and, 8. His most unreasonable dreams. Now the question is, _when_, in such circumstances (that is to say, if no fevers, or cases of love intervene), complete distraction (_idea fixa_, _mania_, _raptus_) comes on. With Swift it fell very late, in old age, when he might already, besides, have been naturally half foolish, and only showed it more afterward. When one considers that Professor Busch once reckoned that his weakness of sight might very well grow upon him from year to year without any serious consequence, because the period of complete blindness fell quite out beyond the end of his whole life, merely upon his grave, so must I assume that my infirmity might swell so gradually, that I should have no occasion for any other _petites maisons_ than the coffin itself; so that I might, in the mean time, have married and held an office as well as any other honest man.

"'My object in this communication is simply to bring myself into correspondence on the subject with some philanthropist or other (he must be, however, a philosophical physician!). My address may be had at the office of the Imperial Advertiser. I make myself, perhaps, more clearly known, bodily and civilly, in this very paper, in the column where I inquire after a wife.

"'Pestitz, February. S----s, L----d, L----r, G----l, S----e.'[116]

"Albano, thou knowest under what bush my serious meaning lies hid. The Advertiser of the Empire and of Schoppe has eight reasons for the thing, which are not only my serious meaning, but my fun. Since the Baldhead announced to me the rising of my mad-dog-star after a year, I have always seen the aurora of this fixed star before me, and seen myself thereupon blind and cowardly at last; I must speak it out. O I had in January, brother, eight frightful dreams, one after another, according to the number of reasons assigned in the Advertiser, and themselves appertaining to the eighth,--dreams wherein a Wild Huntsman of the brain went hunting through the mind, and a stream full of worlds, full of faces, and mountains and hands, billowed along, bearing all before it--I will not distress thee with the details,--Dante and his head were heaven to it.

"Then I grew sullen about the matter of cowardice, and said to myself, 'Hast thou hitherto lived so long, and easily flung overboard the richest cargoes, even this world and the next, and divested thyself so clean of everything, even of glory and of books and of hearts, and kept nothing but thyself, in order to stand up therewith free and naked and cold on the ball of earth before the face of the sun, and now must thou unexpectedly cringe before the mere crazy fixed thought of a crazy fixed idea, which any stroke of a feverish pulse, any blow of a fist, any grain of poison may stamp into thy head, and thus must thou throw away at once thy old, godlike freedom?--Schoppe, I know not at all what I am to think of thee! Whoso still fears anything in the universe, and though it were hell itself, he is still a slave!

"Then the man plucked up his manhood and said, 'I will have what I feared'; and Schoppe stepped up nearer to the broad, high cloud, and lo! it was only (one would gladly have put one's self to bed on the spot) the longest dream of the last, long sleep, no more,--what they call madness. Now if one should go for some time into a mad-house, for example, by way of joke, then might one have the dream, if all other things were as well suited to keep the matter in countenance, as in the case of many a one already. And now, thereinto will I gradually sink,--into the dream, where the point of the dagger is broken off against the future, and the rust rubbed off against the past,--where man, undisturbed and alone, is the reigning House in the shadow-realm and Barataria-island of his ideas, and the John Lackland, and, like a philosopher, _makes_ everything that he _thinks_,--where he also draws his body out of the waves and surges of the external world, and cold and heat and hunger and weak nerves and consumption and dropsy and poverty assail him no more, and no fear, no sin, no error can come near the mind in the mad-house where the three hundred and sixty-five dreams of the nights in the year weave themselves together into a single one, the flying clouds into one great evening red.

"But here lurks something bad! Man must be in a condition to pick out for himself and appropriate with understanding his dream, his good fixed idea,--for a high ant-hill of the most grim and bewitching swims and swarms before him,--otherwise he may fare as ill as if he were still in his senses. I must now, in particular, make my arrangements to find and recognize a good-natured, favorable fixed conceit, which shall deal well with me. If I can bring it about, to be, perhaps, the first man in the crazy house, or the second Momus, or the third Schlegel, or the fourth grace, or the fifth king at cards, or the sixth wise virgin, or the seventh worldly Electorate, or the eighth Wise Man of Greece, or the ninth soul in the ark, or the tenth muse, or the forty-first Academician, or the seventy-first Translator,[117] or, in fact, the universe, or, in fact, the universal spirit himself,--then, certainly, my fortune is made, and life's scorpion robbed of his whole sting. But what golden jewel of a fortune does not in addition thereto still stand open? Can I not be a very highly-favored lover, who sees the sun of a beloved sail all day long through heaven, and looks up and cries, 'I see only thy sunny eye, but it contents me!' Can I not be a deceased person, who, full of disbelief in the next world, has made the journey into it, and now does not know at all which way to turn there for joy? O can I not--for the shorter dream and old age do indeed, of themselves, make one childish--be an innocent child again, that plays and knows nothing, that takes all men for its parents, and that has now a tear-drop hanging before him, formed out of the collapsing gay bubble of life, and again sends out the drop through the pipe, blown up into a glimmering little world-globe of colors?

"It is full midnight; I must now go to church, to hold my vesper-devotions.

"Three weeks later.

"Nota Bene!

"I had been, since thy departure, in a manner damnably unlucky until about one o'clock this morning. At two o'clock I took up my resolution; I have just (at five) taken the pen; and at six, when I have drunken myself full and written myself empty, I take my travelling cane, the point of which, after two months, shall stand sticking in the Pyrenees. O heavens! there must have been something thorny this long time standing by me, which I so long took for a hedgehog, whereas it is the best musical barrel full of pins, out of which I can get nothing less (I turned it a few hours ago) than the best arrangement of flute-pipes, unadulterated music of the spheres, and rotatory music for the bravura-airs of the three men in the furnace, a whole living Vaucanson's wooden flute-player, and unheard-of things wherewith the machine blows till it bursts--not itself, but certain knaves, whereof need I particularly name the Baldhead?

"O listen, youth! It concerns thee. I will now, for thy sake, be what the world calls frank, namely, shameless, for verily I had rather uncover my haunch than my heart, and am less red when I do so.

"There was, once on a time, in old times, a young time, one full of fire and roses, when old Schoppe, for his part, was also young enough; when the alert, contriving bird easily nosed out where the hare lay, and the female hare, too; when the man could still put himself on good terms with the well-known four quarters of the world; or else, just as easily as a steer, thrust with his horn at every fly; when he (now a silver pheasant of cool times) still strode or flew up and down through all Italy as a warm gold pheasant, perched now on Buanorotti's Moses, now on the Colosseum, now on Ætna, now on the dome of St. Peter's, and crowed for joy, flapped his wings, and soared toward heaven.

"It was at this time that the still unpicked storm-bird, hovering one day to and fro through the waterfalls of Tivoli, preciously blest, saw there occasionally, suddenly, overhead, in Vesta's temple, for the first time, nothing more than--the Princess di Lauria, afterward, I conjecture, carried off by a Knight of the Fleece, as his golden fleece. To see her,--to transform one's self from a storm-bird into a cock-pigeon to the chariot of Venus; to tear one's self loose from team and bridle; to fly before that goddess; to float round her in narrower and narrower circles,--all this was not one thing, but three things. I had first to grow and paint myself up into a bird of Paradise, in order to fly into a Paradise; that is to say, I had to learn painting, in order to be permitted her presence.

"When at length I had the portrait-pencil and profile-scissors in my power, and one morning appeared with both before the Princess and the old Prince, I had to paint and cut the Prince himself; his daughter had already been married and secretly travelled off; for thy grandfather (unlike others who prophesy their movements beforehand), prophesies his only afterward, and opens his mouth merely to hear.

"I soon cut out the man,--packed up,--went out into all the world. After nearly three years I stood again on the tenth terrace of Isola Bella, quite unexpectedly, before the Countess Cesara. Heaven and hell! what a woman was thy mother! She threw everybody into both of _those places_ at once; I know not whether she did thy father, too. The writer of this stood in his last ornithological transformation before her, as silent pearl-cock (guinea-peacock), (tears must be the pearls), and got a likeness of her after a few weeks.

"She had two children, thee--I clearly remember thy then already sharpened contour--and thy sister, the so-called Severina. Thy father was not there, but his wax image was, by which I instantly recognized him eighteen years later in Rome. Thy sister, too, was repeated in wax; only thou not. A wax figure, like thee at a distance, which illusively prefigured thee as a man always held up before thee, the brother of thy father, who was there, too, as a file-leader of thy future, saying, 'Here thou art, cubed beforehand, and already forced up into full size, filled out from flask into cask,'--seeking thus to enkindle thee, so that thou mightest grow up and be a man. They had a uniform put on thee, like that which the wax man wore,--I know not of what sort. Then didst thou, striding around thine own micromegas, boldly call him out, out of the future into the present. Now thou knowest what thou hast become, and mayst well, and with more right, look down in thy turn as proudly upon the little one, as the little one formerly looked up to the great one. I could never approve in thy uncle this machine for spiritual ductility; besides, I have for all wax puppets such an abominating, shuddering dread.

"My only object on the beautiful island was to get away from it, and from the fair islander, so soon as I had painted her. 'Stupid century,' said I, 'do I then want anything more of thee?' She sat to me gladly, as upon a throne. I, half in tempest, half in rainbow, sketched her, and naturally had to leave the picture uncopied. But, young man, some letters, which formed my name at that time, and which I wrote and concealed on the picture in the region of the heart under the water-colors, may serve thee as a Tetragrammaton, eleven Dominical letters and mothers of the reading (_matres lectionis_) of thy existence, in case I reach Spain safely, and in Valencia wash away on the likeness the coloring from my letters, and can now read in its heart, _Löwenskiold_. So was I then called in Danish.

"Then is the Countess Linda de Romeiro, without mercy, thy sister Severina. God grant only that thou mayst not haply have seen and married her before the receipt of this letter. She must, according to what I heard yesterday, have set out for Italy.

"For when I saw the Countess Linda here for the first time, it was to me, in the market square of Pestitz, as if I were standing up on the terrace of Isola Bella, and beholding the Alps, thy mother, my youth, hardly three paces distant from me! By Heaven, just as if in the pier-mirror of time the white rosy image of thy buried mother had been snatched at once out of the depths of distance, and brought close to the glass, and now hung before it in blooming redness, so stood Linda before me! For the divine resemblance of the two is so great! No Arian _Homoiousion_[118a] whatever, but a complete Orthodox _Homoousion_[118b] is to be believed here. Thus would I write to thee, hadst thou the necessary church-history at hand for the understanding of such an allusion.

"I painted Linda, too, this winter. What she related to me of the character of her mother was entirely the same, as I had been able to report to her of the character of the Princess di Lauria.

"Linda's father, or Herr von Romeiro, would never appear, and still, I hear, has not yet disappeared.

"Linda's mother called herself a Roman and a relative of the Prince di Lauria.

"In Spain, where I have twice been and inquired, I never could find a residence of a lady by the name of Cesara.

"Trillion spiders'-strands of probability spin themselves into an Ariadne's thread in the Labyrinth.

"A new, unknown sister is introduced to thee in the Gothic house with veils and in mirrors.

"And indeed the illusion is produced upon thee through real mirrors by the honest Baldhead,--who wants something more to be a Christ's-head than the locks, and whom I in autumn called a dog.

"The aforesaid Baldhead, or head of Anubis, stood, then, (Heaven and the Devil best know why, but I believe the fact,) as Father of Death on Isola Bella; he lay as travelling journeyman on the Prince's grave and in every sort of ambush, to give thee thy sister for wife--in case I suffered it; but so soon as ever I have sealed this, I sally forth to Spain, break into Linda's picture cabinet, look after a certain likeness of her mother, the place and chamber whereof I have taken pains clearly to ascertain; and if it is the picture by me, then all is right and the thunder may strike into the midst of the whole business.

"The Baldhead himself is a fifth quarter of a proof,--he is one of the few men who, when hardly of a spider's thickness, wickedly made water in their mothers' womb.

"Perhaps I may find thy uncle, who knew me again here, he said, and who has actually gone off to Valencia.[119]

"O Heavens! if I should succeed (but why not, since my tongue remains of iron and this leaf comes, in iron, under charge of the honest Wehrfritz, whose heart is an old German, and does not _Germany_ rightly represent the _heart_ in the virgin Europa?)--if, I write, I should succeed in kindling a fire upon a cursed mystery of a straw-door, tearing all up and down and away, blind gates and sacrificial gates, and a strong light should fall in upon the brave Linda and the brave youth, illuminating the neighboring Baldhead (perhaps somebody else), who even in the darkness will fain make a slanting thrust with two grafting and slaughtering knives down into a brother and sister----

"If I should once succeed in this, that is to say, in the harvest month,--for then I should come back again to Pestitz and have the likeness in my pocket,--and I should have boldly avenged myself and two innocent beings upon guilty ones: then would I hold myself fully at liberty to seize hold of my head and say, '_À bas, gare_, heads off!' To which, certainly, (since, indeed, the question is not of any stupid packing off of the body by a Werther-powder, but only of the purpose to lose, upon occasion, what competent judges call my understanding,) my friends must agree, because they would still have me (since in this case the body is still retained), although as the night-piece of a man, because I would then carry on a rational discourse upon any subject (only let no one attack the fixed idea!) as well as another man, and certainly should not forget to sprinkle over it, now and then, a good moral joke (verily the true spice), and because the state should find me day and night equipped and saddled to save it, after the example of the Berlin Bedlamites, who once, upon a fire breaking out in the house, extinguished it and saved the house in the best style, and I would come in at the gap and the breach, when the dark intervals of its other civil servants could not otherwise be filled up than with our lucid ones.

"Farewell! I break off. The world smiles upon me gayly. In Spain I shall find a bit of youth again--as in this writing.

"Schoppe.

"Apropos! Has the Baldhead nowhere run against thee? I cannot tell thee how I labor now daily to impress upon myself and appropriate beforehand a real horror and dread at the wish of running him down hereafter in my madness, in order that afterward the possible act may not, as a late fruit of my previous rational, moral state, be reckoned over against me into the other.

"_Annihilate this letter!_"

When Albano raised his fiery eyes from the letter, he stood before Lilar under a high triumphal arch, and the sun went down in splendor behind Elysium. "Dost thou not know me?" asked Linda, in a low tone, who stood beside him in travelling dress, weeping in bright love and bliss; and Julienne came flying out and making a sign of caution to both, from the entrance thicket of the flute-dell, and cried, as a cunning pretext: "Linda, Linda, hearest thou not the flutes, then?" And Albano had forgotten the painful letter.

123. CYCLE.