Part 21

"The same," replied Albano,--but he meant it well,--"holds of the animals: the swan yonder is like the one in Paradise." She took it just as it was meant; but the reason was the pious Father Spener, her teacher; for at Albano's question touching Lilar's abundance of beautiful and gentle creatures, she answered: "The old Lord loved these creatures with a real tenderness, and they could often bring him even to tears. The pious Father thinks so too; he says, since they do everything at God's behest by instinct, accordingly it seems to him, when he contemplates the care of the parents for their young, just as if the Infinitely Gracious One were doing it all himself." They ascended now a half-shaded bridge, over a long water-mirror hung round with quivering poplars, wherein Liana's emblem, namely, a swan, slept on the water-rings, the bent neck beautifully nestled on the back, the head upon the wing, and gently wafted more by the breezes than by the waves. "So reposes the innocent soul!" said Alban, and thought, perhaps, of Liana, but without the courage to confess it. "And thus it awakes!" Liana added with emotion, as this white magnified dove slowly raised its head from the wing; for she thought of her mother's waking on this very day.

Chariton, as if all made up of salient points, was continually turning to Liana, and asking: "Shall we go this way? or in through there? or out through here? If my lord were only here! he knows all about it." She would gladly have led him round every fount and every flower, and looked into the youth's face as lovingly as into that of her friend. Liana said to her, on the cross way at the bridge: "I think the flute-dell yonder, with the gleaming gold ball, will perhaps be pleasantest, especially for a lover of music; and, besides, they will look for me there, when they bring the harp to my mother." She had promised to come back to her as soon as that arrived. She shunned every path toward the south, where Tartarus frowned behind its high curtain.

Liana spoke now of the contest between painting and music, and of Herder's charming official report of this strife. She, although a votary of the pencil, gave in her vote, as was natural to the female and the lyric heart, entirely for tones, and Albano, although a good pianist, was rather for colors, "This magnificent landscape," said Albano, "is in fact a picture, and so is every fair human form." "Were I blind," said Chariton, naively, "then I should not see my lovely Liana." She replied: "My teacher, the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdörfer, also set painting above music. But to me, when I hear music, it is as if I heard _a loud past_ or _a loud future_. Music has something holy; unlike the other arts, it cannot paint anything but what is good."[90] Verily, she was herself a moral church-music, the angel-stop in the organ. The pure Albano felt, by her side, the necessity and the existence of a yet tenderer purity; and it seemed to him as if a man might injure, even unconsciously, a soul like this, whose understanding was hardly anything more than a finer feeling,--as window-glasses of pure transparency are often broken, because they appear as if they were not. He turned round mechanically, because he was always one step in advance, and not only the blooming Lilar, but also Liana's full form, shone at once and transfigured into his soul. To clasp her to his heart was not now his yearning, but to snatch this being, who had so often suffered, from every flame; to rush for her, sword in hand, upon her foe, to bear her mightily through the deep, cold hell-floods of life;--that would have illuminated his existence.

45. CYCLE.

They saw, already, some moist lights, of the high fountains that leaped from above down into the flute-dell, flickering aloft before them, when Liana, contrary to Chariton's expectation, begged them both to go with her into a pathless oak-grove;--she looked upon him so contentedly and open-heartedly as she said it, and without that womanly suspicion of being misunderstood! In the dusky grove rose a wild rock, with the words, "To my friend Zesara." The late Princess had caused this memorial Alp to be erected to Albano's father. Struck, agitated, with smarting eyes the son stood before it, and leaned upon it, as on Gaspard's breast, and pressed his arm up against the sharp stone, and cried, with the deepest emotion, "O thou good father!" His whole youth, and Isola Bella, and the future, fell at once upon a heart which the whole morning had wrought upon, and it could not longer restrain the pressing tears. Chariton was serious, Liana continued faintly to smile,--but like an angel in prayer. How often, ye fair souls! have I, in this chapter, been compelled to constrain my deeply-impressed heart, which would fain address and disturb you: but I will constrain it again!

They stepped silently back into daylight. But Albano's waves of emotion never fell suddenly; they expanded themselves into broad rings. His eye was not yet dry when he came into the heavenly vale,--into that resting-place of the wishes, where dreams might have gone round freely, without sleep. Chariton--from her earnestness much more busy--had, after a questioning glance at Liana to know whether she might, (namely, let certain machines play,) hastened on before them. They passed through the blooming veil, which retired as they approached;--and Albano beheld now the youthful dream of an enchanted valley in Spain, that entangled one in a net of scents and shadows, set out livingly on the earth before him. On the mountains bloomed orange-walks, the stands hidden in the higher terrace,--everything which bears great blossoms on its twigs, from the Linden even to the grape-vine and the apple-tree, drank down below at the brook, or climbed or crowned the two long mountains, which wound, with their blossoms, around the flowers of the low ground, and mutually inclined themselves, to promise an endless valley; fountains placed on the slopes of the mountains threw behind one another silver rainbows over the trees into the brook; in the east burned the gold globe beside the sun,--the last mirror of his dying evening-glance. "Receive my thanks, thou noble old man!" Albano was continually repeating.

Liana went with him along the western ridge as far as a bank covered with blossoms, under the arch that fluttered above, where one may survey the first and second windings of the vale, and, over in the north, high pines, and behind them, the spire of a church-tower, and below, an auricula meadow, while Chariton, opposite them on the eastern height, behind a statue of a Muse,--for the Nine Muses beamed from the green Tempe,--seemed to be winding up weights and pressing springs. "My brother," Liana, in a low tone, broke the silence, going on meanwhile with the knitting-work which she had taken from her friend, "wishes very much to see you." The soul of Albano, now awakened with all its holy faculties, felt itself wholly like her, and free from embarrassment, and he said, "Even in my childhood I loved your _Charles_ like a brother; I have as yet no friend." The tenderly-moved souls did not remark that the word Charles came from the letter.

All at once single flute-tones floated up overhead on the mountains and out of the bowers,--more and more continually joined them,--they quivered through each other in a beautiful confusion,--at last flute-choirs broke forth mightily on all sides, like angels, and soared toward heaven;--they proclaimed how sweet is spring, and how joy weeps, and how our heart longs, and then vanished overhead in the blue spring,--and the nightingales flew up from the cool flowers and alighted on the bright tree-tops, and cried joyfully into the triumphal songs of May,--and the fanning of the morning-breeze swayed the lofty, glimmering rainbows to and fro, and threw them far into the flowers.

Liana's work sank out of her hands into her lap, and, in a way peculiar to herself, while she leaned her head forward like a Muse, she cast her eye upward, fixing it upon a dreamy distance; her blue eye glimmered as the blue cloudless ether overflows with soft lightning in the tepid summer-night;--but the youth's spirit blazed up in its emotion, like the sea in a storm. She drew down the black veil,--certainly not against sun and air alone; and Albano, with an inner world pictured on his agitated form, played--a sublime contrast to himself--with the ringlets of the little Helena, whom he had drawn towards him, and looked, with big tears, into her simple, little face, which understood him not.

At this moment the mother came hastening over into the silence, and asked, in a very friendly manner, how he liked it all. His other ecstasies resolved themselves into a commendation of the tones; and the dear Greek herself extolled what she had often heard, more and more strongly, as if it were new to her, and listened most intently with him.

A maiden with the harp looked in through the entering-thicket of the vale, and Liana saw the sign, and rose up. As she was on the point of raising her veil and departing, the great-hearted youth bethought him of his confession: "I have read your to-day's letter,--by heaven, I must say it now!" said he. She drew the veil no higher, and said, with trembling voice, "You surely have not read it! you could not have been in my chamber?" and looked at Chariton. He replied, he had not read it all, but yet a good deal of it; and related in three words a much milder history than Liana could have hoped. "The naughty Pollux!" Chariton kept saying. "O God, forgive me, I pray you, this sin of ignorance!" said Albano. She threw back the dark veil for a second, and said, with heightened color and downcast look, appeased, perhaps, by her joy at the agreeable disappointment of her worse expectation: "It belonged merely to a female friend; and you will perhaps, if I ask you, not read anything again." And during the fall of the veil her eye looked up soothingly and forgivingly, and with her beloved she slowly departed from him.

O thou holy soul, love my youth! Art thou not the first love of this heart of fire, the morning-star in the early dawn of his life, thou, this good, pure, and tender one? O, the first love of man, the Philomel among the spring-tones of life, is always indeed, because we so err, so hardly treated by Fate, and always killed and buried, but now, if for once, two good souls, in the white-blossomed May of life, bearing the sweet tears of spring in their bosoms, with the glistening buds and hopes of a whole youth, and with the first, unprofaned longing, and with the firstling of life as well as of the year, the forget-me-not of love in their hearts,--if such kindred beings could meet each other and trust each other, and in the blissful month swear a union for all the wintry months of this earthly time; and if each heart could say to the other,--"Hail to me, that I found thee in the holiest season of life, before I had erred; and that I can die and not have loved anyone like thee!"--O Liana! O Zesara! how fortunate must your beautiful souls be!

The youth lingered a few minutes longer in the magic world that was working around him, whose tones and fountains murmured like the waters and machines in the solitary mine; but at last there was something violent in the solitary monotone and glimmer of the valley, wherein he had been left so alone. He hurried on by the nearest way, sprinkled occasionally with veins of water, through the curtain of foliage, and stepped out once more into the free morning earth of Lilar. How strange! how distant! how changed was all! Into his wide open inner world the outer world poured in with full streams. He himself was changed; he could not go into the night of the oak-grove, to the rocky emblem of his father. When he was over the bridge that stands in the twigs, he saw the gentle company slowly walking over the broad silver-white garden-path, and he blessed Liana, who could now press to her agitated heart the heart of a mother. The little one often whirled round dancing, and perhaps saw him, but no one turned back. The harp, carried along after them, was swept by the eastern breeze, and it snatched tones from the awakened strings as from an Æolian harp, and bore them onward with it; and the youth listened with melancholy to the receding murmur, as of swans that hasten away over the lands, while behind him the empty vale continued to speak lonesomely in the fluting pastoral-songs of love, and hovering tones, gliding along after him, came faintly and dimly to his ear. But he went back up the mountain of the altar; and as he looked over the bright region, and saw still the white forms moving in the distance, he let his whole, beautiful soul dissolve itself in weeping. And here close we the richest day of his youthful life!

But, ye good beings, who have a heart, and find none, or who have the loved objects only _in_, and not _on_, your bosoms, am I not, like the Greeks, drawing all these pictures of bliss, as it were, on the marble sarcophagi of your changed, slumbering past? Am I not the _Archimime_, who, following after, mimics before you the mouldering forms which your soul has buried? And thou, younger or poorer man, to whom time, instead of a past, has only given a future,--wilt thou not one day say to me, I should have concealed from thee many blessed forms, like holy bodies, for fear thou wouldst worship them? and wilt thou not add, that, had it not been for these Phœnix-portraits, thou mightst have cherished lighter wishes, and had many fulfilled? And how much pain have I then caused you all! But myself, too; for how could it fare better with me than with the rest of you?

Your conclusion would, accordingly, be this: since you can never really live pleasant days so pleasantly as they shine afterward in _memory_, or beforehand in _hope_, you would, therefore, rather have the present day without either; and since only at the two poles of the elliptic arch of time one can catch the low music of the spheres, and in the centre of the present nothing, you would, therefore, rather stay and listen in the middle; but as to the past and the future,--neither of which can any man live to see, because they are only two different poesy-gardens of our heart, an Iliad and Odyssey, a Milton's Paradise Lost and Regained,--you will not listen to them at all, or have anything to do with them, in order that you may nestle down, deaf and blind, in an animal present.

By Heaven! sooner give me the finest, strongest poison of ideals, so that I may at least not snore away my moment, but dream it away, and then die on it! But the very dying would be my own fault; for whoso would fain translate _poetic_ dreams into waking reality[91] is more foolish than the North American, who realizes his _nightly_ ones: he proposes, like a Cleopatra, to pervert the splendor of the pearls of dew into a refreshing drink, and the rainbow of fancy to a permanent arch, bridging over the rain-waters. Yes, O God, Thou wilt and canst give us one day a reality, which shall embody and redouble and satisfy our present ideals,--as thou hast, indeed, already proved to us, in our love here below, which intoxicates us with moments in which the inner becomes the outer, and the Ideal, Reality; but _then_--no, for the Then of the life hereafter, this little _Now_, has no voice; but if, I say, here below fiction could become fact, and our pastoral poetry pastoral life, and every dream a day,--ah, even then would desire still remain enhanced only, not fulfilled: the higher reality would only beget a higher poetry, and higher remembrances and hopes;--in _Arcadia_ we should pine after _Utopia_; and on every sun we should see an unfathomable starry heaven retiring before us, and we should--sigh as we do here!

FOOTNOTES:

[82] They have a whole room for winter quarters, of which in summer the windows are merely thrown open.

[83] Such was the general title of the secluded Emeritus, the court preacher, Spener, who resided there, and who was related to the noble old pious Spener, not only on the paternal side, but also on the spiritual.

[84] They had these names as twins.

[85] The grammar seems to require "a still almost maidenly looking woman of seventeen years," but the translator did not dare to think Jean Paul could have meant that, consistently with the ages of the three children, though, as an Oriental, Chariton may have married _very_ young.

[86] The Tartarus with Julienne's father's heart.

[87] Such is the name of that mount which Albano found in the well-known spring night.

[88] Linda de Romeiro.

[89] The reason is, that after her recovery she was still short-sighted, and to a short-sighted person the dew is so much the more brilliant.

[90] This proposition, that pure music, without text, cannot represent anything immoral, deserves to be more investigated and developed by me.

[91] It cannot be objected to me, that in fact the scenes of my book have been actually experienced, and that no one would wish to experience any better; for in the representation of fancy reality assumes new charms, charms with which every other faded present magically glimmers through the memory. I appeal here to the sensations of the very characters who figure in _Titan_, whether they would not in my book--in case they should ever light upon it--find in the pictured scenes, which, however, are their own, a higher enchantment, which has gone from the real, and which, to be sure, might produce such an effect--but altogether illusorily--that my characters could wish to live _their own life_.

NINTH JUBILEE.

PLEASURE OF COURT-MOURNING.--THE BURIAL.--ROQUAIROL.--LETTER TO HIM.--THE SEVEN LAST WORDS IN THE WATER.--THE SWEARING OF ALLEGIANCE.--MASQUERADE.--PUPPET MASQUERADE.--THE HEAD IN THE AIR, TARTARUS, THE SPIRIT-VOICE, THE FRIEND, THE CATACOMB, AND THE TWO UNITED MEN.

46. CYCLE.

Ripening love is the stillest: the shady flowers in this spring, as in the other, shun sunlight. Albano spun himself deep into his Sunday-dreams, and drew, as well as he could, the green poppy-leaf of reality into his web,--namely, the Monday, which was to show him, at the state-burial of the Prince, the brother of his maiden-friend.

This day of festive sadness, at which the third but greatest princely coffin was to be conveyed to its repose, at last broke, and had been made momentous already by the preparatory festival, at which the two first coffins, together with the old man, had been interred, somewhat as virtues are buried in the very beginning of a century, and not till its end their empty names and wrappages and half-bindings. At the rehearsal- and prefiguring-burial of the illustrious deceased, the old pious Father Spener too, his last friend, had gone down with him into the vault, in order to have opened the wooden and tin casing of the run-down wheel-work, and to cover over upon the still breast of the dear sleeper his youthful portrait and his own with the colored side down, without speaking or weeping; and the court made much of this morning- and evening-offering of friendship.

Everything swells up monstrously for man, of which they are obliged to talk a long while,--all Pestitz societies were auxiliary funeral societies, and full of burial-marshals,--every scaffolding of the neighboring future was a mausoleum, and every word a funeral sermon or an epitaph upon the pale man. Sphex, as his physician in ordinary, rejoiced in his part of the sorrow and the procession,--the Lector had already tried on the court mourning, in the place of his cast-off winter-garb, and found it to fit,--the court-marshal had not a minute's rest, and the last day, which opens all graves and closes none, had come to him now before its time,--the Minister, Von Froulay, whom the cold Luigi willingly left to do everything, was, as a lover of old princely pomp, and as convoking director of the present occasion, as much in heaven himself as was the illustrious deceased,--the women had risen from their beds this morning as to a new life, because to these busy _drapery-paintresses_ a long chain of coats and of their wearers probably weighs as much as a span of blood-related horses does to their husbands.

Albano waited impatiently at the window for Liana's brother, and loved the invisible one more and more ardently; like two connected wings, Friendship and Love stirred and lifted each other within him. The mourning-spool, namely, the empty coffin, had been fixed in Tartarus, and was gradually wound off, and now the dark mourning-ribbon would soon be ready to be stretched to the upper city. Already, for an hour and a half before the arrival of the procession, the saltpetre of the female crowd had been crystallized on the walls and the windows. Sara, the Doctor's wife, came up with the children and the deaf Cadaver into Schoppe's chamber, the second door of which stood open into Albano's, and, with an ogling, amorous look, spoke in to the Count: "Up here one can overlook the whole much better, and his excellency will pardon it." "You just stay together there, and don't you trouble M. the Count," said she, turning back to the children, and was on the point of entering the Count's chamber, at whose threshold Schoppe, just coming from Albano, caught and stopped her.

Now Sara was one of those common women who are more carried away themselves by their own charms than successful in carrying others away therewith. She would merely set her face in the chair, and let it kindle and singe and burn, while she on her part (relying on her _lazy Jack_[92] of a visage) quietly and coolly worked away at other things, either simple trash or vile scandal; and then when she had been a _clothes'-rod_ of women, as Attila was a Heaven's rod of nations, she looked round and surveyed the damage which the fire of her face had done in the male tinder-boxes. Particularly on the rich and beautiful Count had she an eye,--under Cupid's bandage. Her head was full of good physiognomical fragments; and Lavater's objection, that most physiognomists unfortunately study nothing in the whole man but the face, could not hit in any point her pure physiognomical sense.