Titan: A Romance Volume I Part 19

[112] Autarchs; for monarchs or sole-rulers are etymologically distinguished from self-rulers.

[113] Ghosts of the dead.--TR.

[114] Does he allude to the frightful white form, in my "vision of annihilation"?

[115] A phrase applied to the form of a dying man. [Properly a distemper which gives one a deathly look. See Bailey's Dictionary.--TR.]

[116] The _lapis infernalis_, or silver cautery.--TR.

[117] Frederick's Honor.

[118] Linen cloths smeared with aromatic ointment, anciently placed on the heads of children just born or baptized.--TR.

[119] An allusion to a well-known instrument of the Inquisition.--TR.

TENTH JUBILEE.

ROQUAIROL'S ADVOCATUS DIABOLI.[120]--THE FESTIVAL DAY OF FRIENDs.h.i.+P.

53. CYCLE.[121]

Not toward the years of childhood, but toward the season of youth, should we revert the most longingly, if we came forth out of the latter as innocent as out of the former. It is the festival day of our life, when all avenues are full of music and finery, and all houses are hung round with golden tapestries, and when Existence, Art, and Virtue, like gentle _G.o.ddesses_, still woo us with caresses; whereas, in after years, they summon us, like stern _G.o.ds_, with commands! And at this period Friends.h.i.+p dwells as yet in a serenely open Grecian temple, not, as later, in a narrow Gothic chapel.

Richly and majestically did life now glitter around Albano, covered with islands and s.h.i.+ps; he had his whole breast full of friends.h.i.+p and youth, and could now let the impetuous energy of love, which on Isola Bella had rebounded from a statue, from his father, burst freely and joyously upon a man who appeared to him fully as his youthful dream had sketched him. He could not let go Charles for a day; he laid bare to him his soul and his whole life--(only Liana's name retired deeper and deeper into his heart); all models of friends.h.i.+p among the ancients he was fain to copy and renew, and do and suffer everything for his loved friend; his being was now a double-choir; he drank in every joy with two hearts; a double heaven embosomed his life in pure ether.

When, on the following day, he met the form of the new friend,--which was all that remained to him of the nightly show-piece of the spirit-world, as a pale moon is left by the extinguished stars of night,--and when he found him so bald-headed and white, as the fiery smoke-column of an aetna ascends gray in the daytime, he seemed to see the whilom suicide standing before him, the more freely, but all the more warmly, did he stretch his hand across to the solitary being, who, after his leap over life, dwelt now only on his grave, as on a remote island. Others, for this very reason, would draw their hand away: the baffled self-murderer, who has made a rent in this fair, firm life, comes back from his death-hour as a strange, uncomfortable ghost, whom we can trust no longer, because in his ungovernableness he may at any moment play again the give-away game with the human form.

Therefore Albano saw in the chaotic life of the Captain only the disorder of a being who is packing up and marching away. When he stepped for the first time into his friend's summer-chamber, he saw, of course, a servant's livery wardrobe, a theatrical green-room, and an officer's tent before him at once. On the table lay confused tribes of books, as on a battle-field, and on Schiller's Tragedies the Hippocratic face of the masquerade, and on the Court Almanac a pistol; the book-shelf was occupied by the sword-belt, together with its wash-ball of chalk, a chocolate-mill, an empty candlestick, a pomatum-box, matches, the wet hand-towel and the dried mouth-napkin; the gla.s.shouse of a run-down hour-gla.s.s, and the was.h.i.+ng-and the writing-table stood open, on which latter I, to my astonishment, look in vain for any support whatever, or writing-sand on it; the comb-cloth, or powder-mantle, leaned back on the ottoman, and a long neck-cloth rode on the stove-screen, and the antlers on the wall had two hats with feathers shoved over the right and left ears; letters and visiting-cards were impaled like b.u.t.terflies on the window-curtains. I should not have been capable of writing a billet there, much less a Cycle.

Is there not, however, a sunny-bright, free-fluttering age, when one loves to see everything which announces roving unrest, striking of tents, and nomadic liberty, and when one would be thankful to keep house in a travelling-carriage, and write and sleep therein? And does not one in those years look upon precisely such a students' chamber as this as a spiritual students' endowment of genius, and every chaos as an infusorial one full of life? Forgive my hero this truant time; there was still something n.o.ble in his nature, that kept him back from becoming an imitator of what he eulogized.

As, after the melting away of a late winter, all at once the green garment of earth flutters up high in flowers and blossoms, so in the warm air of friends.h.i.+p and fancy did Albano's nature start up at once into luxuriant verdure and bloom. Charles had and understood all states of the heart; he created them dramatically in himself and others; he was a second Russia, which harbors all climates, from France even to Nova Zembla, and wherein, for that very reason, every one finds his own: he was everything to everybody, although for himself nothing. He could throw himself into any character, although for that very reason it sometimes took his fancy only to carry out the most convenient. The girths, belly-bands, cruppers, and saddle-straps of court, town, and city life, his Bucephalus had long since cleared; and if the Count was vexed every day at the lingual leading-string of the Lector, who p.r.o.nounced everything correctly.--Kanaster instead of Knaster, Juften instead of Juchten, Funfzig instead of Fufzig, and Barbieren (the _r_ in which I myself take to be a stupid barbarism),--Roquairol was a free-thinker, even to the degree of being a hectoring free-speaker; and spoke, according to an expression of his own, which was at the same time an example of the fact, "right out of his liver and jaw." He was annoyed that there should still cleave to the Count a certain epic dignity of speech acquired from books. They often thought over and cursed with one another the pitiful bald life which one would lead, who, like the Lector, should live as a well-bred citizen of extraction, have conduite and a nice dress, and a tolerable dapper knowledge of several departments, and for refreshment his table-wine, and taste for excellent masters in painting and other arts, and should advance to higher posts merely as stepping-stones to still higher, and yet, after all this, have to stretch himself out, all frizzled and washed, in his coffin, in order that the gigantic body-world might, forsooth, hand over its Pest.i.tz representative also to the sublime world of spirits. No, said Albano, rather throw a dark mountain-chain of sorrows into the dead level of life, that one may, at least, have a prospect and something great.

But Roquairol was not the man that he seemed to him;--friends.h.i.+p has its deceptions as well as love;--and often, when he had long looked upon this love-drunken, high-hearted youth, with his chaste maiden-cheeks and proud, manly brow, who reposed such a confidence upon _his_ wavering soul, and whose heart stood so wide open, and the holiness of whose fancy even he envied, then did the delusion of the n.o.ble one move him even to pain, and his heart struggled to break forth, and longed to say to him, with tears: Albano, I am not worthy of thee! But in that case I lose him, he always added; for he shunned the moral orthodoxy and decision of a man, who was not, like a maiden, to be provoked and repelled and won back again, all in sport. And yet the day came--the momentous day for both--when he did it. How could he ever have resisted _Fancy_, when he only resisted _by and through_ Fancy? I do him half injustice: hear the better angel, who opens his mouth.

Roquairol is a child and victim of the age. As the higher youth of our times are so early and richly overhung with the roses of joy that, like the inhabitants of spice-islands, they lose their smell, and by and by put under their heads a Sybarite-pillow of roses, drink rose-sirup and bathe themselves in rose-oil,[122] until nothing more is left them thereof for a stimulus except the thorns, so are most of them--and often the very same ones--stuffed full in the beginning, by their philanthropic teachers, with the _fruits_ of knowledge, so that they come soon to desire only the honey-thick extracts, then the cider and perry thereof, until at last they ruin themselves with the brandy made of that. Now if, in addition to this, they have, like Roquairol, a fancy that makes their life a naphtha-soil, out of which every step draws fire, then does the flame, into which the sciences are thrown, and the consumption become still greater. For these burnt-out prodigals of life there is then no new pleasure and no new truth left, and they have no old one entire and fresh; a dried-up future, full of arrogance, disgust with life, unbelief and contradiction, lies round about them. Only the wing of fancy still continues to quiver on their corpse.

Poor Charles! Thou didst still more! Not merely truths, but feelings also, he antic.i.p.ated. All grand situations of humanity, all emotions to which Love and Friends.h.i.+p and Nature exalt the heart, all these he went through in poems earlier than in life, as play-actor and theatre-poet earlier than as man, earlier on the sunny side of fancy than on the stormy side of reality; hence, when they at last appeared, living, in his breast, he could deliberately seize them, govern them, kill them, and stuff them well for the refrigeratory of future remembrance. The unhappy love for Linda de Romeiro, which, at a later period, would perhaps have steeled him, opened thus early all the veins of his heart, and bathed it warmly in its own blood; he plunged into good and bad dissipations and amours, and afterward represented on paper or on the stage everything that he repented or blessed; and every representation made him grow more and more hollow, as abysses have been left in the sun by ejected worlds. His heart could not do without the holy sensibilities; but they were simply a new luxury, a tonic, at best; and precisely in proportion to their height did the road run down the more abruptly into the slough of the unholiest ones. As in the dramatic poet angelically pure and filthy scenes stand in conjunction and close succession, so in his life; he foddered, as in Surinam, his hogs with pine-apples; like the elder giants, he had soaring wings and creeping snakes'-feet.[123]

Unfortunate is the female soul which loses its way, and is caught in one of these great webs stretched out in mid-heaven; and happy is she, when she tears through them, unpoisoned, and merely soils her bees'-wings.

But this all-powerful fancy, this streaming love, this softness and strength, this all-mastering coolness and collectedness, will overspread every female Psyche with webs, if she neglects to brush away the first threads. O that I could warn you, poor maidens, against such condors, which fly up with you in their claws! The heaven of our days hangs full of these eagles. They love you not, though they think so; because, like the blest in Mahomet's paradise, instead of their lost arms of love, they have only wings of fancy. They are like great streams, warm only along the sh.o.r.e, and in the middle cold.

Now enthusiast, now libertine in love, he ran through the alternation between ether and slime more and more rapidly, till he mixed them both.

His blossoms shot up on the varnished flower-staff of the Ideal, which, however, rotted, colorless, in the ground. Start with horror, but believe it,--he sometimes plunged on purpose into sins and torments, in order, down there, by the pangs of remorse and humiliation, to cut into himself more deeply the oath of reformation; somewhat as the physicians, Darwin and Sydenham, a.s.sert that _strengthening_ remedies (Peruvian bark, steel, opium) work more powerfully when _weakening_ ones (bleeding, emetics, &c.) have been previously prescribed.

External relations might, perhaps, have helped him somewhat, and the vow of poverty might have made the two other vows lighter for him; had he been sold as a negro slave, his spirit would have been a free white, and a work-house would have been to him a purgatory. It was for this reason the early Christians always gave those who were possessed some occupation or other, e. g. sweeping out the churches,[124] &c. But the lazy life of an officer wrought upon him to make him only still more vain and bold.

So stood matters in his breast, when he came to Albano's,--hunting like an epicure after love, but merely to play with it; with an untrue heart, whose feeling was more lyric poetry, than real, sound being; incapable of being true, nay, hardly capable of being false, because every truth a.s.similated to the poetic representation, and this again to that; able much more easily on the stage and at the tragic writing-desk to hit the true language of pa.s.sion than in life, as Boileau could only imitate dancers, but never a dance; indifferent, contemptuous, and decided against the exhausted, worthless life, wherein all that is settled and indispensable--hearts and joys and truths--melted down and floated about; with reckless energy, capable of daring and sacrificing anything which a man respects, because he respected nothing, and ever looking round after his iron patron-saint, Death; faint-hearted in his resolutions, and even in his errors fluctuating, and yet devoid only of the _tuning-hammer_, and not of the _tuning-fork_, of the finest morality; and, in the midst of the roar of pa.s.sion, standing in the bright light of reflection, as the victim of the hydrophobia knows his madness, and gives warning of it.

Only _one_ good angel had not flown with the rest,--Friends.h.i.+p. His so often blown-up and collapsed heart could hardly soar to love; but friends.h.i.+p it had not yet squandered away. His sister he had hitherto loved as a friend,--so fraternally, so freely, so increasingly! And now Albano, splendidly armed, had come to his embrace!

In the beginning he played with him, too, lyingly, as he had with himself at the masquerade and in Tartarus. He soon observed that the country youth saw him falsely, dazzled by his own rays, but he chose rather to verify the error than to correct it. Men--and he--are like the fountain of the sun near the Temple of Jupiter Ammon, which in the morning only was cold; at noon, lukewarm; in the evening, warm; and at midnight, hot: now he depended so much on the seasons of the day, as the sound and vigorous Albano did so little, who accordingly imagined a great man was great all day, from the time of getting up to the time of lying down, as the heralds always represent the eagle with outspread wings, that he seldom went in the morning, but mostly in the evening, to Albano, when the whole girandole[125] of his faculties and feelings burned in the wine-spirit which he had previously poured upon it out of flasks.

But do you know the medicine of example, the healing power of admiration, and of that soul-strengthener, reverence? "It is shameful of me," said Roquairol, "when he is so credulous and open and honest. No, I will deceive the whole world, only not his soul!" Such natures would fain make good their devastation of humanity by being true to one.

Humanity is a constellation, in which _one_ star often describes half the figure.

From this hour forth, his resolution of the heartiest confession and atonement stood fixed; and Alban, before whom life had not yet run down into a jelly of corruption, but was capable of being a.n.a.lyzed as a sound and well-defined organism, and who did not, like Charles, complain that nothing would take right hold of him, but everything played round him like air,--_he_ it was who was to bring back youth to his sick wishes, and with the help of the pure youth's unwavering perceptions and the danger of losing his friends.h.i.+p, Roquairol proposed forcing himself to keep with _him_ the word of fruit-bearing repentance, which to himself he had too often broken.

Let us follow him into the day, when he tells everything.

54. CYCLE.

Once Albano came early in the forenoon to the Captain, when the latter was usually, according to his own expression, "a f.a.g-end of a yesterday's candle stuck on thorns"; but to-day he stood working away bl.u.s.teringly at the piano-forte and writing-desk by turns; and, like a dried-up infusorial animal, was already, even at this early hour, the same old, busy creature, because wine enough had been poured upon him, that is to say, a good deal. Full of rapture, he ran to meet the welcome friend. Albano brought him from Falterle the childish leaves of love--for the Master of Exercises had not had the heart to throw them into the fire--which he had written from Blumenbuhl to the unknown heart. Charles would have been moved on the subject almost to tears, had he not already been so before the arrival. The Count had to stay there all day, and neglect everything; it was his first day of irregularity; it was comic to see how the otherwise unfettered youth, subservient, however, to a long habit of daily exertions, struggled against the short calm, in which he should sail no s.h.i.+p, as against a sin.

Meanwhile, it was heavenly; the low-lying day of childhood, which once clothed him with wings, when the house was full of guests, and he, wherever he wanted to be, came up again above the horizon; the conversation played and made gifts with everything which exalts and enriches us; all his faculties were unchained and in ecstatic dance. Men of genius have as many festal days as others do working days, and hence it is that they can hardly endure a trivial and commonplace[126]

intercalary-day, and especially on such days of youth! When Charles conjured before him tragic storm-clouds from Shakespeare, Goethe, Klinger, Schiller, and life saw itself colossally represented in the poetic magnifying-mirror, then did all the sleeping giants of his inner world rise up; his father came and his future, even his friend stood forth there as in new relief, out of that s.h.i.+ning, fantastic time of childhood, when he had dreamed of him beforehand in these characters; and in the internal procession of heroes, even the cloud that floated through the heavens and the guard-troop marching away across the market were incorporated. His friend appeared to him far greater than he was, because, like all youths, he still believed of actors and poets, that, like miners, they always received into their bodies the metals in which they labored. How often they both said, in that favorite metaphor of the young man, "Life is a dream," and only became thereby more glad and wide-awake! The old man says it differently. And the dark gate of death, to which Charles so loved to lead the way, became before the youth's eye a gla.s.s door, behind which lay the bright, golden age of the belated heart in immeasurable meadows.

Maidens, I own,--as their conversations are more fragmentary, matter-of-fact, and less intoxicating,--instead of such an Eden-park, go for a spruce Dutch garden, well trimmed with crab's-shears and lady-scissors, which is furnished them every day in the afternoon by the black hour, which serves up to them on the coffee- or tea-table, the small black-board[127] of some evil reports, a couple of new shawls sitting by, a well-bred man who pa.s.ses by with a will or marriage certificate, and finally the hope of the domestic report. Come back to our young men!

Towards evening the Captain received a red billet. "Very well!" said he to the woman who brought it, and nodded. "You'll get nothing out of that, madam," said he, turning toward Albano. "Brother, guard only against married women. Just snap once, for a joke, at one of their red beauty-patches; instantly they dart their fish-hooks into your nape.[128] Seven of these hooks, such as you see here, have made a lodgement in mine alone." The innocent child Albano! He took it for something morally great to a.s.sert at once the friends.h.i.+p of seven married ladies, and would gladly have been in Charles's case; he could not see the mischief of it,--that these female friends, like the Romans, love to clip the wings of victory (namely, of ourselves), so that the Divinity may not fly any farther.

On a fine day, nothing is so fine as its sunset. The Count proposed to ride out into the evening twilight, and on the hill to look at the sun.

They trotted through the streets; Charles pulled off his great c.o.c.ked-up hat, now before a fine nose, now before a great pair of eyes, now before transparent forelocks. They flew into the Linden avenue, which was festally decked with a motley wain-scoting of female street-_sitters_.[129] A tall woman, with piercing, fiery eyes, in a red shawl and yellow dress, strode through the female flower-bed, towering like the flower-G.o.ddess: it was the auth.o.r.ess of the red note; she was, however, more attentive to the beautiful Count than to her friend. On all walls and trees bloomed the rose-espalier of the evening redness.

They bl.u.s.tered up the white road toward Blumenbuhl; on both sides the gold-green sea of spring heaved its living waves; a feathered world went rowing about therein, and the birds dove down deep among the flowers; behind the friends blazed the sun, and before them lay the heights of Blumenbuhl, all rosy-red. Having reached the eminence, they turned their horses toward the sun, which reposed behind the cupolas and smoke-columns of the proudly burning city, in distant, bright gardens.

In wondrous nearness lay the illuminated earth round about them, and Albano could see the white statues on Liana's roof blush like life under the blooming clouds. He drove his horse close to his companion's, to lay his hand on Charles's shoulder; and thus they beheld in silence how the lovely sun laid down his golden cloud-crown, and, with the fluttering foliage-breath around his hot brow, descended into the sea. And when it grew dusky on the earth, and a glow lighted up the heavens, and Albano leaned across and drew his friend over to his burning heart, then rose the evening-chime in Blumenbuhl. "And down below there," said Charles, with soft voice, and turned thither, "lies thy peaceful Blumenbuhl, like a still churchyard of thy childhood's days. How happy are children, Albano,--ah, how happy are children!" "Are not we so?" answered he, with tears of joy. "Charles, how often have I stood on high places, in evenings like this, and fervently stretched out my childish hands after thee and after the world. Now indeed I have it all. Truly, thou art not right." But he, sick with the murmur and ringing-in-his-ears of long past times, remained deaf to the word, and said, "Only our cradle-songs, only those cradle-songs, sounding back on the memory, soothe the soul to slumber, when it has wept itself hot."

More silently and slowly they rode back. Albano bore a new world of love and bliss in his bosom; and the youth,--not yet a debtor to the past, but a guest of the present,--sweetly unbent by the long Jubilee of the day, sank into clear-obscure dreams, like a towering bird of prey hanging silent on pinions open with ecstasy.

"We will stay all night at Ratto's," said Charles, when they reached the city.

55. CYCLE.

They alighted down in Ratto's Italian Cellar. The house seemed to the Count at first, after the contemplation of broad nature, like a fragment of rock rolled upon it,--although every story, indeed, groans under architectural burdens,--but the heavy feeling of subterranean confinement[130] soon forgot itself, and singular was the sound that came down into the Italian vault of the rattling of carriages overhead.

The Captain bespoke a _punch royal_. If he goes on so in his good fire-regulation, and always has a full cask at home as extinguis.h.i.+ng-apparatus, and his hose-pipes well proved, then my book cannot be touched by the objection, that, as in Grandison, too much tea is consumed; more likely is it that too much strong drink will be absorbed.

Schoppe was sitting in the Italian souterrain. He loved not the Captain, because his inexorable eye spied out in him two faults which to him were heartily intolerable, "the chronic ulcer of vanity and an unholy guzzling and gormandizing upon feelings." Charles paid him back his dislike; the hottest waves of his enthusiasm immediately bristled up in ice-peaks before the t.i.tular Librarian's face. Only not to-day! He drank so amply of king's-punch,--whereof a couple of gla.s.ses might have burnt through all the heads of Briareus or of the Lernean serpent,--that he then said everything, even pious things. "By heavens!" said he, healing himself in this Bethesda-pool by--drawing from it, "since it is all fiddle-faddle about this growing better, one should obfuscate himself[131] with a shot, in order that the baited spirit may once for all go free from its wounds and sins." "From sins?" said Schoppe; "lice and tape-worms of the better sort will by all means emigrate from my territory, when I grow cold; but the worst of them my inner man will certainly carry up with it. By the hangman! who tells you, then, that this whole churchyard of poor sinners here below shall at once march home as an invisible church full of martyrs and Socrateses, and every Bedlam come out a high-light lodge? I was thinking to-day of the next world, when I saw a woman in the market with five little pigs, every one of which she would fain drive before her with a string tied to its leg, but which shot off from her and from each other like wisps of electric light; now, said I, we, with our few faculties and wishes, which this cultivating age sets out _in quintuplo_, fare already as pitifully as the woman with her drove; but when we get ten or more new farrows by the rope, as the second world, like an America, must surely bring new objects and wishes, how will the Ephorus[132] manage his office there? I prepare myself to expect there greater indescribable distresses, feudal crimes and oppositions." But Roquairol was in his red blaze; he exalted himself far above Schoppe and above himself, and denied immortality plumply, by way of parodying Schoppe. "An individual man," said he, "could hardly, on his own account alone, believe in immortality; but when he sees the ma.s.ses, he has pity, and holds it worth the while, and believes the second world is a _monte testaceo_ of human potsherds. Man cannot come nearer to G.o.d and the Devil hereafter than he does already here; like a tavern-sign, his _reverse_ is painted just like his _obverse_. But we need the fict.i.tious future for a present; when we hover ever so still above our slime, we yet are continually flapping, like carps lying still, with poetic fins and wings. Hence we must needs dress up the future paradise so gloriously that only G.o.ds shall fit into it, but, just as in princes' gardens, no dogs. Mere trumpery! We cut out for ourselves glorified bodies, which resemble soldiers'-coats; _pockets_ and _b.u.t.tonholes_ are wanting; what pleasure can they hold, then?" Albano looked upon him with amazement. "Knowest thou, Albano, what I mean? Just the opposite." So easy is everything for fancy, even freaks of humor.

At this moment he was called out. He came back with a red billet-doux.

He put on his cravat,--he had been sitting there _a la Hamlet_,--and said to Albano he would fly back in an hour. At the threshold he paused, still thinking whether he should go, then ran swiftly up the steps.

In Albano the cup of joy, into which the whole day had been pouring, overflowed with the sparkling foam of a waggish humor. By heaven!

drollery became him as charmingly as an emotion, and he often walked round for a long time without speaking, with a roguish smile, as slumbering children smile, when, as the saying is, angels are playing with them.