Titan: A Romance Volume I Part 3

It appeared to him as if he were dying, for it was some time before he became aware of the increasing warmth of his bleeding left arm, which had lifted him into the long Elysium that reached over from his dreaming into his waking state. He refastened the bandage more tightly.

All at once he heard, during the operation, a louder plas.h.i.+ng below him than mere waters could make. He looked over the balcony, and saw his father and Dian, without a farewell,--which, with Gaspard, was only the poisonous meadow-saffron in the autumnal moment of leave-taking,--fleeing, like blossom-leaves dropped out of the flower-wreath of his life, away across the waves amid the swan-song of the nightingales!... O, thou good young man, how often has this night befooled and robbed thee! He spread out his arms after them,--the pain of the dream still continued, and inspired him,--his flying father seemed to him a loving father again,--in anguish he called down, "Father, look round upon me! Ah, how canst thou thus forsake me without a syllable? And thou too, Dian! O comfort me, if you hear me!" Dian threw kisses to him, and Gaspard laid his hand upon his sick heart.

Albano thought of that copyist of death, the palsy, and would gladly have held out his wounded arm over the waves, and poured out his warm life as a libation for his father, and he called after them, "Farewell!

farewell!" Languis.h.i.+ng, he pressed the cold, stony limbs of a colossal statue to his burning veins, and tears of vain longing gushed down his fair face, while the warm tones of the Italian nightingales, trilling in response to each other from bank and island, sucked his heart till it was sore with soft vampyre-tongues.----Ah, when thou shalt be loved, glowing youth, how thou wilt love!--In his thirst for a warm, communicative soul, he woke up his Schoppe, and pointed out to him the fugitives. But while the latter was saying something or other consolatory, Albano gazed fixedly at the gray speck of the skiff, and heard not a word.

9. CYCLE.

The two continued up, and refreshed themselves by a stroll through the dewy island; and the sight of the alto-rilievo of day, as it came out in glistening colors from the fading crayon-drawings of the moonlight, woke them to full life. Augusti joined them, and proposed to them to take the half-hour's sail over to Isola Madre. Albano heartily besought the two to sail over alone, and leave him here to his solitary walks. The Lector now detected, with a sharper look, the traces of the young man's nightly adventures,--how beautifully had the dream, the monk, the sleeplessness, the bleeding, subdued the bold, defiant form, and softened every tone, and that mighty energy was now only a magic waterfall by moonlight!

Augusti took it for caprice, and went alone with Schoppe; but the fewest persons possible comprehend, that it is only with the fewest persons possible, (and not with an army of visitors,) properly only with two,--the most intimate and like-minded friend and the beloved object,--one can bear to take a walk. Verily, I had as lief kneel down to make a declaration of love openly, in the face of a whole court, on the birthday of a princess,--for show me, I pray, the difference,--as to gaze on thee, Nature, my beloved, through a long vanguard and rear-guard of witnesses to my enraptured att.i.tude!

How happy did solitude make Albano, whose heart and eyes were full of tears, which he concealed for shame, and which yet so justified and exalted him in his own mind! For he labored under the singular mistake of fiery and vigorous youths,--the idea that he had not a tender heart, had too little feeling, and was hard to be moved. But now his enervation gave him a soft, poetical forenoon, such as he had never before known, and in which he would fain have embraced tearfully all that he had ever loved,--his good, dear, far-off foster parents in Blumenbuhl; his poor father, ill just in spring, when death always builds his flower-decked gate of sacrifice; and his sister, buried in the veil of the past, whose likeness he had gotten, whose after-voice he had heard this night, and whose last hour the nightly liar had brought so near to him in his fiction. Even the nocturnal magic-lantern show, still going on in his heart, troubled him by its mysteriousness, since he could not ascribe it to any known person, and by the prediction that at his birth-hour, which was so near,--the next Ascension-day,--he should learn the name of his bride. The laughing day took away, indeed, from the ghost-scenes their deathly hue, but gave to the crown and the water-G.o.ddess fresh radiance.

He roamed dreamily through all holy places in this promised land. He went into the dark Arcade where he had found his childhood's relics and his father, and took up, with a sad feeling, the crushed mask which had fallen on the ground. He ascended the gallery, checkered with lemon-shadows and sunbeams, and looked toward the tall cypresses and the chestnut summits in the far blue, where the moon had appeared to him like an opening mother's eye. He approached a cascade, behind the laurel-grove, which was broken into twenty landing-places, as his life was into twenty years, and he felt not its thin rain upon his hot cheeks.

He then went back again to the top of the high terrace to look for his returning friends. How brokenly and magically did the suns.h.i.+ne of the outward world steal into the dark, holy labyrinth of the inner! Nature, which yesterday had been a flaming sun-ball, was to-day an evening star, full of twilight: the world and the future lay around him so vast, and yet so near and tangible, as glaciers before a rain appear nearer in the deepening blue. He stationed himself on the balcony, and held on by the colossal statue; and his eye glanced down to the lake, and up to the Alps and to the heavens, and down again; and, under the friendly air of Hesperia, all the waves and all the leaves fluttered beneath their light veil. White towers glistened from the green of the sh.o.r.e, and bells and birds crossed their music in the wind: a painful yearning seized him, as he looked along the track of his father; and, ah! toward the _warmer_ Spain, full of voluptuous spring-times, full of soft orange-nights, full of the scattered limbs of dismembered giant mountain-ridges, heaped around in wild grandeur,--thither how gladly would he have flown through the lovely sky! At length, joy and dreaming and parting were all melted into that nameless melancholy, in which the excess of delight clothes the pain of limitation,--because, indeed, it is easier to _overflow_ than to _fill_ our hearts.

All at once Albano was touched and smitten,--as if the Divinity of Love had sent an earthquake into his inner temple, to consecrate him for her approaching apparition,--as he read on a young Indian-tree near him the little sign bearing its name,--the "Liana." He gazed upon it tenderly, and said again and again, "Dear Liana!" He would fain have broken off a twig for himself; but when he reflected, that if he did water would run out of it, he said, "No, Liana, I will not cause thee to weep!" and so forbore, because in his memory the plant stood in some sort of relations.h.i.+p to an unknown dear being. With inexpressible longings to be away, he now looked toward the temple-gates of Germany,--the Alps. The snow-white angel of his dream seemed to veil herself deep in a spring-cloud, and to glide along in it speechless,--and it was to him as if he heard from afar harmonica-tones. He drew forth, just for the sake of having something German, a letter-case, whereon his foster-sister Rabette had embroidered the words, "Gedenke unserer" (Think of us): he felt himself alone, and was now glad to see his friends, who were gayly rowing back from Isola Madre.

Ah, Albano, what a morning would this have been for a spirit like thine ten years later, when the compact bud of young vigor had unfolded its leaves more widely and tenderly and freely! To a soul like thine would have arisen at such a period, when the present was pale before it, two worlds at once,--the two rings around the Saturn of time,--that of the past and that of the future: then wouldst thou not merely have glanced over a short interval of race-ground to the pure, white goal, but turned thyself round, and surveyed the long, winding track already run. Thou wouldst have reckoned up the thousand mistakes of the will, the missteps of the soul, and the irreparable waste of heart and brain. Couldst thou then have looked upon the ground without asking thyself: "Ah, have the thousand and four earthquakes[20] which have pa.s.sed through me, as through the land behind me, enriched me as these have enriched the soil?

O, since all experiences are so dear,--since they cost us either our days, or our energies, or our illusions,--O why must man every morning, in the presence of Nature, who profits by every dew-drop that stands in a flower-cup, blush with such a sense of impoverishment over the thousand vainly dried tears which he has already shed and caused! From springs this almighty mother draws summers; from winters, springs; from volcanoes, woods and mountains; from h.e.l.l, a heaven; from this, a greater,--and we, foolish children, know not how from a given past to prepare for ourselves a future, which shall satisfy us! We peck, like the Alpine daw, at everything s.h.i.+ny, and carry the red-hot coals aside as if they were gold-pieces, and set houses on fire with them. Ah! more than one great and glorious world goes down in the heart, and leaves nothing behind; and it is precisely the stream of the higher geniuses which flies to spray and fertilizes nothing, even as high waterfalls break and flutter in thin mist over the earth."

Albano welcomed his friends with atoning tenderness; but the youth became, as the day waxed, as dull and heavy-hearted as one who has stripped his chamber at the inn, settled his bill, and has only a few moments left to walk up and down in the bare, rough stubble-field, before the horses are brought. Like falling bodies, resolutions moved in his impetuous soul with increasing velocity and force every new second: with outward mildness, but inward vehemence, he begged his friends to start with him this very day. And so in the afternoon he went away with them from the still island of his childhood, speedily to enter, through the chestnut avenues of Milan, on a new theatre of his life, and to come upon the trap-door, which opens down into the subterranean pa.s.sage of so many mysteries.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Scale.--TR.

[3] This statue, thirty-five ells high, on a pedestal of twenty-five ells, in whose head twelve men can find room, stands near Arona, and is exactly of a height with Isola Bella, which stands over against it, and which rises on ten gardens or terraces built one upon another.--_Keysler's Travels, &c._, Vol.

I.

[4] The old Kremnitz ducats have the infant Jesus on the right arm; but the new and _lighter_ ones on the left.

[5] Franklin advised the preserving and corking up of vessels from which all the liquor had been drunk, in order thereby to keep the s.h.i.+p afloat.

[6] The horse, in the funeral procession of a prince, that comes last, and is decked out gayly for the successor of the deceased.--TR.

[7] Gray-league (Grau-bunden), the Swiss Canton of the Grisons.--TR.

[8] Pictures by Peter Molyn, who, on account of his fine storms, was called only Tempesta.

[9] The Pasquino is notoriously mutilated.--Delia Porta was a great restorer of old statues.

[10] I. e. to be pressed between two wooden cylinders and a metallic one.

[11] This pill consists of Antimonia Regia, and by reason of its hardness may be swallowed over and over again with the same effect each time; only a little wine is sprinkled on it before each repet.i.tion of the experiment.

[12] _Tirare di primavere_, the people call it; and Peter Schoppe translated it grandly enough, _Electrical pistol-firing of spring_.

[13] Quotation-marks.--TR.

[14] A good Wouwermann means, in painters' language, a well-executed horse, the sight of which has an influence on the beauty of the future colt.

[15] This name is given to the quantum which is withheld from the a.s.sociate judges of the Supreme Court when they have not worked enough.

[16] The Ipecacuanha belongs to the Violet species.

[17] Of the order of St. Paul, or _memento mori_, which died in France in the seventeenth century. The above address is its usual greeting.

[18] The Zahouris in Spain are, as is well known, gifted with the power of discerning corpses, veins of metal, &c. far under the earth.

[19] According to the account of some astronomers, that the sun, when eclipsed, has sometimes shone through an opening of the moon, Ulloa, e. g., a.s.sures us that he once witnessed.

[20] In Calabria (1785) a thousand and four earthquakes happened in the s.p.a.ce of three fourths of a year.--_Munter's Travels, &c._

_INTRODUCTORY PROGRAMME_

TO t.i.tAN.

Before I dedicated t.i.tan to the Privy-Legation's-Counsellor and Feudal Provost of Flachsenfingen, Mr. Von Hafenreffer, I first requested permission from him in the following terms:--

"Since you have a.s.sisted far more in this history than the Russian Court did in Voltaire's Genesis-History of Peter the Great, you cannot confer any handsomer favor upon a heart longing to thank you, than the permission to offer and dedicate to you, as to a Jew's G.o.d, what you have created."

But he wrote me back on the spot:--

"For the same reason, you might still better, in imitation of Sonnenfels, dedicate the work to yourself, and, in a more just sense than others, combine in one person author and patron. I beg you then (were it only on Mr. Von **'s and Mrs. Von **'s account) to leave me out of the play, and confine yourself to the most indispensable notices, which you may be pleased to give the public, of the very mechanical interest which I have in your beautiful work; but for the G.o.ds' sake, hic haec hoc hujus huic hunc hanc hoc hoc hac hoc.

"VON HAFENREFFER."

The Latin line is a cipher, and shall remain dark to the public.

What the same public has to demand in the way of Introductory Programme consists of four explanations of t.i.tle, and one of fact.

The first nominal explanation, which relates to the _Jubilee Period_, I get from the founder of the Period, the Rector Franke, who explains it to be an Era or s.p.a.ce of time, invented by him, of one hundred and fifty-two Cycles, each of which contains in itself its good forty-nine tropical Lunar-Solar years. The word _Jubilee_ is prefixed by the Rector for this reason, that in every seventh year a lesser, and in every seven times seventh, or forty-ninth, a greater, Jubilee-, Intercalary-, Indulgence-, Sabbath-, or Trumpet-year occurred, in which one lived without debts, without sowing and laboring, and without slavery. I make a sufficiently happy application, as it seems to me, of this t.i.tle, Jubilee, to my historical chapters, which conduct the business-man and the business-woman round and round in an easy cycle or circle full of free Sabbath-, Indulgence-, Trumpet-, and Jubilee-hours, in which both have neither to sow nor to pay, but only to reap and to rest; for I am the only one who, like the bowed and crooked-up drudge of a ploughman, stand at my writing-table, and see sowing-machines, and debts of honor, and manacles, before and on me. The seven thousand four hundred and forty-eight tropical Lunar-Solar years which one of Franke's Jubilee periods includes are also found with me, but only dramatically, because in every chapter just that number of ideas--and ideas are, indeed, the long and cubic measure of time--will be presented by me to the reader, till the short time has become as long to him as the chapter required.

A Cycle, which is the subject of my second nominal definition, needs by this time no definition at all.

The third nominal definition has to describe the _obligato-leaves_, which I edit in loose sheets in every Jubilee period. The obligato-leaves admit absolutely none but pure contemporaneous facts, less immediately connected with my hero, concerning persons, however, the more immediately connected with him; in the obligato-leaves, moreover, not the smallest satirical extravasate of digression, no, not of the size of a blister, is perceptible; but the happy reader journeys on with his dear ones, free and wide awake, right through the ample court-residence and riding-ground and landscape of a whole, long volume, amidst purely historical figures, surrounded on all sides by busy mining-companies and Jews'-congregations, advancing columns on the march, mounted hordes, and companies of strolling players,--and his eye cannot be satisfied with seeing.

But when the Tome is ended, then begins--this is the last nominal definition--a small one, in which I give just what I choose (only no narrative), and in which I flit to and fro so joyously, with my long bee's-sting, from one blossom-nectary and honey-cell to another, that I name the little sub-volume, made up as it is merely for the private gratification of my own extravagance, very fitly my _honey-moons_, because I make less honey therein than I eat, busily employed, not as a working-bee to supply the hive, but as a bee-master to take up the comb.

Until now I had surely supposed that every reader would readily distinguish the transits of my satirical trailing-comets from the undisturbed march of my historical planetary system, and I had asked myself: "Is it, in a monthly journal, any sacrifice of historical unity to break off one essay, and follow it up with a new one; and have the readers complained at all, if e. g. in the annual sets of the 'h.o.r.en,'

Cellini's history, as is sometimes the case, breaks off abruptly, and a wholly different paper is foisted in?" But what actually happened?

As in the year 1795 a medical society in Brussels made the _contrat-social_ among themselves, that every one should pay a fine of a crown, who, during a meeting, should give utterance to any other sound than a medical one; so, as is well known, has a similar edict, under date of July 9th, been issued to all biographers, that we shall always stick to the subject-matter,--which is the history,--because otherwise people will begin to talk with us. The intention of the mandate is this, that when a biographer, in a Universal History of the World, of twenty volumes, or even a longer one,--as in this, for instance,--thinks or laughs once or twice, i. e. digresses, the culprit shall stand out in the critical pillory as his own Pasquino and Marforio,--which sentence has been already executed on me more than once.