The Serapion Brethren Volume Ii Part 15

"Oh, pray avoid them for ever," cried Madame von G----. "No more reference to the dark, unknown realm, the abode of fear and horror. I thank the Eternal Power, which has rescued my beloved child, and freed us from the uncanny guest who brought us such terrible trouble."

It was arranged that they should go back to town the following day, except the Colonel and Dagobert, who stayed behind to see to the burial of the Count's remains.

When Angelica had long been Moritz's happy wife, it chanced that one stormy November evening the family, and Dagobert, were sitting round the fire in the very room into which Count S---- had made his entry in such a spectral fas.h.i.+on. Just as then, mysterious voices were piping, awakened by the storm-wind in the chimney.

"Do you remember?" said Madame von G----.

"Come, come," cried the Colonel; "no ghost stories, I beg." But Angelica and Moritz spoke of what their feelings had been on that evening long ago; of their having been so devotedly in love with each other, and unable to help attaching the most overweening importance to every little incident which occurred: how the pure beam of that love of theirs had been reflected by everything, and even the sweet bond of alarm wove itself out of loving, longing hearts--and how the Uncanny Guest, heralded by all the spectral voices of ill-omen, had brought terror upon them. "Does it not seem to you, dearest Moritz," said Angelica, "that the strange tones of the storm-wind, as we hear them now, are speaking to us, only of our love, in the kindliest possible tones?"

"Yes! yes!" said Dagobert, "and the singing of the kettle sounds to-night to _me_ much more like a little cradle song than anything eerie."

Angelica hid her blus.h.i.+ng face on Moritz's breast. And _he_--for his part--clasped his arm round his beautiful wife, and softly whispered, "Is there, here below, a higher bliss than this?"

"I see very plainly," said Ottmar, when he had finished, and the friends still sat in gloomy silence, "that my little story has not pleased you particularly, so we had better not say much more about it, but consign it to oblivion."

"The very best thing we could do," said Lothair.

"And yet," Cyprian said, "I must take up the cudgels for my friend.

Of course you will say that I am to some extent mixed up in the matter--that Ottmar has taken a good many of the germs of the story from me, and on this occasion has been cooking in my kitchen, so that you won't be disposed to allow me to be a judge in the case. Yet, unless you mean to condemn everything without the slightest remorse, like so many Rhadamanthuses--you must admit, yourselves, that there is much in Ottmar's story which must be allowed to pa.s.s as genuinely Serapiontic; the beginning, for instance."

"Quite right," said Theodore; "the party round the tea-table may pa.s.s as from the life, as well as many other points during the course of the tale. But, to speak candidly, we have had a very large a.s.sortment of spectral characters such as the stranger Count, and it will soon be a difficult matter to go on giving them novelty and originality. He is too much like Alban in 'The Magnetizer.' You know the tale I mean, and indeed that story and Ottmar's have both the same _motif_. Wherefore I wish I might beg our Ottmar and you, Cyprian, to leave monsters of that sort out of the game in future. For Ottmar this will be possible, but for you, Cyprian, I am not so sure that it will. So that we shall have to allow _you_ to serve us up a 'Spook' of the kind now and then, I suppose, only stipulating that it shall be truly Serapiontic, _i.e._ come out of the very inmost depths of your imagination. Moreover 'The Magnetizer' _seems_ rhapsodical, but the 'Uncanny Guest' is rhapsodical in very truth."

"I must take up the cudgels for my friend in this respect too," said Cyprian, "and tell you that, in the very neighbourhood of this place where we are at this moment, there actually happened an event, not very long ago, by no means unlike the incidents of this story. Into a quiet happy group of friends, just when supernatural matters were forming the subject of conversation, there suddenly came a stranger, who struck every one as being uncanny and terrifying, notwithstanding his apparent everydayness, and seeming belonging to the common level. By his arrival this stranger not only spoiled the enjoyment of the evening in question, but subsequently destroyed the peace and happiness of the family for a long period. Even at this day deadly shudders seize a happy wife when she thinks of the crafty wickedness with which this person tried to entangle her in his nets. I told this at the time to Ottmar, and nothing made a greater impression on him than the moment when the stranger made his spectral entry, and the sense of the propinquity of the hostile Spiritual Principle seized upon every one present with a sudden terror. This moment came vividly to Ottmar's mind, and formed the groundwork of his tale."

"But," said Ottmar, "as a single incident is far from being a complete story--which ought to spring perfect and complete from its author's brain, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter--my tale is of course not worth much as a whole, and it is little to my credit, I suppose, that I took advantage of two or three incidents which really happened, weaving them--not without some little success perhaps--into a network of the imaginary."

"Yes," said Lothair, "you are right, my friend. A single striking incident is far from being a tale, just as one well-imagined theatrical situation is a long way from const.i.tuting a play. This reminds me of the way in which a certain playwright (who no longer walks this world, and whose terrible death certainly atoned for any shortcomings of his during his life, and reconciled his worst enemies to him) used to construct his pieces. In a company where I was present, he said, without any concealment, that he selected some one's good dramatic situation which occurred to him, and then, solely for the sake of that, hung a canvas round it and painted away upon it 'just whatever came in his head,' or 'as best he could,' to use his own expressions. This gave me a complete explanation of, and threw a dazzling flood of light upon, the whole character and inner being of that writer's pieces, particularly those of his later period. None of them is without some very happily devised central situation, but all round this the scenes, which he made up out of commonplace material, are woven like a loosely knitted web, although the hand of that weaver, skilled as it is in _technique_, is never to be mistaken."

"Never, say you?" remarked Theodore. "I have been always waiting and looking out for the points where that writer would abandon his commonplaces, and rise into the region of romance and true poetry. The most striking and melancholy instance of what I mean is the so-called Romantic Drama, 'Deodata'; a strange nondescript production, on which a clever composer ought not to have wasted capital music. There can be no more striking proof of the utter want of infelt poetry, of any conception of the higher dramatic life, than where the author of 'Deodata,' in his preface, finds fault with Opera because it is unnatural that people should sing on the stage, and next goes on to explain that he has been at pains to introduce the singing, which is incidental to it, always in a natural manner."

"_De mortuis nil nisi bonum_," said Cyprian, "let the dead repose in peace."

"And all the more," said Lothair, "that I see midnight is close at hand, and he might avail himself of that circ.u.mstance to give us a box or two on the ear (as he is said to have done to his critics in life) with his invisible fist."

Just then the carriage which Lothair had sent for on account of Theodore's still invalid condition, came rolling up, and the friends went back in it to town.

SECTION SIXTH.

It so happened that some irresistible psychic force had impelled Sylvester back to town, although, as a rule, nothing in the world would induce him to leave the country at the time of year when the weather was at its pleasantest. A little theatrical piece which he had written was going to be produced, and it seems an impossibility for an author to miss a first performance of one of his pieces, even though he may have to contend with a world of trouble and anxiety in connection with it. Moreover, Vincent, too, had emerged from the crowd, so that, for the time at least, the Serapion Brotherhood was fairly reestablished; they held their meeting in the same pleasant public-garden where they had last a.s.sembled.

Sylvester was not like the same man; he was in better spirits and more talkative than when he was last seen, and taking him all over, like one who had experienced some piece of great good fortune.

"Was it not well," said Lothair, "that we put off our meeting until our friend's piece had been produced? otherwise we should have found our good brother preoccupied, uninterested in our conversation, oppressed as with a heavy burden. His piece would have been haunting him like some distressful spectre, but now that it has burst its chrysalis and fluttered away like a beautiful b.u.t.terfly into the empyrean, and has not sued for universal favour in vain, everything is clear and bright within him. He stands glorified in the radiance of deserved applause which has fallen so richly to his share, and we won't, for a moment, take it ill of him that he looks down upon us with the least bit of pardonable pride, seeing that not one of us can boast of having done what he has; namely, electrified some six or eight hundred people with one spark; but let everybody have his due. Your piece is good, Sylvester; but you must admit that the admirable rendering was what gave it its wings. You must really have been greatly satisfied with the actors, were you not?"

"I certainly was," said Sylvester, "although at the same time it is very difficult to please the author of a play with the performance of it. You see, he is himself each of the characters of the piece; and all their most intimate peculiarities, with all their necessary conditions, have taken their origin in his own brain; and it seems impossible to him that any other person shall so appropriate, and make his own, those intimate thoughts of his which are peculiar to and innate in the character as to be able to bring them forth into actual life. The author, however, insists in his own mind upon this being done; and the more vividly he has conceived the character, the more is he discontented with the very slightest shortcoming, or alteration in it, which he can discover in the actor's rendering of it. Certain is it that the author suffers an anxiety which destroys all his pleasure in the representation, and it is only when he can manage to soar above this anxiousness, and see his character, the character which he has invented, portrayed before his eyes, just as he saw it rise before his mental vision, that he is able to enjoy, to some extent, seeing his piece represented."

"Still," said Ottmar, "any annoyance which a playwright may feel, when he sees other characters, quite dissimilar from his own, represented instead of them, is richly compensated for by the applause of the public, to which no author can, or should, be indifferent."

"No doubt," said Sylvester; "and as it is to the actor who is playing the part that the applause is, in the first instance, given, the author, who from his distant seat is looking on with trembling and anxiety, yea, often with anger and disgust, at last becomes convinced that the character (not at all his character) which is speaking the speeches of his one on the stage, is, at all events, not so very bad after all as might have been. Also it is quite true, and no reasonable author, who is not entirely shut up in himself, will deny it, that many a clever actor, who has formed a vivid conception of a character, develops features in that character which he himself did not think of, at least not distinctly, and which he must nevertheless admit to be good and appropriate. The author sees a character which was born in his own most inmost elements, appearing before him in a shape new and strange to him. Yet this shape is by no means foreign to the elements of the genesis of the character, nay it does not seem now possible that it could have a.s.sumed a different form; and he feels a glad astonishment over this thing, which is really his own, although it seems so different; just as if he had suddenly come upon a treasure in his garret, whose existence he had not dreamt of."

"There," said Ottmar, "spoke my dear kind-hearted Sylvester, who does not know the meaning of the word 'vanity,' that vanity which has stifled many a great and true talent. There is one writer for the stage who once said, without the slightest hesitation, that there are no actors capable of understanding the soul which dwells within him, or of representing the characters which he creates. How wholly otherwise was it with our grand and glorious Schiller, who once got into that state of delighted surprise of which Sylvester speaks, when he saw his Wallenstein performed, and declared that it was then, for the first time, that he had seen his hero visibly in flesh and blood before his eyes. It was Fleck, the for ever unforgettable hero of our stage, who played Wallenstein then."

"On the whole," said Lothair, "I am convinced, and the instance which Ottmar has given confirms me, that the writer on whom, in the depths of his soul, the true recognition and comprehension of art, and with them, that wors.h.i.+p which they give to the creating formative spirit of the universe, have arisen in light, cannot lower himself to the degraded idol-cult, which wors.h.i.+ps only its own self as being the Fetish that created all things. It is very easy for a great talent to be mistaken for real genius. But time dispels every illusion: talent succ.u.mbs to the attacks of time, but they have no effect on true genius, which lives on in invulnerable strength and beauty. But, to return to our Sylvester, and his theatre-piece, I must declare to you that I cannot understand how any one can come to the heroic decision to permit a work, for which he is indebted to his imagination, and to fortunate creative impulses, to be acted before him on the slippery, risky, uncertain boards of the stage."

The friends laughed, thinking that Lothair was, after his wont, going to utter some quaint, out-of-the-way opinion.

"Am I," asked he, "really a strange being who often thinks things which other people are not very apt to think? Well, be that as it may; I say again that when a fairly good writer, who has genuine talent, such as our Sylvester, puts a piece upon the stage, it feels to me very much as if he made up his mind to jump out of a third-floor window, and take his chance of what might happen to him. I am going to make a confession; when I told you I did not go to the theatre on the first night of Sylvester's piece, I told you a lie. Of course I went; and sat on a back seat, a second Sylvester, a second author of the piece, for it is impossible that he can have felt the strain of anxiety, the strange feeling compounded of pleasure and its opposite, the restlessness amounting to real pain, in any greater degree than I did myself. Every word of the players, every gesture of theirs, took my breath away, and I kept saying to myself, 'Oh, gracious heavens, is it possible that that will do, that it will go down with the audience? and is the author responsible whether it does or not?'"

"You make the thing worse than it is," said Sylvester. "I feel a disagreeable oppression of the breath, particularly at the beginning; but if matters are going on pretty well, and the public expresses itself favourably, this gradually goes off, and makes room for a very pleasant sensation, in which I think selfish satisfaction with one's own production occupies the princ.i.p.al place."

"Oh! you theatre-writers," cried out Vincent, "you are the most conceited of all. The applause of the mult.i.tude is, to you, the very honey of Hybla, and you sip and swallow it with the daintiest of faces and the sweetest of smiles. But I am going to take up the role of devil's advocate, and add that you are as little to be found fault with, for your anxiousness and eagerness (which many folks think are nothing but the pangs of your vanity), as anybody else who is playing a great and risky game. You are staking yourselves; winning means applause, but losing means not only deserved blame, but (if this amounts to a distinct public expression of it) that besmirching of the ludicrous which is the bitterest and (as the French think) the most fearful and d.a.m.nable condemnation which a man can' experience here below. A virtuous Frenchman would, therefore, much rather be considered a vile reprobate than be laughed at, and it is quite certain that a ban of being ludicrous always falls on any playwright who has been (theatrically speaking) 'd.a.m.ned'; and he never shakes it off in all his lifetime. Even future success is a most questionable affair, and many a man who has had this misfortune happen to him, has fled in his despair to the doleful wilderness of those productions which possess the outward appearance of theatrical pieces, but, as their authors solemnly a.s.sure us, are not meant for representation."

"I," said Theodore, "can corroborate you both most thoroughly from my own experience, that it is a most hazardous matter to put a work on to the stage. What it really amounts to is, that you are committing a property of yours to the mercy of the winds and the waves. When one remembers how many thousand accidental contingencies the effect of a work depends upon, how very often the deeply considered and carefully contrived effect of some pa.s.sage is s.h.i.+pwrecked by the blunder, the unskilfulness, or the mistake of a singer or instrumentalist; how often--"

Vincent here interrupted with a vigourous cry of "hear! hear!"

"I cry 'hear! hear!'" he explained, "as the n.o.ble lords in the English Parliament do when one of them is just going to let the cat out of the bag. Theodore's head is full of nothing but the opera which he put upon the stage a few years ago. At the time, he said, 'When I had attended a dozen rehearsals which were more or less useless and pretty much burked, and when the last one came, and the conductor evidently had very little real idea of my score, or about the piece as a whole, I gave things up, and felt quite calm in my mind as to the very dubious destiny which was hanging over my production like a most threatening thunder-cloud.' I said, 'If it is failure, a failure let it be; I am far away aloft above all an author's anxieties and uneasinesses.' With other pretty speeches of a like nature. But when I saw my friend on the day of the performance, and when it came to be time to go to the theatre, he suddenly turned as white as a sheet (though he smiled and laughed a great deal, n.o.body quite knew at what), and gave us the most eager a.s.surances that he had almost forgotten that that was the night when his opera was to be given--tried, when putting on his greatcoat, to stick his right arm into the left sleeve, so that I had to help him on with it--and then ran off across the street like one possessed, without a word. And, as the first chords of his overture sounded just as he was getting into his box, he tumbled into the arms of the terrified boxkeeper. Then--"

"There, there!" cried Theodore, "that's enough about my opera, and the execution of it. I shall be very glad to tell you as much as you please about them any time when we happen to be having a regular talk about music; but not another word to-night."

"We have said enough, and more than enough," said Lothair, "on this particular subject, and by way of winding it up, I may just say that there is a little anecdote of Voltaire which pleases me greatly. Once, when one of his tragedies--I think it was Zaire--was going to be given for the first time, he was in such a terror of anxiety about its fate, that he did not dare to be present himself; but all the way between his house and the theatre he had people posted to send him messages every two or three minutes, by a code of signals, bow the piece was going; so that he was able to suffer all the torments of the Author comfortably, _en robe de chambre_, in his own room."

"Now," cried Sylvester, "wouldn't that make a capital scene on the stage? and what a splendid part it would be for a character actor.

Think of Voltaire on the boards. News comes that 'The public is disturbed, uneasy.' 'Ha!' he cries, 'frivolous race! can any one awaken your sympathy?' Next comes a message that 'the public is applauding--shouting in delight.' 'Oh! great, grand, n.o.ble Frenchmen,'

he cries, 'you comprehend your Voltaire--you are worthy of him.' 'The public is hissing, and there are one or two catcalls audible.' 'Ah!

traitors! this to me--to me!'"

"Enough, enough," said Ottmar. "Sylvester is so inspired by his success that he is favouring us with a scene of a comedy instead of--like a proper Serapion Brother--reading us a tale, the most interesting subject of which he told me of, in writing, and which I know he has finished and brought with him."

"Our having been talking of Voltaire," said Sylvester, "may lead us to think of his 'Siecle de Louis XIV.,' and of that period itself, in which I have laid the scenes of the story which I now venture, with all modesty, to submit, hoping for your favourable opinion."

He read:--

MADEMOISELLE SCUDERI: A Tale Of The Times Of Louis The Fourteenth.

Magdaleine Scuderi, so famous for her charming poetical and other writings, lived in a small mansion in the Rue St. Honore, by favour of Louis the 14th and Madame Maintenon.

Late one night--about midnight--in the autumn of the year 1680, there came a knocking at the door of this house, so loud and violent that it shook the very ground. Baptiste, who filled the offices of cook, butler, and doorkeeper in the lady's modest establishment, had gone, by her leave, to the country to his sister's wedding, so that La Martiniere, the _femme de chambre_, was the only person still awake in the house. She heard this knocking, which went on without ceasing almost, and she remembered that, as Baptiste was away, she and her mistress were alone and unprotected. She thought of the housebreakings, robberies, and murders which were so frequent in Paris at that time, and felt convinced that some of the numerous bands of malefactors, knowing the defenceless state of the house that night, were raising this alarum at the door, and would commit some outrage if it was opened; so she remained in her room, trembling and terrified, anathematizing Baptiste, and his sister's marriage into the bargain.

Meantime the thundering knocking went on at the door, and she thought she heard a voice calling in the intervals, "Open, for the love of Christ! Open!--open!" At last, her alarm increasing, she took her candle and ran out on to the landing, where she distinctly heard the voice crying, "Open the door, for the love of Christ!"

"After all," she said to herself, "one knows that a robber would not be crying out in that way. Perhaps it is somebody who is being pursued and is come to my lady for refuge. She is known to be always ready to do a kind action--but we must be very careful!"