34. CYCLE.

But why shall I not do the same, and let at least one or two lymphatic veins of my water-treasure leap up and run out? I limit myself to ten persecutions of the reader,—calling my ten aphorisms thus, merely because I imagine the readers to be martyrs of their opinions, and myself the Regent who converts them by force. The following aphorism, if one reckons the foregoing as the first persecution, is, I hope, the

Second.

Nothing sifts and winnows our preferences and partialities better than an imitation of the same by others. For a genius there are no sharper polishing-machines and grinding-disks at hand than his apes. If, further, every one of us could see running along beside him a duplicate of himself, a complete Archimimus[63] and repeater in complimenting, taking off the hat, dancing, speaking, scolding, bragging, &c.; by Heaven! such an exact repeating-work of our discords would make quite other people out of me and other people than we are at present. The first and least step which we should take toward reflection and virtue would be this, that we should find our bodily methodology, e. g. our walk, dress, dialect, our oaths, looks, favorite dishes, &c., no better than those of all others, but just the same. Princes have the good fortune that all courtiers around them station themselves as faithful supernumerary copyists and pier-mirrors of their selves, and propose to improve them by this Helot-mimicry. But they seldom attain their good end, because the Prince,—and that were also to be feared of me and the reader,—like the principle of non-distinguendum, does not believe in any real twins, but imagines that in morals, as in catoptrics, every mirror and mock rainbow shows everything inverted.

Third.

It is easier and handier for men to flatter than to praise.

Fourth.

In the centuries before us humanity appears to us to be growing up; in those which come after us, to be fading away; in our own, to burst forth in glorious bloom: thus do the clouds, only when in our zenith, seem to move straight forward, those in front of us come up from the horizon, the others behind us sail downward with fore-shortened forms.

Fifth.

What makes old age so sad is, not that our joys, but that our hopes then cease.[64]

Sixth.

The old age of women is sadder and more solitary than that of men; spare, therefore, in them their years, their sorrows, and their sex! In fact, life often resembles the trap-tree with its spines directed upward, on which the bear easily clambers up to the honey-bait, but from which he can slide down again only under severe stings.

Seventh.

Have compassion on Poverty, but a hundred times more on Impoverishment! Only the former, not the latter, makes nations and individuals better.

Eighth.

Love lessens woman's delicacy and increases man's.

Ninth.

When two persons, in suddenly turning a corner, knock their heads together, each begins anxiously to apologize, and thinks only the other feels the pain and that he himself has all the blame. (Only I excuse myself without any embarrassment, for the very reason that I know, by my persecutions, how the other party thinks.) Would to God we did not invert this in the case of moral offences!

Last Persecution of the Reader.

Deluded and darkened man, living on from the mourning veil to the corpse-veil, thinks there is no further evil beyond that which he has immediately to overcome; and forgets that after the victory the new situation brings a new struggle. Hence, as before swift ships there swims a hill of water and a corresponding billowy abyss glides along close behind, so always before us is there a mountain, which we hope to climb, and behind us still a deep valley out of which we seem to have ascended.

Thus does the reader vainly hope now, after having stood out ten persecutions, to ride into the haven of the story, and there to lead a peaceable life, free from the troubled one of my characters; but can any spiritual or worldly arm, then, protect him against scattered similes,—against hemispherical headaches,—whimsies,—reviews,—curtain-lectures, —rainy months,—or in fact honey-moons, which come in at the end of every volume?—

Now for our History! In the evening Albano and Augusti went with the paternal letter of credit to the Minister's. The frostiness and pride of that individual the Lector endeavored, on their way, to varnish over by praising his laboriousness and discernment. With a knocking at his heart the Count seized the door-knocker to the heaven- or hell-gate of his future destiny. In the antechamber—that higher servant's apartment and Limbus infantum et patrum—there were still people enough, for Froulay regarded an antechamber as a stage, which must never be empty, and on which, as in the Jewish temple, according to the Rabbins, for those who kneel and pray, it is never too close. The Minister's lady was not present as a patient here, merely because she was looking after one of her own elsewhere. The Minister also was not here,—because he made few ceremonies, and only demanded uncommonly many,—but in his working-cabinet; he had heretofore had his head under the warm throne-canopy and taken a deep bite into the forbidden apple of the Empire, therefore he willingly made a sacrifice (not to others, but of others), and let himself, as a saintly statue, be hung round with votive limbs, without having to bestir his own, and, like St. Franciscus at Oporto, with letters of thanks and petitions which he never opens.

Froulay came, and was—as ever, aside from business—as courteous as a Persian. For Augusti was his home friend,—i. e. the Minister's lady was his home-friend,—and Albano was not a good person to run against; because one had occasion for his foster-father in the votes of the Province, and because the youth by a peculiar and proper pride of his own commanded men. There is a certain noble pride through which merits shine brighter than through modesty. Froulay had not the most comfortable part before him; for the Court of Haarhaar was as disaffected toward the Knight of the Fleece, as he was toward it;[65] but Haarhaar was to be without doubt (according to all Italian surgical reports) and in a few years (according to all nosological ones) the heir of his inheritance and throne. Now the bad thing about it was, that the Minister, who, like a good Christian, looked mainly to the future, had to creep along between the German Herr von Bouverot, on the one hand, who was secretly a creature of Haarhaar, and the demands of the present moment, on the other.

He received the Count, I said, in an uncommonly obliging manner, as well as the Lector, and disclosed to the two that he must present to them his lady, who desired their acquaintance. He sent word to her, but, without waiting an answer, conducted them both into her apartment. Now was it to the youth as if the heavy door of a still and holy temple turned on its hinges. Even I too, at this moment, during their passage through the rooms, share so in his foolishness that I fall into full as great anxiety, as if I went in behind them. When we entered the eastern room, which was extended out at pleasure by picturesque paper-tapestry into a latticed arbor of woodbine, there sat merely the Minister's lady, who received us pleasantly, with firm and cold reserve in look and tone. Her severely closed and faintly-marked lips mutely spoke a seriousness which is the gift of a good heart, and a stillness which is the ornament of beauty,—as many wings, only when they are folded, shower down peacocks'-eyes,—and her eye gleamed with the good-will of reason; but the eyelids had been, by stern years, drawn deeply in, with a sickly expression, over the mild sight. Ah, as oftentimes between newly-married people a dividing sword was laid, so did Froulay grind daily at a three-edged one which separated him and her! Singularly did the impure roil on his face contrast with the aftersummer serenity on hers, although before witnesses, as it seemed, he took away the irony from his courteousness towards her, and kept hatred, as others do love, only for solitude.

Fortunately this nut-tree, which threw an unwholesome, frosty nut-shadow on the whole flowerage of love and poetry, soon transplanted itself back again among more congenial guests. The Minister's lady, after the first expressions of courtesy, directed herself more to the Lector, whose correct, civilian's measure accorded entirely with her religious one; especially as only he could ask and condole with her about Liana. She replied, that this room of Liana's had been left exactly as it was the evening the blindness came on, in order that, when she recovered, it might remain for her a pleasant remembrancer, or a mournful one for others, if she did not. O, deeply moved Albano, if every absence glorifies, how much more must it do so with so many traces of the beloved object's presence! I confess, except a loved one, I know of nothing lovelier than her sitting-room in her absence.

On Liana's work-table lay a sketched outline of a Christ's head near the open Messiah,—a folded walking-veil, together with the green walking-fan, with inscribed wishes of female friends,—some cut-out envelopes,—the gossiping letter of one of Froulay's tenants,—a whole lacquerwork sheep-fold, with wagon, stalls, and house, with whose Lilliputian Arcadia she had proposed to please Dian's children,[66]—a plucked leaf from the thinning album of a female friend, which she had trimmed with an India-ink flower border and then planted full of fair wishes, of which fate had robbed her own life. Ah, beautiful heart, how fondly would I sketch and hand round something like a tabular view of all the little mosaic of thy lightsome past, had the fee-provost entered more intimately into these matters! But what moves me and the Count more deeply is a framed embroidery, on which her needle, like an ingrafting-knife, had, on that dark day, ingrafted a rose with two buds, and which wanted nothing more but the thorns. O, these had destiny only too fully developed on thy roses of joy, and then pressed them so deeply through thy breast even to the heart!

At no hour of his life was Albano's love so tender and holy as at this, or his sympathy so fervent. Fortunately, the Minister's lady was all the time looking out of the window into the garden, and did not perceive his emotion. At last she went on to point out Liana's harmonica, which stood near; then was his heart too full and visible; he started with the hasty words, he had never yet heard one, and stepped before it. Ah, he was fain to touch something whereon her finger had so often rested. He laid his hand, as upon a sacred thing, on those prayer-bells which had so often trembled under hers for pious thoughts; but they gave him no answer, till the Lector, a connoisseur in the A B C as in the technology of all arts, gave him in three words the indispensable instructions. Now did he drink into his soul, full of sighs and struggles, the first tri-clang, the first plaintive syllables of that mother-tongue of the pining breast,—ah, of those mutes'-bells which the inner man shakes in his hand, because he has no tongue! and his veins beat wildly like wings which wafted him up from the ground, and bore him to a higher prospect than that which opens into the last joy or the last agony. For in strong men great pains and joys become overlooking heights of the whole road of life.

I know not whether many readers will believe the fault possible, which he now actually committed. The Minister's wife, in the course of conversation, had very naturally—apropos of Liana and Roquairol—fallen upon the proposition that no school is more necessary to children than that of patience, because, either the will must be broken in childhood or the heart in old age. Ah, she and her daughter themselves knelt, indeed, full of patience, before fate, whether loading or armed; although the mother's was a pious patience, which looked more to Heaven than to the wound, Liana's a loving patience, which resigns itself to new sorrows as to old sicknesses, as a queen does on coronation-day to the pains and friction of her heavy jewelry, and like a child that sweetly sleeps away and more sweetly dreams away his scars. But Zesara, who like a wolf fled the very clanking of a chain, and new, exasperated, against everything of the kind, from the light carcanets and chains of knighthood even to the heavy harbor-chains which obstruct the passage of youth out into the laboring sea, could not restrain himself, especially with that heart of his so full of emotions, from saying, in too great warmth: "Man must defend himself; sooner would I, in a free struggle, empty all my veins on the stirring battle-field than shed one drop from them bound to the rack."—"Patience," said the Minister's lady, who was full of it, "contends and conquers also, only in the heart."—"Dear Count," said Augusti, alluding not merely to Arria,[67] "the women must always say to the men, 'It does not hurt!'"

I have not till now had an opportunity to make known this fault of Albano, that he never spoke his opinion more freely and strongly than just then when he had reason to fear losing one or two heavens of his life by the stake; in cases of less danger he could be more yielding. Although, therefore, he observed that the Minister's lady was painfully reminded thereby of the muscular, but also hard-grasping, hand of her wild son,—or much rather for the very reason that he observed it, and because he proposed to be armor-bearer to this future friend,—he stuck to his opinion, threw all instruments for breaking in the young manly will out of the school-rooms into the street, and said, in his strongly relieved style: "The Goths preferred never to send their children to school, in order that they might remain lions. Even if maidens must be soaked in milk a day before planting them out in the civil world, boys, however, must be stuck, like apricots, with the stony shell in the earth, because they will soon enough throw off and forsake the stone by their rooting and growth."—The Lector, with his fine openness,—a crystal vase with golden edge,—remarked, with a gentle reprimand of Alban's impetuosity, that at least the way in which they had severally adduced their proofs was one of those very proofs themselves; and women needed and showed more patience with persons, and we more with things.

The Minister's wife, who imagined herself listening more to her son than to his friend, was silent, and stepped nearer to the window. Amid these war-troubles the evening had wheeled her resplendent moon up over the eastern mountains, and the streams of her light flowed in at this moment, from all quarters, through the whole garden that lay stretched out before the eastern room, and lay in its broad alleys and flower-circles, when all at once a little round house appeared through upshooting water-jets, kindled into triumphal arches by the moon-light, and stood, even to its Italian trellised roof, all in a blaze. With soft emotion, the Minister's lady said: "On that water-house stands my Liana; she is trying the evaporation of the fountain; the physician promises himself much therefrom. And Providence grant it!"

But the agitated Zesara, with all his sharp eyes, could not, however, in the full dazzling light of the level moon, and behind the quivering nunnery-grate of confined silver-or lymphatic-veins, individualize anything at this moment from the glimmering Eden, except an undistinguishable, still, white form. But it was enough for a weeping and burning heart. "Thou angel of my youthful dreams," thought he, "may it be thou! I greet thee with a thousand woes and joys. Ah! can there then be sorrows in thee, thou heavenly soul!" And it came over him, that if she were here in the room, with her afflicted and enchanting form, she would melt his whole being with sympathy, and he could now have cast off the embrace of the brother, by whose hand fate had closed her soft eyes in that long dream.

The stifling air of the most painful sympathy caused him to look away, and turn round, and fasten on the open Messiah those eyes whose drops he would not show; but the recollection that he was repeating her last reading-pleasure made them fall only hotter and thicker. Suddenly something darkening, which fluttered down before the window like a falling raven, directed his look again to Liana, over whom stood a fully illuminated little cloud, as if it were a risen or descending saintly halo. Immortals seemed to dwell thereupon as on Ossian's clouds, awaiting their sister; and when she at length moved and slowly sank down into the water-house, seemed it not then as if her garment of flesh were passing into the earth, and her peaceful spirit into the cloud?

Here Augusti, as the mother had to follow the returning invalid into the sick-chamber, gave him the hint for departure, which he took willingly; his love contented itself for the present with solitude, and with the hope of another meeting. Young love and young birds need, in the beginning, only to be warmed by covering, and not till later to be nourished.

But a paraclete or comforter whispered softly in the ear of the youth's heart as they departed: to-morrow thou wilt see her only a few steps from thee in the garden! And that is very easily brought about; he has only, at evening-twilight to-morrow, when the evening-walker makes use of her eye-medicine, to repair to the alley, and from among the leaves look freely up into the magic countenance, and then drink in the whole doctrine of felicity in one paragraph, one passage, breath, moment;—but what a prospect!

The Count begged the Lector not to sit long with the busy Minister. When they found him again, he hardly—behind a pile of public documents—remembered, after considerable (perhaps counterfeited) thought, that they had been there, and deeply regretted that they were going away. Ah, the comforter is whispering all the evening and all night,—To-morrow, Albano!

35. CYCLE.

As the juggling night threw our Albano from one side and vision to the other,—for not the near past but the near future wearies us with rehearsals of our waking acts, with dreams,—how glad he was, in the morning, that his fairest future had not yet gone by. Two very Eulenspiegelish wishes often lodge in man: I often form the wish with my whole heart, that some real joy of mine, e. g. a master-work, a pleasure-journey, &c., might yet at last have an end; and, secondly, the wish above referred to, that one or another pleasure might stay away a little longer.

The evening came with the greatest pleasure of all, when Zesara, like Le Gentil starting for the East Indies, set off for the eastern park of the Minister, to observe the transit of his evening star Venus; but only through the moon. Before the lighted windows of the palace he stopped among the people, and reflected, whether it were quite allowable thus to run into the garden; but really, had he been turned back, his thirsting heart would have carried him in through a whole Clerus and Diplomatic Congress posted before the gate. Boldly he strode along through the noisy palace before a barricade of tackled carriages, turned the iron lattice-gate, and stepped hastily into the nearest leafy avenue. Here, attended by a torch-dance of gleaming hopes, he went to and fro, but his eye was a telescope, and his ear was a hearing-trumpet. The green avenue wound up over the garden till it grew into another near the bath-house; into this he entered so as not to meet the blind one, or rather her attendant.

But nothing came. To be sure he had not, like the moon,—as was, indeed, to have been expected of him,—come a half-hour too late, but in fact a half-hour too early. The moon, that star which leads wise men full of incense to the adoration, at last let fall broad, long, silver-leaves, like festive tapestry, into Liana's eastern room,—the Madonna on the palace was arrayed in the halo and nun's-veil of her rays,—the Minister's wife stood already at the window,—Nature played the larghetto[68] of an enchanted evening in deeper and deeper strains,—when Albano caught nothing further except a smaller one, made up of mere tones, which came from the bath-house, the pleasure-seat of all his wishes, and which, dying, would fain breathe its last with the spring-day. But he could not guess who played it. One might have inferred that it was Roquairol, merely because he afterward, as I shall relate, according to the April-like nature of his musical temperament, sprang up out of pianissimo into a too wild fortissimo. The brother, exiled by his father, could at least in the bath-house see and console his dear sister, and show her his love and his penitence; although his stormy repentance makes a second necessary, and at last became only a more pious repetition of his fault.

Although Albano's fancy was a retina of the universe, on which every world sharply pictured itself, and his heart the sounding-board of the sphere-music, in which each revolved, yet neither the evening nor the larghetto, with their rays and tones, could pierce through the high waves which expectation as well as anxiety (both obscure nature and art) dashed up within him. The bank of the fountains is entwined around with a green ring of orange-trees, whose blossoms, in the East, according to the Selam-cipher, signify hopes; but really one after another was short-lived, when he thought of the cold, clear mother, or of his perhaps vain waiting. The fountains leaped not yet,—he kept plucking away, like a premature autumn, more and more of the broad fan-leaves from his blooming Spanish wall, and still, through all his widening windows, saw no Liana coming down along the pebbly path (which was impossible, for the very reason that she had been long standing in the bath-house with her brother), and he began to despair of her appearance, when the brother suddenly stormed into the above-mentioned fortissimo, and all the fountains sent up before the moon murmuring wreaths of sparkling silver. Albano looked out....

Liana stood up there in the glimmer of the moon, behind the fluttering water. What an apparition! He tore asunder the twigs of the foliage before his face, and gazed, uncovered and breathless, upon the sacredly beautiful form! As Grecian gods stand and look unearthly before the torch, so shone Liana before the moon, overshadowed with the myriad glancing reflections of the silvery rainbows, and the blest youth saw irradiated the young, open, still Mary's-brow, upon which no vexation and no effort had as yet cast a wave,—and the thin, tender, scarcely-arched line of the eyebrows,—and the face like a perfect pearl, oval and white,—and the loosely flowing ringlets lying on the May-flowers over her heart,—and the delicate grace's-proportions, which, like the white attire, seemed to exalt the form,—and the ideal stillness of her nature, which made her place, instead of an arm, only a finger upon the balustrade, as if the Psyche only floated over the lily-bells of the body, and neither shook nor bowed them,—and the large blue eyes, which, while the head sank a little, opened upward with such inexpressible beauty, and seemed to lose themselves in dreams and in distant plains reflecting the evening-twilight's glow!

Thou too fortunate man!—to whom the only visible goddess, Beauty, appears so suddenly, in her omnipotence, and attended by all her heavens! The present, with its shapes, is unknown to thee,—the past fades away,—the near tones seem to steal from the depth of distance,—the unearthly apparition overflows and overpowers with splendor the mortal breast!

Ah, why must a deep, cold cloud steal through this pure and lofty heaven? Ah, why didst thou not find the heavenly one earlier or later?—and why must she herself remind thee of her sorrow?

For Liana—into whose veiled eye only a strong light could trickle through—was looking for the moon, which was a little overhung by its own aurora, and she turned her head around gropingly, because she thought a linden-top concealed it;—and this uncertain inclination so suddenly pictured to him her misfortune in a thousand colors! A quick pang pressed his eyes, so that tears and sparks darted from them, and pity cried within him: "O thou innocent eye! why art thou veiled? Why from this grateful, good soul is May and the whole creation taken away? And she sends round in vain a look of love after her mother and her companion, and—O God! she knows not where they stand."

But the curtain of the moon soon floated aside, and she smiled serenely on its radiance, as the blind Milton in his immortal song smiles upon the sun, or as an inhabitant of earth smiles upon the earliest splendor of the next life.

A nightingale, who hitherto, while hopping after a glow-worm among the distant flowers, had responded to the tones in the chamber only with single game-calls and complemental notes of joy, flew nearer to Liana, and the winged miniature-organ drew out at once all its flute-stops, so that Liana, forgetting her blindness, looked down, and Albano started back alarmed, as if she were looking upon him. Then was her pale face, upon the cheeks of which a light redness played, as upon the white pink, tenderly suffused with the faint red bloom of emotion under the mingling tones of the brother and of the nightingale,—the eyelids quivered oftener over the gleaming eyes,—and at last the gleam became a quiet tear,—it was not a tear of pain nor of joy, but that soft tear in which the longing of the heart overflows; as, in spring, overfull twigs, though unwounded, weep.

There dwells in man a rough, blind cyclops, who in our storms always begins to speak, and gives us fatal counsel. Frightfully at this moment, in Zesara, did the whole awakened energy of his bosom bestir itself,—that wild spirit which drags us on condor's wings to the brink of the precipice; and the cyclops cried aloud in him: "Rush out,—kneel before her,—tell her thy whole heart;—what though thou then art lost forever, if thou hast only caught one sound of this soul!—and then cool and sacrifice thyself in the cold waters at her feet." Verily he thirsted for the fresh basin in which the fountains leaped back. But ah! before this gentle, this afflicted and pure one? "No," said the good spirit in him, "wound her not again, as her brother did. O spare her! be silent, respectful: then thou lovest her."

Here he stepped out on the illuminated earth as into a heavenly hall, and took the open sun-path, but softly, along before the fountains. As he passed by her, all at once the arcade of drops, which had half latticed her round, collapsed, and Liana stood cloudless, as a pure Luna, without her cloud-court, in the deep blue of heaven; a shining lily[69] from the next world, which, to herself, is a sign that she is soon to pass thither. O his heart, full of virtue, felt with trembling the nearness of virtue in another; and, with all signs of the deepest veneration, he walked along by the quiet being, who could not observe them.

Not till, at every step, a heaven had escaped from him, and he at last had none but the one above his head, did he become quite gentle; and then he was glad that he had not been bolder. How the earth now shines to him, how the heaven of suns approaches him, how his heart loves! O, at some future time after yet many years, when this glowing rose-garden of rapture already lies far behind thy back, how softly and magically will it, when thou turnest round and lookest toward it, glimmer after thee as a white rose-parterre of memory!