"'TO ALL WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.
"'It may well be taken forgranted, that a soundunderstandingandreason(mens sana in c. s.),nextto a clear conscience, holds among the prizeworthy goods of life thehighestplace,—a proposition which I venture to assume as an axiom with the readers of this paper. As to what may further be said on the subject, as well by as against Kantners, (so Campe writes it, and much more correctly, instead ofKantians,) it does not certainly belong to an entirelypopular paper for the peoplelike this present. The undersigned is now in thesorrycase that he is obliged here to consult the physicians of Germany and foreign parts. Have sympathy for suffering; send in your answers; saywhenhe is to be (out with it before all Germany!!) completely insane, for as to the beginning thereof the fact has already answered.
"'Thewhen, but not thewhether, it now lies with and upon noble philanthropists to answer. Here are my reasons, Germans! Leaving out of sight that many a reason might be deduced from the very publication of this request,—which, to be sure, decides little,—the following items are noticeable and sure:—1. The motley style of the author itself, which is to be known less from this insertion (composed at very considerable intervals) than from the similarity between his style and that of a very favorite and tasteless writer,[114]which, denoting a gay exuberance of the most wild and strange images in the head, betokens an approachingcrack, as does a motley play of colors upon glass; 2. The prediction of a scamp,[115]of which he is always thinking,—a circumstance which must have bad effects; 3. His love and study of Swift, whose madness is no novelty to the learned; 4. His complete loss of memory; 5. His frequent bad trick of confounding things dreamed of with things really experienced, andvice versa; 6. His misfortune not to know what he writes till he has read it over afterward, because he now leaves out something bearing upon his subject, or again puts in something that has nothing to do with it, as the crossed and blotted manuscript unfortunately best proves; 7. His whole previous life, all his thinking and joking, the details under which head it would be tedious here to specify; and, 8. His most unreasonable dreams. Now the question is,when, in such circumstances (that is to say, if no fevers, or cases of love intervene), complete distraction (idea fixa,mania,raptus) comes on. With Swift it fell very late, in old age, when he might already, besides, have been naturally half foolish, and only showed it more afterward. When one considers that Professor Busch once reckoned that his weakness of sight might very well grow upon him from year to year without any serious consequence, because the period of complete blindness fell quite out beyond the end of his whole life, merely upon his grave, so must I assume that my infirmity might swell so gradually, that I should have no occasion for any otherpetites maisonsthan the coffin itself; so that I might, in the mean time, have married and held an office as well as any other honest man.
"'My object in this communication is simply to bring myself into correspondence on the subject with some philanthropist or other (he must be, however, a philosophical physician!). My address may be had at the office of the Imperial Advertiser. I make myself, perhaps, more clearly known, bodily and civilly, in this very paper, in the column where I inquire after a wife.
"'Pestitz, February. S——s, L——d, L——r, G——l, S——e.'[116]
"Albano, thou knowest under what bush my serious meaning lies hid. The Advertiser of the Empire and of Schoppe has eight reasons for the thing, which are not only my serious meaning, but my fun. Since the Baldhead announced to me the rising of my mad-dog-star after a year, I have always seen the aurora of this fixed star before me, and seen myself thereupon blind and cowardly at last; I must speak it out. O I had in January, brother, eight frightful dreams, one after another, according to the number of reasons assigned in the Advertiser, and themselves appertaining to the eighth,—dreams wherein a Wild Huntsman of the brain went hunting through the mind, and a stream full of worlds, full of faces, and mountains and hands, billowed along, bearing all before it—I will not distress thee with the details,—Dante and his head were heaven to it.
"Then I grew sullen about the matter of cowardice, and said to myself, 'Hast thou hitherto lived so long, and easily flung overboard the richest cargoes, even this world and the next, and divested thyself so clean of everything, even of glory and of books and of hearts, and kept nothing but thyself, in order to stand up therewith free and naked and cold on the ball of earth before the face of the sun, and now must thou unexpectedly cringe before the mere crazy fixed thought of a crazy fixed idea, which any stroke of a feverish pulse, any blow of a fist, any grain of poison may stamp into thy head, and thus must thou throw away at once thy old, godlike freedom?—Schoppe, I know not at all what I am to think of thee! Whoso still fears anything in the universe, and though it were hell itself, he is still a slave!
"Then the man plucked up his manhood and said, 'I will have what I feared'; and Schoppe stepped up nearer to the broad, high cloud, and lo! it was only (one would gladly have put one's self to bed on the spot) the longest dream of the last, long sleep, no more,—what they call madness. Now if one should go for some time into a mad-house, for example, by way of joke, then might one have the dream, if all other things were as well suited to keep the matter in countenance, as in the case of many a one already. And now, thereinto will I gradually sink,—into the dream, where the point of the dagger is broken off against the future, and the rust rubbed off against the past,—where man, undisturbed and alone, is the reigning House in the shadow-realm and Barataria-island of his ideas, and the John Lackland, and, like a philosopher,makeseverything that hethinks,—where he also draws his body out of the waves and surges of the external world, and cold and heat and hunger and weak nerves and consumption and dropsy and poverty assail him no more, and no fear, no sin, no error can come near the mind in the mad-house where the three hundred and sixty-five dreams of the nights in the year weave themselves together into a single one, the flying clouds into one great evening red.
"But here lurks something bad! Man must be in a condition to pick out for himself and appropriate with understanding his dream, his good fixed idea,—for a high ant-hill of the most grim and bewitching swims and swarms before him,—otherwise he may fare as ill as if he were still in his senses. I must now, in particular, make my arrangements to find and recognize a good-natured, favorable fixed conceit, which shall deal well with me. If I can bring it about, to be, perhaps, the first man in the crazy house, or the second Momus, or the third Schlegel, or the fourth grace, or the fifth king at cards, or the sixth wise virgin, or the seventh worldly Electorate, or the eighth Wise Man of Greece, or the ninth soul in the ark, or the tenth muse, or the forty-first Academician, or the seventy-first Translator,[117]or, in fact, the universe, or, in fact, the universal spirit himself,—then, certainly, my fortune is made, and life's scorpion robbed of his whole sting. But what golden jewel of a fortune does not in addition thereto still stand open? Can I not be a very highly-favored lover, who sees the sun of a beloved sail all day long through heaven, and looks up and cries, 'I see only thy sunny eye, but it contents me!' Can I not be a deceased person, who, full of disbelief in the next world, has made the journey into it, and now does not know at all which way to turn there for joy? O can I not—for the shorter dream and old age do indeed, of themselves, make one childish—be an innocent child again, that plays and knows nothing, that takes all men for its parents, and that has now a tear-drop hanging before him, formed out of the collapsing gay bubble of life, and again sends out the drop through the pipe, blown up into a glimmering little world-globe of colors?
"It is full midnight; I must now go to church, to hold my vesper-devotions.
"Three weeks later.
"Nota Bene!
"I had been, since thy departure, in a manner damnably unlucky until about one o'clock this morning. At two o'clock I took up my resolution; I have just (at five) taken the pen; and at six, when I have drunken myself full and written myself empty, I take my travelling cane, the point of which, after two months, shall stand sticking in the Pyrenees. O heavens! there must have been something thorny this long time standing by me, which I so long took for a hedgehog, whereas it is the best musical barrel full of pins, out of which I can get nothing less (I turned it a few hours ago) than the best arrangement of flute-pipes, unadulterated music of the spheres, and rotatory music for the bravura-airs of the three men in the furnace, a whole living Vaucanson's wooden flute-player, and unheard-of things wherewith the machine blows till it bursts—not itself, but certain knaves, whereof need I particularly name the Baldhead?
"O listen, youth! It concerns thee. I will now, for thy sake, be what the world calls frank, namely, shameless, for verily I had rather uncover my haunch than my heart, and am less red when I do so.
"There was, once on a time, in old times, a young time, one full of fire and roses, when old Schoppe, for his part, was also young enough; when the alert, contriving bird easily nosed out where the hare lay, and the female hare, too; when the man could still put himself on good terms with the well-known four quarters of the world; or else, just as easily as a steer, thrust with his horn at every fly; when he (now a silver pheasant of cool times) still strode or flew up and down through all Italy as a warm gold pheasant, perched now on Buanorotti's Moses, now on the Colosseum, now on Ætna, now on the dome of St. Peter's, and crowed for joy, flapped his wings, and soared toward heaven.
"It was at this time that the still unpicked storm-bird, hovering one day to and fro through the waterfalls of Tivoli, preciously blest, saw there occasionally, suddenly, overhead, in Vesta's temple, for the first time, nothing more than—the Princess di Lauria, afterward, I conjecture, carried off by a Knight of the Fleece, as his golden fleece. To see her,—to transform one's self from a storm-bird into a cock-pigeon to the chariot of Venus; to tear one's self loose from team and bridle; to fly before that goddess; to float round her in narrower and narrower circles,—all this was not one thing, but three things. I had first to grow and paint myself up into a bird of Paradise, in order to fly into a Paradise; that is to say, I had to learn painting, in order to be permitted her presence.
"When at length I had the portrait-pencil and profile-scissors in my power, and one morning appeared with both before the Princess and the old Prince, I had to paint and cut the Prince himself; his daughter had already been married and secretly travelled off; for thy grandfather (unlike others who prophesy their movements beforehand), prophesies his only afterward, and opens his mouth merely to hear.
"I soon cut out the man,—packed up,—went out into all the world. After nearly three years I stood again on the tenth terrace of Isola Bella, quite unexpectedly, before the Countess Cesara. Heaven and hell! what a woman was thy mother! She threw everybody into both ofthose placesat once; I know not whether she did thy father, too. The writer of this stood in his last ornithological transformation before her, as silent pearl-cock (guinea-peacock), (tears must be the pearls), and got a likeness of her after a few weeks.
"She had two children, thee—I clearly remember thy then already sharpened contour—and thy sister, the so-called Severina. Thy father was not there, but his wax image was, by which I instantly recognized him eighteen years later in Rome. Thy sister, too, was repeated in wax; only thou not. A wax figure, like thee at a distance, which illusively prefigured thee as a man always held up before thee, the brother of thy father, who was there, too, as a file-leader of thy future, saying, 'Here thou art, cubed beforehand, and already forced up into full size, filled out from flask into cask,'—seeking thus to enkindle thee, so that thou mightest grow up and be a man. They had a uniform put on thee, like that which the wax man wore,—I know not of what sort. Then didst thou, striding around thine own micromegas, boldly call him out, out of the future into the present. Now thou knowest what thou hast become, and mayst well, and with more right, look down in thy turn as proudly upon the little one, as the little one formerly looked up to the great one. I could never approve in thy uncle this machine for spiritual ductility; besides, I have for all wax puppets such an abominating, shuddering dread.
"My only object on the beautiful island was to get away from it, and from the fair islander, so soon as I had painted her. 'Stupid century,' said I, 'do I then want anything more of thee?' She sat to me gladly, as upon a throne. I, half in tempest, half in rainbow, sketched her, and naturally had to leave the picture uncopied. But, young man, some letters, which formed my name at that time, and which I wrote and concealed on the picture in the region of the heart under the water-colors, may serve thee as a Tetragrammaton, eleven Dominical letters and mothers of the reading (matres lectionis) of thy existence, in case I reach Spain safely, and in Valencia wash away on the likeness the coloring from my letters, and can now read in its heart,Löwenskiold. So was I then called in Danish.
"Then is the Countess Linda de Romeiro, without mercy, thy sister Severina. God grant only that thou mayst not haply have seen and married her before the receipt of this letter. She must, according to what I heard yesterday, have set out for Italy.
"For when I saw the Countess Linda here for the first time, it was to me, in the market square of Pestitz, as if I were standing up on the terrace of Isola Bella, and beholding the Alps, thy mother, my youth, hardly three paces distant from me! By Heaven, just as if in the pier-mirror of time the white rosy image of thy buried mother had been snatched at once out of the depths of distance, and brought close to the glass, and now hung before it in blooming redness, so stood Linda before me! For the divine resemblance of the two is so great! No ArianHomoiousion[118a]whatever, but a complete OrthodoxHomoousion[118b]is to be believed here. Thus would I write to thee, hadst thou the necessary church-history at hand for the understanding of such an allusion.
"I painted Linda, too, this winter. What she related to me of the character of her mother was entirely the same, as I had been able to report to her of the character of the Princess di Lauria.
"Linda's father, or Herr von Romeiro, would never appear, and still, I hear, has not yet disappeared.
"Linda's mother called herself a Roman and a relative of the Prince di Lauria.
"In Spain, where I have twice been and inquired, I never could find a residence of a lady by the name of Cesara.
"Trillion spiders'-strands of probability spin themselves into an Ariadne's thread in the Labyrinth.
"A new, unknown sister is introduced to thee in the Gothic house with veils and in mirrors.
"And indeed the illusion is produced upon thee through real mirrors by the honest Baldhead,—who wants something more to be a Christ's-head than the locks, and whom I in autumn called a dog.
"The aforesaid Baldhead, or head of Anubis, stood, then, (Heaven and the Devil best know why, but I believe the fact,) as Father of Death on Isola Bella; he lay as travelling journeyman on the Prince's grave and in every sort of ambush, to give thee thy sister for wife—in case I suffered it; but so soon as ever I have sealed this, I sally forth to Spain, break into Linda's picture cabinet, look after a certain likeness of her mother, the place and chamber whereof I have taken pains clearly to ascertain; and if it is the picture by me, then all is right and the thunder may strike into the midst of the whole business.
"The Baldhead himself is a fifth quarter of a proof,—he is one of the few men who, when hardly of a spider's thickness, wickedly made water in their mothers' womb.
"Perhaps I may find thy uncle, who knew me again here, he said, and who has actually gone off to Valencia.[119]
"O Heavens! if I should succeed (but why not, since my tongue remains of iron and this leaf comes, in iron, under charge of the honest Wehrfritz, whose heart is an old German, and does notGermanyrightly represent theheartin the virgin Europa?)—if, I write, I should succeed in kindling a fire upon a cursed mystery of a straw-door, tearing all up and down and away, blind gates and sacrificial gates, and a strong light should fall in upon the brave Linda and the brave youth, illuminating the neighboring Baldhead (perhaps somebody else), who even in the darkness will fain make a slanting thrust with two grafting and slaughtering knives down into a brother and sister——
"If I should once succeed in this, that is to say, in the harvest month,—for then I should come back again to Pestitz and have the likeness in my pocket,—and I should have boldly avenged myself and two innocent beings upon guilty ones: then would I hold myself fully at liberty to seize hold of my head and say, 'À bas, gare, heads off!' To which, certainly, (since, indeed, the question is not of any stupid packing off of the body by a Werther-powder, but only of the purpose to lose, upon occasion, what competent judges call my understanding,) my friends must agree, because they would still have me (since in this case the body is still retained), although as the night-piece of a man, because I would then carry on a rational discourse upon any subject (only let no one attack the fixed idea!) as well as another man, and certainly should not forget to sprinkle over it, now and then, a good moral joke (verily the true spice), and because the state should find me day and night equipped and saddled to save it, after the example of the Berlin Bedlamites, who once, upon a fire breaking out in the house, extinguished it and saved the house in the best style, and I would come in at the gap and the breach, when the dark intervals of its other civil servants could not otherwise be filled up than with our lucid ones.
"Farewell! I break off. The world smiles upon me gayly. In Spain I shall find a bit of youth again—as in this writing.
"Schoppe.
"Apropos! Has the Baldhead nowhere run against thee? I cannot tell thee how I labor now daily to impress upon myself and appropriate beforehand a real horror and dread at the wish of running him down hereafter in my madness, in order that afterward the possible act may not, as a late fruit of my previous rational, moral state, be reckoned over against me into the other.
"Annihilate this letter!"
When Albano raised his fiery eyes from the letter, he stood before Lilar under a high triumphal arch, and the sun went down in splendor behind Elysium. "Dost thou not know me?" asked Linda, in a low tone, who stood beside him in travelling dress, weeping in bright love and bliss; and Julienne came flying out and making a sign of caution to both, from the entrance thicket of the flute-dell, and cried, as a cunning pretext: "Linda, Linda, hearest thou not the flutes, then?" And Albano had forgotten the painful letter.
Like a concert that suddenly flutters up with a hundred wings did the swift presence of old love and joy break over the forsaken youth (so troubled about his friend) in beautiful waves; and smitten with delight, he saw Linda again as on Ischia; but she saw him again as in another Elysium; she was more soft, tender, ardent, remembering his past scenes in this garden. She would not relate nor hear anything at all about her own travelling adventures. Albano buried his mystery of Schoppe in his mighty but trembling breast; only to his father he burned to disclose it. He was incessantly representing to himself the possibility of a relationship, and the facility with which Schoppe might confound the pretended sister with the true one, Julienne; this very evening he meant to ask his father.
He imparted to her the paternal consent to their alliance with great joy, but not with the greatest, because Schoppe's letter echoed in his bosom. Julienne perceived that only a cascade instead of a cataract came out of him to-day, and sought with a sly pleasantry to draw him out, by making him answer, which she easily did, through the whole range of questions touching important personalities of his and her acquaintance. She had some inclination to weave and to paint on the theatre curtain, or even to pierce a prompter's-hole in it. She began the questions at Idoine,—who shortly after his arrival had taken her departure back again from the city,—and left off with them at Schoppe,—inquiring after the object of his journey; but Albano had not seen the former, and as to the latter, Schoppe, he said, had confided it to him alone. A beautiful, inflexible marble vein of firmness ran through his being. Linda's black eye was an open, true German one, and looked upon him only to love him.
Out of the flute-dell came the rest of the company, the Lector and others; Julienne constrained the lovers to a separation, saying: "Here is no Ischia; without me you cannot see each other here in the palace at all; I will announce it to thee always through thy father, when I am here."
When he stood alone in Lilar with the heavy thought of Schoppe and Linda, and surveyed the lovely regions and scenes of fair hours, then it seemed to him all at once as if, in the twilight, Elysium, like a charming face, distorted itself into an expression of scorn at him and at life. Little malicious fays sit on the little children's tables, as if they were tender children, and very much loved to see men and human pleasure; anon they start up as wild huntresses, and run through the blossoms; a thousand hands turn up the garden with its blossoming trees, and point its black, gloomy thicket of roots like summits up into heaven; Gorgon heads look out of the twigs, and up in the thunder-house there is an incessant weeping and laughing;—nothing is fair and soft but the great, daring Tartarus.
However, as it was the shortest way to his father, Albano went, stern and angry, through the garden, over the swan bridge, along by the Temple of Dream, by Chariton's little cottage, by the rose arbors, and over the woodland bridge, and soon was in the princely palace with his father, who had just come back from the sick Luigi. With ironical expression of countenance, his father related to him how the patient had begun to swell again, merely because he feared that his dead father, who had promised to appear to him a second time as a sign of death, would give the sign and immediately call him away. Then Albano related, without any introduction, and without mention of Schoppe and of his connections, the hypothesis of the most singular relationship, without putting, out of respect for his father, any long, searching questions, or even more than the short, swift one, "Is Linda my sister?" His father quietly heard him through. "Every man," said he, angrily, "has a rainy corner of his life, out of which foul weather proceeds, and follows after him. Mine is the carrying about of mysteries with me. From whom hast thou the latest?" "On that subject sacred duty bids me be silent," he replied. "In that case," said Gaspard, "thou wouldst better have been silent altogether: he who gives up the smallest part of a secret, has the rest no longer in his power. How much dost thou suppose that I know of the matter?" "Ah, what can I suppose?" said Albano. "Didst thou think upon my consent to thy union with the Countess?" said Gaspard, more angry. "Should I then keep silence? and did not sister Julienne in the end disentangle herself from all mysteries?" Here Gaspard looked at him sharply, and asked, "Canst thou rely upon the earnest word of a man, without wavering, swerving, however eloquently appearances may discourse to the contrary?" "I can," said Albano. "The Countess is not thy sister; rely upon my word!" said Gaspard. "Father, I do so!" said Albano, full of joy; "and now not a word further on the subject."
But the old man, now more composed, went on to say that this new error gave him an occasion now earnestly to insist upon Linda's consent to a speedy union, because her father, perhaps himself the mysterious wonder-worker who had hitherto baffled all attempts at detection, had absolutely fixed, as the time of his appearance, the wedding-day. He indicated yet once more to his son his desire to know the way in which he had arrived at that hypothesis; but to no purpose: holy friendship could not be desecrated or deserted, and his breast closed mightily around his open heart, as the dark rock closes about the bright crystal.
So he parted, warm and happy, from his silent father. In the hard hour of the letter-reading, he had only climbed an artificial, rocky region of life, and there lay the gay gardens again, stretching away even to the horizon; yet, after all, the vain, painful error of his Schoppe, and the thought of that spirit so desolated by love and hatred, which, even in the tone of the letter, seemed to bow itself down, and the prospect of his madness, passed like a distant funeral chime dolefully through his fair landscape, and the happy heart grew full and still.
Soon after this, Albano's kind sister again let a Hesperian hour strike and play on the musical clock of his happiness, whose keeper she was,—an hour with which his whole life, up and down, sounded in unison, and cleared away, and in which, as in Switzerland, when a cloud opens, all at once heights, glaciers, mountain-peaks, now look out from the sky. He saw his Linda again, but in new light, glowing, but like a rose before the blushing evening red. Her love was a soft, still flame, not a leaping of eccentric, stinging sparks. He concluded that his father, who was a man of his word, had already made his request to her for a priestly union, and even got her consent. Julienne told him she wished to speak with him the next evening, at six o'clock, in his father's chamber; that made him still more sure and glad. With new and still more tenderly adoring emotions, he parted with Linda: the goddess had become a saint.
When he came the next day into the paternal apartment, he found no one there but Julienne. She gave him a slight and almost imperceptible kiss, in order to be speedily ready with her intelligence, since her absence was limited to so many minutes as the Princess needed to go from the sick-bed of her husband to the apartment of the Princesse. "She will not marry thee," she began, softly, "notwithstanding that thy father expressed himself so strongly and finely to her, at the first reception after the journey, upon the new good fortune of his son, for which he had now nothing more to desire, he said, than the seal of perpetuity. It was still more finely silvered and gilded; I have forgotten the precise words. Thereupon she replied in her speech, which I never can retain, that her will and thine were the real seal; every other seal of policy imposed chains and slavery upon the fairest life."
Deeply was Albano hurt by an open refusal, which hitherto, coming upon him as a silent one and as philosophy, had floated about untouched, as a mere unsubstantial shadow. "That was not right; she might saya good while hence, but notnever," said he, sensitively. "Moderation, friend!" said Julienne; "thereupon thy father reminded her, in a friendly manner, of the conditional appearance of her own, by saying that he could not but wish very much to transfer her fortunes out of his own hands into nearer ones. No arbitrary condition could compel or annihilate a will, she said. Thy father went on calmly, and added, he had sketched, in that case, the fairest plan of life for you two; but, in the other case, his approval of their love stood open only as long as his stay here, which would end at his friend's death. Then he went coolly and composedly out, as men are wont to do when they have provoked us to a real rage."
"Hesperia, Hesperia!" cried Albano, angrily. "But did Linda really repeat her no?" "O, too true! But, brother?" asked Julienne, with astonishment. "Suffer me," he replied; "for is it not unrighteous, this meddling of parents with the fairest, tenderest strings, whose vibration and melody they at once kill, in order to call forth from them a new tune? Is it not, then, sinful to degrade divine gifts into state-revenues and match-moneys,—yes, match[120]-moneys indeed? Good Linda, now we stand again on the ground, where they set up the flowers of love for sale as hay, and where there are no other trees in paradise than boundary-trees. No, thou free being! never through me shalt thou cease to be so!"
Julienne stepped back some paces, and said, "I will only laugh at thee," which she did, and then added, in earnest, "She, then,—is that thy will?—shall appointtheethe day when the old father is to become visible?" "That does not follow by any means," said he. She calmly remarked, that an excited person always complained of the heat of another, and that Albano, in his very calmness, insisted too sternly upon his own and others' rights; that such people went on to demand, in passion, something beyond the right, as a pin, which fits too nicely into the clock, when warmed stops it by its size. Then she begged him affectionately just to leave the disentangling of the "whole snarl" to her fingers, and to remain mild and still, lest yet more people—perhaps, in fact, herbelle-sœur—might interfere with their union. Albano took it in friendship, but begged her earnestly only not to make any plans, because he should be too honorable toward Linda for that, and should immediately tell her the whole word of the charade.
She disclosed to him that she had made no other plan whatever than a plan for a happy day to-morrow, namely, to visit with Linda the Princess Idoine in Arcadia, to whom she owed still greater things beside a visit, particularly half of her heart. "Thou wilt ride accidentally after us, and find us in the midst of pastoral life," she added, "and surprise thy Linda." He said very decidedly, "No," both out of a shrinking from Idoine's resemblance to Liana,—although he only knew that Liana had personated her in the Dream Temple, and not, also, that Idoine had counterfeited her before his sick-bed,—and because he disliked to come into the presence of the Minister's lady, from a dread as well of bitter as of sweet recollections, of both which, in such a case, Roquairol would have brought up the rear. Julienne mischievously objected: "Only have no fear for the Princesse; she was obliged, in order only to rid herself of the detested bridegroom, to engage with an oath to all her friends never to choose one below her rank,—and that she will keep, even with thee." He answered the joke merely with the serious repetition of his no. Well, then she should insist upon it, she replied, that he should at least come to meet them half-way, and await them in the "Prince's Garden,"—a park which had been laid out by Luigi as hereditary prince, and forgotten when he came into the princely chair. He assented to this proposition very joyfully.
She still asked, jocosely, as they parted, "Who has been presenting thee with a new sister, lately?" He said, "That is what my father could not draw from me." "Brother," said she, softly, "it was a gentleman who easily takes princesses for countesses, and who, in the next place, thinks to be still more crazy than he already is,—thy Schoppe," and flew off.
On the morning after the two friends took their journey to Arcadia, Julienne, although more troubled on account of the increased illness of her sick brother, cheered herself by her reliance upon a plan which, in spite of her assurance, she had sketched for the good fortune of thewellone, and which she was to carry out in Arcadia. She, unlike others who hide their heads behind the dark, mourning-fan of sorrow and sensibility, oftener hid her head, with its designs, behind the gay dress-fan of smiles, which turned to the spectators the painted side; amidst laughing and weeping she pursued and pondered them. Thus she had made the request to Albano to join in the visit to Idoine only for show, and in the certainty that he would refuse, or in case he should not, that then Idoine would; for she knew, from Idoine's visits in the previous winter, that she had frequently thought in conversations of the fair fever-patient who had been restored by her, and that she had just fled before his arrival, in order not to overshadow his bright, loving present, which had become known to her in the easiest manner through the Princess, by coming upon him like a cloud out of the past full of melancholy resemblances. Julienne had even ascertained that the Princess had vainly wished to keep and reserve the Princesse longer, in order, perhaps, by means of her, to remind, terrify, change, or punish the youth. Julienne's love for the Princesse would perhaps have been made as warm by that tender flight from Albano, as her love towards Linda was, had not this very love stood between; at least, this beautiful flight had given her an unlimited confidence—which is exactly the true and only kind—in the Princesse.
The day of the journey was a beautiful harvest morning, full of thickly-peopled cornfields, full of coolness and dew and zest. Linda expressed a childlike joy in Idoine, and gave the reasons in a glad tone. "First, because she saved thy brother's life,—and because she knew, after all, what she wanted, and insisted upon it with spirit, and did not, like other Princesses, transform herself into a victim to the Throne,—and because she is the most German Frenchwoman that I know except Madame Necker. Yes, in my eyes she belongs strictly, with all her fair youth, among old ladies, and these I have always sought out, for there is at least something to be learned from them. She loves thee exceedingly, me, I believe, less. To one who is such a charming medium between the nun and the married woman, I seem too worldly, though it is not the case."
The two companions arrived early in the beautiful, enchanted village in the afternoon before dinner, just as the neat children were already banding together to go to gleaning, and the wagons were already going out to meet the gatherers of the sheaves. Idoine's brother, the future hereditary Prince of Hohenfliess,—the Dwarf of Tivoli,—looked out of the window, and Julienne almost regretted the journey. Idoine flew to meet her, and clasped her heartily to her breast. When Julienne had before and upon her face that great blue eye and every transfigured feature of the form which once her brother had so blissfully and painfully loved, she fancied herself, now that she had become his sister, to receive, as his representative, the love of the representative of Liana; and she must needs, as she had done every time since that death at the first reception, weep heartily.
Linda was received by the Princess with such a deep tenderness that Julienne wondered, since the two generally lived in an alternation of coldness and love. There stood the Minister's lady, Froulay, so old with mourning, so cold, still, and courteous, so cold towards the occasion and the company (except the fac-simile of her daughter), particularly towards Linda, whose bold, decided, philosophical tone seemed to her unwomanly, and like a trumpet on two female lips.
The future hereditary Prince of Hohenfliess fortunately withdrew himself soon from so inconvenient a place, where he navigated a shipwreck plank instead of a gondola. After inquiring of Julienne with interest about the state of her brother, his present predecessor, and reminding her and Linda of her and his Italian tour, he became so fretful and out of tune at Julienne's frigidity, and at the moral discourses of the women, and at a certain oppressiveness premonitory of a moral tempest,—which sensualists experience in the presence of women, where everything rude, selfishness, arrogance, screams like discord,—and at the general, plaguy hypocrisy,—which he could not but immediately take it all to be,—that he was glad to break away, and relieve this pastoral life of the only wolf who had crept into it. Voluptuaries can never hold out long amongmanynoble women, tormented as they are by their many-sided, sharp observations, although they can more easily with one, because they hope to ensnare her. What made him feel worst of all was, that he was compelled to pronounce them all hypocrites. He found no good women, because he had faith in none; since we must believe in them in order to see them where they are, just as one must exercise virtue in order to be acquainted with it, though not the reverse.
With him a black cloud seemed to draw off out of this Eden and ether. The Minister's lady received a card from her son Roquairol, who had just arrived, and she went too, to the joy of Julienne, who found in her a little obstacle to her plan of conversion for Linda, because the latter looked upon the Minister's lady as a one-sided, narrow, anxious, unyielding nature. Idoine begged the two maidens to travel over her little kingdom with her. They went down into the clean, wide village. On the steps they were met by cheerful, obliging faces. From the distant apartments of the palace was heard now singing, now blowing of wind instruments. As on the bird the shining feathers slide swiftly and smoothly under each other and out again, so did all occupations move around Idoine; her economical machine was no clumsy, jarring steeple-clock, but a musical picture-watch, which conceals the hours behind tones, the wheels behind images.
In a meadow-garden the youngest children were playing wildly with each other. Moravian and Dutch neatness had scoured and painted the village to a sleek, bright fancy-shop. New and shiny hung the bucket over the well; under the linden-rotunda of the village the earth-floor was swept clean; everywhere were seen clean, whole, fair clothes, and happy eyes; and Idoine showed, under the unusual gayety, an earnest meaning in the looks with which she inspected her Arcadia, flower after flower.
She led her friends over the various Sunday dancing-places of the different ages, along before the house of the steward,—wherein the Minister's lady resided, and now, to Julienne's fear, her son was,—to the bright, plain church. Soon came the parson and steward, for whom her passing by had been a hint, following her into the church, and received commissions from her. Both were fair young men, with open brow and a little youthful pride. When the party were out of the church, she said through these young men she ruled over the place, and them she guided gently; that only young people were furnished with hatred and spirit against conventionalism, and with enthusiasm and faith. She added, jocosely, she governed nothing but a school of girls, upon which she laid more stress than upon the other, because education was the formation of habits and manners, and these a girl needed more than a boy, whom the world, after all, would not allow to have any; and she had, she said, some inclination to be ala Bonne, because she had, even when a girl, often been obliged to be one with her sisters.
Thereupon she introduced the two to several houses; everywhere they found well-whitened, neatly-ordered apartments, flowers and vine-clusters over the windows, fair women and children, and now a flute, now a violin, and nowhere a spinning child. In all she had charges to give, and what seemed a mere walk was also business. She showed a sharp insight through people, and their perverted, crooked ways, and a talent for business, which possessed and united at once the universal and the particular. "I should be glad, of course," said she, "to have only pleasures and amusements about me; but without labor and seriousness the best good of the world dies: not so much as a real play is possible without real earnestness." Linda commended her for training all to music,—that real moonlight in every gloomy night of life. "Without poesy and art," she added, "the spirit grows mossy and wooden in this earthly clime." "O what were mine without tones!" said Idoine, glowingly.
Linda inquired about the right of citizenship in this pleasant state. "It is mostly possessed by Swiss families," said Idoine, "with whom I became acquainted at hearth and home on my travels. Immediately after the French women I rank my Swiss." Julienne replied, "You repeat to me riddles." She solved them for her; and Linda, who had been in France shortly after her, confirmed it, that there, among the women of a certain higher tone, to whom no Crebillon had ever come up, a development prevailed, unusual in Germany, of the most delicate morality, almost holiness. "Only," added Linda, "they had in morality, as in art, prejudices of fine taste, and more delicacy than genius."
They went out through the village, toward the loveliest evening sun; Alpine horns responded to each other on the mountains, and in the vale gay old men went to light employments. These Idoine greeted with peculiar love. "Because," she said, "there was nothing more beautiful than cheerfulness on an old face; and among country people it was always the sign of a well-regulated and pious life."
Linda opened her heart to the golden scene before her, and said: "How must all this delight in a poem! But I know not what I have to object to the fact that it now exists so in the real reality."
"What has this same reality," said Idoine, playfully, "taken away from you or done to you? I love it; where then areyouto be found for us except in reality?" "I," said Julienne, "am thinking of something quite different; one is ashamed here, that one has yet done so little with all one's willing. From willing to doing is, however, to be sure, a long step here," she subjoined, while she placed her little finger on herheart, and stretched the fore-finger as if vainly attempting to span from there to herhead. "Idoine, tell me, how then can one think of what is great and what is little at once?" "By thinking of the greatest first," said she; "when one looks into the sun, the dust and the midges become most visible. God is, surely, the sun of us all."
The earthly sun stood now looking toward them far down on an immeasurable plain amid mild roses of Heaven. A distant windmill flung its arms broadly through the fair purple glow; on the mountain declivities children sang near the pastured herds, and their smaller brothers and sisters were playing under their eye; the evening bell, which in Arcadia was always tolled at the farewell of the sun, rocked sun and earth to slumber with its vibrations; not only in youthful, but even in childlike beauty lay the soft little village and its world round about them. No storm, one said to one's self, can intrude into this soft land, no winter stalk in in heavy panoply of ice: here, one thought, only spring winds and rosy clouds come and go: no rains fall, except early rains, and no leaves, except those of the blossoms: only dust from the flowers rises here; and the rainbow,—only forget-me-nots and May-flowers hold it upon their little blue and white leaves; the landscape and life and all seemed here to be only a continuous morning twilight, so fresh and new, full of presentiment and contentment, without glow or glitter, and with a few stars over the morning red.
Children with wreaths of grain in their hands sat on other people's wagons full of sheaves, and rode proudly in.
Idoine hung with hearty love, as if this evening made it all new, upon the double groups. "Only the countryman is so fortunate," said she, "as to live on in all the Arcadian relations of his childhood. The old man sees nothing around him but implements and labors which as a child he also saw and plied. At last he goes up into that garden over yonder, and sleeps it out." She pointed to the churchyard on the hill, which was a veritable garden, with flower-beds and a wall of fruit-trees. Julienne looked thither with agitation,—she saw the dark curtain tremble behind which her sick brother was soon to be borne.
Transparent evening gold-dust was wafted over the garden; the loud day was muffled, and life peaceful; olive-branches and their blossoms sank slowly down out of the quiet heavens. "There is the only place," said Idoine, "where man concludes an eternal peace with himself and others, as a French clergyman so beautifully said to me." "Such Christian-catholic night-thoughts," replied Linda, "are as disagreeable to me as the clergymen themselves. We can as little experience an immortality as an annihilation." "I do not understand that," said Julienne. "Ah, Idoine, if now there were no immortality, what would you do?" "J'aimerais," said she to her, in a low voice.
Suddenly they heard some one singing before them, as at a great distance: "Taste"—then after some time—"of life's"—at last—"pleasure."[121]"That is the echo from the churchyard," said Idoine, and endeavored to persuade the party to return. "Echo and moonshine and churchyard together," she continued playfully, "may well be too strong for female hearts." At the same time she touched her eye, with a hint to Julienne, as much as to say how sorry she was that the eyes of the Countess could only see through a mist the beautiful evening coming on afar off. "The singing voice sounds so familiar to me," said Linda. "It's Roquairol, that's all; shall we go on?" said Julienne. But Linda begged to stay, and Idoine courteously agreed.
Now did the echo—the moonlight of sound—give back tones like dirges from the funeral choir; and it was as if the united shades of the departed sang them over in their holy-week under the ground,—as if the corpse-veil stirred on the white lip, and out of the last hollows sounded again a hollow life. The singing ceased; Alpine horns began on the mountains; then the echo of the concert came over again in enchanting tones, as if the departed still played behind the breastwork of the grave-mound, and rehabilitated themselves in echoed tones,[122]All men bear dead or dying ones in their breast; so did the three maidens. Tones are the garments of the past fluttering back with a glimmer, and they excite the heart too much thereby.
They wept, and neither could say whether for sadness or joy. The hitherto so moderate Idoine grasped Linda's hand, and laid it softly on her heart, and let it sink again. They turned round silently and with one accord. Idoine held Linda by the hand. The subterranean waters of the echoes of the dead and the Alpine horns murmured after them, though more distantly. It did not escape Julienne how Idoine continually turned her face, merely in order to withdraw it fromher, with the great drops in her large eyes, towards the thickly-veiled Linda; and she inferred therefrom that Idoine knew and was acquainted with much, and respected the bride of the youth to whom she had by her fair resemblance given back a happy life.
"What now do we get from all this?" said Idoine, by and by, and near the village. "We foresee that we should be too tender, and yet we give ourselves up. For that very reason men call us weak. They prepare themselves for their future by mere hardenings, and only we do it with mere softening processes." "What shall one do, then," said Julienne,—"leap into rivers, up mountains, on horseback, and so on?" "No," said Idoine. "For I see it by my peasant-women: they suffer in their nerves, with all their muscular labor, as well as others. With the mind, I imagine, we must all do and seek more; but we always let only the fingers and eyes exercise and stir themselves. The heart itself knows nothing thereof, and does what it pleases the while: it dreams, weeps, bleeds, dances. A little philosophizing would be of service to us; but, as it is, we give ourselves up, bound, to all feelings, and if we think, it is merely to give them additional aid."
They came back into the village; it was full of busy evening noise. Children came dancing to meet Idoine; alp-horns sounded in from the heights, and from the houses flutes and songs. Idoine gave cheerfully evening commands. "How easily, after all," said she, "outward tranquillity breaks up the internal. A busied heart is like a vessel of water swung round; hold it still, and it runs over."
Julienne had already several times, but in vain, snatched at the helm of the hour and the conversation, to carry out her plan; now, when she observed Linda's silence, emotion, and dreaminess, she fancied she had hit upon the long-expected, favorable moment when some words which Idoine let drop on the subject of marriage would find in Linda a softened soil for their roots. By the easy turn of a eulogy which she pronounced upon Idoine for her spirited opposition against launching into a hated princely marriage, and her gain of a perpetual young life, she brought the Countess to the point of expressing her heretical hatred of marriage, and saying that it laid the flower painfully fastened with a sharp iron ring to its frame; that love without freedom, and from duty, was nothing but hypocrisy and hatred; and that acting according to morality, so called, was as much as if one should choose to think or poetize according to a system of logic which he had before him, and that the energy, the will, the heart of love, was something higher than morals and logic.
At this moment came a note from the Minister's lady, wherein she excused her to-day's absence on the score of the too sad farewell which her son had this evening so strangely and as if forever bid her. However many silent thoughts this intelligence left behind in Julienne and Linda, Idoine was not drawn by it out of the lively emotion into which the previous discourse had thrown her; but, with a noble indignation, which made out of the beautiful maiden a beautiful youth, and put Minerva's helmet on her head, she made to her lofty adversary, who was less to be roused by others' passions than by opposing sentiments, this declaration of war: Certainly her aversion to marriage was chargeable only upon her other aversion to "priests"; for was the marriage bond anything else than eternal love, and did not every real love hold itself for an eternal one? A love which thinks to die at some time or other was already dead, and that which feared to live forever, feared in vain. If even friends were joined at the altar, as is said to be somewhere or other the case,[123]they would at most only be more sacredly attached to each other in love. One might count quite as many if not more unhappy intrigues than unhappy marriages. One might, indeed, be a mother, but not a father, without marriage, and the latter must honor the former and himself by a decent respect for morality. "I am a German," she concluded, "and respect the old knightly ladies, my ancestors, highly. Blessed is a woman like Elizabeth and a man like Götz von Berlichingen, in their holy wedlock." All at once she found herself surprised by her warmth and her fluency. "I have really," she added, smiling, "become a pedantic parson's widow. This comes of my being the highest authority in the village, and from the fact that, as in almost every cottage a happy refutation of single blessedness dwells, I do not love to let other sentiments come up here."
"O," said Julienne, pleasantly, because she saw Linda serious, "girls always talk together about love and marriage a little; they love to draw flowers for themselves out of a bride's bouquet."
"That, as you know, I could not well do," said Idoine, alluding to the sworn promise which she had been obliged to give her parents, who were suspicious of her enthusiastic boldness, never to marry below her princely rank, which, to her, according to her sharp propensities and parts, amounted to as much as celibacy. "You were right, however," pursued Julienne, and would fain continue in her mirthful mood; "love without marriage is like a bird of passage, who seats himself upon a mast, which itself moves along. I praise, for my part, a fine, green-rooted tree, which stays there and admits a nest."
Contrary to her custom, Linda did not laugh at this, but went alone, without saying a word, down into the garden and the moonlight.
"The Countess," said Idoine to her friend, troubled about the meaning of that silent seriousness, "has not, I hope, misunderstood us." "No," said Julienne, with glad looks at the thought of having gained her point so far that the discourse had made an impression on Linda; "she has the rarest gift to understand, and the most common misfortune not to be understood." "The two things always go together," said she, remained a moment in thought, looked at Julienne, and at last said, "I must be entirely true. I knew the Countess's relation through my sister. Friend, is he entirely worthy of her?"—a question whose source the Princesse could seek only in the supposition of revengeful insinuations on the part of the Princess.
"Entirely!" answered she, strongly. "I gladly believe you," replied Idoine, with rapidity in her tones, but tranquillity in her looks. She looked longer and longer upon the sister of Albano; her great, blue eyes gleamed more and more strongly; Minerva's helmet was removed from the maidenly head; the soft countenance appeared lovely, tranquil, clear, not more strongly moved than a prayer to God permits it to be, and with as little of passionate desire as a glorified saint has, and yet shining more and more celestially. Julienne's fair heart leaped up; she saw Liana again, as if she had come from heaven to press the beloved man with a blessing to a new heart; she said, with tears, "Thou, thou didst once give him peace." Idoine was surprised; two tears gushed from her bright eyes; with emphasis she answered, "Gave!" in an agitated and passionate manner pressed herself to her friend, saying, "I loved you long ago," and they said nothing further.
Quickly she collected herself, reminded Julienne of Linda's night-blindness, and begged her to go directly after her as her friend, although she herself would gladly steal this service from her if she dared. Julienne hastened into the garden, but remembered with emotion that Idoine had not reciprocated herthou; Idoine avoided the femalethou. Unlike the Oriental women, who leave off the veil before relations, she, like her fair French neighbors, transferred the delicate laws ofpolitesseinto matters of the heart.
Julienne found her friend in the garden in a dark bower, still, with deep, sunken eyes, buried in dreams. Linda started up: "She loves him!" said she, with pain and heat. "Hear it, Julienne: she loves him!" The latter, upon this utterance of a truth with which she had herself come directly from Idoine's arms, could do nothing but express her terror; but Linda took it for astonishment, and went on: "By Heaven! my eye has detected her. O, once she was not by far so lively and earnest and sensitive and soft. Her deep emotion at beholding me, and her weeping at Roquairol's voice because it resembles his, and her long and earnest marriage-sermon, and her soul-like glances at me,—O, did she not see him in the great, glorious moment when the blooming one knelt weeping, and lifted his godlike head to heaven, and called down the saint and peace? O, that she should have so much as ventured to personate either before him! And can she forget that?"
Julienne at last got the word: "Well, suppose it, then; is not Idoine, however, noble and good?" "I have nothing to say against her or for her," answered Linda. "But when he sees her now, when he finds the saintly one once more like the departed, when his whole first love returns and triumphs over the second ... By Heaven! No," she added, proudly and strongly, "no, that I cannot brook; I will not beg, will not weep nor resign, but I will battle for him. Am not I, too, beautiful? I am more so, and my spirit is more boldly shaped for his. What can she give which I cannot offer him three times over? I will give it to him,—my fortune, my being, even my liberty; I can marry him as well as she; I will ... O speak, Julienne! But thou art a cold German, and secretly attached to her from like godliness. O God, Julienne! am I, then, beautiful? Assure me of it, I pray. Am I not at all like the glorified one? Should I not look exactly as he would wish! Why was I not his first love, and his Liana, and even dead too? Good Julienne, why dost thou not speak?"
"Onlyletme speak," said she, although not with entire truth. She had been struck and punished by Linda's home-coming truth, and by her own consciousness that she had laid out a plan of doing away Linda's prejudices against marriage, the very supports of which plan had been anticipated and reckoned over by Linda as justifications of jealousy, and that she had set a rock in motion on the point of a rock, and brought it to the point of falling, which she could now no longer manage. She was confounded, too, yes, angered, by what she felt to be a strange impetuosity of love, before which she could not at all speak out the Job's-comfort that Albano would always act according to theobligationsof fidelity. Beautifully was she surprised by the prospered conversion to a readiness for marriage. With some uncertainty as to the result, however, on the part of Linda, who by the moonlight and the mild, distant mountain-music had only been made more stormy, she continued: "I would not willingly interrupt thee with praise of thy marriage resolution; in all other particulars thou art wrong. To be sure, she is now more serious; but she stood at the deathbed of her likeness, and saw herself grow pale in Liana; that does much to chasten. Touching him, had he seen thee earlier ..."
"Did he not see early the image onLago Maggiore, but unlike, as he said?"
"I will, then, confess it to thee, wild one," replied Julienne, "because one must not surprise thee, that I yesterday begged him to join us in our visit to the Princesse, and that he, even out of regard and dislike to all resemblances, gave me a downright refusal; but he awaits us to-morrow in the Prince's garden."
Changed, softened, with transfigured eyes, and with sinking voice, Linda said, "Does my friend love me so greatly? But I love him exceedingly too,—the pure one. To-morrow will I say to him, take my freedom, and stay forever with me. We will go from the altar, my Julienne,—thou and I and he,—to Valencia, to Isola Bella, or whithersoever he will, and stay together. Thanks, dear moon and music! How childlike the tones and the rays play with each other! Embrace me, my beloved; forgive that Linda has been naughty!" Here the storm of her heart dissolved into sweet weeping. So, in countries upon which the sun shines vertically down, is the blue sky daily transformed into thunder, tempest, and black rain, and daily the sun goes down again blue and golden.
Julienne only replied, "Beautiful! now will we go up!"—being less capable than Linda of swift transitions. When they saw, above, the tranquil, bright, contented Idoine again,—always steadfastly and serenely active,—undisturbed by regret or expectation,—wearing only the harvest-wreath of action, never the flowery bridal-wreath,—so many white blossoms at her feet, lying ungathered for garland or festoon,—her pure, radiant soul like a clear, bright tone, which bears the charm of its melody through moist, cloudy air, undisturbed and unbroken,—then did she feel that Idoine was connected with her by a more sisterly tie than Linda. The former was to her anidealand a constellation in her heaven above her; the latter, an unknown one, which sparkles far off and invisible in a second hemisphere of the heavens; but in her the womanly power of loving on, almost even to the degree of hatred, worked on more intensely than in any one woman, and she remained constant to her old friend. Idoine was one of those female souls which resemble the moon; pale and faint must she stand in the magnificent evening sky, which splendor and burning clouds adorn, and not a single shadow can she dislodge on the earth, and mounts with invisible rays, but all other light grows pale, and hers grows out of the shadow, until at last her supernatural radiance invests the earthly night, and transforms it into a second world, and all hearts love her, weeping, and the nightingales sing in her beams.
All was now settled and ended. Linda kept herself reserved, and merely from respect to the law of social propriety, which she never overstepped. Idoine, guessing a change, softly drew herself back out of her former familiarity. Early in the dark morning they parted, but Julienne told not her friend, how, when they left each other, she had seen Idoine turn away with wet eyes.