But a change had come over the youth of the others, compared with his.
Rabette"s countenance, the once full cheeks and blooming lips, had fallen in, and were overlaid and overgrown with the white veil, and she had two gray tears instead of eyes ; yet she smiled a great deal. Like his own Gorgon-head, Roquairol"s face appeared pale and hard, as if chiselled on his gravestone; only naked piers stood in the water,--the light arches of the beautiful bridge were gone. Albina and Rabette looked up with a steady gaze at Albano"s blooming figure; he seemed to be an Italian growth, a Neapolitan nerved by daily bathing in the gulf.
Roquairol had his part immediately at command more easily than Albano his truth; he demeaned himself with the highest courteousness toward one who had broken in two for him the magic wand of life and thrown it away as a pair of beggar"s sticks,--kissed him on the cheek, kept up the lightest, often a French tone of conversation, requested the latest intelligence about Italy, and retailed in turn the most edifying news from the country, as well, he said, as he could muster it up for a man with a Hesperian standard of measurement. He related, also, "that the Knight"s brother had been there,--a man full of talent, especially the mimetic and that sort, and of the most singularly intense fancy with the highest coldness of character, though perhaps not always sufficiently true. For my tragedy," added he, "he would be worth his weight in gold. Dear brother, hold yourself forthwith as invited on the occasion. The play is called The Tragedian; I give it soon. Rabette is acquainted with it." She nodded. Albano glowed, but was silent.
Among all parts, the Captain succeeded most perfectly in that of a world"s-man; the show of coldness is more easy and true, also, than the show of warmth. Albano kept a proud distance. Roquairol could not gain in any respect by being opposite to the afflicted, faded Rabette, not even by the intercession of that form of his, full of the ruins of life. Albano found there something forever confused, and the wax wings crushed down into a lump; and it was as close and confining to him as to one who from the bright world creeps down at once into a low, damp cavern of a cellar.
The Captain rose, reminded him once more of his invitation to the "Tragedian," and springing on his festive horse rode away.
Behind his back every one was silent about him, as if embarra.s.sed. The women, a little shy of Albano"s brilliant presence, found some difficulty in venturing forth upon the subject of the old familiar past, while the foster-father, Wehrfritz, who having steadily grown on in his opinions and manners, and being still encased in the old cry of dogs and canary-birds, knew nothing at all about time, expressed his hearty thanks to his foster-son for the obliging recollection and choice of his birthday festival, which Albano necessarily and vainly declined, continued in his old thouing and patronizing, wrought himself into ecstasies on the subject of the French and their future victories, and bestowed more premiums of praise now on the older foster-son than he ever had on the younger, in order thereby, as he hoped, to give him as great pleasure as ever. The Magister backed the praise from a distance, although he could not let slip the opportunity, so soon as his pupil had p.r.o.nounced Napel, Baia, c.u.ma, to p.r.o.nounce Neapel, Baiae, c.u.mae. Albano was pure, true, human, frank, and hearty toward all; there was no vanity in his self-forgetting pride.
Rabette found at last a lifting-screw to wind her polished and yet familiar brother out of the receiving-room up into her or his former apartment, so as to be alone on his breast. As they stepped in, she immediately began, as she said, "Dost thou still know the chamber, Albano?" to weep infinitely, with the tears which had been so long gathering; and Albano showed her in his own, his long-cherished sympathy, but tore open thereby all the wounds of the past. She herself seized upon the remedy, namely, the telling of her story,--however earnestly he persisted that he knew, and, indeed, could well guess all,--and drying her eyes, informed him how all stood,--and that Charles was a good deal with his mother in Arcadia; that the Minister still acted the old tyrant toward his only child, and did not dole out to him a farthing more than ever, although he was always heaping up greater and greater debts, especially since there was no longer any Liana silently to wipe them away; that he borrowed everywhere, only, however, he never would accept anything from her; that he still continued to desire and know nothing but the Countess, and that G.o.d knew what all this would come to. Antic.i.p.ating all inquiry, she added: "He knows the whole already, all thy intercourse with that same person.
He behaves quietly and pleasantly about it, but I know him as well as I want to. Ah!" she sighed, in the fulness of anguish, and added immediately, with the same voice: "Thou lookest at me; is it not true thou findest me very haggard to what I once was?" "Yes, indeed, poor girl!" "I drank much vinegar on his account, because Charles loves slender figures; and grief has much to do with it too," said she.
Albano would have consoled her with the nearer possibility of a union of Charles with her, since the impossibility of every other union had been decided, and readily tendered his services for any prefatory word or coercive measure. "Before G.o.d and us, he is thy husband," said he.
"That he never could have been," replied she, blushing, "for he never could have been honest; and did I not write thee that I am now too proud for it, too?" "Then cast him off forever!" said he. "Ah!" said she, fearfully, "do I know, then, that he meditates no harm against himself? Then I should reproach myself with it eternally."
Involuntarily he could not but compare with this loving, holy fear, the hardness of the Princess, who could relate so gladly and proudly how many a love-smitten life had fallen a victim to her prudish heart and coquettish face. "What wilt thou do now?" he asked. "I weep," said she.
"Ah, Albano, that is enough, indeed, that thou hast given me hearing and counsel; I am cheerful again. But be once more his friend."
He was silent, a little angry at the naughtiness of women, which, under pretence of seeking advice, only desires a hearing. "What is that?" he asked, showing her a leaf. "That is perfectly my hand, and I never wrote it!" She looked at it, and said Charles was often trying experiments with her in this way at handwriting. He wondered, and said: "Nothing, but imitating and counterfeiting all the time! But how canst thou think of my forgiving him?" Some descriptions of travels on her table, formerly so poor in books, met his eye. "I wanted to know, of course," said she, "how you might probably be faring in this, that, and the other place, and that is why I read the long stuff." "Thou art still my sister!" said he, and kissed her heartily. She still asked him much and urgently about his new connection; but chary of words with his full heart, he hastened down stairs.
The first word down below to the Provincial Director was a request for the "deposed letter of Schoppe"s." Wehrfritz brought the broad letter, which had been laid up in the little iron box of bonds, and delivered it he hoped, he said, in good order. Hardly could Albano keep back his tears, when he held the crinkled but precious traces of the beloved hand, which certainly never in its life had swerved or stained itself, in his own. As he did not break the seal, they all began good-naturedly to portray to him his friend Schoppe, according to the presumptions and views which man so boldly and complacently indulges upon every higher spirit, with all his actions or colors, as if actions or colors were strokes and outlines. Wehrfritz and Wehmeier deplored that he was growing mad, if not already so. The Magister held back with his main-proof, till the Provincial Director should have contributed the lesser auxiliary ones.
His life beneath this palace-roof was uncovered and showed up, but in a friendly spirit. "He had hitherto"--so went the reports--"had no real or solid aim." Wehrfritz swore he had himself seen him reading the Literary Gazette, just as it was folded together half-sheetwise, and said he of course ascribed it less to insanity than to absence of mind, because he knew with what pleasure the man always took into his hands and understandingly perused the Imperial Advertiser, which the same declared to be the gate-key to the great imperial city, Germany. In the midst of company the Librarian had looked upon his hands with the words: "There sits a gentleman here in bodily presence, and I in him, but who is the same?" Of work he had done very little, seldom looked into a book of any importance, as Herr Wehmeier knew, but got along more easily with the worst of all stuff, for instance, whole volumes of dream-interpretations. His dearest society had been his wolf-dog, with whom for whole hours he would carry on regular discourse, and of whose growling he seriously a.s.serted it sounded like a very distant thunder.
He had been fond of sitting before the looking-gla.s.s, and had entered into a long conversation with himself. Sometimes he had looked into the camera-obscura, then on a sudden out into the landscape again, to compare the two, and had a.s.serted, unoptically enough, that the busy, gliding images of the camera were magnified by the outer world, but deceptively imitated. "It was a shy bird," added the Director, "for all that. Divers of my acquaintances in the neighboring estates let him paint them, because he did it cheap; he always knew, however, how to slip something into the face so that one"s physiognomy should appear quite ridiculous or simple, and that he called his flattering. Of course after that, no one could expect in the long run anything _honnette_ from him."
"Were it permitted me," Wehmeier began, "I would now communicate to Mr.
Count a fact in regard to Mr. Librarian, which, perhaps--such is at least my opinion--is as _frappant_ as many another. The school-house, as you certainly still well remember, stands close to the church."
Thereupon he related, in a long narrative, the following: "Once, at dead of night, he heard the organ going. He listened at the church door, and distinctly heard Schoppe sing and play a short stanza of a popular hymn. Thereupon the said Schoppe came down, with a loud noise, from the choir, and mounted the pulpit, and commenced an occasional sermon to himself with the words: "My devout hearer and friend in Christ." In the exordium he touched upon the silent, but unhappily so fleeting bliss which one enjoyed _before_ life, although not according to correct Homiletic principles, since the second part almost repeated the introduction. Thereupon he sang a pulpit stanza to himself, and taking from the 3d chapter of Job, where the writer shows the happiness of non-existence, the 26th verse as his text, which reads thus: "Was I not in safety, had I not rest, was I not quiet? Yet trouble came,"[111]--he proposed to himself as his theme the joys and sorrows of a Christian; in the first part the sorrows, in the second the joys.
Thereupon he crowded together concisely, but in a droll style and speech, and yet with Scriptural expressions, too, all the misery and distress on earth,--under which he enumerated singular things: long sermons, the two poles, ugly faces, compliments, games, and the world"s stupidity. Thereupon he pa.s.sed over abruptly to the consolation in the second part, and described the future joys of a Christian, which, as he blasphemously said, consisted in a heavenly ascension into future nothingness, in the death after death, in an eternal deliverance from self. Then (shocking it was to hear it) he addressed the neighboring dead down below under the church and in the princely vault, and asked, whether they had aught to complain of? "Arise," said he; "seat yourselves in the pews, and open your eyes, in case they are wet with weeping. But they are drier than your dust. O how still and lovely lies the infinite past world, swathed in its own shadow, softly laid on the bed of its own ashes, without a single remaining dream-limb upon which a wound can be inflicted. Swift, old Swift, thou who once in thy latter days wast not so very much in thy head, and didst read through, every birthday, the whole chapter from which the text of our harvest sermon is taken,--Swift, how contented thou now art and entirely restored, the hatred of thy bosom burnt out, the round pearl, thy Self, eaten up, at last, and dissolved in the hot tear of life, and the tear alone stands there sparkling! And thou, too, hadst once preached before the s.e.xton like me!" Here Schoppe wept, and excused himself for his emotion, G.o.d knows before whom. Thereupon he pa.s.sed to the practical improvement, and sharply insisted on both hearer and preacher growing better; upon downright honest truthfulness; fidelity of friends; high-mindedness, bitter hatred of suavity, snake-like movements, and weak lasciviousness. Finally, he had concluded the devotions with a prayer to G.o.d, that, if it should be his lot some day to lose his health or understanding, or the like, he would still be pleased to let him die like a man, and darted at once out of the church door. He put me,"
added Wehmeir, "almost out of my senses for terror, when he all at once flew at me angrily; "Mock corpse, why creepest thou about the grave?"
and I, pale and hurried, made my way home without having made the least reply to him. But what says Mr. Count?"
Albano shook his head with vehemence without one enlightening word, with pain and tears on his face. He merely took a sudden leave of all, and begged them to pardon his haste; and sought the evening sun and freedom, in order to read the letter of the n.o.ble man, and learn the purpose of his journey. He struck into the old road to Lilar, where he hoped to find, on the joyous southern breast of his radiant Dian Southern gayety and Southern ways again; for his heart had been upheaved by an earthquake, because, after all, many a wild sign in this Schoppe, as it were an immoderate lightening and flashing of this star, seemed to him to announce a setting and doomsday, which to his extreme pain he was constrained to ascribe to the rising of the new star of love, which had kindled this world of his nature.
122. CYCLE.
He read the following letter from Schoppe:--
"Thy letter, my dear youth, came duly to hand. I praise thy tears and flames, which alternately sustain, instead of extinguishing each other.
Only become something, much, too, but not everything, in order that thou mayest be able, in so extremely empty a thing as life is--(I should be glad to know who invented it)--to hold out for all the desolateness. A Homer, an Alexander, who have at length vanquished the whole world and got it under them, must needs be plagued often with the most tiresome and annoying hours, because their life, from being a bride, has now become a wife. Much as I had palisaded and fortified myself against that, in order not to mount over everybody"s head, and sit up top as Factotum of the world; I nevertheless, after all, came out at last, un.o.bserved and all standing, on the summit, merely because, under my long contemplation, the whole circle of the earth, full of foam-mountains and cloud-giants, had been melting down lower and lower and crawling together; and now I gazed alone and dry-shod down from my mountain-peak, wholly possessed with the bloodsuckers of disgust at the world.
"Brother, it has changed, however, during this year, and I am afloat.
For that reason a long, and to me quite tiresome, letter is written thee here in February, which shall tell thee about my approaching grub- and chrysalis-state, where and how; for when I am once a shining chrysalis, then I can only feebly stir and show myself any longer.
"I will explain myself _more_ clearly,--the Germans add, when they have explained themselves clearly. It fits and hits most luckily--which I prize as much as another--that precisely the end of the year is the end of the paternal property upon which I have thus far lived, and consequently, if Amsterdam ceases to pay, I also fail, and have nothing more on hand than weak, chiromantic prophecies, and nothing in my body except my stomach. I would I could still live by my navel, as in my earlier times, and make myself such a soft bed.
"What, then, shall I do? As to accepting presents from my lords, men, year out and year in, I do not respect them enough for that; and the few, whom one does somewhat respect upon occasions, must in their turn respect me too highly to make such an offer. What! shall I be a flea, attached to the thinnest little golden chain, and a gentleman who has fastened me by it, that I may spring with him but not away from him, shall draw me up now and then upon his arm and say, "Suck away, my little creature!" Devil! I will remain free upon so contemptible an earth,--no salary will I take, no orders in this great servants"
apartment,--sound to the core, so as not to awaken any sympathy or any house-doctor,--yes, if one should knock off to me the heart of the Countess Romeiro on the condition of my kneeling down to it, I would take the heart, indeed, and kiss it, but immediately thereupon get up and run away (either into the new world or the next) before she had time to recapitulate the matter to herself and bring it before me.
"As to being something, and thereby earning in proportion, that I could, if one should propose it to me, of course undertake, without any special forfeiture of freedom and disparity. In fact, I see here from my centre three hundred and sixty roads radiate, and I hardly know how to choose among them, so that one would choose rather to flatten out the centre into a circ.u.mference, or to seek to draw the latter into the former, so as only to continue standing upon it. _Serving_, as the staff-officers of the regiments say, were, to be sure, next to commanding. Thou wilt thyself, as thou writest, take the field. (I have duly received thy letter, and found therein thy shyness and pa.s.sion all right and good, and thyself entire.) And, in truth, if the Archangel Michael were to array a holy legion, a _legio fulminatrix_ of some weak Septuagints, against the commonwealth of the world,--were he to proclaim a giant war against the domineering populace, in order to drive four or five quarters of the world out of the world or into prison by a sixth (on an island there would be good room for it), and to make all spiritual slaves bodily ones,--be a.s.sured, in that happy case I would plant myself foremost in the van, and would bring on the cannon, with the short, flying remark, that, as Handel first introduced cannon into music, so here for the first time, inversely, they were bringing music into cannon. When we at length came back in a body,--when the holy militia again swept hitherward,--then would G.o.d"s throne stand upon the earth, and holy men, with lofty fires in their hands, should go up, much less to rule therefrom the world"s body than to sacrifice to the soul of the worlds.
"With the flower of France, then, thou wilt, as thou writest, for thy individual self, for one man, hereafter stand up. Of course it is hard for me to think highly of five and twenty millions, of which it is true the cubic root must have grown and run up freely, but stem and twig have, after all, for whole centuries, been drying and withering in a slave"s dungeon. He who was not, before the Revolution, a silent Revolutionist,--somewhat as Chamfort was, against whose fire-proof breast I once in Paris struck fire with mine, or like Montesquieu and J. J. Rousseau,--let him not, with his silly spatterings, spread himself out far beyond his house-door. Freedom, like everything G.o.dlike, is not learned and acquired, but inborn. Of course, all over France and Germany there sit young authors and sons of the muses, who admire and proclaim their own sudden worth, only they are cursedly astonished that they had not earlier felt their sense of freedom,--soft, sickly knaves, who look upon themselves as complete blowing whales, because they have found some bone or other of the said fish, and buckled it to their ribs. I should always, in a war such as these dead times can furnish, believe that I was fighting against fools, indeed, but for fools too.
"The cynical, naive, free nature"s-men of the present day--Franks and Germans--are almost like the naked honorables, whom I have seen bathing in the Pleisse, Spree, and Saale. They were, as was said, very naked, white, and natural, and savages, but the black cue-tail of culture fell down over their white backs. Some great, tall men, and fathers of their times, like Rousseau, Diderot, Sidney, Ferguson, Plato, have laid aside their worn-out breeches, and their disciples have taken them and worn them, and because they sat so wide, long, and open upon their diminutive bodies, have called themselves _sansculottes_ (men without breeches).
"Truly, instead of the sword, I could also very well grasp the penknife, and, as writing Caesar, rise, to better the world, and be useful to it, and use it. I shall always remember the conversation which I once held upon this subject with a universal German librarian of Berlin, as we walked quietly up and down in the menagerie. "Every one should surely enrich his native land with his talents, which else would lie buried," said the German librarian. "To const.i.tute a native land, it is necessary, first and foremost, that there should be some _land_," said I. "The Maltese librarian, however, who here speaks, first saw the light at sea under a pitch-black storm. Of knowledge I possess, of course, enough, and know that one has it, like a gla.s.sful of cow-pock rationally taken, only to inoculate one"s self withal. The scholar, for his part, only swallows it again, in order to give it out from himself, and so it goes on. Thus does the light, like the glimmering brand in the game, "Kill the Fox, and Sell the Skin," pa.s.s from hand to hand, until, however, to be sure, the brand goes out in one,--mine,--and there remains."
""Droll enough!" said the universal German librarian. "With such a humor as this only connect the study of bad men and good models, and then you create for us a second Rabener, to scourge fools." "Sir,"
replied I, in a rage, "I should prefer to transfer the first blow to the backs of the wise ones and you. Philosophers suffer themselves to be enlightened and washed, have always their insight into things, and are good fools, and just my people. Let a man like a universal German farrier, who takes the pulse of the muses" horse, holds his out to me, and I will feel it with great pleasure. But the rest and refuse of the world, sir? Who can skim off the world sea, if he does not break away its banks? Is it not a sorrow and a shame that all men of genius, from Plato even to Herder, have become noisy, and die printed, and frequently read and studied by the learned rabble and custom-house, without having the least power to change them? Librarian, call and whistle out, I pray you, all that lies in the critical dog-kennels on the watch beside those temples, and ask the whole body of greyhounds, bulldogs, and boar-hounds whether anything else is stirring in their souls than a potentiated maw, instead of a poetic and holy heart? In the mountain-cauldron they see the pudding-pot and brewer"s-kettle, in the leaves the spades[112] on the play-cards, and the thunder has for them, as a greater electric spark, a very sour taste, which it afterward infuses into the March beer."
""Do you mean any allusion?" he asked. "a.s.suredly!" said I. "But further, Librarian, suppose we too were so lucky as to turn on our heels, and, with one whirl of a breath, to blow over all fools, as if they were infected with an a.r.s.enical fume, and lay them dead as a mouse: I cannot see, for all that, where the blessing is coming out, because, besides that we are still standing before each other, and have to breathe on ourselves too, I see, in all corners round about, women sitting, who will hatch the slain world anew."
""My dear fellow, best pair of bellows,[113] full of fire," I continued, "can this, however, call and stamp one very strongly to be of the satirical handicraft? O no! This is genuine humor with me, perhaps strange madness, also, perhaps--but O, will not the rare joke-maker, even in your uncommon library, resemble the porcupine-man in London (the son) who had the office under the beast-dealer, Brook, of acting as Cicerone to the stranger among the wild stock and through the park of outlandish beasts, and who commenced on the threshold with the observation that he showed himself as one of the species man?
Consider it coolly and first of all! I still swing my satirical horsetail loosely and merrily, and perhaps against an occasional horse-fly; but let a book be tied to it, as in Poland they tie a cradle to the cow"s tail, and the beast shall rock the cradle of the readers and give pleasure; the tail, however, becomes a slave."
""To such images," said the Librarian, "sure enough, the cultivated world could never be accustomed by any Rabener or Voltaire, and I now perceive myself that satire is not your department." "O, most true!"
replied I, and we parted on very good terms.
"But to take things seriously, brother, what is there now left for a man (in the shape of prospects as well as of wishes) to whom the age is so over-salted and so bitter and briny as it is to me, and to whom life is made so by living men,--who is annoyed to death with the universal insipid hypocrisy and the glistening polish of the most poisonous wood,--and the horrible commonness of the German life-theatre, and the still greater commonness of the German theatre-life,--and the Pontine marshes of infamous and immoral Kotzebuean weakliness, which no Holy Father can drain and make into sound land,--and the murdered pride, together with the living vanity, that stalk about, so that I, only for the sake of drawing breath, can betake myself for whole hours to the plays of children and of cattle, because there I am a.s.sured, at least, that neither of them are coquetting with me, that, on the contrary, they have nothing in mind and are in love with nothing but their work,--what is there left, I asked at the top of this page, for one in whose nostrils, as was said, so many sorts of things stink, and especially this further particular, that improvement is hard, but deterioration not so by any means, because even the best do somewhat impose upon the worst, and thereby on themselves too, and because with their secret cursings of the age, and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g and truckling to it, they dance at least for gold and glory, and in consideration thereof willingly let themselves be used by the more steady ma.s.s, as wine-casks are used for meat-barrels,--what is there, friend, I say, for a man in times when, as now, one makes in print, not _black white_, indeed, but yet gray, and where one, as good catechists must, always avoids precisely the question, yes or no,--what remains except hatred of tyrants and slaves at once, and indignation at the maltreated no less than at the maltreatment? And what shall a man to whom the armor of life in such situations is worked thin or worn thin, seriously resolve upon?"
I, for my part, if the question is about myself, resolved, half in joke, upon inserting a fine-spun, lucid demand in the Imperial Advertiser, which you perhaps have already read in Rome, without even guessing the author.
""TO ALL WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.
""It may well be taken for _granted_, that a sound _understanding_ and _reason_ (_mens sana in c. s._), _next_ to a clear conscience, holds among the prizeworthy goods of life the _highest_ place,--a proposition which I venture to a.s.sume 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 of _Kantians_,) it does not certainly belong to an entirely _popular paper for the people_ like this present. The undersigned is now in the _sorry_ case that he is obliged here to consult the physicians of Germany and foreign parts. Have sympathy for suffering; send in your answers; say _when_ he is to be (out with it before all Germany!!) completely insane, for as to the beginning thereof the fact has already answered.
""The _when_, but not the _whether_, it now lies with and upon n.o.ble 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 approaching _crack_, as does a motley play of colors upon gla.s.s; 2. The prediction of a scamp,[115] of which he is always thinking,--a circ.u.mstance 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, and _vice 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 ma.n.u.script 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 circ.u.mstances (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 a.s.sume that my infirmity might swell so gradually, that I should have no occasion for any other _pet.i.tes maisons_ than 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.
""Pest.i.tz, 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 a.s.signed 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, G.o.dlike 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 h.e.l.l 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, _makes_ everything that he _thinks_,--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 a.s.sail 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.