20. CYCLE.
Our Zesara, on entering into the years when the song of poets and nightingales flows more deeply into the softened soul, became suddenly another being. He grew stiller and wilder at once, more tender and more impetuous, as, for instance, he once flew in the highest rage to the help of a dog yelping under the blows of the cudgel. Heaven and earth, which hitherto in his bosom, as in the Egyptian system, had run into each other, that is to say, the ideal and the real, worked themselves free from each other, and Heaven ascended and receded, pure and high and brilliant,—upon the inner world rose a sun and upon the outer a moon, but the two worlds and hemispheres attracted each other and made one whole,—his step became slower, his bright eye dreamy, his athlete-gymnastics less frequent,—he could not now help loving all human beings more warmly, and feeling them more near to him; and often with closed eyes he fell trembling upon the neck of his foster-mother, or out in the open air bade his foster-father, at his starting on his journeys, a more lonely and heartfelt farewell.
And now before such clear and sharp eyes the Isis-veil of Nature became transparent, and a living Goddess looked down into his heart with features full of soul. Ah, as if he had found his mother, so did he now find Nature,—now for the first time he knew what spring was, and the moon, and the ruddy dawn, and the starry night.... Ah, we have all once known it, we have all once been tinged with the morning-redness of life!... O, why do we not regard all first stirrings of human emotion as holy, as firstlings for the altar of God? There is truly nothing purer and warmer than our first friendship, our first love, our first striving after truths, our first feeling for Nature: like Adam, we are made mortals out of immortals; like Egyptians, we are governed earlier by gods than by men; and the ideal foreruns the reality, as, with some trees, the tender blossoms anticipate the broad, rough leaves, in order that the latter may not set before the dusting and fructifying of the former.
When, as often happened, Albano came home from his inner and outer roamings, at once intoxicated and thirsty,—with senses at the same time shut and sharpened, but dreaming like sleepers who feel the more painfully the putting out of the light,—at such times of course it needed only a few cold drops of cold words to make the hot, flowing soul, upon the contact of the strange, cold bodies, scatter in zigzag and globules; whereas a warm mould would have rounded the fluid mass into the loveliest form.
Circumstances being such, of course no one will wonder at what I am presently to report. The dancing-, music-, and fencing-master, who boasted little of his steps, touches, and thrusts, but so much the more of his (Imperial Diet-) Literature,—for he had the new names of the months, the orthography of Klopstock, and the Latin characters in German letters sooner in his letters than any one of us,—would fain show the house of Wehrfritz that he understood a little more of literature and knew a thing or two better than other Viennites (the more so since he read absolutely nothing, not even political newspapers and novels, because he preferred real, living men); he therefore never came into the house without two pockets full of romance and verse for Rabette and Albano. He was encouraged in this by his endless officiousness, and his emulous race-running with his colleague Wehmeier in education, and the interest which he took in the youth now growing so silent, whom he wished to help out of the sweet dreams which the ruby[36] of his glittering young life inspired with the exegetic dream-books, the works of the poets. The revolution which had taken place in the youth, who now mowed away whole romantic glades of Everdingen, and plucked whole poetical flower-borders of Huysum, I have now neither time nor wish even so much as tolerably to portray, on account of the above-promised wondrous circumstance; suffice it, that Albano, so situated,—the heaven of the poetic art open before him, the promised land of Romance spread out before his eyes,—resembled a planet, assailed by several whizzing comets, and blazing up with them into a common conflagration.
But what further? The Vienna master—this I must still premise—was a vain fool (at least in matters of humility, for example, his pigmy feet, his literature, his success with women), and particularly loved, by familiar pictures of great ones and ladies, to have inferred his confederation with the originals. The poor devil was, to be sure, poor, and believed, with many other authors, that he—unlike Solomon, who prayed for wisdom and received gold—had inversely had the misfortune while supplicating for the latter to receive only the former. In short, on such grounds as these he would have been very glad, let it be observed in passing, to know that the belief prevailed in the house of Wehrfritz that he stood on very good terms with his former pupil, the Minister's daughter,—Liana, I think it was, if I read Hafenreffer's handwriting correctly,—and that he quite often saw her, and spoke with her mother. Add to this, that there was not one word of truth in the whole: through the temple in which Liana was there was no door-way for him. But so much the less could he let the Director get ahead of him, who often saw her, and always praised her more warmly at home, merely for the sake of scolding the rude innocence of Rabette, who had never been educated by anybody. The Vienna master wished also, of course, to draw the Count—to whom he only showed the coasts of Roquairol's isle of friendship afar off, but no point for landing—cunningly away from the brother through the sister (he had found it impossible longer to deceive and hold him back); for why did he paint it out before him at such length, how poisonously, some years before, the night-and death-chill brought on by that parting shot of a brother whom she too devotedly loved had fallen upon those tender, white leaves of her heart?
Quite often would he, during a meal, hang up broad merit-tables, countersigned by Wehrfritz, of Liana's progress in music and painting, in order, seemingly, to stimulate his pupil on the harpsichord and in drawing to greater achievements. For if it was not for appearance' sake, why did he paste up such very long altar-pieces of Liana's charms before Rabette, that impartial one, who, vying only with parsons' daughters, and not with those of ministers, heard almost as gladly the praise of city beauties as we do of Homer's, and in whose presence only a windy fool, that would fain hold himself upright in the saddle before women by singing the praises of other women, could intone such eulogies as his were of Liana? Verily, before such a resigned and unenvious soul as Rabette,—especially as her complexion and hands and hair were none of the softest, at least harder than Falterle's,—I would not for any prize-medal in the world have undertaken, as he however did, to bring near, in high colors, the happy results with which the Minister, in order to bring over Liana's uncommonly youthful beauty, by proper training, into her present years, had done his best by means of delicate and almost meagre fare, by tight lacing, by shutting up his orangery, whose window he seldom lifted off from this flower of a milder clime,—still less would I have cared to be able to describe, like him, how she had thereby become a tender creature of pastil-dust, which the gusts of fate and the monsoons of climate could almost blow to pieces,—and that she actually could only wash herself with spirits of soap, and only with the softest linen dry herself without pain, and could not pluck three gooseberries without making her finger bleed.
The shallow Viennite, who, if he spied a man of rank standing up on the cupola of a mountain, could never take off his hat before him, down in the marsh, without saying, in a low tone, at the same time, "Your most profoundly obedient servant!" and who spoke of distinguished people, at the farthest, only in familiar or satirical tones (to show his connection), but never in earnest criticism, was, of course, as became him, not the man to call old Froulay a stiff, sharp gravestone, under which two such tender flowers as his lady with the ivy (Liana) twining round her, crooked and crowded, had to wind their way out into light. Mr. Von Hafenreffer, to his honor,—in respect that he is a Legation's-Counsellor and Fee-Court-Provost,—makes here the quite different but more feeling observation, that the hard strata of such connections as those through which Liana's life-rill must needs filter and force its way, make it purer and clearer, just as all hard strata are filtering-stones of water,—and all her charms become, indeed, through her father's tyranny, torments, but also all her torments become, through her own patience, charms....
But, good Zesara, supposing now thou art compelled, daily, to hear all this,—and supposing the master of accomplishments forgets not to depict, besides, how she has never grieved him with a disobedient look, or a tardiness, how cheerfully she always brought him the paper-marks of the lessons, and, at the end, her schooling-money or an invitation,—and how carefully, mildly, and courteously she behaved toward her servants, and how one must have thought her heart could not be warmer than her very philanthropy made it, if one had not seen her still more ardent filial affection for her mother;—good Zesara, I say, what if thou hearest all this in addition to thy romances, and that, too, of the sister of thy Roquairol; for every one, if it is only half practicable, loves to spin himself into one chrysalis with the sister of his friend,—and beside all this, of a maiden in the consecrated Linden-city, about which Don Gaspard, as the old Prussians[37] did about their sacred groves, draws additional mystic curtains; and, what is harder than all, just after the turning-point of thy seventeenth year, Zesara, when the monsoons and spring winds of the passions already sweep over the waves of the blood! For, of course, at an earlier period, in the midst of the learned club of so many linguists,—i. e. books of linguists, of eclectics, upper-rabbins,—of ten wise men from the East and from Greece, and, by reason of the uncommonly dazzling Epictetus'-lamps which the said Decemvirate of wise men had lighted at the day-star of the wise ones,—at such a time, I say, it was hardly to be expected of thee that love's little Turin-lantern, which he kept as yet unopened in his pocket, should strike thy eye very strongly! But now, my dear, now, I say! Truly, nowhere could any of us find less fault, if we are uncommonly attentive to it, with what he does in the 21st Cycle, than in this 20th.
