67. CYCLE.
I have often in the theatre made the pleasant experience, that when painful scenes immediately followed the rising of the curtain, I took but a slight interest in them, while in joyful ones which, immediately after the music, came on with their own music, I took the greatest; man demands more that sorrow than that rapture should show its motive and its apology. Without hesitation, therefore, I begin a third volume[180] with blisses of which, to be sure, the foregoing couple have been preparing more than enough.
At the moment where our story has arrived, among all the descendants of Adam who lifted a glad face to heaven, and imaged in that face a still fairer heaven, there must have been some one who had the highest heaven,—a happiest of all men. Ah yes! And to be sure, among all suffering creatures upon this globe, which our short race makes a plain, there must also have been one most unhappy; and may the poor man soon lie down to sleep under, not on, his rocky road! Although I could wish that Albano might not be the happiest of all,—in order that there might yet be a higher heaven above his,—still it is probable that, on the morning after that holiest night, in his present dream of the richest dream, deep in the threefold bloom of youth, of nature, and of anticipation, he bore the broadest heaven in himself which the narrow bosom of man can span.
He looked from his thunder-house,—that little temple on whose walls still lingered the radiance of the goddess who had therein become visible to him,—out over the new-created mountains and gardens of Lilar; and it was to him as if he looked into his white and red blooming future, adorned with mountain-peaks and fruit-tree-tops, a full Paradise built out into the naked earth. He looked round in his future after any robbers of joy who might attack his triumphal chariot; he found them all visibly too weak to cope with his arms and weapons. He called up Liana's parents, and his own father, and the host of spirits which had hitherto been working in the air, and set them out on the road which lay between him and his beloved; in his muscles glowed more than sufficient power easily to dash through them to her, and take her with him into his life by main force. "Yes," said he, "I am completely happy, and need nothing more,—no fortune, only my heart and hers!" Albano, may thy evil genius not have heard this dangerous thought, so as to carry it to Nemesis! O, in this wildly entangled wood of thy life, no step, even in the blooming avenues of pleasure, is wholly safe; and amidst the very fulness of this artistic garden there awaits thee a strange, gloomy upas-tree, and breathes cold poisons into thy life! Therefore it was better as it was once, when men were still lowly and prayed to God even in their great raptures; for in the neighborhood of the Infinite One the fiery eye sinks and weeps, but only out of gratitude.
Let no mean almanac measurement be applied to the fair eternity which he now lived, when he saw the beloved every evening, every morning, in her little village. As evening star she went forth before his dreams; as morning star, before his day. The interval both filled out with letters, which they themselves carried to each other. When they parted at evening, not long before they were to see each other again, and while in the north already the rose-bud twigs shot along low down in the heavens, which during men's sleep speedily grew out toward the east, in order to hang down from heaven with thousands of full-blown roses ere the sun and love came back again,—and when his friend Charles stayed with him by night, and he asked, in the course of an hour, whence the light came, whether from the morning or from the moon,—and when he sallied forth, while moon and morning still appeared together in the dew-dripping pleasure-woods,—and when the road, left only a few hours before, appeared wholly new and the absence too long, (because Cupid's wing is half a second-hand, which shows the day of the month, and half a month-hand, which points to the second, and because, in the neighborhood of the loved one, the shortest absence lasts longer than the longest when she is far away,)—and when at last he saw her again,—then was the earth a sun, from which rays proceeded: his heart stood all in light; and as a man, who on a spring morning dreams of a spring-morning, finds it still brighter around him when he awakes, so, after the blessed youthful dream of the beloved, did he open his eyes before her, and desire the fairest dream no more.
Sometimes they saw each other, when the long summer day was too long, on distant mountains, where by appointment they looked upon the harvests; sometimes Rabette came alone to Lilar to her brother, that he might hear something from Liana. When Liana had read a book, he read it after her; often he read it first and she last. Whatever of divine the fairest, purest souls can manifest to each other when they unfold themselves,—a holy heart which makes one still holier, a glowing heart which makes one still more glowing,—that they manifested to each other. Albano was mild toward all, and the radiance of a higher beauty and youth filled his countenance. The fair realms of nature and of his childhood were both adorned by love, not it by either of them; he had mounted from the pale, light moon-car of hope upon the sounding, shining sun-car of living ecstasy. Even on the galleys of wooden sciences, as if animated by the wonder-working hand of Bacchus, masts and shrouds fluttered out into vine-stalks and clusters. If he went to the Froulay house, he always, because he went in full of tolerance, came back without any sacrifice of the same: the Minister, who had returned from Haarhaar with a veil of gay, blooming ideas on his face, imparted to him charming prospects of the exultation wherewith city and country would celebrate the approaching marriage-feast of the Prince and the gain of the most beautiful bride.
And had he not, in addition to all, his friend too? When one stands so close before the flame of joy, one does indeed shun men,—because they easily step between us and the pleasant warmth,—but one seeks them too; a hearty friend is our wish and joy, who shall gently lead on, without chasing away, the happy dream in which we sleep and speak. Charles played softly into his friend's dream; he would, however, have also done it from sincere love for the sister.
In fact, with so much youth, summer weather, innocence, freedom, beautiful scenery, and deep love and friendship, there may well be constructed, even on this low earth, something like that which up in heaven is called a heaven; and a celestial chart, an Elysium-atlas, which one should map out thereof, would perhaps look not far otherwise than this: in front, a long pastoral land, with scattered pleasure-castles and summer-houses; a philanthropist's grove in the middle, the Tabor mountains overhead, with herdsmen upon them, long Campanian vales; then the broad archipelago, with St. Peter's islands; over on the other side the shores of a new pastoral continent, all covered with Daphnean groves and gardens of Alcinoüs; behind that again, stretching far inward, an Arcadia; and so on.
All the philosophy and stoicism that he now had in him—for he held that which the arm out of the clouds gave him as booty gained by his own—Albano applied to the purpose of taking from his ecstasy the moderation which they impart. Moderation, he said, was only for patients and pigmies; and all those anxious, evenly balanced sticklers for temperament[181] and time-keepers had, whether in the cultivation of a pleasure or of a talent, profited themselves more than the world; on the contrary, their antipodes had benefited the world more than themselves.[182]
He kept in view very good fundamental principles. Man, said he, is free and without limits,—not in respect to what he will do or enjoy, but in respect to what he will do without; he can, if he will, will to dispense with everything. In fact, he continued, one has simply the choice, either always or never to fear; for thy life-tent stands over a loaded mine, and, round about, the hours aim at thee naked weapons. Only one in a thousand[183] hits; and, in any case, I am sure I would sooner fall standing than bending like a coward. But, he concluded, in order to justify himself on the subject, is then steadfastness made for nothing better than for a surgeon and serving-maid, and not much rather for our muse and goddess? for it is not surely a good, merely because it helps do without something which we have lost, but it is intrinsically one, and a greater than the one whose place it supplies; even the happiest must acquire it, even without outward occasion or bestowal; yes, it is so much the better, if it is possessed earlier than applied.
These deceptions or justifications were partly weapons of self-defence against the tragic Roquairol, who would fain heighten every pleasure, and even those of his friend, by sombre contrasts; and partly they were such as a noble man, who hitherto has plunged into sorrow without measuring its depth, and who would always feel his power of swimming through life, must necessarily fall upon, when he is inwardly aware that the centre of gravity of his bliss and of his hell has shifted and fallen out of himself into another being. "O, what if she should die?" he asked himself. He had not been wont to shudder so at the thought of any death as of this. Therefore he squeezed these thorns of fancy right sharply in his hand in order to crush them. At last, when the pure country air of love and the shepherd-dance in this Arcadia had brought more and more roses to Liana's cheek, then his thorns ceased to grow.
To all other vipers of life, so long as they could find no entrance through Liana's heart, he was inaccessible. At whatever price,—and though he should have to forsake, give up, provoke, undertake all,—he would buy Liana. The phantoms of terror which came threateningly to meet him out of two houses,—Froulay's and Gaspard's,—he let come on, and dispelled them: let the foe once show himself, thought he, so am I his foe too. Often he stood in Tartarus, and found, in this still life of death in rilievo, peace of soul. The actual world takes more quickly our image than we its; even here he gained soft, broad, life-illumining hopes and sweet tears, which flowed from him at the thought of Liana's faith in her death, not because he believed in the probability, but in the improbability thereof, which, through love and joy and recovery, would daily grow greater.
Only one misfortune was there for him, against which every weapon snapped in pieces, whose possibility, however, he held to be a sinful thought,—namely, that he and Liana, by some fault or time or the world's influence, might cease to love each other. Here, relying on two hearts, he boldly defied the future. O, who has not said, when, in reliance upon a warm eternity, he has expressed his rapture, The Fatal Sister may clip the thread of our life, but shall she come and open the scissors against the bond of our love? The very next day the Fatal Sister has stood before him, and snapped the scissors to.