TENTH JUBILEE.
Roquairol's Advocatus Diaboli.[120]—The Festival Day of Friendship.
53. CYCLE.[121]
Not toward the years of childhood, but toward the season of youth, should we revert the most longingly, if we came forth out of the latter as innocent as out of the former. It is the festival day of our life, when all avenues are full of music and finery, and all houses are hung round with golden tapestries, and when Existence, Art, and Virtue, like gentle goddesses, still woo us with caresses; whereas, in after years, they summon us, like stern gods, with commands! And at this period Friendship dwells as yet in a serenely open Grecian temple, not, as later, in a narrow Gothic chapel.
Richly and majestically did life now glitter around Albano, covered with islands and ships; he had his whole breast full of friendship and youth, and could now let the impetuous energy of love, which on Isola Bella had rebounded from a statue, from his father, burst freely and joyously upon a man who appeared to him fully as his youthful dream had sketched him. He could not let go Charles for a day; he laid bare to him his soul and his whole life—(only Liana's name retired deeper and deeper into his heart); all models of friendship among the ancients he was fain to copy and renew, and do and suffer everything for his loved friend; his being was now a double-choir; he drank in every joy with two hearts; a double heaven embosomed his life in pure ether.
When, on the following day, he met the form of the new friend,—which was all that remained to him of the nightly show-piece of the spirit-world, as a pale moon is left by the extinguished stars of night,—and when he found him so bald-headed and white, as the fiery smoke-column of an Ætna ascends gray in the daytime, he seemed to see the whilom suicide standing before him, the more freely, but all the more warmly, did he stretch his hand across to the solitary being, who, after his leap over life, dwelt now only on his grave, as on a remote island. Others, for this very reason, would draw their hand away: the baffled self-murderer, who has made a rent in this fair, firm life, comes back from his death-hour as a strange, uncomfortable ghost, whom we can trust no longer, because in his ungovernableness he may at any moment play again the give-away game with the human form.
Therefore Albano saw in the chaotic life of the Captain only the disorder of a being who is packing up and marching away. When he stepped for the first time into his friend's summer-chamber, he saw, of course, a servant's livery wardrobe, a theatrical green-room, and an officer's tent before him at once. On the table lay confused tribes of books, as on a battle-field, and on Schiller's Tragedies the Hippocratic face of the masquerade, and on the Court Almanac a pistol; the book-shelf was occupied by the sword-belt, together with its wash-ball of chalk, a chocolate-mill, an empty candlestick, a pomatum-box, matches, the wet hand-towel and the dried mouth-napkin; the glasshouse of a run-down hour-glass, and the washing-and the writing-table stood open, on which latter I, to my astonishment, look in vain for any support whatever, or writing-sand on it; the comb-cloth, or powder-mantle, leaned back on the ottoman, and a long neck-cloth rode on the stove-screen, and the antlers on the wall had two hats with feathers shoved over the right and left ears; letters and visiting-cards were impaled like butterflies on the window-curtains. I should not have been capable of writing a billet there, much less a Cycle.
Is there not, however, a sunny-bright, free-fluttering age, when one loves to see everything which announces roving unrest, striking of tents, and nomadic liberty, and when one would be thankful to keep house in a travelling-carriage, and write and sleep therein? And does not one in those years look upon precisely such a students' chamber as this as a spiritual students' endowment of genius, and every chaos as an infusorial one full of life? Forgive my hero this truant time; there was still something noble in his nature, that kept him back from becoming an imitator of what he eulogized.
As, after the melting away of a late winter, all at once the green garment of earth flutters up high in flowers and blossoms, so in the warm air of friendship and fancy did Albano's nature start up at once into luxuriant verdure and bloom. Charles had and understood all states of the heart; he created them dramatically in himself and others; he was a second Russia, which harbors all climates, from France even to Nova Zembla, and wherein, for that very reason, every one finds his own: he was everything to everybody, although for himself nothing. He could throw himself into any character, although for that very reason it sometimes took his fancy only to carry out the most convenient. The girths, belly-bands, cruppers, and saddle-straps of court, town, and city life, his Bucephalus had long since cleared; and if the Count was vexed every day at the lingual leading-string of the Lector, who pronounced everything correctly.—Kanaster instead of Knaster, Juften instead of Juchten, Fünfzig instead of Füfzig, and Barbieren (the r in which I myself take to be a stupid barbarism),—Roquairol was a free-thinker, even to the degree of being a hectoring free-speaker; and spoke, according to an expression of his own, which was at the same time an example of the fact, "right out of his liver and jaw." He was annoyed that there should still cleave to the Count a certain epic dignity of speech acquired from books. They often thought over and cursed with one another the pitiful bald life which one would lead, who, like the Lector, should live as a well-bred citizen of extraction, have conduite and a nice dress, and a tolerable dapper knowledge of several departments, and for refreshment his table-wine, and taste for excellent masters in painting and other arts, and should advance to higher posts merely as stepping-stones to still higher, and yet, after all this, have to stretch himself out, all frizzled and washed, in his coffin, in order that the gigantic body-world might, forsooth, hand over its Pestitz representative also to the sublime world of spirits. No, said Albano, rather throw a dark mountain-chain of sorrows into the dead level of life, that one may, at least, have a prospect and something great.
But Roquairol was not the man that he seemed to him;—friendship has its deceptions as well as love;—and often, when he had long looked upon this love-drunken, high-hearted youth, with his chaste maiden-cheeks and proud, manly brow, who reposed such a confidence upon his wavering soul, and whose heart stood so wide open, and the holiness of whose fancy even he envied, then did the delusion of the noble one move him even to pain, and his heart struggled to break forth, and longed to say to him, with tears: Albano, I am not worthy of thee! But in that case I lose him, he always added; for he shunned the moral orthodoxy and decision of a man, who was not, like a maiden, to be provoked and repelled and won back again, all in sport. And yet the day came—the momentous day for both—when he did it. How could he ever have resisted Fancy, when he only resisted by and through Fancy? I do him half injustice: hear the better angel, who opens his mouth.
Roquairol is a child and victim of the age. As the higher youth of our times are so early and richly overhung with the roses of joy that, like the inhabitants of spice-islands, they lose their smell, and by and by put under their heads a Sybarite-pillow of roses, drink rose-sirup and bathe themselves in rose-oil,[122] until nothing more is left them thereof for a stimulus except the thorns, so are most of them—and often the very same ones—stuffed full in the beginning, by their philanthropic teachers, with the fruits of knowledge, so that they come soon to desire only the honey-thick extracts, then the cider and perry thereof, until at last they ruin themselves with the brandy made of that. Now if, in addition to this, they have, like Roquairol, a fancy that makes their life a naphtha-soil, out of which every step draws fire, then does the flame, into which the sciences are thrown, and the consumption become still greater. For these burnt-out prodigals of life there is then no new pleasure and no new truth left, and they have no old one entire and fresh; a dried-up future, full of arrogance, disgust with life, unbelief and contradiction, lies round about them. Only the wing of fancy still continues to quiver on their corpse.
Poor Charles! Thou didst still more! Not merely truths, but feelings also, he anticipated. All grand situations of humanity, all emotions to which Love and Friendship and Nature exalt the heart, all these he went through in poems earlier than in life, as play-actor and theatre-poet earlier than as man, earlier on the sunny side of fancy than on the stormy side of reality; hence, when they at last appeared, living, in his breast, he could deliberately seize them, govern them, kill them, and stuff them well for the refrigeratory of future remembrance. The unhappy love for Linda de Romeiro, which, at a later period, would perhaps have steeled him, opened thus early all the veins of his heart, and bathed it warmly in its own blood; he plunged into good and bad dissipations and amours, and afterward represented on paper or on the stage everything that he repented or blessed; and every representation made him grow more and more hollow, as abysses have been left in the sun by ejected worlds. His heart could not do without the holy sensibilities; but they were simply a new luxury, a tonic, at best; and precisely in proportion to their height did the road run down the more abruptly into the slough of the unholiest ones. As in the dramatic poet angelically pure and filthy scenes stand in conjunction and close succession, so in his life; he foddered, as in Surinam, his hogs with pine-apples; like the elder giants, he had soaring wings and creeping snakes'-feet.[123]
Unfortunate is the female soul which loses its way, and is caught in one of these great webs stretched out in mid-heaven; and happy is she, when she tears through them, unpoisoned, and merely soils her bees'-wings. But this all-powerful fancy, this streaming love, this softness and strength, this all-mastering coolness and collectedness, will overspread every female Psyche with webs, if she neglects to brush away the first threads. O that I could warn you, poor maidens, against such condors, which fly up with you in their claws! The heaven of our days hangs full of these eagles. They love you not, though they think so; because, like the blest in Mahomet's paradise, instead of their lost arms of love, they have only wings of fancy. They are like great streams, warm only along the shore, and in the middle cold.
Now enthusiast, now libertine in love, he ran through the alternation between ether and slime more and more rapidly, till he mixed them both. His blossoms shot up on the varnished flower-staff of the Ideal, which, however, rotted, colorless, in the ground. Start with horror, but believe it,—he sometimes plunged on purpose into sins and torments, in order, down there, by the pangs of remorse and humiliation, to cut into himself more deeply the oath of reformation; somewhat as the physicians, Darwin and Sydenham, assert that strengthening remedies (Peruvian bark, steel, opium) work more powerfully when weakening ones (bleeding, emetics, &c.) have been previously prescribed.
External relations might, perhaps, have helped him somewhat, and the vow of poverty might have made the two other vows lighter for him; had he been sold as a negro slave, his spirit would have been a free white, and a work-house would have been to him a purgatory. It was for this reason the early Christians always gave those who were possessed some occupation or other, e. g. sweeping out the churches,[124] &c. But the lazy life of an officer wrought upon him to make him only still more vain and bold.
So stood matters in his breast, when he came to Albano's,—hunting like an epicure after love, but merely to play with it; with an untrue heart, whose feeling was more lyric poetry, than real, sound being; incapable of being true, nay, hardly capable of being false, because every truth assimilated to the poetic representation, and this again to that; able much more easily on the stage and at the tragic writing-desk to hit the true language of passion than in life, as Boileau could only imitate dancers, but never a dance; indifferent, contemptuous, and decided against the exhausted, worthless life, wherein all that is settled and indispensable—hearts and joys and truths—melted down and floated about; with reckless energy, capable of daring and sacrificing anything which a man respects, because he respected nothing, and ever looking round after his iron patron-saint, Death; faint-hearted in his resolutions, and even in his errors fluctuating, and yet devoid only of the tuning-hammer, and not of the tuning-fork, of the finest morality; and, in the midst of the roar of passion, standing in the bright light of reflection, as the victim of the hydrophobia knows his madness, and gives warning of it.
Only one good angel had not flown with the rest,—Friendship. His so often blown-up and collapsed heart could hardly soar to love; but friendship it had not yet squandered away. His sister he had hitherto loved as a friend,—so fraternally, so freely, so increasingly! And now Albano, splendidly armed, had come to his embrace!
In the beginning he played with him, too, lyingly, as he had with himself at the masquerade and in Tartarus. He soon observed that the country youth saw him falsely, dazzled by his own rays, but he chose rather to verify the error than to correct it. Men—and he—are like the fountain of the sun near the Temple of Jupiter Ammon, which in the morning only was cold; at noon, lukewarm; in the evening, warm; and at midnight, hot: now he depended so much on the seasons of the day, as the sound and vigorous Albano did so little, who accordingly imagined a great man was great all day, from the time of getting up to the time of lying down, as the heralds always represent the eagle with outspread wings, that he seldom went in the morning, but mostly in the evening, to Albano, when the whole girandole[125] of his faculties and feelings burned in the wine-spirit which he had previously poured upon it out of flasks.
But do you know the medicine of example, the healing power of admiration, and of that soul-strengthener, reverence? "It is shameful of me," said Roquairol, "when he is so credulous and open and honest. No, I will deceive the whole world, only not his soul!" Such natures would fain make good their devastation of humanity by being true to one. Humanity is a constellation, in which one star often describes half the figure.
From this hour forth, his resolution of the heartiest confession and atonement stood fixed; and Alban, before whom life had not yet run down into a jelly of corruption, but was capable of being analyzed as a sound and well-defined organism, and who did not, like Charles, complain that nothing would take right hold of him, but everything played round him like air,—he it was who was to bring back youth to his sick wishes, and with the help of the pure youth's unwavering perceptions and the danger of losing his friendship, Roquairol proposed forcing himself to keep with him the word of fruit-bearing repentance, which to himself he had too often broken.
Let us follow him into the day, when he tells everything.