CHAPTER III.
It is necessary here to take a retrospective glance into Schoenlein’s history, that we may understand the horror which possessed him at the discovery of his son upon the stage.
We may readily conceive how his dislike to his profession made him very sedulous of keeping his child from all contact with it, lest its fascination should mislead him also. He had never permitted him to see a play. He brought him up strictly, religiously, austerely. He had no friends among actors: acting was never spoken of in his presence. Yet, by an inconsistency easily enough explained, the works most constantly read and talked about by him were those of Shakspeare, Molière, Göthe, and Schiller. These were his household gods. Young Franz was early initiated into their beauties, and would declaim, (in private,) with great gusto, all the long speeches.
Franz was sent to the university of Leipsic, where it was his father’s fond hope he would distinguish himself as a student of theology. For the first year he was assiduous enough; but theology grew inexpressibly wearisome, while poetry became irresistibly alluring to him. Göthe’s Wilhelm Meister fell into his hands, and was read with rapture. He fell in love with the actor’s life, and felt secret yearnings to quit the university, and throw himself upon the world in quest of adventure—especially in quest of a Marianne, a Philina, and a Mignon! He had not as yet dared to disobey his father’s strict commands—he had never ventured inside a theatre; but he had imbibed the dangerous poison—he had learned to look upon an actor’s life as a life of poetry. The seed was sown!
About this time my cousin William went to the Leipsic university, and became the fellow-student and companion of Franz. From him I learned most of these details. William was by no means a model of select virtue—in fact, was what, in the jargon of the day, is called “rather a fast man;” and he led Franz into many a debauch which would have driven Schoenlein wild, had he known it; but he could not persuade him to go to the theatre.
Franz was ready enough at a duel, and had spoiled the beauty of some half-dozen faces by the dexterous sword-cut which draws a line over the nose, and lays open the cheek. He was ready enough, too, with his beer—few youths of his age had more promising talents that way: and as to patriotic songs, energetically demanding of the universe where the German’s fatherland might be, or the probability of tyrants long crushing free hearts beneath their heels, together with frantic calls upon the sword, responded to by the clatter of beer-jugs—in these Franz was distinguished.
At last he did brush away his scruples, and accompanied William to the theatre. They played Schiller’s Don Carlos. Conceive his rapture at this first taste of the long-coveted forbidden fruit! He thought the Marquis of Posa a demigod. But words cannot express his adoration of the Princess Eboli, that night played by Madame Clara Kritisch. She was to him the “vision of loveliness and light,” which an actress always is to an impassioned youth, the first time he sees one. Her large voluptuous eyes, her open brow, her delicate nostrils, her full and not ungraceful figure, together with the dazzling beauty of her (theatrical) complexion, made a powerful impression on him. Her acting seemed to him the acting of an angel.
He left the theatre madly in love with her.
We all know what it is to be in love with an actress. We have all of us, in the halcyon days of boyhood, offered up the incense of our young hearts to some painted, plain, conventional, and perfectly stupid actress, round whose head we have thrown the halo and the splendour of our imaginations. We have had our Juliets, our Desdemonas, our Imogens, our Rosalinds, our Violas, our Cordelias, who, though in the flesh-and-blood reality they were good, honest, middle-aged women, mothers of families or disreputable demireps, to us were impersonations of the ideal—fairy visions, to whom we have written verses, whose portraits have hung over our beds!
Therefore, having known a touch of this “exquisite fooling,” we can sympathise with Franz. Never having seen an actress before, any hag painted for the heroine of the night would have charmed him. But Clara was by no means a hag: in fact, his passion was excusable, for on the stage she was charming.
Franz went again and again, only to return home more in love than before. He fancied she had remarked him in the pit; he fancied the smile on her ruddy lips was a smile of encouragement addressed to him. He wrote her a burning love-letter, which she quietly burned. He waited impatiently for an answer, and went to the theatre expecting to read it in her looks. He could read nothing there but her loveliness.
He wrote again; he wrote daily. He sent her quires of verses, and reams of “transcripts of his heart,” in the form of letters. He lived a blissful life of intense emotion. Fatherland was forgotten; the sword was no longer called upon; all tyrants were merged in the cruel one whom he adored.
At length he gained admittance behind the scenes; nay, more—he was introduced to Clara.
Alas! the shock his sense of loveliness received, when he beheld before him the fat, rouged, spangled woman, whom he had regarded as the incarnation of beauty! Her complexion—was this its red and white? were its roses and lilies gathered by the hare’s foot and the powder-puff?
He could not speak; the springs of his eloquence were frozen; the delicate compliments he had so laboriously prepared, faded away in an unmeaning stammer. The first illusion of his life was gone.
Perhaps there is nothing more striking to a young man than his first experience of the stage behind the scenes. That which, seen from the boxes, looks health and beauty, behind the scenes is weariness and paint; that which in the house is poetic, behind the scenes is horrible mechanism. What scene-painting is when looked at closely, that are actresses seen in the green-room.
Franz was staggered, but not cured. He could not divest his heart of her image, and began to see her again as he had always seen her. Growing accustomed to the reality, he again beheld it in its ideal light; and as on the stage Clara was always enchanting, she carried with her some of the enchantment when she left it. Poor fellow! how patiently he stood there, hungering for the merest word—the simplest look! He saw others—a privileged few—speaking to her boldly; jesting with her; admiring her; giving their opinions respecting her costume, as if she were an ordinary woman, while he could only stammer out some meaningless remark. What would he have given to feel himself at ease with her, to be familiar, so that he might be seen to advantage!
At last he thought of a plan for making himself better known to her. He wrote a play, in which the heroine was destined for her; and as hers was the only character in the piece which was effective, she pronounced it the finest thing which had been written since Schiller. Franz was in ecstasies. She read the play herself to the manager, and exerted all her eloquence in its behalf. But the manager saw well enough her motive,—knew that she was so delighted with the play merely because her part was the important one, and declined to produce it. The play gained its author’s end however. It had established him among Clara’s friends. She began to notice his love for her, began to recognise its seriousness. She knew how to distinguish between the real homage of a heart, and the lip-homage which others offered her.
There is something inexpressibly charming in knowing yourself possessed of a heart’s first love; and women—especially those who have passed the first flush of youth—are more gratified by the love of a boy, than by that of twenty men. A boy’s love has something in it so intense, so absorbing, so self-forgetting! It is love, and love only, unmixed with any thoughts of responsibilities; looking forward to no future, reflected by no past. There is a bloom on first love. Its very awkwardness is better than grace; its silence or imperfect stammerings more eloquent than eloquence; there is a mute appeal in its eyes, which is worth all the protestations in the world.
Clara, who had been accustomed to the admiration of roués, felt the exquisite charm of this boy’s love. In a few weeks he became her acknowledged lover; and excited no little envy among the habitués of the theatre, who could not for the life of them comprehend “what the devil she could see in that bumpkin.”
But if boys love intensely, they love like tyrants, and Clara was made a slave. Jealous of every one who approached her, he forced her to give up all her friends; she gave way to every caprice; she began to idolise him.
This connexion with an actress, as may easily be foreseen, led to Franz’s adopting the profession of the stage. Clara taught him in a few months that which ordinary actors take years to acquire; but this was owing to his hereditary dramatic talent more than to her instruction. His appearance on the stage, which would, he knew, profoundly hurt his father, was not the mere theatrical ambition which possesses most young men: it was stern necessity; it was the only profession open to him, for he had married Clara!
Yes! he, the boy of one-and-twenty, had married a woman of five-and-thirty! It was a mad act—the recklessness or delirium of a boy: but it was an act which has too many precedents for us to wonder at it. He had by this act separated himself, he feared, from his father for ever. His only hope of pardon was, as he fondly thought, dramatic success. Could his father but see him successfully following in his footsteps, he would surely forgive him. It was a proud moment—that boy’s triumphant debut; proud because he had succeeded, proud because his pardon was purchased—as he thought!
Franz had only played a few weeks, and Germany was ringing with his praises. So great was his success, that when a few critics and actors whose judgments were all traditional, objected that he could not be a good actor because he had not gradually worked his way upwards, they were speedily silenced by the incontestible fact that he was a great actor. A brilliant engagement had been offered him at Berlin; and he was about to appear on the same stage with his father, before that father had the faintest suspicion of his son’s ever having entered a theatre.