At length the Lector, who had long been frappé with the vocation and the collaboratorship of the singular Schoppe, came, by polite circumlocutions, upon the question, how the Knight had become acquainted with him. "Through the Pasquino," he replied. "He was just stepping round the corner of the Palazzo degli Ursini, when he saw some Romans and our hereditary prince standing round a man who was on his knees (they were my knees) before the statues of Pasquino and Marforio, and offering to them the following prayer: Dear Castor and Pollux! why do ye not secularize yourselves out of the ecclesiastical estate, and travel through my Germany in partibus infidelium, or as two diligent vicars? Could you not go round among the cities of the empire as missionary preachers and referendaries, or post yourselves as chevaliers d'honneur and armorial bearers on either side of a throne? Would to God they might at least vote thee, Pasquino, royal high-chaplain and master of ceremonies in the court chapels, or let thee down from the roof by a rope at the christening as baptismal angel! Say, could not you twins, now, once come forward and speak as petition-masters-general in the halls of the Diet, or, as magistri sententiarum, oppugn one another within the walls of the universities on Commencement days? Pasquino, can no Delia Porta[9] restore thee, were it only so far that thou mightest, at least, at Congresses and treaty-makings of the diplomatic corps, play the silhouetteur as the figure-head of the stove, or must you serve at the highest only in university libraries, as the busts of critical editors? Ah, gay pair, would that Chigi, who stands here beside me, might only model you into a portable pocket edition for ladies, I would put you by, and not take you out of my pocket till I reached Germany! I can, however, do it even here on the island," said Schoppe; whereupon he drew forth the satirical work of art; for the renowned architect and modeller, Chigi, who heard him, had really cast a copy of it. Schoppe went on to tell how Don Gaspard then seriously stepped up to him, and asked him, in Spanish, who he was. "I am (he answered also in Spanish) actual Titular librarian to the Grand Master at Malta, and a descendant of the so-called grammatical dog, the toothed humanist, Scioppius (German Schoppe); my baptismal name is Pero, Piero, Pietro (Peter). But many here call me, by mistake, Sciupio or Sciopio (extravagance)."
Gaspard had an impartial, deep-reaching eye for every spirit, even though it were most unlike his own; and, least of all, did he seek a repetition of himself. He therefore took the librarian home with him. Since, now, the latter seemed to live solely by portrait-painting, and was besides just meaning to go back to Germany, he accordingly proposed to this rich, many-eyed, rough spirit, Albano's society, which only the present fellow-laborer, Augusti, was to share with him. But there were four things which the librarian demanded beforehand, as preliminaries,—a sitting from the Count, his profile, and—when both these had been granted—yet a third and a fourth, in the following terms: "Must I suffer myself to be calendered[10] by the three estates, and forced to take on gloss and smoothness by polishing-presses? I will not; whithersoever else, be it to heaven or hell, I will accompany your son, but not into the stamping-washing-roasting-melting-and-forcing-works of great houses." This was granted easiest of all; besides, the second Imperial vicegerent of the paternal supremacy, Augusti, was appointed to the business in question. But upon the fourth point they came near falling out. Schoppe, who would rather be an outlaw than a slave or a freedman, and whose ground, no less imperially free than fruitful, would not endure a hedge, could accommodate himself only to accidental, undetermined services, and felt obliged to decline the fixum of a salary. "I will," said he, "deliver occasional sermons, but none of your weekly sermons; nay, it may be, oftentimes, I shall not enter the desk for a half-year together." The Knight considered it beneath him to be under obligations, and drew back, till Schoppe hit upon the diagonal road, and said he would give his society as a don gratuit, and should expect of the Knight, from time to time, a considerable don gratuit in return. As for the rest, Schoppe was now full as dear to the Knight as the first-best Turk of the Court who had ever helped him up his carriage-steps; his trial of a man was like a post-mortem examination, and after the trial he neither loved nor hated more cordially; to him, as he looked into the show-piece of blustering life, the manager and the first and second mistresses, and the Lears and Iphigenias and heroes were no friends, nor were the Kasperls and the tyrants and supernumeraries foes, but they were simply different actors in different parts. Ah, Gaspard, standest thou, then, in the front box, and not also on the stage of life itself? And dost thou not in the great drama recognize, like Hamlet, a lesser one? Ay, does not every stage imply, after all, a twofold life,—a copying and a copied?
Either the glass or two (or more) of wine, or else his annoying contrast to the elegant, sedate Lector, set Schoppe's winnowing-mill with all its wheels in motion, though this humor of his found small scope on the enchanting island; and when Augusti expressed a wish that Schoppe might go to Germany under happier auspices than other painters, the latter drew forth a pack of gilded pictures of German patron saints, and said, shuffling them: "Many a one would here lay a papal miserere on the desk and sing it off, particularly if, like me, he had to go into winter quarters among the German ice and fog-banks in the middle of spring;—and it is with reluctance, I am free to confess, I leave the Harlequin and Pulzinella and Scapin, and the whole comedia dell' arte behind. But the gentlemen saints whom I here shuffle have brought the lands under their charge into high and dry condition, and one passes through them with comfort. Mr. Architect, you laugh, but you know altogether too little of what these painted heavenly advowees hourly undertake in behalf of the German circles. Mr. Architect, show me, after all, a country anywhere, in which so many cudgels, programmes, professors, Perukes-allongées, learned advertisements, imperial notices, cits and surburbans, ceremonies, coronations, and Heidelberg tubs, but without indwelling Diogeneses, are to be mustered together as in the aforementioned? Or I appeal to you, Mr. Von Augusti! Point out to me, I pray, one single territory which is provided with such a Long Parliament, namely, a most lengthy Diet of the Empire, as it were, an extraordinarily wholesome pillula perpetua[11] which the patient is incessantly swallowing, and which as incessantly purges him; and who is not reminded, as well as myself, in this connection, of the capitulatio perpetua, and in general of the body politic of the Empire, that perpetuum immobile,—and on good grounds?" Here Schoppe drank. "The body of the Empire becomes thereby, like the first principle of morals, or like virgin earth, altogether insoluble; nay, supposing one of us were to take an electoral sword, and cut it in two therewith, as if it were an earwig, still the half with the teeth would, like the cloven earwig, turn round and eat the latter half clean up,—and then there would be the whole continuous earwig rejoined and well fed into the bargain. It is not by any means to be regretted as a consequence of this close nexus of the Empire, that the corpus can devour and digest its own limbs, as the brook-crab does its stomach, without any real harm to itself, so that the corpus, like a Homeric god, can only be wounded, but not killed. Take this bunchy polypus-stalk, I often say, mash it to a pulp with Rösel,—turn it wrong side outward like a glove,—like Lichtenberg, cut the polypus in two dexterously with a hair,—like Trembley, stick and incorporate several severed limbs into one another, as other naturalists do imperial cities, abbeys, small provinces into greater, or the reverse,—and then examine after some days; verily, magnificent and whole and well, thy polypus will be found sitting there again, or my name is not Schoppe."
The Count had heard him again and again on this subject, and could therefore more easily and properly smile; the Lector, however, was learning all this for the first time, and even the comic actor is not such to his new hearers. But amidst all these diversions there still sounded on in Albano's soul a confused tumult, like the murmuring of the waterfall of the coming times. He peered longingly through the wavering seams of the laurel-foliage, out toward the shining hills, when Dian said, in his painter's-language: "Is it not as if all the gods stood, with thousands of cornucopias, on the mountains around Lago Maggiore, and poured down wine and cascades, till the lake, like a goblet of joy, foams over and gushes down with the brimming juice?" Schoppe replied: "Pleasures of exceeding flavor, like pineapples, have the misfortune, that, like pineapples, they make the gums bleed." "I think," said Augusti, "that one ought not to reflect much upon the pleasures of life, any more than upon the beauties of a good poem; one enjoys both better without counting or dissecting them." "And I," said Cesara, "would calculate and dissect from very pride; whatever came of it I would abide, and I should be ashamed to be unhappy about it. If life, like the olive, is a bitter fruit, then grasp both with the press, and they will afford the sweetest oil." Here he rose to remain alone on the island till evening; he asked indulgence, but gave no excuse. His lofty, ambitious soul was incapable of descending to the smallest lie, even towards an animal. In Blumenbühl he used daily to entice the tame pigeons near him by holding out food; and his foster-sister often begged him to catch one; but he always said, "No," for he would not betray the confidence even of a brute creature.
While they followed him with their eyes, as he slowly retired through the laurel shades, with the shadows dancing after him and stray sunbeams gliding down over him, and, as in a dream, gently bent the branches apart with his hands extended before him, Dian broke forth: "What a statue of Jupiter!" "And the ancients," said Schoppe, joining in, "believed, moreover, that every god dwelt in his own statue." "A magnificent, threefold breadth of brow, nasal bridge, and breast!" continued Dian. "A Hercules planting olive-trees on Olympus!" "It struck me very much," said the Lector, "that, after considerable study, I could read in his countenance what I wished and what was mutually contradictory,—coldness, warmth, innocence and gentleness, most readily defiance and force." Schoppe added: "It may be still harder for himself to compel such a congress of warring powers within him to become a peace-congress." "How beautifully," said the humanly feeling Dian, "must love sit upon so mighty a form, and how sublimely must anger!" "Those are two poetic beauties," replied Schoppe, "out of which two Pedagogiarchs and Zenophons, like us, can make little with their Cyrus in their Cyropædia."
4. CYCLE.
Zesara had tasted only three glasses of wine; but the must of his thick, hot blood fermented under it mightily. The day grew more and more into a Daphnian and Delphic grove, in whose whispering and steamy thicket he lost himself deeper and deeper,—the sun hung in the blue like a white glistening snow-ball,—the glaciers cast their silvery glances down into the green,—from distant clouds it thundered occasionally,[12] as if spring were rolling along in his triumphal chariot far away towards us at the north,—the living glow of the climate and the hour, and the holy fire of two raptures, the remembered and the expected, warmed to life all his powers. And now that fever of young health seized upon him, in which it always seemed to him as if a particular heart beat in every limb,—the lungs and the heart are heavy and full of blood,—the breath is hot as a Harmattan wind,—and the eye dark in its own blaze,—and the limbs are weary with energy. In this overcharge of the electrical cloud he had a peculiar passion for destroying. When younger, he often relieved himself by rolling fragments of rock to a summit and letting them roll down, or by running on the full gallop till his breath grew longer, or most surely by hurting himself with a penknife (as he had heard of Cardan's doing), and even bleeding himself a little occasionally. Seldom do ordinary, and still seldomer extraordinary, men attain full-blooming youth of body and spirit, but when it does happen, so much the more luxuriantly does one root bear a whole flower-garden.
With such emotions Albano now stood alone behind the palace towards the south, when a sport of his boyish years occurred to him.
He had, namely, often in May, during a heavy wind, climbed up into a thick-limbed apple-tree, which supported a whole green hanging cabinet, and had laid himself down in the arms of its branches. And when, in this situation, the wavering pleasure-grove swung him about amidst the juggling play of the lily-butterflies and the hum of bees and insects and the clouds of blossoms, and when the flaunting top now buried him in rich green, now launched him into deep blue, and now into the sunshine, then did his fancy stretch the tree to gigantic dimensions: it grew alone in the Universe, as if it were the tree of endless life, its root pierced far down into the abyss, the white-red clouds hung upon it as blossoms, the moon as a fruit, the little stars glistened like dew, and Albano reposed in its infinite summit, and a storm swayed the summit from day into night and from night into day.