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.