Schoppe knew no "plaster" for all this distress (to use his own fine play on words) "except the plaster of Paris,"[[20]] namely, an excursion. At least, he concluded, when one is out in the country, all inquiries about one's health are done with, and all these poisonous anxieties about the answer; and on return one finds much pain spared or in fact all the trouble gone.
Albano obeyed his last friend; and they rode off into the Principality of Haarhaar.
83. CYCLE.
Whoever thinks that Schoppe, on the way, was to Albano a flying field-lazaretto of consolation,—an antispasmodicum,—a Struve's table of ailments and remedies,—a pulverized Fox's lung for the hectic of the heart, &c., and that at every milestone he delivered a consolatory sermon,—whoever thinks so, Schoppe himself laughs him to scorn.
"What then," said he, "if misfortune does knead a young man thoroughly and soundly in her kneading-trough? The next time, he, who is now in the power of grief, will have her in his power. Whoso has never borne anything, never learns to bear up under anything."[[21]] As regards weeping, he, as a Stoic, was, as may well be imagined, an enemy to it at least; Epictetus, Antonine, Cato, and several such, men made less of ice than of iron, would very willingly, as he so often said, have allowed the body these extreme unctions of sorrow, provided only the spirit beneath and behind all had kept itself dry. The true disconsolateness is to desire and to accept consolation; why will not one then for once just go through with the pang out and out without any physic?
But his view of things and his actual life became, without his express intention, powerful over the Count, whom everything great only enlarged, as it belittles others. Schoppe sat like a Cato upon ruins, but, to be sure, upon the greatest of all; if the wise man ought to be a barometer-tube at the Equator, in which even the tornado produces little displacement, he was a wise man. Accidentally he tore open the Count's glued-up wings at an inn by means of the Hamburg Impartial Correspondent, which he found lying there. Schoppe read aloud out of it two extensive battles, wherein, as by an earthquake, lands instead of houses were buried, and whose wounds and tears only the evil genius of the earth could be willing to know; thereupon he read,—after the death-marches of whole generations, and the rending open of the craters of humanity,—with uninterrupted seriousness, the notices, under the head of Intelligence, where one solitary individual mounts upon an unknown little grave and announces and asseverates to the world, which surely condoles with him,—"Frightful was the blow which laid our child of five weeks—"; or, "In the bitterest anguish which ever—"; or, "Overwhelmed with the loss of our father in the eighty-first year of his age," &c.
Schoppe said, he pronounced that to be right; for every distress, even a universal one, after all, housed itself only in one individual breast; and were he himself lying on a red battle-field full of fallen sheaves, he would sit up among them, if only he could, and deliver to those lying around him a short funeral sermon upon his shot-wound. "So has Galvani observed," he said, "that a frog which stands in electrical relations quivers as often as thunder rolls over the earth."
He adhered to this position, also, out of doors. He cited with disapprobation what Matthison remarks,—as a traveller's note by the way,—that in the modern town, Avenches, in Switzerland, on the site of the Helvetian capital, Aventicum, which was laid in ruins by the Romans, the plan of the streets and walls may be traced by the thinner strips of grass; whereas, in fact, the same stereographic projections of the past lay manifestly all about in every meadow,—every mountain was the shore of a deluged old world; every spot here below was actually six thousand years old and a relic; all was churchyards and ruins on the earth, particularly the earth itself; "Heavens!" he continued, "what is there, in fact, which is not already gone by,—nations, fixed stars, female virtue, the best Paradises, many just men, all Reviews, Eternity a parte ante, and just now even my feeble description of all this? Now, if life is such a game of nothingness, one must prefer to be card-painter rather than king of cards."
A vigorous, high-minded man, like Albano, will hardly, then, in the midst of thirty-years' wars, last days, emigrating nations, crumbling suns, strip off his coat, and exhibit to himself or the universe the ruptured vein which bleeds on his breast.
So stood matters, when the two friends at evening climbed a half-open woodland height, from which they saw below them a wonderful glory-land, so friendly and foreign, as if it were the remains of a time when the whole earth was still warm, and an ever-green orient land. It seemed, so far as they could see for the trees and the evening-sun, to be a valley formed by the angle of mutually approaching mountains, and stretching away immeasurably toward the west. A party-colored windmill, flinging round its broad wings before the sun, confused the eye, which would fain analyze the throng of evening lights, gardens, sheep, and children; on both steeps white-clad children, with long, green hat-ribbons flowing behind them, were keeping watch; a motley Swissery ran through the meadow-green along the dark brook; on a high-arched hay-wagon there drove along a peasant-woman, dressed as if for a marriage festival, and at the side went country-people in Sunday finery; the sun withdrew behind a colonnade of round, leafy oaks,—those German liberty-trees and temple-pillars,—and they soared aloft, transfigured and magnified in the golden blue. At this moment the surprised travellers saw the shaded Dutch village near below,—composed, as it were, of neat, painted garden-houses clustered together, with a linden-circle in the middle, and a young, blooming hunter not far off, or an Amazon, who with one hand took off her hat, stuck full of twigs, and with the other let the crossbeam with the bucket mount high over the well.