"Oh, Prince, see how beautiful, how glorious it is!"
"Beautiful, glorious? Pardon me, but I see nothing to call forth words you so rarely use! You must have narrowed your demands if, after the view of the wondrous garden of the Isola Bella and all the Italian villas, you suddenly take delight in cabbage-stalks, wild-pears, broom, and colt's foot."
"Now see how you talk again!" replied the countess, unpleasantly affected by his words. "Does not Spinoza say: 'Everything is beautiful, and as I lose myself in the observation of its beauty, my pleasure in life is increased.'"
"That has not been your motto hitherto. You have usually found something to criticise in every object. It seems to me that you have wearied of the beautiful and now, by way of a change, find even ugliness fair."
"Very true, my friend. I am satisfied, nothing charms me, nothing satisfies me, not even the loveliest scene, because I always apply to everything the standard of perfection, and nothing attains it." She shook herself suddenly as if throwing off a burden. "This must not continue, the æsthetic intolerance which poisoned every pleasure must end, I will cast aside the whole load of critical analysis and academic ideas of beauty, and snap my fingers at the ghosts of Winckelmann and Lessing. Here in the kitchen-garden, among cabbage-stalks and colt's foot, wild-pear and plum-trees, fanned by the fresh, crystal-clear air of the lofty mountains, whose glaciers shimmer with a bluish light through the branches, in the silence and solitude, I suddenly find it beautiful; beautiful because I am happy, because I am only a human being, free from every restraint, thinking nothing, feeling nothing save the peace of nature, the delight of this repose."
She rested her feet comfortably on the bench and, with her head thrown back, gazed with a joyous expression into the blue air which, after the rain, arched above the earth like a crystal bell.
This mood did not quite please the prince. He was exclusively a man of the world. His thoughts were ruled by the laws of the most rigid logic, whatever was not logically attainable had no existence for him; his enthusiasm reached the highest pitch only in the enjoyment of the noblest products of art and science. He did not comprehend how any one could weary of them, even for a moment, on the one side because his calm temperament did not, like the countess' passionate one, exhaust everything by following it to its inmost core, and he was thus guarded from satiety; on the other because he wholly lacked appreciation of nature and her unconscious grandeur. He was the trained vassal of custom in the conventional, as well as in every other province. The countess, however, possessed some touch of that doctrine of divine right which is ready, at any moment, to cast off the bonds of tradition and artificial models and obey the impulse of kinship with sovereign nature. This was the boundary across which he could not follow her, and he was perfectly aware of it, for he had one of those proud characters which disdain to deceive themselves concerning their own powers. Yet it filled him with grave anxiety.
"What are you thinking of now, Prince?" asked his companion, noticing his gloomy mood.
"That I have not seen you so contented for months, and yet I am unable to understand the cause of this satisfaction. Especially when I remember what it usually requires to bring a smile of pleasure to your lips."
"Dear me, must everything be understood?" cried the beautiful woman, laughing; "there is the pedant again! Must we be perpetually under the curb of self-control and give ourselves an account whether what we feel in a moment of happiness is sensible and authorized? Must we continually see ourselves reflected in the mirror of our self-consciousness, and never draw a veil over our souls and permit God to have one undiscovered secret in them?"