Titan: A Romance Volume I Part 16

[84] They had these names as twins.

[85] The grammar seems to require "a still almost maidenly looking woman of seventeen years," but the translator did not dare to think Jean Paul could have meant that, consistently with the ages of the three children, though, as an Oriental, Chariton may have married _very_ young.

[86] The Tartarus with Julienne's father's heart.

[87] Such is the name of that mount which Albano found in the well-known spring night.

[88] Linda de Romeiro.

[89] The reason is, that after her recovery she was still short-sighted, and to a short-sighted person the dew is so much the more brilliant.

[90] This proposition, that pure music, without text, cannot represent anything immoral, deserves to be more investigated and developed by me.

[91] It cannot be objected to me, that in fact the scenes of my book have been actually experienced, and that no one would wish to experience any better; for in the representation of fancy reality a.s.sumes new charms, charms with which every other faded present magically glimmers through the memory. I appeal here to the sensations of the very characters who figure in _t.i.tan_, whether they would not in my book--in case they should ever light upon it--find in the pictured scenes, which, however, are their own, a higher enchantment, which has gone from the real, and which, to be sure, might produce such an effect--but altogether illusorily--that my characters could wish to live _their own life_.

NINTH JUBILEE.

PLEASURE OF COURT-MOURNING.--THE BURIAL.--ROQUAIROL.--LETTER TO HIM.--THE SEVEN LAST WORDS IN THE WATER.--THE SWEARING OF ALLEGIANCE.--MASQUERADE.--PUPPET MASQUERADE.--THE HEAD IN THE AIR, TARTARUS, THE SPIRIT-VOICE, THE FRIEND, THE CATACOMB, AND THE TWO UNITED MEN.

46. CYCLE.

Ripening love is the stillest: the shady flowers in this spring, as in the other, shun sunlight. Albano spun himself deep into his Sunday-dreams, and drew, as well as he could, the green poppy-leaf of reality into his web,--namely, the Monday, which was to show him, at the state-burial of the Prince, the brother of his maiden-friend.

This day of festive sadness, at which the third but greatest princely coffin was to be conveyed to its repose, at last broke, and had been made momentous already by the preparatory festival, at which the two first coffins, together with the old man, had been interred, somewhat as virtues are buried in the very beginning of a century, and not till its end their empty names and wrappages and half-bindings. At the rehearsal- and prefiguring-burial of the ill.u.s.trious deceased, the old pious Father Spener too, his last friend, had gone down with him into the vault, in order to have opened the wooden and tin casing of the run-down wheel-work, and to cover over upon the still breast of the dear sleeper his youthful portrait and his own with the colored side down, without speaking or weeping; and the court made much of this morning- and evening-offering of friendship.

Everything swells up monstrously for man, of which they are obliged to talk a long while,--all Pest.i.tz societies were auxiliary funeral societies, and full of burial-marshals,--every scaffolding of the neighboring future was a mausoleum, and every word a funeral sermon or an epitaph upon the pale man. Sphex, as his physician in ordinary, rejoiced in his part of the sorrow and the procession,--the Lector had already tried on the court mourning, in the place of his cast-off winter-garb, and found it to fit,--the court-marshal had not a minute's rest, and the last day, which opens all graves and closes none, had come to him now before its time,--the Minister, Von Froulay, whom the cold Luigi willingly left to do everything, was, as a lover of old princely pomp, and as convoking director of the present occasion, as much in heaven himself as was the ill.u.s.trious deceased,--the women had risen from their beds this morning as to a new life, because to these busy _drapery-paintresses_ a long chain of coats and of their wearers probably weighs as much as a span of blood-related horses does to their husbands.

Albano waited impatiently at the window for Liana's brother, and loved the invisible one more and more ardently; like two connected wings, Friendship and Love stirred and lifted each other within him. The mourning-spool, namely, the empty coffin, had been fixed in Tartarus, and was gradually wound off, and now the dark mourning-ribbon would soon be ready to be stretched to the upper city. Already, for an hour and a half before the arrival of the procession, the saltpetre of the female crowd had been crystallized on the walls and the windows. Sara, the Doctor's wife, came up with the children and the deaf Cadaver into Schoppe's chamber, the second door of which stood open into Albano's, and, with an ogling, amorous look, spoke in to the Count: "Up here one can overlook the whole much better, and his excellency will pardon it."

"You just stay together there, and don't you trouble M. the Count," said she, turning back to the children, and was on the point of entering the Count's chamber, at whose threshold Schoppe, just coming from Albano, caught and stopped her.

Now Sara was one of those common women who are more carried away themselves by their own charms than successful in carrying others away therewith. She would merely set her face in the chair, and let it kindle and singe and burn, while she on her part (relying on her _lazy Jack_[92] of a visage) quietly and coolly worked away at other things, either simple trash or vile scandal; and then when she had been a _clothes'-rod_ of women, as Attila was a Heaven's rod of nations, she looked round and surveyed the damage which the fire of her face had done in the male tinder-boxes. Particularly on the rich and beautiful Count had she an eye,--under Cupid's bandage. Her head was full of good physiognomical fragments; and Lavater's objection, that most physiognomists unfortunately study nothing in the whole man but the face, could not hit in any point her pure physiognomical sense.

Schoppe, readily divining that with this female soul-dealer the walk or _gang_ was a press-gang,[93] the white linen, hunting-gear, the shawl, a bird-net,[94] and the neck, a swan's-neck for any fox that happened to be near, caught her by the hand at the threshold of the two chambers, and asked her, "Do you, also, take as much interest as I in the universal joy of the land, and the long-desired court-mourning? Your eyes indicate something like it, Mrs. Provincial Physician." "What interest do you mean?" said the medical lady, struck quite stupid. "In the pleasure of the courtiers, who, in general, are distinguished from monkeys, as the orang-outangs are, by the fact that they seldom make leaps of joy; at least, like young performers on the piano-forte, they drum away, without the smallest emotion, their most mournful and their merriest pieces one after the other. O, if only nothing bitter should spoil the mourning of the court-household! Do you wish the dear ones to have arrayed themselves in vain in the black robes of joy, wherein, like the grandsons of those who were left behind in the battle of Leuctra, they go to meet the jubilee of a new prince? What!" Unluckily she replied, in a sarcastic tone: "Black is, in these parts, the mourning-color, Mr. Schoppe." "Black, Mrs. Doctor!" (he bounced back with astonishment.) "Black?--black is a travelling-color, and bridal-color, and gala-color, and, in Rome, a princely-children's color; and, in Spain, it is a law of the empire that the courtiers, like the Jews in Morocco,[95] shall appear in black.

"Pestalozzi, madam--but there's Malt, does he understand me?" Schoppe turned round to the man, who had his drum on, and meant secretly to tap it during the procession, so as to catch something of the m.u.f.fled funeral drums, and exhorted him to give a beat or two, in order that he might profit by the discourse. "Malt," said he, louder, "Pestalozzi remarks very justly, that the great ones of our time, in face, dress, posture, image-worship, superst.i.tion, and love for charlatans, approach daily nearer and nearer the Asiatics; it speaks in favor of Pestalozzi, that they borrow of the Chinese, who dress themselves in black for joy, and in white for mourning, not merely temples and gardens and caricatures, but also this very black of joy."

Among the children,--of whom the uneducated alone were not ill-bred,--Boerhave, Galen, and Van Swieten made themselves most prominent by the inlaid work and designs of the present company, which they were engraving on their bread and b.u.t.ter; and Galen showed his satirical projection of Mama, saying, "Only see what a long nose I have made Mama have!"

The Librarian, who was turning something similar, arrested her, as she offered to go in, a.s.suring her he would not let her pa.s.s till she surrendered to his views: the funeral column of march could hardly have got an acre's distance out of Tartarus, and would give him time enough.

He continued:--

"Genuine mourning, on the contrary, my dear, always, like anger, makes one party-colored, or, like terror, white; e. g. the creatures of a dead Pope mourn violet, so does the French king, his lady chestnut brown, the Venetian Senate, for their Doge, red. But to a regent you cannot, more than I, allow any mourning whatever; to the high-priest and a Jewish king[96] it was wholly forbidden; why should we allow the household more than the master? And must not a sovereign, my best one! who should permit the expensiveness of public mourning, manifestly open afresh the closed wounds of private sorrow? And could he, when, like Cicero,[97] he had, by his exile, thrown twenty thousand people into mourning weeds, answer it to his conscience, that his last act was a _Droit d'Aubaine_, a robbery, and that the dying-bed, whereupon one formerly bequeathed clothing to servants and the poor, should now strip them thereof? No, madam, that does not look like regents at least, who often, even by their dying, as Marcion[98] a.s.serted of Christ's journey to h.e.l.l, bring up a Cain, Absalom, and several others of the Old-Testament culprits out of h.e.l.l into the heaven of the new administration.

"You do not yet give in, and the Cadaver looks at me like a cow; but consider this: peruke- and stuff-weavers have frequently besought crowned heads to wear their manufactures, in order that they might get a sale for them;--an hereditary and crown-prince, on the first happy consecration- and regency-day, when he deposes, that is, deposits his predecessor in the ground, puts on coal-black, because the black wool is not good for much, and does not sell well, and such an example at once strikes the whole metropolis,--even cattle, drums, pulpits, black. Only one word more, love: I a.s.sure you there is nothing coming yet but the company of choristers. For this very reason has the princely corpse, which might easily spoil the whole pleasure of the funeral, been previously disposed of, and only a vacant box is carried along, in order that the procession may have no other _pensees_ than _Anglaises_[99]....

O dearest, one last word: What can you see, then, in the corps of equerries and pages? Well, go now! I too rejoice to see at once so many people, and the prince so happy in the midst of his children."

But the longer he saw the procession growing, that loose juggler's thread, by which they were letting down the empty but figured chest of Cypselus[100] into the family vault, so much the more indignant became his mockery. He applied his hypothesis to every sable member of the dark chain. He praised them for opening the _bal masque_ of the new administration with these slow minuet steps, and preparing themselves for the waltz of the wedding and the grandfather's-dance of the allegiance-day. He said, as one loved on festive days to make everything easy for himself and his beast, as, accordingly, the Jews, on the Sabbath, would not allow themselves or their cattle to carry anything, not even the hens to carry the rags sticking to them; so he saw with pleasure, that in the ceremony-carriages, and in the parade-box, and on the mourning-horses, nothing was suffered to lie or sit; yes, that even the trains of the mourning-mantles were borne by pages, and the four points of the bier-cloth by four stout gentlemen. The only fault he found was, that the soldiery in their joy had seized their guns upside down, and that precisely the persons of the highest rank, Luigi, Froulay, Bouverot, as they came from a hasty funeral potation at once into the open air, were obliged, by reason of their staggering, to be led along and held up on both sides.

47. CYCLE.

In Albano another spirit spoke than in Schoppe, but the two soon met. To the Count the night-like forms of c.r.a.pe, the still funeral banners, the dead-march, the creeping sick-man's-walk, and the tolling of the bells, opened wide all earth's charnel-houses, especially as before his blooming eyes these death plays came for the first time: but one thing more loudly than all--one will hardly guess what--proclaimed before him the partings of life,--namely, the beat of the drum stifled by the funeral cloth; a m.u.f.fled drum was to him a broken reverberation of all earthly catacombs. He heard the dumb, strangled complainings of our hearts,--he saw higher beings looking down from above on the lamentable three hours' comedy of our life, wherein the ruddy child of the first act fades in the fifth to the old man in jubilee, and then, grown up and bowed down, vanishes behind the falling curtain.

As, in spring, we think more of death, autumn, and winter than in summer, so also does the most fiery and energetic youth paint out to himself in _his_ season of life's year, the dark leafless one oftener and more vividly than the man in that stage which is nearest to it; for in both springs the wings of the ideal unfold widely and find room only in a future. But before the youth, Death comes in blooming, Greek form; before the tired, older man, in Gothic.

Schoppe generally began with _comic_ humor, and ended with _tragic_; so also now did the empty mourning-chest, the c.r.a.pe of the horses, their emblazoned caparisons, the Prince's contempt of the heavy German Ceremonial; in short, the whole heartless mummery, lead him up to an eminence, to which the contemplation of a mult.i.tude of men at once always impelled him, and where, with an exaltation, indignation, and laughing bitterness hard to describe, he looked down upon the eternal, tyrannical, belittling, objectless and joyless, bewildered and oppressed frenzy of mankind, and his own too.

Suddenly a gay, shining knight broke the dark chain: it was Roquairol, on the parading gala-horse, who agitated our two men, and none besides.

A pale, broken-down face, glazed over with long inward fire, stripped of all youthful roses, lightening out of the diamond-pits of the eyes under the dark, overhanging eyebrows, rode along in a tragic merriment, in which the lines of the veins were redoubled under the early wrinkles of pa.s.sion. What a being, full of worn-out life! Only courtiers or his father could have set down this tragic exultation to an adulatory rejoicing over the new regency; but Albano took it all into his heart, and grew pale with inward emotion, and said, "Yes, it is he! O, good Schoppe, he will certainly become our friend, this distracted youth. How painfully does the n.o.ble one laugh at this gravity, and at crowns, and graves and all! Ah, he too has, indeed, once died." "There the rider is right," said Schoppe, with quivering eyes, and suddenly tapped Albano's hand and then his own head; "my very skull here appears to me like a close _bonsoir_, like a light-extinguisher, which death claps upon me,--we are neat silvered figures, kept up in an electrical dance, and we leap up with the spark; fortunately I am still alive and kicking,--and there is our good Lector creeping along, too, and trailing his long c.r.a.pe,"--in which respect Augusti's citizenly-serious mood contrasted very strongly with the humanly-serious one of the Librarian.

All at once Schoppe, out of patience with this general emotion, said: "What a masquerade for the sake of a mask! Rag and tag for a piece of rag-paper! Throw a man quietly into his hole, and call n.o.body to see. I always admire London and Paris, where they toll no alarm-bells, nor set the neighborhood stirring, when the undertaker carries one, who has fallen asleep, to bed." "No, no," said Zesara, full of capacity for grief, "I admire it not: to whomsoever the holy dead are of no consequence, to him the living are so too;--no, I will gladly let my heart break into one tear after another, if I can only still remember the dear being."

O, how did the neighborhood accord with his heart! In a cistern, before which the coffin of the coffin pa.s.sed by, there stood a bronze statue of the old man on horseback, who saw pa.s.s by below him the unsaddled mourning-horses, and the mounted festive-steed; a deaf and dumb man was stopping from door to door, and making, with his bell, a begging jingle, which neither he nor the buried one could hear: and was not the forgotten Prince laid in the earth all unseen, and more lonesome than any one of his subjects? O Zesara! it sank into thy heart, how easily man is forgotten, whether he lies in the urn or in the pyramid; and how our immortal self is regarded, like an actor, as _absent_, so soon as it is once behind the scenes, and frets and fumes no longer among the players on the stage.

But had not the gray hermit, Spener, laid upon the sunken breast of that deeper hermit a double youth? O, in this frosty hour of pomp and pageantry, counts not the faithful Julienne every tone of the funeral bell with the beads of her tears,--that poor daughter whom sickness has exempted from the ceremonials, not from pain, who now has lost her _last but one_, perhaps her _last_ relative, since her brother is hardly one?

And will not Liana, in her Elysium, guess the farce of sorrow which is acted so near to her over behind the high trees in Tartarus? And if she suspects anything, O how profoundly will she mourn!

All this the n.o.ble youth heard in his soul, and he thirsted hotly after the friendship of the heart: it was to him as if its mountain- and life-air floated down from eternity, and blew the grave-dust away from his life-path, and he saw, up yonder, the Genius place his inverted torch upon the cold bosom, not to extinguish the immortal life, but to enkindle the immortal love.

He could not now do otherwise than go forth into the open air, and, amid the flying tones of spring and the deep, hollow murmur of the receding dead march, write the following words to Liana's brother, in which he said to him, after a youthful style, Be my friend!

"TO CHARLES.

"Stranger! At this hour, when, in the dead sea and through our tears, the triumphal columns and thrones of men and their bridge-posts appear to us _broken_, a true heart puts a question to thee frankly, and let thine answer it willingly and in truth!

"Has the longest prayer of man been answered to thee, stranger, and hast thou thy friend? Do thy wishes and nerves and days grow together with his, like the four cedars on Lebanon, which can bear nothing around them but eagles?

Hast thou two hearts and four arms, and livest thou twice over, as if immortal, in the battling world? Or standest thou solitary and alone upon a frosty, dumb, slender, glacier-point, having no human being to whom thou canst show the Alps of creation, and with the heavens arching far above thee and abysses yawning below? When thy birthday comes, hast thou no being to shake thy hand, and look thee in the eye and say, We still cleave together faster than ever?

"Stranger: if thou hast had no friend, hast thou deserved one? When spring kindled into life, and opened all her honey-cups, and her serene heaven, and all the hundred gates of her Paradise, hast thou, like me, bitterly looked up and begged of G.o.d a heart for thine? O when, at evening, the sun went down like a mountain, and his flames departed from the earth, and now only his red breath floated upward to the silvery stars, hast thou beheld the brotherly shadows of friendship which sank together on battle-fields, like stars of one constellation, stealing forth through the b.l.o.o.d.y clouds out of the old world, like giants; and didst thou think of _this_,--how imperishably they loved each other, and thou, like me, wast alone? And, solitary one, when night--that season at which the spirit of man, as in torrid climes, _toils_ and _travels_--reveals her cold suns above thee in a sparkling chain, and when, still, among all the distant forms of the ether there is no dear loved one, and immensity painfully draws thee up, and thou feelest, upon the cold earth, that thy heart beats against no breast but only thine own,--O beloved! weepest thou then, and most bitterly?

"Charles, often have I reckoned up, on my birthday, the increasing years,--the feathers in the broad wing of time,--and thought upon the sounding flight of youth: then I stretched my hand far out after a friend, who should stick by me in the Charon's skiff wherein we are born, when the seasons of life's year glide by along the sh.o.r.e before me, with their flowers and leaves and fruits, and when, on the long stream, the human race shoots downward in its thousand cradles and coffins.

"Ah, it is not the gay, variegated sh.o.r.e that flies by, but man and his stream: forever bloom the seasons in the gardens up and down along the sh.o.r.e; only _we_ sweep by once for all before the garden, and never return.

"But our friend goes too. O, if thou at this hour of death's juggleries art contemplating the pale Prince, with the images of youth on his breast, and thinking of the gray friend who secretly bewails him in Tartarus, then will thy heart dissolve, and in soft, warm flames run round through thy bosom, and softly say: 'I will love, and then die, and then love--O Almighty, show me the soul which longs and languishes like mine!'

"If thou say'st that, if thou art thus, then come to my heart: I am as thou. Grasp my hand, and hold it till it withers. I have seen thy form to-day, and on it the marks of life's wounds: hasten to me; I will bleed and struggle at thy side. I have long and early sought and loved thee. Like two streams will we mingle and grow, and bear our burdens, and dry up together. Like silver in the furnace, we will run together with glowing light, and all slags shall lie cast out around the pure shimmering metal. Laugh not, then, any longer so grimly, to think what _ignes-fatui_ men are; like _ignes-fatui we_ burn and fly away in the rainy storm of time. And then, when time is gone by, we find each other again, and it will be again in the spring.

"ALBANO DE CESARA."

48. CYCLE.