Titan: A Romance Volume II Part 12

At this moment there came suddenly along up the _Via Sacra_ a tall man, deeply enveloped in his mantle, who drew near to the fountain; without looking round threw down his hat, and held a coal-black, curly, almost perpendicular hindhead under the stream of water. But hardly had he, turning upward, caught a glimpse of the profile of Albano absorbed in his fancies, when he started up all dripping, stared at the Count, fell into amazement, threw his arms high into the air, and said, "_Amico?_"

Albano looked at him. The stranger said, "_Albano!_" "My Dian!" cried Albano. They clasped each other pa.s.sionately, and wept for love.

Dian could not comprehend it at all. He said, in Italian, "But it surely cannot be you; you look old." He thought he was speaking German all the time, till he heard Albano answer in Italian. Both gave and got only questions. Albano found the Architect merely browner, but there was the lightning of the eyes and every faculty in its old glory. With three words he described to him the journey and the company. "How does Rome strike you?" asked Dian, pleasantly. "As life does," replied Albano, very seriously; "it makes one too tender and too hard. I recognize here absolutely nothing at all," he continued; "do those columns belong to the magnificent Temple of Peace?" "No," said Dian, "to the Temple of Concord; of the other there stands yonder nothing but the vault." "Where is Saturn's Temple?" asked Albano. "Buried in St.

Adrian's Church," said Dian, and added, hastily, "close by stand the ten columns of Antonine's Temple; over beyond there, the Baths of t.i.tus; behind us, the Palatine Hill, and so on. Now tell me--"

They walked up and down the Forum, between the arches of t.i.tus and Severus. Albano--especially beside the teacher who in the days of childhood had so often conducted him hitherward--was yet full of the stream which had swept over the world, and the all-covering water sank but slowly. He went on to say, "To-day, when he beheld the obelisk, the soft, tender brightness of the moon had seemed to him eminently unbecoming the giant city; he would rather have seen a sun blazing on its broad banner; but now the moon was the proper funeral torch beside the dead Alexander, who at a touch collapses into a handful of dust."

"The artist does not get far with feelings of this kind," said Dian; "he must look upon everlasting beauties on the right hand and on the left." "Where," Albano went on asking, "is the old Lake of Curtius, the Rostrum, the _pila Horatia_, the Temple of Vesta, of Venus, and of all those solitary columns?" "And where is the marble Forum itself?" said Dian; "it lies thirty span deep under our feet." "Where is the great, free people, the senate of kings, the voice of the orators, the procession to the Capitol? Buried under the mountain of potshards. O Dian, how can a man, who loses a father, a beloved in Rome, shed a single tear, or look round him with consternation, when he comes out here before this battle-field of time, and looks into the charnel-house of the nations? Dian, one would wish here an iron heart, for fate has an iron hand!"

Dian, who nowhere stayed more reluctantly than upon such tragic cliffs, hanging over, as it were, into the sea of eternity, always leaped off from them with a jest. Like the Greeks, he blended dances with tragedy.

"Many a thing is conserved here, friend," said he; "in Adrian's church yonder they will still show you the bones of the three men that walked in the fire." "That is just the frightful play of destiny," replied Albano, "to occupy the heights of the mighty ancients with monks shorn down into slaves."

"The stream of time drives new wheels," said Dian; "yonder lies Raphael twice buried.[77] How are Chariton and the children doing?" "They are blooming on," said Albano, but in a sombre tone. "Heavens!" cried Dian, with all a father's terror, "is it really so?"[78] "Verily, Dian!" said Albano, softly. "Does Liana," said Dian, "still come often to Chariton's? And how fares the sweet one?" Albano answered, in a low tone, "She is dead." "What! dead? Impossible! Froulay's daughter, Albano? The gold-rose? O speak!" he cried. Albano nodded affirmatively.

"Ah! thou good maiden!" said he, piteously, with tears in his black eyes, "so friendly, so enchantingly lovely, so fine an artist! But how did it come to pa.s.s? Have you, then, not been acquainted at all with the lovely child?" "One spring only," said Albano, hurriedly. "My good Dian, I will now go back to my father, and I can answer no more questions." "O certainly! But I must learn more," Dian concluded. And so they climbed silently and speedily over rubbish and torsos of columns, and neither gave heed to the mighty emotion of the other.

TWENTY-SEVENTH JUBILEE.

St. Peter's.--Rotunda.--Colosseum.--Letter to Schoppe.--The War.--Gaspard.--The Corsican.--Entanglement with the Princess.--Sickness.--Gaspard's Brother.--St. Peter's Dome, and Departure.

104. CYCLE.

Rome, like the creation, is an entire wonder, which gradually dismembers itself into new wonders, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, St.

Peter's Church, Raphael, &c.

With the pa.s.sage through the Church of St. Peter the knight began the fair race through immortality. The Princess let herself be bound by the tie of art to the circle of the men. As Albano was more smitten with edifices than with any other work of art, so did he see from afar with holy awe the long mountain-chain of art, which again bore upon itself hills; so did he stand before the plain, around which two enormous colonnades run like Corsos, bearing a people of statues; in the centre shoots up the obelisk, and on its right and left an eternal fountain, and from the lofty steps the proud church of the world, inwardly filled with churches, rearing upon itself a temple toward heaven, looks down upon the earth. But how enormously, as they drew near, had its columns and its rocky wall mounted up and flown away from the vision!

He entered the magic church, which gave the world blessings, curses, kings, and popes, with the consciousness that, like the world-edifice, it was continually enlarging and receding more and more, the longer one remained in it. They went up to two children of white marble, who held an incense-muscle-sh.e.l.l of yellow marble; the children grew by nearness till they were giants. At length they stood before the main altar and its hundred perpetual lamps;--what a stillness! Above them the heaven's arch of the dome, resting on four inner towers; around them an overarched city, of four streets, in which stood churches. The temple became greatest by walking in it; and when they pa.s.sed round one column, there stood a new one before them, and holy giants gazed earnestly down. Here was the youth's large heart, after so long a time, filled. "In no art," he said to his father, "is the soul so mightily possessed with the sublime as in architecture; in every other the giant stands in it and in the depths of the soul, but here he stands out of it and close before it." Dian, to whom all images were more clear than abstract ideas, said: "He is perfectly right." Fraischdorfer replied: "The sublimity here also lies only in the brain: for the whole church stands, after all, in something greater, namely, in Rome, and under the heavens, in the presence of which latter we certainly should not feel anything." He also complained, "That the place for the sublime in his head was very much narrowed by the innumerable volutes and monuments which the temple shut up therein at the same time with itself." Gaspard said, taking everything in a large sense: "When the sublime once really appears, it then, by its very nature, absorbs and annihilates all little circ.u.mstantial ornaments." He adduced as evidence the tower of the minster,[79] and nature itself, which is not made smaller by its gra.s.ses and villages.

The Princess, among so many connoisseurs of art, enjoyed in silence.

The ascent of the dome Gaspard recommended to defer to a dry and cloudless day, in order that they might behold the queen of the world, Rome, upon and from the proper throne; he therefore proposed very earnestly the visiting of the Pantheon, because he was eager to let this follow immediately after the impression of St. Peter's Church.

They went thither. How simply and grandly the Hall opens upon one!

Eight yellow columns sustain its brow, and majestically, as the head of the Homeric Jupiter, its temple arches itself! It is the Rotunda or Pantheon. "O the pygmies," cried Albano, "who would fain give us new temples! Raise the old ones higher out of the rubbish, and then you have built enough."[80] They stepped in; there reared itself around them a holy, simple, free world-structure with its heavenly arches soaring and striving upward, an odeum of the tones of the sphere-music, a world in the world! And overhead[81] the eye-socket of the light and of the sky gleamed down, and the distant rack of clouds seemed to touch the lofty arch over which it shot along! And round about them stood nothing but the temple-bearers, the columns! The temple of _all_ G.o.ds endured and concealed the diminutive altars of the later ones.

Gaspard questioned Albano about his impressions. He said he preferred the larger church of St. Peter. The Knight approved, and said that "youth, like nations, always more easily found and better appreciated the sublime than the beautiful, and that the spirit of the young man ripened from strength to beauty, as his body ripens from beauty to strength; however, he himself preferred the Pantheon." "How could the moderns," said the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdorfer, "build anything, except some little Bernini's towers?" "That is why," said the offended Provincial Architect, Dian, who despised the Counsellor of Arts, because he never made a good figure, except in the aesthetic hall of judgment as critic, never in the exhibition-hall as painter, "we moderns are, beyond contradiction, stronger in criticism, though in practice we are collectively and individually blockheads." Bouverot remarked, "The Corinthian columns might be higher." The Counsellor of Arts said, "After all, he knew nothing more like this fine hemisphere than a much smaller one, which he had found in Herculaneum, moulded in ashes--of the bosom of a fair fugitive." The Knight laughed, and Albano turned away in disgust, and went to the Princess.

He asked her for her opinion about the two temples. "Here Sophocles, there Shakespeare; but I comprehend and appreciate Sophocles more easily," she replied, and looked with new eyes into his new countenance. For the supernatural illumination through the zenith of Heaven--not through a hazy horizon--transfigured in her eyes the beautiful and excited countenance of the youth, and she took for granted that the saintly halo of the dome must also exalt her form.

When he answered her: "Very good! But in Shakespeare Sophocles also is contained; not, however, Shakespeare in Sophocles; and on Peter's Church stands Angelo's rotunda!" Just then the lofty cloud all at once, as by the blow of a hand out of the ether, broke in two, and the ravished sun, like the eye of a Venus, floating through her ancient heavens,--for she once stood even here,--looked mildly in from the upper deep; then a holy radiance filled the temple, and burned on the porphyry of the pavement, and Albano looked around him in an ecstasy of wonder and delight, and said, with low voice: "How transfigured at this moment is everything in this sacred place! Raphael's spirit comes forth from his grave in this noontide hour, and everything which its reflection touches brightens into G.o.dlike splendor!" The Princess looked upon him tenderly, and he lightly laid his hand upon hers, and said, as one vanquished, "Sophocles!"

On the next moonlit evening Gaspard bespoke torches, in order that the Colosseum with its giant-circle might, the first time, stand in fire before them. The Knight would fain have gone around alone with his son dimly through the dim work, like two spirits of the olden time, but the Princess forced herself upon him, from a too lively wish to share with the n.o.ble youth his moments,--and perhaps, in fact, to have her heart and his own common property. Women do not sufficiently comprehend that an idea, when it fills and elevates man's mind, shuts it up against love, and crowds out persons, whereas with woman all ideas easily become human beings.

They pa.s.sed over the Forum by the _Via Sacra_ to the Colosseum, whose lofty, cloven forehead looked down pale under the moonlight. They stood before the gray rock-walls, which reared themselves on four colonnades, one above another, and the flames shot up into the arches of the arcades, gilding the green shrubbery high overhead; and deep in the earth had the n.o.ble monster already buried his feet. They stepped in, and ascended the mountain full of fragments of rock, from one seat of the spectators to another; Gaspard did not venture to the sixth, or highest, where the men used to stand, but Albano and the Princess did.

Then the youth gazed down over the cliffs, upon the round, green crater of the burnt-out volcano, which once swallowed nine thousand beasts at once, and which quenched itself with human blood; the lurid glare of the flames penetrated into the clefts and caverns, and among the foliage of the ivy and laurel, and among the great shadows of the moon, which, like recluses, kept themselves in cells; toward the south, where the streams of centuries and barbarians had stormed in, stood single columns and bare arcades,--temples and three palaces had the giant fed and lined with his limbs, and still, with all his wounds, he looked out livingly into the world.

"What a world!" said Albano. "Here coiled the giant snake five times about Christianity! Like a smile of scorn lies the moonlight down below there upon the green arena, where once stood the colossus of the sun-G.o.d. The star of the north[82] glimmers low through the windows, and the serpent and the bear crouch. What a world has gone by!" The Princess answered, that twelve thousand prisoners built this theatre, and that a great many more had bled in it. "O, we too have building prisoners," said he, "but for fortifications; and blood, too, still flows, but with sweat! No, we have no present; the past without it must bring forth a future."

The Princess went off to break a laurel-twig and pluck a blooming wall-flower. Albano sank away into musing,--the autumnal wind of the past swept over the stubble,--on this holy eminence he saw the constellations, Rome's green hills, the glimmering city, the Pyramid of Cestius; but all became past, and on the twelve hills dwelt, as upon graves, the lofty old spirits, and looked sternly into the age as if they were still its kings and judges.

"This in remembrance of the place and the time!" said the Princess, returning and handing him the laurel and the flower. "Thou mighty one, a colosseum is thy flower-pot; for thee nothing is too great, and nothing too small!" said he, and threw the Princess into considerable confusion, till she observed that he meant not her, but Nature. His whole being seemed newly and painfully moved, and as it were removed to a distance,--he looked down after his father and went to find him,--he looked at him sharply, and spoke of nothing more this evening.

105. CYCLE.

Albano, like a world, was wonderfully changed by Rome. After he had thus, for several weeks, lain encamped among Rome's creations and ruins; after he had drunk out of Raphael's crystal magic goblet, whose first draughts only cool, while the last send an Italian fire through all the veins; after he had seen the mountain-stream of Michael Angelo, now as a succession of cataracts, now as a mirror of the ether; after he had bowed and consecrated himself before the last greatest descendants of Greece, before her G.o.ds, who, with calm, serene countenance, stand looking into the inharmonious world, and before the Vatican Apollo, who is indignant at the prose of the age, at the abject Pythonian serpent, which is ever renewing its youth;--after he had stood so long in splendor before the full moon of the past, all at once his whole inner world was overcast, and became one great cloud. He sought solitude; he ceased to draw or to practise music; he spoke little of Rome's magnificence. By night, when the daily rain ceased, he visited alone the great ruins of the earth, the Forum, the Colosseum, the Capitol; he became more pa.s.sionate, unsocial, sharp; a deep, brooding seriousness reigned on the lofty brow, and a sombre spirit burned through the eye.

Gaspard, un.o.bserved, kept his eye upon all secret unfoldings of the youth. A mere sorrow for Liana did not seem to be his case. In the northern winter this wound would only have frozen up, and not healed up; but here, in the temple of the world, where G.o.ds he buried, a n.o.ble heart gathered strength, and beat for older graves. The Princess, who, under the mask of friendship for the father, aspired after the son, he sought less than the old, cold Lauria and the fiery Dian.

At this same period, he longed sadly for his Schoppe; on that breast, he thought, would the secret of his own have found the right place and comfort. It was to him as if he had, since this separation, lived with him uninterruptedly, and become bound to him by a faster fraternal bond. Thus do spirits dwell and melt together in the invisible land; and when the bodies again meet each other in the visible, the hearts find each other again mutually more acquainted. Unfortunately, among all the letters that his father received from Pest.i.tz, he heard not one sound from his friend over the mountains, whom he had left behind in the dark relations of a strange, perplexing pa.s.sion. He never reckoned silence as a fault against Schoppe, whose hatred and spite against all letter-writing he well knew. However, his own heart could not bear it any longer, and he wrote to him as follows:--

"We were torn from each other sleeping, Schoppe. That time has veiled itself, and remains so. Very wide awake will we be when we look on each other again. Of thee I know nothing; if Rabette does not write to me, I shall have to bear about with me and endure this burning impatience till our meeting in summer. Of myself what is there to write? I am changed even to my innermost being, and by an ingrasping giant-hand.

When the sun pa.s.ses over the zenith of countries, they all wrap themselves in a deep cloud; so am I now beneath the sun at its highest point, and I am also shrouded. How a man in Rome, in actual Rome, can merely enjoy and weakly melt away before the fire of art, instead of starting up red with shame, and striving and struggling for power and exploits, is what I cannot comprehend. In painted Rome, in the Rome of poetry, there laziness may luxuriate; but in the real Rome, where obelisks, Colosseum, Capitol, triumphal arches, incessantly behold and reproach thee,--where the history of ancient deeds, all day long, like an invisible storm-wind, sweeps and sounds through the city, and impels and lifts thee,--O, who can stretch himself out in inglorious ease and contemplation before the magnificent stirring of the world? The spirits of saints, of heroes, of artists, follow after the living man, and ask, indignantly, 'What art thou?' With far other feelings dost thou go down out of the Vatican of Raphael, and over the steps of the Capitol, than thou comest out of any German picture-gallery or antique cabinet. There thou seest, on all hills, old, eternal majesty. Even a Roman woman is, in shape and pride of stature, still related to her city. The dweller beyond the Tiber is a Spartan, and thou wilt no more find a Roman than a Jew stupid; whereas in Pest.i.tz thou must become impatient with the very contrast of the mere form. Even the calm Dian maintains that the odious masks of the ancients look like the faces in the German streets, and their Fauns and other b.e.s.t.i.a.l G.o.ds like n.o.bler court-faces, and that their copy-pictures of Alexander, of the philosophers, of the Roman tyrants, however pointedly and prosaically they stand out in contrast to their poetical statues of the G.o.ds, resemble the present ideals of the painters.

"Is it enough, here, to creep around the giants with eyes full of astonishment and folded hands, and then languidly and pusillanimously to lie pining at their feet? Friend, how often in the days of discontent did I p.r.o.nounce the artists and poets happy, who at least may appease their longing by light and joyous creations, and who with beautiful plays celebrate the mighty dead,--Archimimes of the heroic age. And yet, after all, these voluptuous plays are only the jingling of the bells on the lightning-conductor: there is something higher; action is life; therein the whole man bestirs himself, and blooms with all his twigs. Not of the narrow, timid achievements of littleness on the oar-bank and the lolling-bank of the times are we speaking here. There still stands a gate open to the coronation-city of the spirit,--the gate of sacrifice, the door of Ja.n.u.s. Where else on earth than on the battle-field is the place to be found in which all energies, all offerings, and virtues of a whole life, crowded into an hour, play together in divine freedom with thousand sister powers and offerings? Where else do all faculties--from the most rapid sharp-sightedness even to all bodily capacities of despatch and of endurance, from the highest magnanimity down to the tenderest pity, from all contempt of the body even up to the mortal wound--find the lists so freely open for a covenant-rivalry? although, for the very same reason, the play-room of all the G.o.ds stands open also to the mask-dance of all the furies. Only take war in a higher sense, where spirits, without relation of gain and loss, only by force of honor and of object, bind themselves over to destiny, that it shall select from among their bodies the corpses, and draw the lot of victory out of the graves. Two nations go out on the battle-plain, the tragic stage of a higher spirit, in order to play against one another, without any personal enmity, their death-parts; still and black hangs the thunder-cloud over the battle-field; the nations march on into the cloud and all its thunders; they strike, and gloomily and alone burns the death-torch above them; at last it is light, and two triumphal gates stand built up,--the gate of death and the gate of victory,--and the host has divided and pa.s.sed through both, but through both with garlands of honor. And when it is over, the dead and the living stand exalted in the world, because they had not cared for life. But when the great day is to be still greater, when the most costly thing is to come to the spirit which can hallow life, then does G.o.d place an Epaminondas, a Cato, a Gustavus Adolphus, at the head of the consecrated host, and freedom is at once the banner and the palm. O, blessed he who then lives or dies at once for the G.o.d of war and for the G.o.ddess of peace!

"Let me not profane this by speaking of it. But take here my softly spoken but firmly meant word, and lay it up in thy bosom, that so soon as the probable war of Gallic freedom breaks out, I take my part decidedly in it, for it. Nothing can hold me back, not even my father.

This resolution belongs to my peace and existence. Not from ambition do I form it; though I do from an honorable self-love. Even in my earlier years I could never enjoy the flat praise of an eternal domestic felicity, which certainly beseems women rather than men. Of course hardly any one else has _thy_ strength or disposition to take everything great quietly, and silently to melt down the world into an internal dream. Thou gazest upon the coming clouds and along the milky-way, and sayest coldly, Cloudy! But dost thou not, prithee, allow thyself too deeply in this feeling, in this cold vault? It is true, the poison of this feeling will, in all parts of Rome particularly, that churchyard of such remote nations, such opposite centuries, consume one more sweetly than anywhere else; but couldst thou know the changeable, except by contrast with the unchangeable, standing side by side with it? and where does death dwell but in life? Let decay and dust reign!

there are, after all, three immortalities; although in the first, the superterrestrial, thou dost not believe; then the subterranean, for the universe may decay, but not its dust; and the immortality which ever worketh therein, namely, this, that every action becomes more certainly an eternal mother than it is an eternal daughter. And this union with the universe and with eternity encourages the ephemera, in their flying-moment, to carry and sow still farther abroad the blossom-dust, which in the next thousand years will perhaps appear as a palm-grove.

"Whether I disclose myself to my father is to me still a matter of doubt, because I am still in doubt on the subject, whether I am to take his previous expressions against the modern French for sharp earnest, or only as another instance of the sportive coldness wherewith he was formerly wont to treat his very divinities,--Homer, Raphael, Caesar, Shakespeare,--from disgust at the mimicking idolatry which the vulgar show to true elevation and to false. Greet my brave, manly Wehrfritz, and remind him of our union-festival on the day when the news comes of the demolition of the Bastille. Farewell, and stay by me!

"Albano."

On the evening of writing this letter he went with his father to a _Converzatione_ in the _Palazzo Colonna_; here they found the dark marble gallery, full of antiques and pictures, perverted from a chamber of art and a parlor into a fencing-school; all arms and tongues of Romans were in commotion and in conflict about the latest developments of the French Revolution, and most in its favor. It was at the time when almost all Europe forgot for some days, what it had been for centuries learning from the political and poetic history of France, that this same France could more easily become a magnified than a great nation. The Knight alone gave himself up rather to the works of art than to the sham-fight in his neighborhood. At length, however, he heard distant words which announced how Albano, like all the youth of that day, was marching exultingly after the _Queen of Heaven_, _Liberty_, following on in the train of eternal freemen and eternal slaves after the _equality_ of the times; then he drew nearer and remarked, in his manner, "That the Revolution was something very great; but that he found, however, in great works, e. g. in a Colosseum or obelisk, in the bloom of a science, in war, in the heights of astronomy, of physics, less to admire than others, for it was merely a ma.s.s in time or s.p.a.ce that created it, a considerable mult.i.tude of _little_ forces. But only great ones a man should respect.[83] In revolution he saw more of the former than of the latter. Freedom was as little gained as lost in _one_ day; as weak individuals in a state of intoxication were exactly the opposite of themselves, so too there was a sort of intoxication of the mult.i.tude by mult.i.tude."

Hereupon Bouverot replied, "That is exactly my sentiment, too." Albano made answer, and very visibly only to his father, because he profoundly despised the German gentleman, and held him utterly unworthy of enjoying high works of art, for which he had brought with him an eminent _taste_, although no sense, and said: "Dear father, the twelve thousand Jews did not design the Colosseum which they built, but the idea was, after all, at some time or other, entirely in _one_ man, in Vespasian; and so universally must there preside over the concentric directions of little forces some great one, and though it were G.o.d himself." "To that source," said Gaspard, "to which everything G.o.dlike is referred, thou mayst transfer it if thou wilt." Bouverot smiled.

"The Gallic intoxication," replied Albano, warmly, "is surely and verily no accidental one, but an enthusiasm grounded at once in humanity and in time, for whence otherwise the universal interest in it? They may perhaps sink, but only to soar higher. Through a red sea of blood and war humanity wades toward the promised land, and the wilderness is _long_; with gashed hands, gluing themselves in their own blood, they, like the chamois-hunters, climb upward." "The chamois-hunters themselves," said the Knight, "do the same still more, when they undertake to come _down from the Alps_; meanwhile such hopes are charming, and we will gladly wish their fulfilment." "_Signor Conte_," added Bouverot, "was very happy in naming the outbreak a fit of intoxication. One sleeps it out; but in the morning there is a great deal broken and to pay." "Intoxication?" said Albano; "what best thing has not occurred in a state of enthusiasm, and what worst thing has not been done in cold blood? Say, Herr von Bouverot? Yes, there is a grim, dreadful frost of the soul, as well as a similar physical frost, which, like the greatest heat, makes one black and blind and sore;[84]

something like French tragedy, _cold_, and yet _barbarous_."

"Thou approachest the tragic, son," said Gaspard, interrupting him, and reinforcing the German gentleman; "we may expect of the French very much political sagacity, especially in distress; that is their forte.

Therein they match women. They are, too, like women, either uncommonly tender, moral, and humane, when they are good, or, like them, quite as cruel and rough, when they are beside themselves. It may be predicted, that, in a liberation-war, if one should break out, they will, in valor, take precedence of all parties. That will dazzle exceedingly, since, after all, nothing is rarer than a cowardly people. One learns to estimate military courage very moderately, when one sees that the Roman Legions, precisely when they were mercenary, bad, slavish, and half freedmen, namely, under the Triumvirate, fought more courageously than ever. The citizens fought and died to the very last man for that insignificant incendiary, Catiline, and only slaves were made prisoners."

This speech set a hot seal upon Albano's mouth; it seemed exactly as if his father had found him out, and took his old pleasure in damping, like a fate, all enthusiasm, and giving all expectations, even gloomy ones, the lie. The offended, self-inflaming spirit remained now fast covered from Gaspard and Bouverot.

But to his Dian he showed all on the morning after. He knew how this friend, with the arm of an artist and a youth at once, bore and waved the banner of freedom, and therefore he broke before him the dark seal of his previous melancholy. He confessed to his most beloved teacher his full-grown purpose, so soon as the unholy war against Gallic liberty, which now hung out its pitchy torch in all streets of the city of G.o.d, burst into flames, to repair to the side of freedom, and to fall himself sooner than see her fall. "Truly, you are a brave man,"

said Dian. "Had I not child and profession hanging upon my neck, by Heaven, I myself would join you. An old fellow like that yonder sees much and hears badly. He shall not nose out anything, nor his beast of a _Barigello_ neither." He meant the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdorfer, whom he, with an artist's obstinacy, eternally abominated, because the Counsellor painted worse and criticised better than himself. "Dian, your word is finely said; yes, indeed, age makes one physically and morally _far-sighted_ for one's self, and _deaf_ to others," said Albano. "Have I spoken well, Albano? But truly such is the fact," said he, very much pleased, in his diffidence with respect to his language, at the praise of its beauty.

After some time, the Knight, just as if he saw away through the seal, uttered some words which took hold of the youth on all sides. "There are," said he, "some vigorous natures which stand exactly on the boundary-line of genius and talent, fitted out, half for active, half for ideal effort, and, withal, of burning ambition. They feel forcibly all that is beautiful and great, and would fain create it again out of themselves; but they succeed only very feebly in doing so. They have not, like genius, one direction toward the centre of gravity, but they stand themselves at the gravitating point, so that the directions destroy each other. They are now poets, now painters, now musicians; most of all do they love in youth bodily courage, because in that strength most easily and expeditiously expresses itself through the arm. Hence, in early life, everything great which they see enraptures them, because they think to create it anew, but later in life quite annoys them, because, after all, they have not the power. They should, however, perceive that it is just they, if they know early how to guide their ambition, who have drawn the finest lot of various and harmonizing powers. They seem to be rightly fitted for the enjoyment of all that is beautiful, as well as for moral development and for the care of their being, for _whole_ men,--something like what a prince must be, because in that office one must have for his all-sided destination all-sided directions of effort and kinds of knowledge."

They stood, as he said this, just on Mount Aventine; before them the Pyramid of Cestius, that epitaphium of the Heretics' Churchyard, wherein so many an undeveloped artist and youth sleeps, and, near by, the lofty potshard mountain[85] (_monte testaccio_), before which Albano always pa.s.sed along with a miserable, sickly feeling of stale dreariness. The shock which his father's ideas gave his own, and the relationship of the potshard mountain to the strangers' churchyard, caused Albano to answer rather himself than his father, with a melted ice-drop of displeasure in his eye: "Such a nameless mountain of pots is, upon the whole, also the history of nations. But one would much rather kill one's self on the spot than, after a long life, to bury one's self so namelessly and ingloriously in the ma.s.s at last."

After his union with himself, he grew more happy. Already he began with zeal to set himself to work, agreeably to his nature, which, as in the seed-corn, put forth out of one seed-point stem and root, thoughts and actions.

He threw all other pursuits away, and studied the art of war, ancient and modern, for which Dian borrowed and supplied him the books and the study-chamber. With unspeakable delight and exaltation, he ran over again the sun-charts of the Roman history, here on the very body of the burnt-out sun itself, and often, when he read descriptions of its volcanic eruptions, he stood in the very craters where they had occurred.

Dian gave, into the bargain, his knowledge of the small service, and gladly gave himself for bodily exercises, when he had previously ushered him up to divine service under the heaven of Raphael's art, where graces, like constellations, walk in the lofty ether; for with Dian body and soul were _one_ casting; the most delicate ocular nerve and the hardest brachial muscle were _one_ band. At last, as a word was much more disagreeable to him than an action, and as he had much rather bestir the whole body than the tongue, he introduced to the Count an oratorical brother-in-arms, a young Corsican, all alive, as if formed out of the clear marrow of life.