Chapter 44
"I should like even that trifling matter to be got over. His Majesty is very particularly sensitive on those matters just now, and with reason. Now, my dear Werben, we have all been young once, and you know my feelings towards you. I speak for your own sake, and may tell you in confidence that Wallbach, if not exactly prepared for any sacrifice--that would be saying too much--is ready to help you as far as he can in making any arrangement. You understand!"
The Colonel held out his hand, and turned quickly away to put an end to the interview. He had in the kindest and friendliest manner said his last word, his ultimatum. Ottomar had quite understood. The blood ran hot and cold through his veins; his temples throbbed violently.
He stopped a servant who was pa.s.sing with a tray, tossed down several gla.s.ses of wine and then laughed, as one of his brother officers called out to him: "Leave a little for me!"
"Do you find it so hot too?"
"Tolerably! But I believe we are going to dance,"
"After supper; I don't know why it is so late. I will ask my sister."
"She is in that room."
Ottomar plunged into the room, into the midst of a circle which had grouped itself round Carla. An extraordinary feeling of perversity came over him. In this little room almost all his most decisive meetings with Carla had taken place; here it was the custom, when the company was smaller, to withdraw in order to talk more at ease; and here were now gathered together all his most intimate friends: a few of his favourite brother officers--Wartenberg, Tettritz--only Schonau was absent--few of Elsa's particular friends, Elsa herself, even old Baroness Kniebreche had made her appearance, as she always did wherever she expected an interesting conversation, and, preventing Carla from rising off the small, blue silk sofa, had sunk into an armchair, in which, leaning forward, with her hand to her left ear, she listened eagerly to Carla's words. The only one of the party who was a stranger, as Ottomar himself had said a few minutes before to Clemda, was Count Golm; and this stranger stood, with one hand on the back of the small sofa, close to Carla, where he himself ought to have been standing, instead of remaining in the doorway, without the possibility of advancing a step farther into the crowded room, and not daring either to withdraw, after Baroness Kniebreche, turning her pince-nez angrily on him, had exclaimed: "There you are at last, when our dear Carla has been enchanting us with her clever talk--yes, yes, my dear Carla, positively enchanting us. Let your brother stand, Elsa; he has richly deserved it. For heaven's sake go on, my dear Carla!"
Carla had hastily glanced towards the door through her eye-gla.s.s. "I cannot say any more without repeating what I have said already."
"Then repeat it!" exclaimed the Baroness. "One cannot hear often enough that Wagner is the master of all masters who have ever lived or ever will live."
"I did not say that, Baroness," said Carla, laying her hand on the old lady's; "only of those who have lived! It is not for nothing that the master calls his music that of the future; and the future is so called because it is yet to come. But who can venture to predict what will come?"
"Is it not magnificent?" exclaimed the old lady--"positively magnificent?"
"For," continued Carla, "deep as is my admiration for the master, I cannot conceal from myself, though with some trembling--only too natural in face of such incomparable greatness--that the mystical connection between word and sound--the Eleusinian mystery--proclaimed by the master, though only to the initiated, produces a deeper, more heart-felt satisfaction, in which the last remains of that barbarous separation which has..h.i.therto existed between poetry and music entirely and for ever disappear."
"Positively stupendous!" exclaimed the Baroness.
"Magnificent!" growled Lieutenant von Tettritz.
"But Wagner himself allows that," said Von Wartenberg.
"And that speaks in my favour," answered Carla. "When we see how this splendid genius goes further and deeper with every work, how he advances with giant strides from 'Rienzi' and the 'Fliegende Hollander'
to 'Tannhauser' and 'Lohengrin;' from these to the 'Meistersinger;'
from the 'Meistersinger' to 'Tristan and Isolde,' which I have only glanced at as yet, and now to what the 'Ring des Nibelungen' is to bring us--can we, dare we say, in opposition to the most modest of men, who looks upon every height that he has reached as only
Impossible! 'Art,' says Goethe, who, if he understood nothing of music, always deserves to be listened to on the universal principles of aesthetics--'Art has never been possessed by one man alone;' and, G.o.d-like though he is, we must still look upon the master as a man."
"I must kiss you--I positively must kiss you!" exclaimed the Baroness.
"What do you say to it, Count Golm--what do you say to it?"
"I bow my head in admiration and--silence," answered the Count, laying his hand on his heart.
"And you, Ottomar?" exclaimed the Baroness, turning in her chair with almost girlish activity, and fixing her pince-nez like a double-barrelled pistol on him.
"I consider Wagnerism, from beginning to end, to be an abominable humbug!" answered Ottomar defiantly.
The company were horror-struck. "Good heavens!" "Unheard of!"
"Abominable!" "Positive blasphemy!" was heard on all sides.
"What did he say?" asked the old lady, her hand to her ear, bending towards Carla.
Carla shrugged her shoulders. "You really cannot expect me to repeat Herr von Werben's words. Baroness?"
"Which Ottomar did not mean seriously," said Elsa, with an imploring look at her brother, which Ottomar answered by a shrug of the shoulders.
"I thought myself bound," he said, "as the Baroness did me the honour to appeal directly to me, to give my opinion, though it can be of no importance in this 'n.o.ble circle.'" He emphasised scornfully the last words.
"Humbug!" exclaimed the old lady, who, while the others were all talking at once, had made Herr von Tettritz repeat the fearful word in her ear. "It is too bad! You must withdraw it!--you must positively withdraw it! Do you hear, Ottomar?"
"Perfectly, Baroness," answered Ottomar; "but I am unfortunately unable to comply with your command."
"It is an insult--a positive insult!" exclaimed the Baroness, waving her enormous fan violently up and down--"to us all, to Carla in particular--on my honour, my dear Carla!"
Carla appeared not to hear; she was leaning back on the sofa, and laughing with Count Golm, who, leaning on his elbow, bent low over her.
Elsa was greatly disturbed. She knew that her brother did not in the least care about music, and that under any other circ.u.mstances he would have put an end to the disagreeable scene with one of the light jests that came so easily to him; and that if he did not do so now--if, as was evident from his gloomy countenance, he was determined to continue it, he could only have one reason for doing so--the wish to bring about a crisis, to break with Carla irrevocably and for ever, in the presence of their friends! She did not wish for the marriage; she had spoken eagerly against it that very day; had opened her anxious heart to her brother. But Carla had not deserved this; she was only behaving today as she always did, and her laughter at this moment was doubtless forced. What could she say or do?
"Will you at least honour me with an answer?" exclaimed the angry old lady, half rising from her chair.
"Let me answer for him, Baroness?" said a voice.
Elsa almost exclaimed in joyful astonishment. It was Schonau, who, laying his hand on Ottomar's shoulder, stepped into the doorway. Behind them she saw another bearded countenance, whose large, honest eyes rapidly surveyed the group, and finally rested on her. He could do no good here; but his very presence was a comfort, while Schonau's wits would bring help.
Half a dozen voices at once made him acquainted with the crime Ottomar had committed.
"Now, Werben, Werben!" said Schonau, shaking his head at him. "How could you let your rash daring lead you into such danger, even if you were as much at home in logic as you are on horseback? But to confuse cause with effect--to call Bark giddiness because it produces giddiness, singing in the ears, and headache, is really unheard of!"
"You hear him!" exclaimed the old lady triumphantly, having only caught the last words. "Unheard of--positively unheard of! Get up, Tettritz; let Schonau sit down here. Go on, Schonau. Wagner is the greatest musician--eh?"
"And the greatest dramatist also," said Schonau, taking the place willingly left free for him by the Baroness.
"Go on, go on!" exclaimed the Barones, tapping Schonau on the hand with her fan.
"Undoubtedly," continued Schonau, with a smile, "it is the mission of every poet to hold a looking-gla.s.s to nature; but with a difference.
'_J'ai vu les m[oe]urs de mon temps, et j'ai publie ces lettres_,'
wrote Rousseau in the preface to his 'Nouvelle Heloise;' that may suffice for the novelist, the poet's half-brother, as Schiller calls him. We must be content if he presents to us good photographs of reality--instantaneous pictures; and more than content if these photographs come out stereoscopically, and appear almost like life--almost. For only the dramatist fulfils, and can fulfil, his mission in earnest, his aim having been from the first, and being still, to leave the impress of his style on the age and on the material world. The first thing necessary for this, however, is Shakespeare's golden rule--'Be not too tame.' And it is just because Wagner is not too tame--because he has the courage, which his enemies call audacity, to allow the salient points in the character of his age to appear, to allow the excrescences to grow out of the material world--it is this which raises him so far above his rivals in the estimation of all who have ears to hear and eyes to see."
"I should like to kiss you!" exclaimed the Baroness. "Go on, my dear Schonau--go on!"
Schonau bowed.
"What are, however, the salient points of our age? Ask our philosophers--Schopenhauer, Hartmann----"
"This will please you, Carla!" exclaimed the Baroness.
"They will answer, the deep conviction of the insufficiency, wretchedness, misery--let me say the word--worthlessness of this our earthly life; and combined with this, the conscious-unconscious longing after the Nirvana, the sweet Nothing--the beginning and foundation of things, which appears to our troubled nature as the only deliverance and last haven of refuge from the desolation and error of this life, and to which we should undoubtedly fly were it not for our will--our gigantic, invincible, indestructible will--that cares for nothing more than to live, to enjoy, to drink down the foaming cup of life, of love, to its last bitter drops. Renunciation there, enjoyment here, both to overflowing; because each is aware of the other, each hates the other, like the hostile brothers. And in this constantly renewed contest between irreconcilable contradictions; in this sensation of being torn backwards and forwards in the wildest confusion, the maddest tumult, the most entangled whirl; in this witches' Sabbath, this will-o'-the-wisp dance, and this halo of falling stars of modern humanity, hurrying from h.e.l.l to heaven, from heaven to h.e.l.l, raging and vanis.h.i.+ng into mist; in this everything, and something more, turned into endless sing-song and eternal clang--the most horrible Past painted into a rosy-red caricature of the Present, while the eyes of a spectral Future stare from the empty sockets--the flute-notes of soft enjoyment, the violin-tones of fading bliss, drowned by the cras.h.i.+ng cymbals and the shrill sound of the trumpets--here you have the 'Venusberg' and the 'Penitent,' the 'Wedding-night' and 'Monsalvat,'
the chronic sorrows of love and the magic drink from a prescription; here you have, taking it all in all, him whose like has never been seen, and never will be seen--here you have Richard Wagner! And now, Baroness and ladies, allow me to withdraw before the enchanted silence into which I have lulled you breaks into words, which might hurt my modesty, though not that of nature."
Schonau kissed Baroness Kniebreche's hand and disappeared, taking Ottomar with him. A few laughed, others cried "Treachery." The Baroness exclaimed: