Consuelo, p.42
Consuelo, page 42
"If they told you that I preferred the reform of the Hussites to that of the Lutherans, and the great Procopius to the vindictive Calvin, as much as I prefer the exploits of the Taborites to those of the soldiers of Wallenstein, they have told you the truth, Consuelo. But what signifies my creed to you, who seem instinctively aware of truth, and who know the Deity better than I do? God forbid that I should bring you here to trouble your poor soul and peaceful conscience with my tormenting reveries! Remain as you are, Consuelo; you were born pious and good; moreover, you were born poor and obscure, and nothing has changed in you the pure dictates of reason and the light of justice. We can pray together without disputing—you who know every thing although having learned nothing, and I who know very little after a long and tedious study. In whatever temple you raise your voice, the knowledge of the true God will be in your heart, and the feeling of the true faith will kindle your soul. It is not to instruct you, but in order that your revelation may be imparted to me, that I wished our voices and our spirits to unite before this altar, formed of the bones of my fathers."
"I was not mistaken, then, in thinking that these honored remains, as you call them, are those of Hussites, thrown into the fountain of the Schreckenstein during the bloody fury of the civil wars, in the time of your ancestor John Ziska, who, they say, made fearful reprisals? I have been told that, after burning the village, he destroyed the wells. I fancy I can discover in the obscurity of this vault, a circle of hewed stones above my head, which tells me that we are precisely under a spot where I have often sat when fatigued after searching for you in vain. Say, Count Albert, is this really the place that you have baptized as the Stone of Expiation?"
"Yes, it is here," replied Albert, "that torments and atrocious violence have consecrated the asylum of my prayers, and the sanctuary of my grief. You see enormous blocks suspended above our heads, and others scattered on the banks of the stream. The just hands of the Taborites flung them there by the orders of him whom they called the Terrible Blind Man; but they only served to force back the waters toward those subterranean beds in which they succeeded in forcing a passage. The wells were destroyed, and I have covered their ruins with cypress, but it would have needed a mountain to fill this cavern. The blocks which were heaped up in the mouth of the well, were stopped by a winding stair, similar to that which you had the courage to descend in my garden at the castle. Since that time, the gradual pressure of the soil has thrust them closer together, and confines them better. If any portion of the mass escapes, it is during the winter frosts; you have therefore nothing to fear from their fall."
"It was not that of which I was thinking, Albert," replied Consuelo, looking toward the gloomy altar on which he had placed his Stradivarius. "I asked myself why you render exclusive worship to the memory of these victims, as if there were no martyrs on the other side, and as if the crimes of the one were more pardonable than those of the other?"
Consuelo spoke thus in a severe tone, and looking distrustfully at Albert. She remembered Zdenko, and all her questions, had she dared so to utter them, assumed in her mind a tone of interrogation, such as would befit a judge toward a criminal.
The painful emotion which suddenly seized upon the count seemed the confession of remorse. He passed his hands over his forehead, then pressed them against his breast, as if it were being torn asunder. His countenance changed in a frightful manner, and Consuelo feared that he might have only too well understood her.
"You do not know what harm you do me," said he, leaning upon the heap of bones, and drooping his head toward the withered skulls, which seemed to gaze on him from their hollow orbits. "No, you cannot know it, Consuelo, and your cold remarks recall the memory of the dreary past. You do not know that you speak to a man who has lived through ages of grief, and who, after being the blind instrument of inflexible justice in the hands of God, has received his recompense and undergone his punishment. I have so suffered, so wept, so expiated my dreary destiny, so atoned for the horrors to which my fate subjected me, that I had at last flattered myself I could forget them. Forgetfulness!—yes, forgetfulness!—that was the craving which consumed my aching breast; that was my vow and my daily prayer; that was the token of my alliance with man and my reconciliation with God, which, during long years, I had implored, prostrate upon these moldering bones. When I first saw you, Consuelo, I began to hope; when you pitied me, I thought I was saved. See this wreath of withered flowers ready to fall into the dust, and which encircles the skull that surmounts the altar. You do not recognize it, though I have watered it with many a bitter yet soothing tear. It was you who gathered them, you who sent them to me by the companion of my sorrows, the faithful guardian of this sepulcher. Covering them with kisses and tears, I anxiously asked myself if you could ever feel any true and heartfelt regard for one like myself—a pitiless fanatic, an unfeeling tyrant——"
"But what are the crimes you have committed?" said Consuelo firmly, distracted with a thousand varying emotions, and emboldened by the deep dejection of Albert. "If you have a confession to make, make it here to me, that I may know if I can absolve and love you."
"Yes, you may absolve me; for he whom you know, Albert of Rudolstadt, has been innocent as a child; but he whom you do not know, John Ziska of the Chalice, has been whirled by the wrath of Heaven into a career of iniquity."
Consuelo saw the imprudence of which she had been guilty, in rousing the slumbering flame and recalling to Albert's mind his former madness. This, however, was not the moment to combat it, and she was revolving in her mind some expedient to calm him, and had gradually sunk into a reverie, when suddenly she perceived that Albert no longer spoke, no longer held her hand—that he was not at her side, but standing a few paces off, before the monument, performing on his violin the singular airs with which she had been already so surprised and charmed.
CHAPTER LVI
ALBERT at first played several of those ancient canticles whose authors are now either unknown or forgotten in Bohemia, but of which Zdenko had preserved the precious tradition, and the text of which the count had found by dint of study and meditation. He was so imbued with the spirit of these compositions, barbarous at the first glance, but profoundly touching and truly beautiful to an enlightened and serious taste, and had made himself so familiar with them, as to be able to improvise on them at length, mingling with them his own ideas, then resuming and developing the original idea, and again giving way to his own inspiration, all without changing the original austere and striking character of these ancient productions by his ingenious and learned interpretation. Consuelo had determined to listen to and retain these precious specimens of the popular genius of ancient Bohemia; but all her endeavors soon became impossible, as much from her musing mood as the vague impression which the music itself produced.
There is a species of music which maybe termed natural, because it is not the production of science and reflection, but rather of an inspiration which escapes from the trammels of rules and conventions. Such is popular music, that of the peasants in particular. What glorious poetry appears, lives, and dies, as it were, among them, without ever having been correctly noted down, or appearing in any regular form! The unknown artist, who improvises his rustic ballad while he tends his flocks or drives the plow—and such exist even in the most prosaic countries—can rarely be induced to give a form to his fugitive ideas. He communicates it to others, children of nature like himself, and they chant it from hamlet to hamlet, from hut to hut, each one according to his taste. It is for this reason that these songs and pastoral romances, so lively and simple, or so tender in sentiment, are for the most part lost, and have never lasted more than one century. Educated musicians will not trouble themselves to collect them. The most part despise them, for want of an intelligence and sentiment sufficiently elevated to comprehend them; others are turned aside by the difficulties they encounter in their search for the true and real version, with which perhaps the author himself was unacquainted, and which certainly was not acknowledged as an invariable type by its numerous interpreters. Some have changed it through ignorance; others have developed, modified, or embellished it by their superior taste and intelligence, because cultivation has not taught them to repress their natural impulses. They do not know that they have transformed the primitive work, and their candid hearers are no more aware of it than themselves. The peasant neither examines nor compares. When Heaven has made him a musician, he sings after the fashion of the birds, the nightingale especially, whose improvisation is endless, though the elements of her song be the same. Moreover, the genius of the people is unbounded. It is needless to register its productions, which, like those of the earth they cultivate, are unceasing; it creates every hour, like nature, which inspires it.5
Consuelo had all the candor, poetry, and sensibility in her composition which are requisite to comprehend and love popular music. In this she proved that she was a great artist, and that the learned theories which she studied had in no respect impaired the freshness and sweetness which are the treasures of inspiration and the youth of the soul. She had sometimes whispered to Anzoleto, so that Porpora could not hear, that she loved several of the barcaroles sung by the fishermen of the Adriatic, better than all the science of Padre Martini and Maestro Durante. Her mother's songs and boleros were a source of poetic life from which she never wearied in drawing inspiration. What impression then must the musical genius of the Bohemians—that pastoral, warlike, fanatic people, grave and mild in the midst of the most potent elements of activity—have produced upon her! Such characteristics were at once striking and new to her. Albert performed this music with rare perception of the national spirit, and of the pious and energetic feelings in which it originated. He combined in his improvisation the profound melancholy and heart-rending regret with which slavery had imbued his soul and that of his people; and this mingling of sorrow and bravery, of exultation and depression, these hymns of gratitude united with cries of distress, pictured in the deepest and most lively colors the sorrows of Bohemia and of Albert.
It has been justly said, that the aim of music is to awaken feeling. No other art so reveals the sublime emotions of the human soul; no art so depicts the glories of nature, the delights of contemplation, the character of nations, the whirl of passion, and the cry of suffering. Hope, fear, regret, despair, devotion, enthusiasm, faith, doubt, glory, peace—all these, and more, music gives us, and takes away from us again, according to its genius and our own capacity. It presents things in an entirely new and original aspect, and without being guilty of the puerilities of mere sound, and the imitation of external noises, it suffers us to perceive, through a dreamy haze which enhances and ennobles them, the exterior objects to which it transports our imagination. Certain anthems will evoke the gigantic phantoms of ancient cathedrals, allow us to penetrate into the secret thoughts of their constructors, and of those who, kneeling within their holy precincts, utter their hymns of praise to God. Those who are able to express simply and powerfully the music of different nations, and know how to listen to it as it deserves, need not to make a tour of the world in order to behold different nations, to visit their monuments, to read their books, or to traverse their plains, their mountains, their gardens, and their wildernesses. A Jewish air at once transports us into the synagogue; a pibroch conveys us to the Highlands of Scotland; while all Spain is revealed to us by a melody of that fair land. Thus have I been many a time in Poland, Germany, Naples, Ireland, India; and thus have I come to be better acquainted with the inhabitants of these countries than if I had known them for years. It required but an instant to transport me there and make me a sharer in all their thoughts and emotions. I identified myself with every phase of their existence by studying their music and making it my own.
Consuelo gradually ceased to hear Albert's violin. Her soul was rapt, and her senses, closed against all outward objects, awoke in another world, to traverse unknown regions inhabited by a new race of beings. She beheld, amidst a strange chaos at once horrible and magnificent, the spectral form of the heroes of old Bohemia; she heard the mournful clang of bells, while the formidable Taborites descended from their fortified mounts, lean, half-clad, bloody and ferocious. Then she beheld the angels of death assembled in the clouds, the cup and sword in their hands. Hovering in a compact troop over the heads of the prevaricating pontiffs, she saw them pour out upon the accused earth the vial of divine wrath. She fancied she heard the rushing of their wings, and the dropping blood which extinguished the conflagration lighted by their fury. Sometimes it was a night of terror and gloom, wherein she heard the sobs and groans of the dying on the field of battle. Sometimes it was a glowing day, of which she could hardly bear the splendor, in which she saw the thundering chariot of the Terrible Blind Man, with his helmet and his rusty cuirass, and the gore-stained bandage which covered his eyes. Temples opened of themselves as he approached; monks fled into the bosom of the earth, carrying away their relics and their treasures in a corner of their robes. Then the conquerors brought feeble old men, mendicants covered with sores like Lazarus; madmen who ran singing and laughing like Zdenko; executioners stained with blood, little children with pure hands and angel looks, amazons carrying torches and bundles of pikes, and seated them round a table, while an angel radiant with beauty, like those which Albert Durer has introduced into his apocalyptic compositions, presented to their greedy lips the wooden cup, the chalice of forgiveness, of restoration, and of sacred equality. This angel re-appeared in all the visions that floated around Consuelo. She saw him, the beautiful one, the sorrowful, the immortal, proudest among the proud. He bore along with him his broken chains; and his torn pinions dragging on the ground betrayed tokens of violence and captivity. He smiled compassionately on the men of crime, and pressed the little children to his bosom.
Excited, fascinated, she darted toward him with open arms while her knees bent under her. Albert let fall his violin, which gave out a plaintive sound as it fell, and received the young girl in his arms while he uttered a cry of surprise and transport. It was he whom Consuelo had listened to and looked at, while dreaming of the rebellious angel—his form, his image which had attracted and subdued her—it was against his heart that she had come to rest her own, exclaiming in a choking voice—"Thine! thine! Angel of Grief, thine and God's forever!"
But hardly had Albert's lips touched hers, than a deadly chill and scorching pain ran through limb and brain. The illusion, so roughly dissipated, inflicted so violent a shock upon her system that she felt as if about to expire, and extricating herself from the arms of the count, she fell against the bones of the altar, which gave way with a frightful crash. Seeing herself covered with these dread remains, and in the arms of Albert, who gazed on her with surprise and alarm, she experienced such dreadful anguish and terror that, hiding her face in her disheveled hair, she exclaimed with sobs: "Away! away! in the name of Heaven—light! air! O God, rescue me from this sepulcher, and restore me to the light of the sun!"
Albert, seeing her pale and delirious, darted toward her, and would have lifted her in his arms to extricate her from the cavern. But in her consternation she understood him not, and, abruptly rising, she began to fly recklessly toward the recesses of the cavern, without giving any heed to the obstacles by which she was beset, and which in many places presented imminent danger.
"In the name of God," said Albert, "not that way! Death is in your path! Wait for me!"
But his cries only served to augment Consuelo's terror. She bounded twice over the brook with the lightness of a roe, and without knowing what she did. At last, in a gloomy recess planted with cypress, she dashed against a sort of mound, and fell with her hands before her on earth freshly turned up.
This shock made such an impression upon her that a kind of stupor succeeded to her terror. Suffocated, breathless, and not well comprehending what she felt, she suffered the count to approach. He had hastened after her, and had had the presence of mind in passing to seize one of the torches from the rocks, in order to light her along the windings of the stream in case he should not overtake her before she reached a spot which he knew to be deep, and toward which she appeared to direct her course. The poor young man was so overwhelmed by such sudden and contrary emotions, that he dared not speak to her, nor even offer her his hand. She was seated on the heap of earth which had caused her to stumble, and dared not utter a word, but confused, and with downcast eyes, she gazed mechanically upon the ground. Suddenly she perceived that this mound had the form and appearance of a tomb, and that she was really seated on a recently made grave, over which were strewed branches of cypress and withered flowers. She rose hastily, and with fresh terror which she could not conquer, exclaimed, "Oh, Albert, whom have you buried here?"
"I buried here what was dearest to me in the world before I knew you," replied Albert, with the most painful emotion. "If I have committed an act of sacrilege during my delirium, and under the idea of fulfilling a sacred duty, God will, I trust, pardon me. I shall tell you another time what soul inhabited the body which rests here. At present you are too much agitated, and require the fresh air. Come, Consuelo, let us leave this place, where you made me in one moment the happiest and most miserable of men."
"Oh, yes!" she exclaimed, "let us go hence. I know not what vapors are rising from the earth, but I feel as if I were about to die, and as if my reason were deserting me."
They left the cavern together without uttering another word. Albert went first, stopping and holding down his torch before each stone, so that his companion might see and shun it. When he was about to open the door of the cell, a recollection occurred to Consuelo, doubtless in consequence of her artistic turn of thought, though otherwise seemingly out of place.
