“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 Schönau, 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 Schönau’s wits would bring help.
Half a dozen voices at once made him acquainted with the crime Ottomar had committed.
“Now, Werben, Werben!” said Schönau, 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 Schönau sit down here. Go on, Schönau. Wagner is the greatest musician—eh?”
“And the greatest dramatist also,” said Schönau, taking the place willingly left free for him by the Baroness.
“Go on, go on!” exclaimed the Barones, tapping Schönau on the hand with her fan.
“Undoubtedly,” continued Schönau, with a smile, “it is the mission of every poet to hold a looking-glass to nature; but with a difference. ‘J’ai vu les mœurs de mon temps, et j’ai publié ces lettres,’ wrote Rousseau in the preface to his Nouvelle Héloise; 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 Schönau—go on!” Schönau 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 hell to heaven, from heaven to hell, raging and vanishing into mist; in this everything, and something more, turned into endless singsong 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 crashing 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.”
Schönau kissed Baroness Kniebreche’s hand and disappeared, taking Ottomar with him. A few laughed, others cried “Treachery.” The Baroness exclaimed:
“I don’t know what you mean; he is quite right!”
Lieutenant von Tettritz, who, as an enthusiastic Wagnerite, felt himself seriously offended, and was considering whether he ought not to call out Schönau for this insult, tried to explain to her that the Captain had mystified and laughed at her in the most outrageous manner.
“Without my finding it out!” exclaimed the old lady. “You must not say that, my dear child; old Kniebreche knows better than that when she is laughed at, I can assure you.”
IX
Fortunately at this moment supper was announced; it was served from a buffet which had been prepared in the hitherto closed room, on two small tables which had in the meantime been laid.
“Are you not yet engaged?” asked Elsa of Reinhold as she passed him; “make haste, then; Fräulein Emilie von Fischbach is waiting for you; she is indeed, though you look so astonished! It is all settled; she is standing near the looking-glass with Fräulein von Rossow whom Schönau has engaged. I do not intend to engage myself—I shall follow you in—we are going
