Memorials and Other Papers — Volume 2

"If you speak of my directions for administering the torture,—a matter in which I presume that I exercised no unusual privilege amongst German sovereigns,—you are right. But it was not that of which I spoke."

"Of what else, then?—The Lady Paulina has escaped."

"True, to Falkenberg. But, doubtless, young Landgrave, you have heard of such a thing as the intercepting of a fugitive prisoner; in such a case, you know the punishment which martial law awards. The governor at Falkenberg had his orders." These last significant words he uttered in a tone of peculiar meaning. His eye sparkled with bright gleams of malice and of savage vengeance, rioting in its completion.

"O, heart—heart!" exclaimed Maximilian, "can this be possible?"

The imperial legate and all present crowded around him to suggest such consolation as they could. Some offered to ride off express to Falkenberg; some argued that the Lady Paulina had been seen within the last hour. But the hellish exulter in ruined happiness destroyed that hope as soon as it dawned.

"Children!" said he, "foolish children! cherish not such chimeras. Me you have destroyed, Landgrave, and the prospects of my house. Now perish yourself.—Look there: is that the form of one who lives and breathes?"

All present turned to the scaffold, in which direction he pointed, and now first remarked, covered with a black pall, and brought hither doubtless to aggravate the pangs of death to Maximilian, what seemed but too certainly a female corpse. The stature, the fine swell of the bust, the rich outline of the form, all pointed to the same conclusion; and, in this recumbent attitude, it seemed but too clearly to present the magnificent proportions of Paulina.

There was a dead silence. Who could endure to break it? Who make the effort which was forever to fix the fate of Maximilian?

He himself could not. At last the deposed usurper, craving for the consummation of his vengeance, himself strode forward; with one savage grasp he tore away the pall, and below it lay the innocent features, sleeping in her last tranquil slumber, of his own gentle-minded daughter!

* * * * *

No heart was found savage enough to exult; the sorrow even of such a father was sacred. Death, and through his own orders, had struck the only being whom he had ever loved; and the petrific mace of the fell destroyer seemed to have smitten his own heart, and withered its hopes forever.

Everybody comprehended the mistake in a moment. Paulina had lingered at Waldenhausen under the protection of an imperial corps, which she had met in her flight. The tyrant, who had heard of her escape, but apprehended no necessity for such a step on the part of his daughter, had issued sudden orders to the officer commanding the military post at Falkenberg, to seize and shoot the female prisoner escaping from confinement, without allowing any explanations whatsoever, on her arrival at Falkenberg. This precaution he had adopted in part to intercept any denunciation of the emperor's vengeance which Paulina might address to the officer. As a rude soldier, accustomed to obey the letter of his orders, this commandant had executed his commission; and the gentle Adeline, who had naturally hastened to the protection of her father's chateau, surrendered her breath meekly and with resignation to what she believed a simple act of military violence; and this she did before she could know a syllable of her father's guilt or his fall, and without any the least reason for supposing him connected with the occasion of her early death.

At this moment Paulina made her appearance unexpectedly, to reassure the young Landgrave by her presence, and to weep over her young friend, whom she had lost almost before she had come to know her. The scaffold, the corpse, and the other images of sorrow, were then withdrawn; seven thousand imperial troops presented arms to the youthful Landgrave and the future Landgravine, the brilliant favorites of the emperor; the immense area of St. Agnes resounded with the congratulations of Klosterheim; and as the magnificent cortege moved off to the interior of the schloss, the swell of the coronation anthem rising in peals upon the ear from the choir of St. Agnes, and from the military bands of the imperial troops, awoke the promise of happier days, and of more equitable government, to the long-harassed inhabitants of Klosterheim.

* * * * *

The Klosterheimers knew enough already, personally or by questions easily answered in every quarter, to supply any links which were wanting in the rapid explanations of the legate. Nevertheless, that nothing might remain liable to misapprehension or cavil, a short manifesto was this night circulated by the new government, from which the following facts are abstracted:

The last rightful Landgrave, whilst yet a young man, had been assassinated in the forest when hunting. A year or two before this catastrophe he had contracted what, from the circumstances, was presumed, at the time, to be a morganatic or left-handed marriage, with a lady of high birth, nearly connected with the imperial house. The effect of such a marriage went to incapacitate the children who might be born under it, male or female, from succeeding. On that account, as well as because current report had represented her as childless, the widow lady escaped all attempts from the assassin. Meantime this lady, who was no other than Sister Madeline, had been thus indebted for her safety to two rumors, which were in fact equally false. She soon found means of convincing the emperor, who had been the bosom friend of her princely husband, that her marriage was a perfect one, and conferred the fullest rights of succession upon her infant son Maximilian, whom at the earliest age, and with the utmost secrecy, she had committed to the care of his imperial majesty. This powerful guardian had in every way watched over the interests of the young prince. But the Thirty Years' War had thrown all Germany into distractions, which for a time thwarted the emperor, and favored the views of the usurper. Latterly, also, another question had arisen on the city and dependences of Klosterheim, as distinct from the Landgraviate. These, it was now affirmed, were a female appanage, and could only pass back to the Landgraves of X—— through a marriage with the female inheretrix. To reconcile all claims, therefore, on finding this bar in the way, the emperor had resolved to promote a marriage for Maximilian with Paulina, who stood equally related to the imperial house and to that of her lover. In this view he had despatched Paulina to Klosterheim, with proper documents to support the claims of both parties. Of these documents she had been robbed at Waldenhausen; and the very letter which was designed to introduce Maximilian as "the child and sole representative of the late murdered Landgrave," falling in this surreptitious way into the usurper's hand, had naturally misdirected his attacks to the person of Paulina.

For the rest, as regarded the mysterious movements of The Masque, these were easily explained. Fear, and the exaggerations of fear, had done one half the work to his hands, by preparing people to fall easy dupes to the plans laid, and by increasing the romantic wonders of his achievements. Coöperation, also, on the part of the very students and others, who stood forward as the night-watch for detecting him, had served The Masque no less powerfully. The appearances of deadly struggles had been arranged artificially to countenance the plot and to aid the terror. Finally, the secret passages which communicated between the forest and the chapel of St. Agnes (passages of which many were actually applied to that very use in the Thirty Years' War) had been unreservedly placed at their disposal by the lady abbess, an early friend of the unhappy Landgravine, who sympathized deeply with that lady's unmerited sufferings.

One other explanation followed, communicated in a letter from Maximilian to the legate; this related to the murder of the old seneschal,—a matter in which the young prince took some blame to himself, as having unintentionally drawn upon that excellent servant his unhappy fate. "The seneschal," said the writer, "was the faithful friend of my family, and knew the whole course of its misfortunes. He continued his abode at the schloss, to serve my interest; and in some measure I may fear that I drew upon him his fate. Traversing late one evening a suite of rooms, which his assistance and my own mysterious disguise laid open to my passage at all hours, I came suddenly upon the prince's retirement. He pursued me, but with hesitation. Some check I gave to his motions by halting before a portrait of my unhappy father, and emphatically pointing his attention to it. Conscience, I well knew, would supply a commentary to my act. I produced the impression which I had anticipated, but not so strongly as to stop his pursuit. My course necessarily drew him into the seneschal's room. The old man was sleeping; and this accident threw into the prince's hands a paper, which, I have reason to think, shed some considerable light upon my own pretensions, and, in fact, first made my enemy acquainted with my existence and my claims. Meantime, the seneschal had secured the prince's vengeance upon himself. He was now known as a faithful agent in my service. That fact signed his death- warrant. There is a window in a gallery which commands the interior of the seneschal's room. On the evening of the last fęte, waiting there for an opportunity of speaking securely with this faithful servant, I heard a deep groan, and then another, and another; I raised myself, and, with an ejaculation of horror, looked down upon the murderer, then surveying his victim with hellish triumph. My loud exclamation drew the murderer's eye upwards: under the pangs of an agitated conscience, I have reason to think that he took me for my unhappy father, who perished at my age, and is said to have resembled me closely. Who that murderer was, I need not say more directly. He fled with the terror of one who flies from an apparition. Taking a lesson from this incident, on that same night, by the very same sudden revelation of what passed, no doubt, for my father's countenance, aided by my mysterious character, and the proof I had announced to him immediately before my acquaintance with the secret of the seneschal's murder, in this and no other way it was that I produced that powerful impression upon the prince which terminated the festivities of that evening, and which all Klosterheim witnessed. If not, it is for the prince to explain in what other way I did or could affect him so powerfully."

This explanation of the else unaccountable horror manifested by the ex- Landgrave on the sudden exposure of The Masque's features, received a remarkable confirmation from the confession of the miserable assassin at Waldenhausen. This man's illness had been first brought on by the sudden shock of a situation pretty nearly the same, acting on a conscience more disturbed, and a more superstitious mind. In the very act of attempting to assassinate or rob Maximilian, he had been suddenly dragged by that prince into a dazzling light; and this settling full upon features which too vividly recalled to the murderer's recollection the last unhappy Landgrave, at the very same period of blooming manhood, and in his own favorite hunting palace, not far from which the murder had been perpetrated, naturally enough had for a time unsettled the guilty man's understanding, and, terminating in a nervous fever, had at length produced his penitential death.

A death, happily of the same character, soon overtook the deposed Landgrave. He was laid by the side of his daughter, whose memory, as much even as his own penitence, availed to gather round his final resting-place the forgiving thoughts even of those who had suffered most from his crimes. Klosterheim in the next age flourished greatly, being one of those cities which benefited by the peace of Westphalia. Many changes took place in consequence, greatly affecting the architectural character of the town and its picturesque antiquities; but, amidst all revolutions of this nature, the secret passages still survive, and to this day are shown occasionally to strangers of rank and consideration, by which, more than by any other of the advantages at his disposal, The Masque of Klosterheim was enabled to replace himself in his patrimonial rights, and at the same time to liberate from a growing oppression his own compatriots and subjects.

THE SPHINX'S RIDDLE

The most ancient [Footnote: That is, amongst stories not wearing a mythologic character, such as those of Prometheus, Hercules, &c. The era of Troy and its siege is doubtless by some centuries older than its usual chronologic date of nine centuries before Christ. And considering the mature age of Eteocles and Polynices, the two sons of dipus, at the period of the "Seven against Thebes," which seven were contemporary with the fathers of the heroes engaged in the Trojan war, it becomes necessary to add sixty or seventy years to the Trojan date, in order to obtain that of dipus and the Sphinx. Out of the Hebrew Scriptures, there is nothing purely historic so old as this.] story in the Pagan records, older by two generations than the story of Troy, is that of dipus and his mysterious fate, which wrapt in ruin both himself and all his kindred. No story whatever continued so long to impress the Greek sensibilities with religious awe, or was felt by the great tragic poets to be so supremely fitted for scenical representation. In one of its stages, this story is clothed with the majesty of darkness; in another stage, it is radiant with burning lights of female love, the most faithful and heroic, offering a beautiful relief to the preternatural malice dividing the two sons of dipus. This malice was so intense, that when the corpses of both brothers were burned together on the same funeral pyre (as by one tradition they were), the flames from each parted asunder, and refused to mingle. This female love was so intense, that it survived the death of its object, cared not for human praise or blame, and laughed at the grave which waited in the rear for itself, yawning visibly for immediate retribution. There are four separate movements through which this impassioned tale devolves; all are of commanding interest; and all wear a character of portentous solemnity, which fits them for harmonizing with the dusky shadows of that deep antiquity into which they ascend.

One only feature there is in the story, and this belongs to its second stage (which is also its sublimest stage), where a pure taste is likely to pause, and to revolt as from something not perfectly reconciled with the general depth of the coloring. This lies in the Sphinx's riddle, which, as hitherto explained, seems to us deplorably below the grandeur of the occasion. Three thousand years, at the least, have passed away since that riddle was propounded; and it seems odd enough that the proper solution should not present itself till November of 1849. That is true; it seems odd, but still it is possible, that we, in anno domini 1849, may see further through a mile-stone than dipus, the king, in the year B. c. twelve or thirteen hundred. The long interval between the enigma and its answer may remind the reader of an old story in Joe Miller, where a traveller, apparently an inquisitive person, in passing-through a toll-bar, said to the keeper, "How do you like your eggs dressed?" Without waiting for the answer, he rode off; but twenty- five years later, riding through the same bar, kept by the same man, the traveller looked steadfastly at him, and received the monosyllabic answer, "Poached." A long parenthesis is twenty-five years; and we, gazing back over a far wider gulf of time, shall endeavor to look hard at the Sphinx, and to convince that mysterious young lady,—if our voice can reach her,—that she was too easily satisfied with the answer given; that the true answer is yet to come; and that, in fact, dipus shouted before he was out of the wood.

But, first of all, let us rehearse the circumstances of this old Grecian story. For in a popular journal it is always a duty to assume that perhaps three readers out of four may have had no opportunity, by the course of their education, for making themselves acquainted with classical legends. And in this present case, besides the indispensableness of the story to the proper comprehension of our own improved answer to the Sphinx, the story has a separate and independent value of its own; for it illustrates a profound but obscure idea of Pagan ages, which is connected with the elementary glimpses of man into the abysses of his higher relations, and lurks mysteriously amongst what Milton so finely calls "the dark foundations" of our human nature. This notion it is hard to express in modern phrase, for we have no idea exactly corresponding to it; but in Latin it was called piacularity. The reader must understand upon our authority, nostro periculo, and in defiance of all the false translations spread through books, that the ancients (meaning the Greeks and Romans before the time of Christianity) had no idea, not by the faintest vestige, of what in the scriptural system is called sin. The Latin word peccatum, the Greek word amartia, are translated continually by the word sin; but neither one word nor the other has any such meaning in writers belonging to the pure classical period. When baptized into new meaning by the adoption of Christianity, these words, in common with many others, transmigrated into new and philosophic functions. But originally they tended towards no such acceptations, nor could have done so; seeing that the ancients had no avenue opened to them through which the profound idea of sin would have been even dimly intelligible. Plato, four hundred years before Christ, or Cicero, more than three hundred years later, was fully equal to the idea of guilt through all its gamut; but no more equal to the idea of sin, than a sagacious hound to the idea of gravitation, or of central forces. It is the tremendous postulate upon which this idea reposes that constitutes the initial moment of that revelation which is common to Judaism and to Christianity. We have no intention of wandering into any discussion upon this question. It will suffice for the service of the occasion if we say that guilt, in all its modifications, implies only a defect or a wound in the individual. Sin, on the other hand, the most mysterious, and the most sorrowful of all ideas, implies a taint not in the individual but in the race—that is the distinction; or a taint in the individual, not through any local disease of his own, but through a scrofula equally diffused through the infinite family of man. We are not speaking controversially, either as teachers of theology or of philosophy; and we are careless of the particular construction by which the reader interprets to himself this profound idea. What we affirm is, that this idea was utterly and exquisitely inappreciable by Pagan Greece and Rome; that various translations from Pindar, [Footnote: And when we are speaking of this subject, it may be proper to mention (as the very extreme anachronism which the case admits of) that Mr. Archdeacon W. has absolutely introduced the idea of sin into the "Iliad;" and, in a regular octavo volume, has represented it as the key to the whole movement of the fable. It was once made a reproach to Southey that his Don Roderick spoke, in his penitential moods, a language too much resembling that of Methodism; yet, after all, that prince was a Christian, and a Christian amongst Mussulmans. But what are we to think of Achilles and Patroclus, when described as being (or not being) "under convictions of sin"?] from Aristophanes, and from the Greek tragedians, embodying at intervals this word sin, are more extravagant than would be the word category introduced into the harangue of an Indian sachem amongst the Cherokees; and finally that the very nearest approach to the abysmal idea which we Christians attach to the word sin—(an approach, but to that which never can be touched—a writing as of palmistry upon each man's hand, but a writing which "no man can read")—lies in the Pagan idea of piacularity; which is an idea thus far like hereditary sin, that it expresses an evil to which the party affected has not consciously concurred; which is thus far not like hereditary sin, that it expresses an evil personal to the individual, and not extending itself to the race.

This was the evil exemplified in dipus. He was loaded with an insupportable burthen of pariah participation in pollution and misery, to which his will had never consented. He seemed to have committed the most atrocious crimes; he was a murderer, he was a parricide, he was doubly incestuous, and yet how? In the case where he might be thought a murderer, he had stood upon his self-defence, not benefiting by any superior resources, but, on the contrary, fighting as one man against three, and under the provocation of insufferable insolence. Had he been a parricide? What matter, as regarded the moral guilt, if his father (and by the fault of that father) were utterly unknown to him? Incestuous had he been? but how, if the very oracles of fate, as expounded by events and by mysterious creatures such as the Sphinx, had stranded him, like a ship left by the tide, upon this dark unknown shore of a criminality unsuspected by himself? All these treasons against the sanctities of nature had dipus committed; and yet was this dipus a thoroughly good man, no more dreaming of the horrors in which he was entangled, than the eye at noonday in midsummer is conscious of the stars that lie far behind the daylight. Let us review rapidly the incidents of his life.

Laius, King of Thebes, the descendant of Labdacus, and representing the illustrious house of the Labdacidae, about the time when his wife, Jocasta, promised to present him with a child, had learned from various prophetic voices that this unborn child was destined to be his murderer. It is singular that in all such cases, which are many, spread through classical literature, the parties menaced by fate believe the menace; else why do they seek to evade it? and yet believe it not; else why do they fancy themselves able to evade it? This fatal child, who was the dipus of tragedy, being at length born, Laius committed the infant to a slave, with orders to expose it on Mount Cithćron. This was done; the infant was suspended, by thongs running through the fleshy parts of his feet, to the branches of a tree, and he was supposed to have perished by wild beasts. But a shepherd, who found him in this perishing state, pitied his helplessness, and carried him to his master and mistress, King and Queen of Corinth, who adopted and educated him as their own child. That he was not their own child, and that in fact he was a foundling of unknown parentage, dipus was not slow of finding from the insults of his schoolfellows; and at length, with the determination of learning his origin and his fate, being now a full- grown young man, he strode off from Corinth to Delphi. The oracle at Delphi, being as usual in collusion with his evil destiny, sent him off to seek his parents at Thebes. On his journey thither, he met, in a narrow part of the road, a chariot proceeding in the counter direction from Thebes to Delphi. The charioteer, relying upon the grandeur of his master, insolently ordered the young stranger to clear the road; upon which, under the impulse of his youthful blood, dipus slew him on the spot. The haughty grandee who occupied the chariot rose up in fury to avenge this outrage, fought with the young stranger, and was himself killed. One attendant upon the chariot remained; but he, warned by the fate of his master and his fellow-servant, withdrew quietly into the forest that skirted the road, revealing no word of what had happened, but reserved, by the dark destiny of dipus, to that evil day on which his evidence, concurring with other circumstantial exposures, should convict the young Corinthian emigrant of parricide. For the present, dipus viewed himself as no criminal, but much rather as an injured man, who had simply used his natural powers of self-defence against an insolent aggressor. This aggressor, as the reader will suppose, was Laius. The throne therefore was empty, on the arrival of dipus in Thebes; the king's death was known, but not the mode of it; and that dipus was the murderer could not reasonably be suspected either by the people of Thebes, or by dipus himself. The whole affair would have had no interest for the young stranger; but, through the accident of a public calamity then desolating the land, a mysterious monster, called the Sphinx, half woman and half lion, was at that time on the coast of Boeotia, and levying a daily tribute of human lives from the Boeotian territory. This tribute, it was understood, would continue to be levied from the territories attached to Thebes, until a riddle proposed by the monster should have been satisfactorily solved. By way of encouragement to all who might feel prompted to undertake so dangerous an adventure, the authorities of Thebes offered the throne and the hand of the widowed Jocasta as the prize of success; and dipus, either on public or on selfish motives, entered the lists as a competitor.