But when she returned to him, incredibly beautiful, and pale and proud, and quite naked, just as he had last seen her when his sword had ripped open this woman’s belly so that he might see the womb in which he had once lain, then the divine Augusta drew him implacably downward among the dead, and so into the corridors of a hollow mountain. This place was thronged with all high-hearted worshippers of the frightening, discrowned, imperious, so beautiful woman who had drawn him thither resistlessly, and in this Horselberg he lived in continued splendor and in a more dear lewdness, and he still made songs, only now it was as Tannhauser that the damned acclaimed him as supreme among poets. But Heaven would not let him rest even among these folk who had put away all thought of Heaven. Heaven troubled Tannhauser with doubts, with premonitions, even with repentance. Heaven with such instruments lured this fine poet from the scented Horselberg into a bleak snow-wrapped world: and presently he shivered too under the cold wrath of Pope Urban, bells rang, a great book was cast down upon the pavement of white and blue slabs, and the candles were being snuffed out, as the now formally excommunicated poet fled westerly from Rome pursued by the ever-present malignity of Heaven.
But from afar he saw the sapless dry rod break miraculously into blossom, and he saw the messengers of a frightened Bishop of Rome (with whom also Heaven was having its malicious sport) riding everywhither in search of him, bearing Heaven’s pardon to the sinner whom they could not find. For the poet sat snug in a thieves’ kitchen, regaling himself with its sour but very potent wines and with its frank, light-fingered girls. Yet a gibbet stood uncomfortably near to the place: upon bright days the shadow of this gallows fell across the threshold of the room in which they rather squalidly made merry. Death seemed to wait always within arm’s reach, pilfering all, with fingers more light and nimble than those which a girl runs furtively through the pockets of the put-by clothing of her client in amour. Death nipped the throats of ragged poor fellows high in the air yonder, and death very lightly drew out of the sun’s light and made at one with Charlemagne all the proud kings of Aragon and Cyprus and Bohemia, and death casually tossed aside the tender sweet flesh which had been as white as the snows of last winter, and was as little regarded now, of such famous tits as Heloise and Thai’s and Queen Bertha Broadfoot. Time was a wind which carried all away. Time was preparing by and by (still at the instigation of ruthless Heaven) to make an end even to Francois Villon, who was still so fine a poet, for all that time had made of him a wine-soaked, rickety, hairless, lice-ridden and diseased sneakthief whose food was paid for by the professional earnings of a stale and flatulent harlot. For time ruined alclass="underline" time was man’s eternal strong ravager, time was the flail with which Heaven pursued all men whom Heaven had not yet destroyed, ruthlessly.
But time might yet be confounded: and it was about that task he set. For Mephistophilus had allotted him twenty-four years of wholly untrammeled living, and into that period might be heaped the spoilage of centuries. He took unto himself eagle’s wings and strove to fathom all the causes of the misery which was upon earth and of the enviousness of Heaven. That which time had destroyed, Johan Faustus brought back into being: he was a poet who worked in necromancy, his puppets were the most admirable and lovely of the dead. Presently he was restoring through art magic even those lost nineteen books in which were the secrets of all beauty and all knowledge and all contentment, the secrets for which Prometheus had paid. But the professors at the university would have nothing to do with these nineteen books. It was feared that into these books restored by the devil’s aid, the devil might slily have inserted something pernicious: and besides, the professors said, there were already enough books from which the students could learn Greek and Hebrew and Latin. So they let perish again all those secrets of beauty and knowledge and contentment which the world had long lost. Now Johan Faustus laughed at the ineradicable folly with which Heaven had smitten all men, a folly against which the clear-sighted poet fought in vain. But Johan Faustus at least was wise, and there had never been any other beauty like this which now stood before him within arm’s reach (as surely as did death), now that with a yet stronger conjuration he had wrested from all-devouring time even the beauty of Argive Helen.
But when he would have touched the Swan’s daughter, the delight of gods and men, she vanished, precisely as a touched bubble is shattered into innumerable sparkling bits, and over three thousand of them he pursued and captured in all quarters of the earth, for, as he said of himself, Don Juan Tenorio had the heart of a poet, which is big enough to be in love with the whole world, and like Alexander he could but wish for other spheres to which he might extend his conquests, and each one of these sparkling bits of womanhood glittered with something of that lost Helen’s loveliness, yet, howsoever various and resistless were their charms, and howsoever gaily he pursued them, singing ever-new songs, and swaggeringly gallant, in his fair, curly wig and his gold-laced coat adorned with flame-colored ribbons, yet he, the eternal pursuer, was in turn pursued by the malevolence of Heaven, in, as it seemed, the shape of an avenging horseman who drew ever nearer unhurriedly, until at last the clash of rapiers and the pleasant strumming of mandolins were not any longer to be heard in that golden and oleander-scented twilight,—because of those ponderous, unhurried hoof beats, which had made every other noise inaudible,—and until at last he perceived that both the rider and the steed were of moving stone, of an unforgotten stone which was gray and lichen-crusted.
But when fearlessly he encountered the over-towering statue, and had grasped the horse about its round cold neck, he saw that the stone rider was lifeless, and was but the dumb and staring effigy of a big man in armor which was inset with tinsel and with bits of colored glass. It was the bungled copy and the parody of a magnanimous, great-hearted dream that he was grasping, and yet it was a part or him, who had been a poet once, but was now a battered old pawnbroker, for in some way, as he incommunicably knew, this parodied and not ever comprehended Redeemer and he were blended, and they were, somehow, laboring in unison to serve a shared purpose. He derided and he came too near to a mystery which he distrusted, and which yet (without his preference having been consulted in the affair) remained a part of him, as it was a part of all poets, even of a cashiered poet, and a part very vitally necessary to the existence of a Jurgen. A Jurgen had best not meddle with such matters one half-second sooner than that dimly foreseen, inevitable need arose for a Jurgen also to be utilized in the service of this mystery, without having his preference in the affair consulted. The aging pawnbroker was a little afraid. He climbed gingerly down from the tall pedestal of Manuel the Redeemer, he descended from that ambiguous tomb upon which he was trampling, he stepped rather hastily backward from that carved fragment of the crag of Prometheus. He stepped backward, treading beyond the confines of the golden mirror which was worshipped at Caer Omn; and he was thus released from its magic.