When we have read Ottomar's letter, we will take our places at Gustavus's new theatre and look at him. In the following letter a spirit reigns and riots, which, like an Alp, oppresses and often possesses all men of the higher and nobler quality, and which--much as it outweighs even Holland spirits--ahigherspirit only can overpower and crowd out. Many men live in thePerigee, some in theApogee, few in thePerihelion.--Fenk so often yearned for his Ottomar, especially since his complete silence of some years' standing, and spoke of him so often to Gustavus, that it was well the address of the letter was from a strange hand and to Doctor Zoppo in Pavia: else the Doctor had sinned at once against the first line of the letter.
* * * * *
"Name not my name, oh eternal friend, to the bearer: I must do it. On the last year of my life there lies a great black seal; break it not, count the past as the future--I make it for thee the present, only not just yet--and if I should die I would appear before and tell thee my last mystery of earth.
"I write to thee, simply that thou mayst know that I am living and am coming in autumn. My thirst for traveling is quenched with Alpine ice and sea-water; I repair home now to my resting-place, and if there, at my street-door, a tempting voice of secret desire should call me again to cross the mountains, I should say to myself: the same panting and pining human heart gazes down into the waters of the Gaudiana and the Volga, which sighs in thee beside the Rhine stream, and that which climbs the Alps and Caucasus, is what thou art, and turns a longing eye over toward thy street-door.[62]But if I sit here, and every morning go to the close-stool, and am glad to be hungry, and afterward that my appetite is satisfied, and if I daily put on and pull out breeches and hair pins, ah! what in the end does all amount to? What was it then I wanted, when in my childhood I sat upon the stone in my gateway, and gazed yearningly in the direction of the long road and thought how it ran on and on, shot over the mountains, still onward and onward ... and at last?... Ah, all roads lead to nothing, and where they break off, there stands another looking longingly back over the hills to where we sit. What was it then I would have, when my little eye swam along with the waves of the Rhine, that it might waft me to a promised land, whither all streams, I thought, were flowing, not knowing, meanwhile, that the same river, which bore in its bosom many a heavy heart, murmured along by many a crushed form, which it alone could release from its anguish, that then, like man, it frittered and crumbled itself away, and filtered itself at last into Holland sands?--Orient land! morning land! toward thy fields also did my soul once lean as trees do toward the East:--'Ah! how must it be there, where the sun rises!' I thought; and when I traveled with my mother to Poland, and at last into the land lying toward morning, and came among its nobles, Jews and slaves--.... But there is no other sunny land of the morning to be found on this optical ball, than that one which all our steps can neitherremovenorreach. Ah, ye joys of earth, none of you can do more than satisfy the breast with sighs and the eye with water, and into the poor heart, which opens under your heaven, ye only pour one more wave of blood! And yet these two or three wretched pleasures lame us as poisonous flowers do children who play with them, in arm and limb. Only let there be no music, that mocker of our wishes; do not, at her call, all the fibres of my heart fly asunder and stretch themselves out like so many sucking polypus's-arms and tremble with longing and seek to embrace--whom? what?... An unseen something waiting in other worlds. I often think, perhaps it is, after all, nothing; perhaps, after death, all goes on just as now, and thy longings will reach forward out of one heaven toward another[63]--and then I crush under this fantastic nonsense the strings of my harpsichord, as if I would bring a fountain out of them, as if it were not enough that the pressure of this yearning untunes and snaps the thin strings of my inner musical system.
"In Rome there lived opposite the Church of St. Adrian a painter, who during a rain always placed himself under the spouts, and laughed till he was crazy, and who often said to me: 'There is no dog's death, but only a dog's life.' Fenk! take at least what man is or does: so very, very little! What power, then, is wholly developed in us, or in harmony with the other powers? Is it not a piece of good fortune, if so much as one faculty gets drawn in like a branch into the hot-house of a lecture-room or library and is forced by partial warmth to bloom, while the whole tree stands outside in the snow with hard black twigs? Heaven snows two or three flakes together to make one inner snow-man, which we call our education; the earth melts or muddies a quarter of it, the tepid wind loosens the snow man's head off--that is our cultured inner man, such an abominable patch-work in all our knowings and willings! From individuals to universal humanity I have no desire to pass; I care not to think, how a century is ploughed and harrowed under to manure the next--how nothing will round itself to anything--how the eternal writing in books and stratifying of theScibilehas no aim, no end, and all dig and drive in opposite directions! What does man do? Even less than he knows and becomes. Tell me, what then does thy penetration, thy heart, thy swiftness effect before the princely portrait over the President's chair, or in fact before an emasculated reigning face? The crooked twigs pressed back into each other are squeezed against the window of the winter-house, the Regent causes their fruit to pass by his dish in thecompotière, the blue sky is denied them, the cleverest thing at last is, that they rot! What, then, do the noblest faculties avail in thee, when weeks and months glide away, which do not use, do not call out, do not exercise them? When I have thus contemplated, as I often do, the impossibility, in all our monarchical offices, of being a whole, a really active, a universally useful man--even the monarch cannot, with those innumerable black subaltern claws and hands which he must first fasten to his own hands as fingers or pincers, do anything completely good--as often as I have contemplated this, I have wished I were hanged with my robbers, but were first their captain, and with them ran down the old constitution!... Beloved Fenk!Thyheart no one can tear out ofmybreast, it propels my best blood and never canstthoumisunderstand me, let me be as unknowable as I will! But, oh friend, the times are coming on, when for thee this misunderstanding may after all grow easier!
"Veiled Genius of our overshadowed globe! ah, had I only been something, had the globe of my brain and had my heart, like Luther's, only earned by some lasting and far-rooting deed the blood which reddens and feeds them; then would myhungry pridebecomesatisfied lowliness, four humble walls would be large enough for me, I should no longer sigh for anything great except death, and first for the autumn of life and age, in which man, when the birds of youth are dumb, when over theearthlies haze and flying gossamer-summer, when the heavens hang bright, but not blazing, over all, lays himself down to sleep upon the withered leaves.----Farewell, my friend, upon an earth where one can no further do any good except to lie down in it;nextautumn we shall be with one another!"
* * * * *
To this letter, which takes possession of my whole soul and renews my errors as well as my wishes, I can add nothing more, than that to-day the first man in this history has been buried on a mountain. When, after four or five sections, I come to speak of his evening-euthanasy, then will the outlines of his form already have grown paler and fainter, as well in the coffin as in the hearts of his friends!
I call certain menloftyor festal-day-men, and to this class belong, in my history, Ottomar, Gustavus, the Genius and the Doctor, and none beside.
By a lofty man I do not mean the man of strict honesty and rectitude, who, like a body of a solar system, pursues his path without other than apparent aberrations; nor do I mean the fine soul which, with prophetic feeling, smooths all down, spares every one, satisfies every one, and sacrifices itself, but does not throw itself away; nor the man of honor, whose word is a rock, and in whose breast, heated and moved by the central Sun of Honor, there are no thoughts and purposes other than the deeds outside of it; nor, finally, either the cold, virtuous man of principle, or the man of feeling, whose feelers wind about all beings, and quiver in another's wound, and who embraces Virtue and a Beauty with equal ardor; nor do I mean by the lofty man the mere great man of genius, and indeed the very metaphor indicates in the one case horizontal, and in the other vertical extension.
But I mean him who, to a greater or lesser degree of all these distinctions, adds something more, which earth so seldom possesses--elevation above the earth, the feeling of the pettiness of all earthly doings, and the disproportion between our heart and our place; a countenance lifted[64]above the confusing jungle and the disgusting filth of our floor--the wish for death and the glance beyond the clouds. If an angel should place himself above our atmosphere and look down through this darkened sea, turbid with cloud-scum and floating verdure, to the bottom on which we lie and to which we cleave; were he to see the thousand eyes and hands which stare and clutchhorizontallyat the contents of the air, at mere tinsel; should he see the worse ones which are bentsheer downwardtoward the prey and yellow mica on the muddy bottom, and finally the worst, whichsupinelydrag the noble human face[65]through the mire;--if this angel however, should behold among the sea-animals some lofty men walking upright and looking upward to himself, and should perceive how they, weighed down by the watery column above their heads, entangled in the snarl and slime of the ground beneath them, pressed through the waves and panted for a breath of the vast ether above them, how they loved more than they were loved, endured life rather than enjoyed it, equally far from the stationary upward gaze of astonishment and the race of business-life, left their hands and feet to the mercy of the bottom, and gave only the upward yearning heart and head to the ether beyond the sea, and looked at nothing but the hand which separates the weight of the body from the bottom to which the diver is held down by it, and lets him soar into his proper element-- ... Oh, well might this angel count such men as submerged angels, and pity their low condition and their tears in the sea.... Could one gather together the graves of a Pythagoras (that noblest soul among the ancients), of Plato, Socrates, Antoninus (not so much, of Cato the great or Epictetus), Shakespeare's (if his life was like his writing), J. J. Rousseau's, and the like, into one churchyard, then would one have the true princely bench of thehigh nobilityof mankind, the consecrated earth of our globe, God's flower-garden in the low North. But why do I take my white paper and picture it and strew it with coal-dust or ink-powder, in order to dust-in the image of a lofty man, while from heaven hangs down the great, never-fading picture of the virtuous man which Plato in his Republic has transferred out of his own heart to the canvas?
The greatest villains are the least acquainted with each other; lofty men know each other after the first hour. Authors who belong to this class are the most censured and the least read; for example, the departed Hamann. Englishmen and Orientals have this fixed star on the breast oftener than any other people.
Ottomar led me to the subject of the passions: I know that he, once at least, hated nothing so much as heads and hearts which were covered with the stony rind of Stoicism--that he longed for cataracts in his veins and in his lungs tempests--that he said, a man without passion was a still greater egotist than one of the intensest; that one whom the near fire of the sensuous world did not kindle would be still inflamed by the distant fixed-starlight of the intellectual; that the Stoic differed from the worn-out courtier only in this, that the cooling off of the former proceeded from within outward, that of the other from without inward.... I know not whether with the inwardly burning, outwardly freezing, slippery court-man it is so; but so it is with glass: when it receives from without too much chilling around the glowing nucleus, it becomes porous and frangible;[66]the process must be reversed.
All passions deceive themselves, not in respect to thekind, or thedegree, but in respect to theobjectof the feeling; namely thus:
Our passions err, not in this respect, that they hate or love some person or other:--for then there would be an end of all moral beauty and ugliness:--nor yet in this, that they wail or exult over anything--for in that case, not the smallest tear of joy or sorrow over weal or woe would be allowable, and we should not be permitted any longer to wish or even will anything, not even virtue. Nor do the passions err as to the degree of this inclination or disinclination, this rejoicing and bewailing; for supposing the sense and the fancy invest the object in their eyes with thousandfold greater moral or physical charms than they wear to others: nevertheless the loving and hating must increase in proportion to the outward occasion; and provided any external attraction gratifies the least degree of love or hatred, then must even the exaggerated attraction justify an aggravated degree of the passions. Most of the arguments against anger only prove that the imputed moral ugliness of the enemy does not exist, not that it does exist and he is still to be loved--most of the arguments against our love only prove that our love mistakes not so much the degree as the object, etc. Not merely a moderate, but the highest degree of the passions would be allowable, provided only their object were presented to them,e. g., the highest love toward the highest of good beings, the highest hatred toward the highest of bad ones. Now as no earthly objects have the quality that can justly excite in us such tempests of the soul; as therefore the greatest objects which can attract or repel us must be found, in other worlds: we see that the greatest emotions of our inner being perhaps find only outside of the body their permitted and more ample field of activity.
On the whole, passion is subjective and relative: the same movement of the will is in the stronger soul and amidst greater billows only a volition, and in the weaker one and on the smoother surface an internal storm. A perpetual stream of volition flows through us, and the passions are only thewater-fallsandspring-floodsof this river; but are we justified in damming them up merely because of their rarity?--Is not that a flood to the brooklet which is only a wave to the river?--And if we, when on fire, censure our coldness, and when cold our heat, where do we get the right? And does the duration of our censure give it?
I feel in advance, objections and difficulties, nay I know and feel that, on this beclouded rainy globe nothing can wall and roof us in against outward storms, except the subjugation of inward ones--nevertheless I also feel, that all which has gone before is true.
When an author is left so many weeks behind his story as I am, he says to himself, the deuce may take and carry off to-day's Post-Trinitatis if he will. I will therefore speak of nothing in this section but of to-day's Post-Trinitatis, of my sister, my keeping-room and myself. Few storytellers will have had to-day behind their ink-stands so good a day as their colleague.
I sit here in Schoolmaster Wutz's upper chamber and have for the last quarter of a year been holding my arm out of the window as a branch candlestick with a long light, to shine into the ten German circles. I shall, every fall and winter, begin to make all my sections as I do to-day's by candle-light at 4½ o'clock in the morning; for as the sublime darkness before midnight lifts man away above the earth and its clouds, so does that which follows midnight lay us back again in our earthly nest--after 12 o'clock at night I begin already to feel a new joy of life, which increases just in proportion as the morning light streaming down thins the darkness and makes its transparent. Precisely the finest and most invisible feelers of our soul run on like roots under the coarse world of sense and are repelled by the most distant agitation.E. g. if the sky is rayless and cloudless toward the east, and toward the west darkened with heavy clouds, I then just in joke turn round and round more than ten times--when I stand facing the east all inner clouds flee away out of my spirit--if I turn toward the west, they hang down again round about it--and in this way by rapid revolutions I compel the most opposite sensations to approach and recede before me.
In this pleasure-section logical order is not even to be thought of; historical order is alone to be found; only there is many a thought with a thousand brilliant angles that will be suppressed by my snuffers when I trim the candle, or drowned in my cup, when I drink out of it yesterday's coffee. This latter is rather to be recommended to the public; among all warm drinks cold coffee is, indeed, of the most detestable flavor, but at the same time of the least potency. The sleeping day like a sleeping beauty, aglow with her morning dreams, is already red, and must soon open its eye. Its first business will be--poetically speaking--to wake up my sister and come with her as a bedfellow into my chamber. I ought like a Moravian Brother to have two or three thousand sisters, I so love them all. Verily, many a time, I feel like striking out with a Satyr's rude goat-feet against the good female sex, and then let it be, because I see beside me the little Sunday shoes of my Philippina and my fancy shoves into them the small, womanly feet, that will have to step into so many a thorn-tangle and rain-puddle, both of which easily penetrate the thin tapestry of the female foot. Theemptyclothes of a person, particularly of children, inspire me with kindliness and pity, because they remind me of the suffering which the poor occupant must already have undergone in them; and once in Carlsbad I could easily have reconciled myself to a Bohemian damsel, if she would have allowed me to behold her house-dress, when she was not in it herself....
Theseperiodsrepresent periods of time that have rolled away. Now the blind are healed, the lame walk, the deaf hear--that is to say, all are awake; under my feet the schoolmaster is already cracking up the Sunday sugar; my sister has already laughed at me four times in succession; the senior parson, Setzmann, has already from his window whistled to my landlord the most necessary religious edicts for the day; the clock, like Hezekiah's sun-dial, has, by the miraculous power of the decreeing whistle, gone back an hour, and I can write so much longer; but have thereby withdrawn my pencil from my morning sketch. The sun shines over against my face, and makes my biographical paper a blank Moses'-visage; it is therefore my good fortune that I can take a penknife and Austria and Bohemia or the Germany of the Jesuits, namely, Hamann's maps of the same, and with the knife nail and impale these countries over my window; such a country always keeps off themorning-sunas well and throws as muchshadowover it, as if I had the shame-apron orpalliumof a window curtain hanging there.
My pen now runs on, in theearth-shadowof the orb, thus: Wutz keeps not in his house three respectable chairs, no window curtains or tapestry-hangings. Meanwhile very much too showy furniture lies in Scheerau; I enjoy here the most miserable, and say to myself, a Prince can hardly show a worse in an artificial hermitage. Even our almanac we, I and my landlord, write out for ourselves with our own hands, like fellows of the Berlin Academy--only with chalk on the keeping room door; every week we publish aHeftor weekly part of our almanac and wipe out the past. On the four-square stove three couples might dance, whom, like the modern tragedies, notwithstanding all deformity of arrangement and breadth, it would poorly warm through. It must, by the way, come at last to hand and pocket stoves when the times arrive that we shall have to fetch out of the mines instead of the metals the wood wherewith we now feed them....
A ram was terribly pounded, that is, his red shank--the tin platters, the baptismal presents of the little Wutzes, are dusted out--my silver knife and fork are borrowed for the occasion--the fire crackles--the Frau Wutz runs--her children and birds scream.--All these preparations for a far too greatdiner, which is to-day to be given down below, I hear up in my study-chamber. Such preparations are perhaps more suitable to the rank of the two guests who are to receive the entertainment, than to the station of the two school-men who give it. To the present historian and his sister, namely, they are permitted to give a dinner and to sit themselves with the company at the table. The schoolmaster had been allowed to install much of his cleaned-out furniture for the space of a week in my sitting-room, because his own was at last, after long petitioning--for the consistory does not look with favor on repairs in the visible any more than in the invisible church--being reformed,i. e., repaired, namely whitewashed.--Therefore he invited me (in court style) to dine, and I (in similar court style) accepted the invitation.
I shall not write out the rest of the section till evening, partly in order not tothink awaymy appetite for dinner, partly by way of hobbling after a little addition to it in the open air, where, besides, I can hear two or three yellow-hammers and the church-people sing. On the whole the after-summer, which, to-day, with its finest sky-blue dress and the sun upon it as order-badge, stands out there upon the fields, is a still Good Friday of Nature; and if we human beings were polite people, we should go out oftener into the open air and politely escort the departing summer to the very door. I foresee I should never be able to look my fill at the mild sun, which has become a moon stealing softly around us, and which in the after-summer deserves the feminine article [die Sonne], if I were not obliged to fix my eye upon the heights of Scheerau, where my good souls live and whence my Doctor is coming to-day to visit me....
Gone down below the earth is now the day and its sun. A happy journey home, beloved friend! On the silver-ground with which the moon overlays thy way, may thy soul paint the lost Eden of youth, and the black shadow which thou and thy shy steed cast upon the radiant floor must glide behind you, not before!
Why are most of the population of this book precisely Fenk's friends? For two substantial reasons. In the first place the quicksilver of humor which shines out from him side by side with the warmth of his heart, amalgamates the most easily with all characters. Secondly, he is amoral optimist. I would give ten metaphysical optimists for one moral one, who knows how to enjoy, not a single plant as the caterpillar does, but like man, a whole flora of pleasures--who has not five senses only, but a thousand for everything, for women and heroes, for fields of knowledge and pleasure parties, for tragedies and comedies, for Nature and for courts.--There is a certain higher tolerance, which is not the fruit of the Peace of Westphalia, nor of the Concord of 1705, but of a life filtered through many years and improvements--this tolerance finds in every opinion the element of the True, in every species of beauty the Beautiful, in every humor the Comic, and does not regard, in men, nations and books, difference and peculiarity of merit as the absence of it. Not merely with the best must we be pleased, but with the good and everything.
When the people had come back from the little church and I from the great one, the dining in the Wutz house began. Our landlord received the pair of guests with his usual, and with an unusual friendliness beside; for he had brought home with him to-day from his church-collection--by creeping into all the pews after divine service and attracting to himself magnetically all the pennies which had fallen during the collecting--a considerable silver fleet of 18 pence. The splendor of the banquet did not in this room crush out the enjoyment. Knives and forks, as already mentioned, were of silver and from me; but who could help taking pleasure in performing therewith at a table where the meats and sauce are dished out of one--pan?--our show-dishes were perhaps too sumptuous for an elector; for they consisted not of porcelain, wax or alabaster seeds on plate-glass dishes, nor did they weigh a few pounds merely: but the two show-dishes weighed sixty, and were from the same master and of the same material as the electoral bench, of flesh and blood, namely, Wutz's children. An ecclesiastical elector would not have been able for pleasure to eat a morsel, if like us, he had had standing beside his giant-table a dwarf-table with its little ones around it. Their table was not much larger than a herring-dish; but they had an eye to proportion and feasted from the Lilliputian table-service of which since Christmas they had made more of a sportive than serious use. The little ones were beside themselves, at cutting up their meat on wafers of plates and with hair-saws of knives; play and earnest, here as with feasting actors, melted into each other; and I saw in the end that it was so with me too, and that my enjoyment arose from artificial littleness and poverty.
At the great table--with other tables the reverse holds--the individual conversation soon passed over into general; I and the Cantor said every moment "the Prussian," "the Russian," "the Turk," meaning (like the Prime Minister) by the nation in each case its Regent. I took to-day such a peculiar pleasure in miserable customs, that I let every morsel bepreached intome and drank over twenty healths. Ladies of rank cannot let themselves down to unfrizzled people so easily as men can, at least to those of the female sex; but my sister deserves that her brother should bestow upon her in his book the praise of the handsomest and most amiable condescension. The more womanly a lady is, so much the more disinterested and good-natured is she; and those maidens, especially, who lovehalfthe human race, love thewholeheartily,e. g., in regard to the Resident Lady von Bouse, one knows not whether she bestows more on the poor or on the men. Old maids are stingy and hard. My doctor and a bottle of wine came in as dessert. As he reads in the present book every week, I prefer to scold rather than praise him in it. The best I can do is to weave in here an ambiguous thing, which with many will amount neither to praising nor blaming him--his hearty inclination toward the female sex, which stands midway between indifferent gallantry and ardent love. This same inclination suits our sex very well, but not the female, to which, however, my sister belongs. The affair grew simply out of her left ear. The ear-ring had torn its way through the ear-flap; she ought, however, properly to have waited till Monday, when her brother would have bored her ear for her, like that of a Jewish slave, in the most skillful manner. But it must be done to-day and his doctor's hat was the cover of her design. It should have made the subject of a picture, how the poor Pestilentiary rubbed and polished the ear-flap between his three front fingers--like a medical leaf which one is to smell of--in order to make it swollen and insensible.
Nothing is more perilous to me and the medical counsellor, than to pick and stroke at a lady with two or three fingers--to stretch the whole arm around her is, for us, attended with no danger whatever; just as nettles burn far more when lightly touched than when grasped vigorously. Perhaps it is with this fire as with the electric fluid, which passes into man in a larger stream through the tips of the fingers than through a broad surface. My sister went further and brought an apple; the Doctor had to press with his pulse-fingers the red ear-tip against the apple, and then force an egrette, or whatever it was, through this organ of sense, which maidens prick up much seldomer than they pucker-up the one nearest to it--and now could be buckled or buttoned in what belonged there. The steel almost chained the operator himself to her ear. "There is nothing with which a beauty attaches one to her more effectually, than by giving one occasion to do her a favor," the Doctor himself said and learned it by his own experience. Hence the operator and ear-magnetizer complained it was hard to cure a beauty without loving her, and that his first fair patient had almost made a patient of him. I have nothing against the Doctor; let him be a cosmopolite in love if he will--but, Sister, I would thou wert already in bed, because any minute in which I merely take two or three steps up and down, I am not sure that thou wilt not be squinting into my chapters and reading what I blame in thee. Ah, I blame less than I pity thy fancy, that plays so airily around thy own and others' troubles, and thy heart so spun out of the tenderest fibres, that the white crown ofshy womanliness, which alone adorns and exalts all these traits, has, in the crowded apartments of the Lady Resident become slightly tarnished with black, like silver in marshy Holland, and that thy virtue, which essentially wants nothing, wants the form of virtue! Ye parents! your young men can hardly make themselves black in hell; but for your daughters and theirsnow-whiteraiment Heaven itself is scarcely clean enough!
They are seldom worse than their company, but also seldom better. This spiritual wine absorbs the flavor of the Apples-of-Eve and of-Paris which lie about it; after that it still tastes good, only not like wine.
The Doctor gave me much light on Gustavus's condition, which at a proper time shall in turn be given to the reader.
A certain person, who almost every fortnight reads over what I have written, is satirical, and asks me whether on page Aaa Zzz the further courting between Paul and Beata will be worked out--he further asks, whether it has been already related to the reader, that the coquetting Paul has since that made verses, profiles, bouquets and adagios, in order to bring on and present his heart in these dessert dishes, these pierced fruit-dishes, these confect-baskets--thisenfant terribleof a mocking personage asks finally whether it has been already reported to the world that Beata, however, cared for nothing of it all but the empty basket[67]and the empty dessert dish.... At bottom this malice never offends me; but Doctor Fenk and the reader have manifestly the wickedest ingenuity in placing and seeing heart-matters in a false light. Verily, it has heretofore been mere joke, my alleged love; and if it were not, it must needs become such, because such a handsome and meritorious rival as I, it seems, am to meet in Gustavus, I could not find it in my heart to outstrip and overshadow, even if I had the power or the liberty, which to be sure is not the case.
Gustavus is now in the old palace--thus far his theatre has been daily rising, from the subterranean cell to a knightly manor, thence to a military academy, and finally to a princely castle. The rich Oefel hired it, because it adjoined the new palace, where lay the Blocksberg of the great world of Scheerau. The Lady Resident von Bouse had inherited both from her brother, who had here, amidst her tears and kisses, departed this life. Nature had given her all that exalts one's own heart and wins the hearts of others; but art had given her too much and her rank had taken too much away from her--she had too many talents to retain at a court any other than masculine virtues; she combined friendship and coquetry--sensibility and satire--she united respect for virtue and worldly philosophy--herself and our Prince. For the latter was her avowed lover, to whom she surrendered her heart more from ambition than inclination. She was made for something better than to shine; only as she had no opportunity for any thing else than shining, she forgot that there was anything better. But anyone who is born for something higher than worldly or courtly happiness feels in better hours the forfeiture of his destiny. It will be proper here to assign a new reason which sent Oefel out of Scheerau: he was called upon and was pleased at the princely behest to knead out on the potter-wheel of his desk a drama for the birthday of the Lady Resident. The drama was to have applications. On the amateur-stage at Upper-Scheerau--where the Prince was, not as on the war-theatre a mere supernumerary, but first actor, and where he filled the place and saved the expense of a regular court troop--it was to be played by the Prince, Oefel and some others. The Prince still had eyes to look upon the Resident Lady; still a tongue to love her; still, days to prove it to her; still a theatre to pay her homage: nevertheless he already hated her, because she was too noble for him; for his theatrical part (as shall be printed further on) was to do more service to him than to her. Oefel (who was ambassador, court theatre-poet and actor in one, because there is miserably little difference among them) worked into his drama a portrait of Beata and would fain flatter her by this likeness of her, and hoped she would be one of the actors and make her portrait her part. All this he hoped of Gustavus too; but we shall see below how it was.
Gustavus, in the old palace--while all visiting-wheels rattled over his nerves of hearing and all processions of visitors swarmed around his eyes--still felt himself as lonesome as death. He worked his way to his future destination. More than fifty secretaries of legation will conclude, therefore, that he learned to open letters and hearts, to decipher women and reports, to make love, pay court and execute knaveries--the fifty are in error; they will furthermore think he learned to write a fine hand, in order to lighten his portfolio, item to know whose name should stand first in a public instrument which goes to three Powers, and that each Power should stand first in its instrument--they are right; but he did more: he learned in solitude to endure and enjoy society. Far from menprinciplesthrive; among themactions. Solitary inactivity ripens outside of the glass-bell of the study to social activity, and among men one grows nobetter, unless when he comes among them he is alreadygood.
His occupations gradually experienced pleasant interruptions. For out of doors before his windows stood lovely and almost coquettish Nature hung round with Paris's apples, and in the midst of all a fair promenader who deserved the whole of them. Who can it be but--Beata? Did she walk into the park, it was quite as impossible for him to walk after her, asnotto look after her through the window, and his eyes sought out from among the bushes all the ribbons that went twinkling by through them. Did she come back on her walk with her face toward his windows, then he stepped back as far as possible not only from them, but even from the curtains, so as to see without being seen. Perhaps (but hardly) the parts were reversed, if he ventured to follow her in her walks, which to him were ways to heaven. A rose that had dropped from its stem and which he once in the darkest night picked up under her window, was to him the rose of an order; its withered honey-cup was thepotpourriof his sweetest dreams and his flora of pleasure:--thus dost thou, lofty Destiny, oftentimes place immortal man's heaven under a faded rose-leaf, often on the blossom-cup of a forget-me-not, often in a piece of land 305,000 miles square.
He who has been too forgiving, will afterward avenge himself. Gustavus's friendship towards Amandus has mounted to so high aflame, that it must necessarily burn down to ashes upon its material. When he looked after Beata, he looked back to Amandus, and blamed himself so often that he must needs begin to justify himself. What was carried away from the ash-heap under which his love glimmered, was thrown upon the ash-heap of his friendship. Nevertheless he would at any hour have sacrificed for Amandus all that people call pleasures;--for in the new time of a first friendship sacrifices are more ardently sought, than at a later time they are offered, and the giver is more blessed than the receiver. O! the rightly-disposed soul has not only the power, but also the yearning, to sacrifice.--The life which Gustavus, encompassed with spring and gardens and wishes of love, now enjoyed, he shall himself paint in a letter to me. This lettertheyof course will throw aside, who stand before the spectacle of Nature as cold spectators, as absentee-box-proprietors; but there are better and rarer men, who feel themselves irresistibly drawn in as players, and regard every spear of grass as animated, every chafer as eternal, and the illimitable whole as an infinite pulsing venous system in which every creature throbs as an absorbing and dropping twig between lesser and greater ones and whose full heart is God.
* * * *
Gustavus's Letter.
"To-day, for the second time, I have come up out of my cavern into the infinite world; all my veins are still flooded with the afternoon's influence--it seems as if my blood would revolve with the worlds around their suns, and my heart with the suns around the sparkling goal, which stands beside the Creator....
"The night-air which bends my light cools me off in vain, unless I can open my burning bosom to the heart of a friend, and tell him all. In the afternoon I took my instruments with which I had hitherto been obliged to create, instead of landscapes, the fortifications which disfigure and desolate them, and went out into the Silent Land. This ball of earth glided away through the ethereal ocean as softly as did the swan among the flowery islands, on which I reclined; the friendly heaven bent down lower toward the earth--it seemed as if my heart would melt away in the still expanse of blue, as if it must hear in the distance the echo of a shout of exultation, and it yearned for Arcadian lands and for a friend before whom it might expire. I seated myself with my drawing pen upon an artificial rock near the lake and prepared to draw the scene: the mutually embracing alders which veiled and embowered the end of the winding lake--the variegated row of flowery islands around each of which floated a double flower-piece of its beauteous islander, namely the gay flower-image which went down under the water to the mirrored heaven, and the silhouette which rocked on the trembling silver-ground--and the living gondola, the swan, that wheeled at my feet in hungry expectation:--but when all Nature in full height sat to me and dazzled me with its rays that reach from sun, to sun, then did I adore what I would have copied, and sank at the feet of Goddess and God....
"I rose with lamed hand and surrendered myself to the sea which bore me up. I went from corner to corner of the vast table with its million covers for giant guests and for guests invisible, for my bosom was not yet full, and I passively suffered the billows which rolled in to rise within me. I penetrated into the deepest shadow of the shadowy world, in which the sun, that had shrunk into a star, more remotely glimmered.--I went out through the firwood by the jangling of the coal-mouse and the lonely desolate cry of the thrush till I stood under the singing lark.--I went up through the long evening valley to the populous brook, and an enraptured choir of beings moved along with me, the sun which had dipped its head in the waves, and the fly with its skate-like feet ran along beside me on the water, the large-eyed dragonfly floated along on a willow-leaf.--I waded through green, inhaling und exhaling life, with glad children of short, warm moments flying, singing, skipping, creeping around me.--I climbed the hermitage-hill and my bosom was not yet full of the world-stream to which it lay passively open.... But there stood the giantess Nature no longer recumbent, but erect before me, bearing in her arms thousands and thousands of nursing children; and when my soul, amidst the throng of innumerable souls, now set in the gold of insect wings, now encased in armor of wing-shells, now dusted over with butterfly-down, now enclosed in flower-chrysales, was enfolded in an immense and infinite embrace, and when the earth lay before me with its mountains and streams, and pastures, and forests, and when I thought, all this is full of hearts, which are moved by joy and love; and from the great human heart with four cavities to the shrunk-up insect's heart with one, and down to the gullets of the worm, there leaps from generation to generation a perpetually creating, eternal, rapture-kindling spark of love--....
"Ah! then did I spread out my arms into the fluttering, quivering, throbbing air, which brooded over the earth, and all my thoughts cried out: 'O wert thou she, in whose broad, billowy bosom the globe rests; O couldst thou, like her, enfold all souls; oh, could thy arms reach around all like hers, which bend the antennæ of the chafer and the quivering plumage of the lily-butterfly and the tough woods, that stroke with their hands the hair of the caterpillar and all the flowery meadows and the seas of the earth; oh, couldst thou, like her, rest on every lip which burns with joy, and hover with cooling breath over every agonized bosom that longs to relieve itself with a sigh! All, has man, then, so slender, so narrow a heart, that of the whole realm of God enthroned around him he can love nothing, feel nothing, but what his ten fingers grasp and feel? must he not wish that all human beings and all beings had only one neck, one bosom, that he might embrace them all with a single arm, that he might forget none, and in his satisfied love no longer know but two hearts, the loving and the loved?--To-day I became linked to the whole creation and gave all beings my heart....
"I turned eastward in the direction of the new palace and of Auenthal. Behind the Auenthal woods swept roaring through a ragged arch of rain-cloud a precipitous ocean. I stood here alone in a wide silence. I turned toward the sunken sun; I reflected that I had once taken it for God, and it fell heavily upon my heart to-day, I had so seldom thought on Him who was God. 'O Thou! Thou!' my whole being cried out to Him who was now so near me--but all languages and all hearts and all emotions lose their tongue before Him and prayer is profound silence, not merely of the lips, but of the thoughts.... But the Great Spirit, who knows the weakness of good-hearted man, has sent down to him brother-companions, that man may open his heart before man, and complete before them the prayer in which he was struck dumb.
"O friend of my fairest years! thou that hast implanted gratitude and humility in my innermost being, both of these I felt, when on the mountain of the hermitage I felt myself exalted in my loneliness above the created worms and felt what man feels, but only he upon earth--when I could kneel in solitude with human eyes before the great mirror stretching out into nothingness, at which the insect dashes his feelers, before the mirror out of which flames the infinite giant, the sun.... No! in earthly colors and on a canvas of animal-skins and on all that lies before me, is merely theimageof the arch-genius; but in man is not His image, nay, it is Himself....
"Half of the sun still blazed above the rim of the earth, which cut it asunder; but I saw it no more through my dissolving eye,--smothered, silenced, sunk, extinguished as I was, in the sweeping, flaming, rushing shoreless sea around me....
"The sun has carried the enraptured day down with him; and now that diamond of the ether which night sets in black--the moon--stands above these veiled scenes and radiates, like other diamonds, the borrowed brilliancy.... O thou still midnight sun! Thou beamest and man reposes; thy rays appease the earthly turmoil, thy falling shower of sparks, like a shimmering brook, lulls reclining man to slumber, and sleep then covers, like a grave-mound, the resting heart, the drying eye and the painless face.... Fare thee well and may the white disk of Luna show thee all Paradises of thy past and all Paradises of thy future youth.
"Gustavus."
* * * * *
So far had he gone, when Oefel's servant came into his chamber with a parcel which more effectually than the coldest night-air or the warmest letter arrested and cooled off the emotions of his soul. It contained a letter from the Doctor with the intelligence that Madam von Röper had transmitted to him in Maussenbach the enclosedportrait, which her daughter had taken for the one she had lost, on the back of which, however, stood the name of Falkenberg, which refuted all remaining correspondences. Much as he prized the portrait, just in that degree did it vex him, as it was a fresh proof of his supposition that mother and daughter hated him on account of the exposure in the grain affair. The spider of hatred, that in every man hangs its web over a corner of the heart chamber--only in many a one great cankers (or crab-spiders) spin over all four chambers with their five teats--ran out on its threads which Amandus had agitated, in quest of prey: in a word, the cold dyer's-hand touched his heart and made it a little colder toward his Amandus, whose own the returning portrait had made warmer. Not disturbed, but only happy love makes the best man better.
In seven minutes all was over, for in the spiritual man the same admirable arrangement holds as in the physical, namely, that around a sharp, bitter idea other ideas flow in as milder juices until they have thinned and drowned out its sharpness. The portrait was now the finding of a second rose; it had a new life and rose-fragrance breathed over it by the fairest eyes and lips. And now, for some time he no longer saw Beata in the garden, but instead the Prince, with and without the Resident Lady. Go, both of you out of the Still Land into your noisy one! You enjoy fair nature, after all, only as a larger landscape, which hangs in your picture-gallery or on the curtain of your opera-house, or as a merely broader table-and-chimney ornament, in which the rocks appear to you as formed of pumice-stone and the trees of moss, or at most as the largest English park, which is to be found at any court of modern times in all Europe.--In all session-chambers, on account of the dog-day vacation, there was a lull of labor--in winter, on account of the cold, one could allow frost-holidays, and give opportunity for a winter-sleep of business as well as for a summer siesta, just as the well-known animals must on account of both extremes stay at home from dread of their hydrophobia--consequently the minister could more easily get away with the Prince and both remained here longer. But for me the reader would never learn how the presence of the Prince came to be the occasion of Beata's exchanging theStill Landfor her still chamber. It was thus: Our prince is, to be sure, a little hard, a little avaricious, and tends his flock oftener with theshepherd's staffthan with theshepherd's pipe; but he loves quite as well to be a shepherd in a finer sense, and gladly goes down from the throne, where his subjects adore him, to any one of its steps in order to adore a fair one--he can bear, indeed, to hear the people sigh, but not a single beauty; he is more eager to avert a social embarrassment than a famine; he would rather be in debt to the estates than to a rival player, and has no care to build up a burned town, but takes great pains to repair a torn head-dress. In short, the sovereign and the man-of-society are, in his heart's-chambers, next-door neighbors, but deadly foes. This man-of-society subdivided himself again into two lovers, the short and the long. His long or perennially blooming love consists in a cold, contemptuous gallantry, and in enjoying the refinement, the wit, and the grace wherewith he and the beloved object know how to adorn their reciprocal conquests. His short love consists in his enjoyment of these victories, in so far as they have not those decorations. In order that this innocent pasquil upon one may not be taken for a satire upon most of the great, I will proceed as follows:
Long love he cherished for the Resident Lady, of whose testimonials of affection one could not say, this is the most innocent--the first--the last. Such an immovable [or real estate] love he interwove simultaneously with a hundred cursory marriages of a second or amours, and over the creeping month-hand of the long fixed love or marriage the flying third-hand of the abbreviated marriages whirled round innumerable times.
Against this the Resident Lady had nothing to say--she could carry on the same kind of interweaving--against that he had nothing to say.
In these short marriages the great folk do, perhaps, many a good thing, which moralists too easily overlook, who would rather fill their printed pages than their birth-lists. Like young authors, young grandees let their first copies appear anonymously or under borrowed names, and I can add nothing to Montesquieu's observation, that thegiving of namesbenefits population, because every one strives to propagate his own, except my own remark, thatnamelessnesshelps it still better. In fact, it holds in this respect with the most exalted persons, as with the Greek artists, who, under the fineststatueswith which their hand decoratedtemplesand roads, were not allowed to place their patronymic; while the cunning Phidias also finds his imitators, who instead of his name foisted in on the statue of Minerva his oldface.
The Prince had in his mind to offer Beata, who seemed to him to have too much innocence and too little coquetry, a short love. Her resistance led him to think of a longer. Under the eyes of the Resident Lady all her senses were secured against him, only not the ear; in the park, none of them. The Resident Lady--who knew that her spirit could for every moment transfer itself into a new body, while her rival had no more than one, in which, moreover, was lodged nothing but innocence and love--looked upon the whole affair with no other than satirical eyes. So far had things gone when the Prince in the dog-day interregnum arrived, and the next morning, instead of the sceptre had in his hand nothing but the frizzling-comb and the Resident Lady's head. He had established it as a fashion at his court, every chamberlain down to the court-dentist had thenceforth hisprèteuse de tête, in order to learn as much upon her head, as he would have to practice upon the head of a fairerprèteuse. It was as necessary for one to frizzle as to be frizzled.
I might say it in a note, that aprèteuse de têtein Paris is a damsel who is frizzled a hundred times in a day, because the fraternity would learn the art by her--it is impossible that so many changes and trials should go on under her skull as over it--the coalition and affiliation of the most unlike frisures is so great, combings and curlings follow each other so swiftly, or building up and tearing down, that only on the head of the Goddess of Truth can it fare worse, which the philosophers frizzle andfix up, or in whole bodies politic, upon which regents practice.
On the same morning when ours frizzled the Resident Lady, he said to the dreamy Beata that the next day he was coming with the friseur to her. The Resident Lady said nothing but "the men can do anything; but seldom what is easy: they can more easily entangle ten law-suits than ten hairs." Beata could not speak, at night she could not sleep. Her whole soul curdled with horror at the Prince's frosty face and stinging fiery glance, which (however little she entertained the thought distinctly) burned to abridge thepreliminary victoriesin the new palace, just as if he were in the Palais Royal. The next morning her wish to be sick had almost grown into the conviction that she was so. She looked with life-weary vacancy out of the window into the Still Land in which two children of the court-gardener were rolling round a variegated glass-ball, when the canary bird who lived on the shoulders of the Prince, and flew round him like a fly, came fluttering from his head, which was separated from her by six windows, and alighted upon hers. She drew in her head with the bird--but with the proprietor of the creature also, who came up to her at once without ceremony and said: "With you one is fated to lose--but from my bird you cannot take away--liberty;" for people of his sort let all this slip out without accent; they speak in the same tone of the starry canopy and of the coach canopy, and of the motion of both.
Without ceremony he was about to put on her the powder-mantle; she took it however and put it on herself with other purposes and said she was already dressed for the whole day, even to powdering. Only she would fain still invest her refusals in the fairest forms, which her station and the respect for his sex, to which her mother had trained her, dictated; in the end she saw that his remonstrances were not much better than his hair-dressing. When he began this latter, and stood so close to her, she then, again, perceived the opposite. Every hair upon her head grew to a feeler, and it seemed to her as if he touched her sore nerves, as if, with him, a flaming hell traveled round her. All at once, according to the laws of the female nature, her agony welled up from the middle stage to the highest--I should be glad to know, whether it arose from his assumed attitudes, which availed him nothing, or from a kiss, as the receipt of the benefit-play which he was performing for his advantage, or from her glance at the pyramid of the hermitage-mountain, which filled to overflowing her trembling bosom with thementalandmaterialimages of her brother--suffice it, she sprang up feverishly, and after saying: "She had promised the Resident Lady so faithfully to help her put on her hat, and now she was still here!" she certainly expected that this modestly-formed rebuke would drive him away. He was not to be driven away. This disappointment shattered her tender forces and she leaned, trembling, her arm and frizzled head against the arras. He, perhaps, tired of waiting, or glad to have accustomed her to his neighborhood, took his bird and her and led her himself to the Resident Lady's; here he repeated with her his laughter at the benefit-play, and so on.
Meanwhile the torments of the outer head had resolved themselves into the migraine of the inner; she stayed away from the table and--so long as he remained there this time--from the park also.
Which latter was not so much to be stated as to be explained.