Forcible Abduction of the Fair Face.--Important Portrait.
The state of astonishment into which Gustavus had, all day long by one
object after another, been wrought up, and the loss of sleep, ended his
first heavenly day with a feverish evening, which he would have had to
relieve by a gush of tears, even without any other reason. But he had
one: his Genius had, during the tumult in the garden, been snatched
away from the darling with a speechless kiss, and had left nothing
behind but a leaf to the mother. That is, he had cut a leaf of
note-paper into two halves; the one contained the dissonances of the
melody and the questions of the text thereto, on the other stood the
solutions and the answers. The dissonant half was to come into the
hands of his Gustavus; the other he kept. "I and my friend," said he,
"shall one day recognize each other thereby in the world's wilderness;
in the fact, that he has questions, to which I have the answers." The
poodle too, which was every day growing bigger, he took with him....
Where shall we see thee again, unknown, beautiful enthusiast? Thou art
all unaware how thy orphaned pupil cries and sobs for thee, and
how the new, star-studded heaven does not please him so much as his
chamber-ceiling when thou wast with him, and how the lighted candles
transform every apartment to the still cavern in which he had loved
thee and thou him. Even so in life's evening we bend down over the
graves of our early friends, whom no one mourns but we; till at length
a strange youth buries the last old man out of the loving circle; but
not a single soul remembers the fair, youthful days of the last old
man!
In the morning he was well again and cheery; the sun dried up his eyes,
and the misty image of his genius under the veil of the past night
receded far into the background. I am sorry to have to lay it to the
charge of his years and his character, that, with the exception of the
evening hours of the most painful yearning, he let the image of a
friend be crowded out by nearer images and thrust far backward. All
flowers were now playthings for him, every animal a playmate and every
human being a bird Ph[oe]nix; every change in the heavens, every
sunset, every minute overwhelmed him with novelties.
It was with him as with children of distinction who come out into the
country; who peer into, handle, jump over, everything in the new earth
and the new sky. For it is an indescribable good fortune for children
of rank, that their parents, who generally make little account of
Nature, nevertheless train them between high walls and high houses,
which do not leave thirty-eight square feet of heaven visible, as in
hot-house gardens with high walls, that Nature may come before their
eyes as little as to those of their parents; whereby their feeling for
both is kept as unworn above the earth, as if they had been actually
brought up under it; nay, they see sunrise for the first time almost
later than Gustavus--in the post-chaise or in Carlsbad.
His parents treated him as a new-born child, and did not like to have
him out of their sight; they would hardly let him go out into the
castle-garden and never down the mountain, where he would be in danger
from the post-road. He had brought up with him, too, from his
subterranean school-room a certain bashfulness which ordinary men and
almost his father take for simplicity, but which men in higher life, if
it only appears, as with him, in the company not of a staring, but of
an overfull, enthusiastic eye, regard as the order-cross of a brother
of the order. Nevertheless, eight days after, his parents repented not
that they had shut him up, but that they had ever let him out.
The wife of the Head-forester, von Knoer, had brought a lot of
Moravian men and women with her to hear the disciple of the grave; an
aftermath-sheaf of old maids had already bespoken the visit four weeks
before, and had renewed the invitation, just to get sight of such a
wonderful child. The Moravian brethren were lively and free, within the
bounds of propriety; the sisters in a body formed a wall around a tall
clock, whose case was bordered with angels blowing trumpets--they could
not be torn away from the horn-blowers. Nor could they be persuaded to
take anything; they opened neither their jaws nor their eyes, and the
Captain was black with suppressed vexation. At last the lip of a sister
touched a wine-glass, the others touched theirs; as much as one nibbled
off of a cake just so big a crumb nibbled the others; one shiver would
agitate this whole obligato company of two-footed sheep. The aftermath
of old damsels, on the contrary, plunged into everything; on solid and
in fluid, like Amphibia, they were equally at home; they had never in
their chewing and chattering life stirred any member but the tongue.
But now when for the benefit or so many spectators the wondrous
creature was to come forth, behold! he was--gone. Every corner was
dusted out, long-lost things were found, every place was screamed into,
every nook and every bush--no Gustavus! The Captain, whose first stage
of distress was always a kind of anger, let the whole expectant
sisterhood sit there with eyes wide open; but the Captain's lady, whose
distress took hold of tenderer parts of her nature, drew her seat close
up to them for sympathy. But when all anxious, inquiring, running faces
came back more and more disconsolate, and when they actually found
behind the open castle-gate the plucked flowers which the little fellow
had stuck into his little shaded bed, and which were still moist with
his sprinkling, then were the faces of the parents darkened with
despair. "Ah! the angel has plunged into the Rhine," said she, and he
said nothing to the contrary. At _another_ time he would have stamped
such a _non sequitur_ under foot, for the Rhine ran half a league from
the castle; but here the reasoner in both was desperate anxiety, which
makes far wider leaps than hope. I spoke just now of _another_ time,
therefore, because I know what the Captain's way usually was, namely,
to be, from very compassion, excited against the sufferer himself.
Never, for instance, did his look express a stronger curse against his
wife than when she was sick (and a single swift globule of blood would
upset her); she must not murmur in the least; and when that was obeyed,
she must not sigh; that done, she must not even make a sorrowful face;
and if she obeyed all these directions she must not, in fact, be sick.
He had the folly of idle and genteel people, he would always be jolly.
But here, when for once his pot of luck lay in fragments, another's
sigh sweetened his own and his wrath at the careless troop of servants
and at the dry sheep and aftermath of the sisterhood.
When the child had stayed out all night and the whole of the next
forenoon, and when they actually found his little hat in the woods on
the carriage-road, then did the stings of anxiety grow into the
festering pains of inflicted wounds. There is no agitation of the soul
against which it is so hard to bring an effective argument as against
anxiety: I have, therefore, for a year and a day ceased to attempt any;
I just willingly admit the worst it urges and then simply assail the
next inward emotion which may grow out of the apprehended worst with
the question, "and what if it should come?"
Every toadstool in the woods was trodden flat and every woodpecker
scared away, in the effort to find a head for the hat, but in vain; and
on the third day the Captain, whose face was an etching-plate of agony,
wandered, without any distinct design of searching, so deeply into the
woods that he would hardly have noticed the swift passing through the
thicket of a traveling carriage, set out with trunks and servants, had
not, issuing from it like a thunder-clap of gladness, the voice of his
lost son startled his soul. He runs after it, the carriage shoots
ahead, and out in the open ground he sees it already sending up a cloud
of dust beyond his castle. Beside himself he comes up storming into the
castle-yard to start in pursuit of it and--let it go. For up at the
house-door stood the inmates of the castle who had suddenly run
together and were now gathered in a knot around Gustavus, the castle
dogs barked without having any clearly defined reason, and all were
talking and questioning in such a way that one could not properly hear
from the child a single answer. The carriage as it whirled by had let
him out. On his neck hung by a black ribbon his portrait. His eyes were
red and moist with the pangs of homesickness. He told of long, long
houses, which he took streets to be, and of his little sister who had
played with him, and of his new hat; but no soul would have been the
wiser for all this had not the cook spied a card which had fallen at
his feet. This the Captain read, and saw that _he_ was not to read it,
but his wife. He deciphered and translated it out of the Italian and
the female handwriting thus:
"Can a mother, then, excuse herself to a mother, for having so long
kept her child from her? Even if you do not forgive me my fault, still
I cannot repent it. I found your dear little one three days ago
wandering about in the woods, where I stole him into my carriage, in
order to save him from worse thieves, and to find out his parents. Ah,
I will just confess it to you: I should have taken him with me, even
without either of these excuses. O, not because of his heavenly beauty,
but because he looks so perfectly like, even to his hair, my dear, lost
Guido; I can, even now, hardly give him up. Ah, it is already many
years since fate in a strange manner snatched my dearest child, living,
out of my bosom. Yours comes back to-day--mine, never!--Pardon the
neck-pendant. The portrait you will take to be his, so like is he to my
son: but it is really that of my Guido. His own I had also painted for
me, and keep it, in order to have a duplicate image of my good child.
Should I one day come to see your Gustavus, in his full bloom, I should
gaze long upon him; I should say to myself: so must my Guido be now
looking; so much innocence will he, too, have in his eyes; so very
pleasing will he, also, be.--Ah, my little daughter weeps that her
playmate is to leave her--and I do too; she gives back only a brother:
but I, a son. May you and he be happier!--Excuse me from giving my
name."
They all fell to guessing who the authoress could be. The Captain alone
looked sad, and said nothing. I know not whether from sorrow at the
recollection of his first lost son, or because he thought as I, in
fact, do about the whole affair. I conjecture, namely, that the lost
Guido is just his own child; and the correspondent is the beloved whom
the commercial agent Roeper had wrested out of his hands. I shall give
my reason, by and by. Gustavus's beauty may be demonstrated, either _a
priori_ (by reasoning downward from cause to effect) or, secondly, by a
reverse process, from consequent to antecedent. His forcing-house, in
which he was trained and hidden, very naturally bleached his lily-skin
to a white ground on which two pale cheek-roses, or only their
reflection and the darker and denser rosebud of the upper lip had
lighted. His eye was the open heaven which you happen upon in a
thousand cases of five-year-old children, and only in ten of people
fifty years old; and this eye was, moreover, veiled or beautified by
long eye-lashes, and by a somewhat dreamy and enthusiastic haze.
Finally, neither exertion nor passion had struck their marking-axe and
its sharp letters into this fair tree, nor had the death sentence which
was to announce its fall, been cut into its bark. But all beauty is
soft, hence, the fairest people are the most tranquil; hence, violent
labor distorts poor children and poor races.
But the year has not yet come, in which I can prove the beauty of
Gustavus by the _a posteriori_ process.
For as the auctioneer was at that time my most intimate friend, he
executed for my pleasure the little trick of setting up for sale the
paintings and engravings precisely on a day, when, on account of the
masquerade, not a soul of the great world of Unterscheerau came out to
the auction, I, alone, excepted; as expiatory payment for the same, I
had to endure a thousand things. The whole town and suburb had
contributed to this rubbish-heap of furniture, and was seller and buyer
at once. In this auction appeared all European potentates, but
wretchedly drawn and colored; and a nobleman of _bon sens_ set up his
two parents and was fain to pass them off as good knee-pieces (or
half-length portraits);--in Rome, inversely, parents sold their
children, only _in natura_. The nobleman hoped I would bid on his papa
and mamma; but I overbade on nothing, except the portrait of Gustavus,
which was knocked off to me. The nobleman was named Roeper, of whom I
have mentioned above, that he on one and the same day became husband
and step-father.
And here, verily, thou hangest, Gustavus, opposite me and my
writing-table, and when I am thinking upon anything, my eye always
falls upon thee. Many blame me, my little hero, that I have nailed thee
up here between Shakespeare and Winkelmann (by Bause); but hast thou
not--a thing few think of--an arched nose, on which rest high and
weighty thoughts; such a one as under the hand of death is often bent
more beautifully; and hast thou not under the bony architrave a broad
eye through which as through a triumphal gate nature enters into the
soul, and a dome-crowned house of the spirit, and all else that
entitles and enables thee to hold up thy head beside thy copper-plate
neighbors?
The reader ought to know (but it occurs farther on) what obliges me
just now, suddenly to finish and close the present sector.