The Second Decade of Life.--Ghost Story.--Night-Scene.--Rules
of Life.
Oefel kept his word. Fourteen days after this Professor Hoppedizel
wrote to us that he was coming to fetch the new cadet. Now, what had
been hitherto our wish became our grief. The bond between Gustavus and
myself was to be strained and wrenched asunder; every book that we now
read together afflicted us with the thought that each would finish it
alone; I could hardly bear to teach anything more to my Gustavus, whose
building-up I must hand over to strange architects, and every fair
flower-ground was to us the garden-gate of the Eden which an armed
cherub guarded against us.
The stormy months of his heart were now, too, drawing nearer. Besides,
I had not plucked out feathers enough from the wings of his fancy nor
driven him often enough out of his solitude. Therein his fancy sent its
roots in through all the fibres of his nature and obstructed with the
curtain of blossoms which adorned his head, the entrances of the outer
light.
In truth, neither the rattling Mentor nor his books, _i. e_., neither
the garden-shears nor the watering-pot nourish and color the flower,
but the sky and the earth between which it stands--_i. e_., the
solitude or society, in which the child spends the first budding
moments of his growth. Society is the germinative power in the
common-place child, who gives out his sparks only under external blows.
But solitude is the best environment of the exalted soul, as a desert
place sets off a palace; here it develops itself more harmoniously
among congenial dreams and images than among heterogeneous utilitarian
applications. So much the more reason have general excise-colleges to
see to it that great poetic geniuses--no one of whom in fact can make a
judicious chancery or finance officer--shall from the tenth to the
thirty-fifth year be kept on the move through nothing but saloons,
studies and town-halls, without having a still minute; else not one of
them is to be transformed into an archive keeper or registrator. Hence
too, the market-din of the great world so happily keeps all growth of
fancy to the level of the earth.
I have often thought on this matter, and brought up many objections to
my mind. Would not (I represented to myself), a more thorough school
colleague, when thy Gustavus was lying on his back on the grass and
dreaming to sink upward into the blue crater of the heavens, or with
wings on his shoulder-blades to swim through the universe, drive him
with his cane to a useful book? And, (said I), if I should say to the
more thorough colleague it was all one on what a child's fancy wound
its way upward, whether on a lackered staff, or on a living elm or on a
black smoker's-tube, would not the colleague wittily reply, for that
very reason it was _all one_?
Meanwhile I, on my part, should also possess wit of my own; I should
hit upon the reply: "Do you believe, then, Sir Confrater, that between
the greatest knave and the greatest comic poet, whom you produce, there
is any difference? Certainly, a good plan of a Cartouche differs from a
good plan of the Poet Goldoni's in this, that the first acts, himself,
the comedy, which the latter gets acted by players."
Gustavus was now in the midst of the fairest and most momentous decade
of man's flight to the grave, namely, the second. This decade of life
consists of the longest and hottest days; and--as the torrid zone
increases at once the size and the venom of the beasts--so at the glow
of youth there ripen, indeed, love, friendship, zeal for truth, the
spirit of poesy, but also the passions with their poison-teeth and
poison-bags. In this decade the maiden steals away out of the years
she has laughed through, and hides her sadder eye under the same
weeping-willow beneath which the still youth cools his breast and his
sighs, which rise for something nearer than moon and nightingale. Happy
youth! at this moment all graces take thy hand, the poetic, the female,
and nature herself, and lay aside their invisibleness and draw thee
into a charmed circle of angels. I said, nature herself; for about her
there glow still higher charms than the picturesque; and man, for whose
eye she was a mile-long portrait full of enchantments, can bring with
him to her a heart which shall make out of her a Pygmalion's image that
has a thousand souls and with them all embraces one.... Oh, it never,
never comes back again, the second decade of our poor life, which has
more than three high festival days; when it has once gone by, a cold
hand has touched our breast and eye; what still finds its way into
that, what still forces its way out from both, has lost the first
morning-charm and the eye of the old man opens then only to a higher
world where he will perhaps again become a youth!
Three days before the arrival of the Professor there was a great
ghost-scare in the castle; two days before it still continued; one day
before the Captain made arrangements for the detection of the trickery.
He had a hydrophobia-like dread of ghost-stories and gave every servant
who, like Boccaccio, told one, as payment for his novel, cudgelings, so
many for every sheet. The Captain's wife vexed him by her credulity,
and she often got that look from him which men give when the hopes or
fears of their wives make hares' leaps of half the earth's diameter.
She had heard at night a three-footed tramp through the corridor, a
flash had shot through the keyhole and another clock than hers had
struck twelve, and all had flown away.
He, therefore, loaded his double-barreled pistols, in order to attack
the devil with the powder which the latter, according to Milton,
invented earlier than the Chinese; his Gustavus must be with him at the
time, for the sake of exercising his courage. The castle-clock struck
eleven, nothing came--it struck twelve, still nothing--it struck twelve
a second time, without help of the clock-work; at this moment a
hieroglyphic racket made its way over the castle-floor, three feet
tramped down the many steps and shook the corridor. He, who was seldom
courageous in _suffering_, but always in _danger_, walked slowly out of
the chamber and saw nothing in the long passage but the blown-out
house-lantern on the top stair; something came up to him in the
darkness--and as he was about to fire at the dumb thing, he cried:
who's there? Suddenly there flashed five paces from him--and here the
tetanus of horror seized the nerves of Gustavus--the light of a
dark-lantern upon a face which hung in the air, and which said:
"Hoppedizel!" It was he; he threw his boot-tree and other apparatus of
this farce away, and no one had anything against it but the Captain,
because he could not show his courage, and the Captain's wife, because
she had not shown any.
But in Gustavus's brain this face, hanging in the air, scratched with
the etching-needle a distorted image which his feverish fancies will
one day hold up again before his dying eyes. It is not want of courage,
but merely intense fancy that creates fear of ghosts, and whoso has
once awakened that in a child so as to terrify him gains nothing, even
if afterwards he refutes it again and teaches him that "it was all
natural." Hence, in the same family, only certain children are timid,
_i. e_., those of a lively and volatile fancy. Hence Shakespeare in his
ghost scenes raises the hair of the incredulous one in the front box
mountain high, evidently through his excited fancy. The fear of ghosts
is an extraordinary meteor of our nature; first, because of its
dominion over all peoples; secondly, because it does not come from
education; for in childhood one shudders equally before the great bear
at the door and before a ghost; but in the one case the terror fades
away. Why does it remain in the other? Thirdly, on account of the
object: the person who is afraid of ghosts dreads neither pain nor
death, but shrinks from the mere presence of a being of an entirely
foreign nature. He would be able to look upon an inhabitant of the
moon, a resident of a fixed star, as easily as upon a new animal; but
there resides in man a dread as if of evils which the earth knows not,
of a wholly different world from what revolves around any sun, of
things which trench more nearly upon the limits of our personality....
I could not well avoid recording the foolish trick of the Professor's,
because, two days after, it conjured up around Gustavus, on the eve of
his departure, the following scene, which might full as well have
crushed as cheered his heart.
In the interval before his departure he carried his heavy heart and
heavy eye to all places which he loved and was leaving, to the holy
sepulchre of his childhood, under every tree which had shut out from
him the sun, up every hill which had shown it to him--he went on
through nothing but ruins of his tender child life; over his whole
youthful Paradise the past lay like a flood; before him, behind him,
stretched the marsh land and land of tillage, into which fate so soon
drives man.
... This was the moment when, before the sun, which, like him, was
going hence, and before the whole of great nature, which, with
invisible hands lifts blind man into vast, pure, unknown regions, I
pressed the likeness of his Guido,[52] which I had hitherto withheld
from him, to my beloved scholar's heart; at such moments words are
unnecessary, but every word one does speak has an almighty hand: "Here,
Gustavus," said I, "here, before Heaven and Earth, and before all that
is invisible around man, here I make over to thee from my guardian
hands into thine five great things--I deliver to thee thy innocent
heart--I deliver to thee thy honor--the thought of the Infinite--thy
Destiny--and thy form, which also encloses Guido's soul. Not on the
earth do the great hours stand, which will ask thee whether thou hast
kept or lost these five great things--but they will one day compare thy
future soul with thy present. Ah! let me not think of myself, if thou
shalt have lost all!" ...
I went away without embracing him; the best feelings keep a firmer hold
when one does not allow them to express themselves. He remained where
he was, and his feelings turned toward the picture of Guido; but that
had no power to remind him of his own form--for a man may have
come to his twentieth year without knowing his own teeth, and to his
twenty-fifth remain unacquainted with his own eyelashes, whereas a
maiden shall know all about hers before her confirmation--but the
picture woke to life again all of memory and love towards his Genius,
his first educator, that slumbered within him; nay, he found in the
likeness nothing but resemblances to his friend who had fled from him
and saw his form in the painted nothing as in a concave mirror.
His brain burned on in dream, as he lay on his pillow, like a glowing
anthracite coal-mine. It seemed to him as if he melted away into a
dew-drop and a blue flower-cup drank him up--then the swaying flower
stretched itself up with him to a great height and landed him in a
lofty, lofty chamber, where his friend, the Genius, or Guido, was
playing with his sister; and he dreamed that as often as the young man
stretched out his arm towards him it dropped off, and his sister handed
it to him again. All at once the flower collapsed, and falling downward
he saw three white moonbeams bear his friend into heaven, who cast his
eyes downward toward the fallen one. He woke--he was out of bed leaning
at the open window which looked out over the garden into the sleeping
Auenthal. The heavens came down in a dumb rain of light--throughout the
gleaming universe nothing stirred save the scintillating points of the
fixed stars--the houses stood like sepulchres in which mortals were
taking their long sleep; dreams went in and out through the closed
senses of men and sometimes death's tread clove asunder a head and the
dream within it. Heaven seemed to Gustavus to have sunk down before his
window. "Oh, turn back, come again, beloved!" he cried, transported at
once by dream and present reality, "O thou wast there, thou wast
seeking me! Ah, thou thousand times beloved! send me from thy heaven at
least thy voice!" Unexpectedly something cut the air before the window
and cried, "Gustavus," and in its distant flight called down twice from
a higher and higher altitude, "Gustavus! Gustavus!" An iceberg fell
upon his stiffening skin in the first second; but in the next he
recovered his glow, gave his arms to death and to his friend, and
concentrated his vision upon a spot in the air under the dazzling
moonlight, in order to see something. The two worlds had now for him
collapsed into one; calmly he awaited his friend from the world behind
the suns and was ready to fall with earthly breast upon his ethereal
one. He cooled off at last, and with a shudder of soul and a shiver of
the skin went back to bed. But long will the emotions of his soul be
wafted to him from this hour, as the winds blow from a region of a
storm.
It was probably the work of the old starling, who, so far as I know,
had escaped from his cage. Gustavus never knew it. Whether a soul like
a standing-pool heaves its waves as high as the shirt-frills, or like
the ocean mountain high, those are two things; whether these lofty
emotions are excited by a starling or a saint in bliss, that is all
one.
The Professor taught him, in my hearing, golden brocards[53] of
practical wisdom, which he himself transgressed in his teaching,--_e.
g_., Not merely the love but also the hatred of men is changeable, and
both die unless they grow.--Most people speak against those vices only
which they themselves have.--The greater the genius, the fairer the
person, so much the more does the world pardon them; the greater the
virtue so much the less does the world pardon it.--Every youth thinks
none is like him in feelings, etc., but all youths are alike.--One must
never excuse himself; for not the reason but the passion of another is
provoked with us, and against that there is no argument but time.--Men
love their pleasures more than their prosperity; a good companion more
than a benefactor; parrots, lap-dogs, and monkeys more than useful
beasts of burden.--One guesses what men are when one gives them credit
for having no principles, and the suspicious man is always right; he
guesses, if not the _actions_, yet the _thoughts_ of another; the
_defeats_ of the bad and the _temptations_ of the good.--The sin
against the Holy Ghost, which no one forgives thee, is the sin against
_his_ spirit, _i. e_., against his vanity, and the flatterer pleases,
if not by his conviction, yet by his humiliation. Etc.
There are certain rules and means of knowing human nature which the
higher and better man despises and condemns, which he is just the one
not to be helped by in guessing character, and which neither instruct
nor reveal him. The Professor further advised my Gustavus to form his
face, to silhouette virtue upon it, to smooth it out before the
looking-glass, and not to rumple or ruffle it by intense emotions. I
know full well that with the world's people the _mirror_ is still the
only conscience which holds up their faults before them, and which,
like the brain, must be divided into the larger and the lesser; the
great conscience consists of wall and pier-mirrors, the little one
consists of _etuis_, and is drawn out as a pocket-looking-glass; this
for the world's people; but for thee, Gustavus----? Thou, who can'st
neither accept, nor even understand, least of all use, the above
Decalogue for knaves--for one understands and finds useful only such
rules of life as rest upon experiences which he has himself so passed
through, that he himself could have given the rules--thou, whom I have
taught that virtue is nothing but _reverence_ for our own personality
and that of others; that it were better to believe in no vices than in
no virtue; that the worst know only their own caste, and the best, one
beside----? ... If Gustavus had not risen in rebellion against those
teachings, which are mostly truths, and against the teacher of them; if
he had not sworn that this disgusting cancer-philosophy should never
spin and fasten itself upon a corner of his heart; then should I not
have thought even as well of him as of the Resident Lady von Bouse, to
whom the system of Helvetius seems as beautiful as her own face; for in
her station the best heart has often the worst philosophy.
It will hardly reward the trouble, that I should add here that the
rascal Robisch was chased to the devil, because he gave out and
reckoned in a runaway recruit for a new one. If I said "chased to the
devil," I was satirizing, for it was only to Herr von Roeper, who
accepts no servants except such as are Polyhistors[54] in livery, like
Robisch, _i. e_., who are at once hunters, gardeners, scribes,
peasants, and servants.