New Contract Between the Reader and the Biographer.--Gustavus's
Letter.
"Go thy way, beloved," said I, "whom the world-sea bears along with it;
may the solar image of thy shy and sensitive heart smile up out of the
watery depths and swim along with thee! Thy young heart thou wilt bring
to Auenthal no more! Alas, that the fruits of man's life must have a
different weather from that of his blossoms, instead of the breath of
Spring the sting of August and the autumnal tempest!" Such were my
thoughts so long as his carriage remained in sight; after that I went
down into the garden-vault to the two monks, and as I thought: in your
cold stony breasts dwells no wish, no longing, no sorrow, and--no
heart: "for that very reason," said I in another sense.
To-day is Michaelmas, and to-day--I can no longer dissemble--his
departure is _a year old_. To-day begins, between me and the reader, a
wholly new life, and we will quietly settle it all with one another
beforehand.
In the first place, it is true, I am a year behind Gustavus's life; but
I think in eight weeks to have written up to it. I expected, indeed,
half a year ago, that _now_ I should overtake him; but a life is easier
to lead than to picture, especially in a good style. On the whole an
author--a good one--can more easily reckon the stars in heaven than his
future sheets, which are also stars. Finally, one expects that the
Literary Times will consider at least so much as this, that I, as a
counsellor-at-law, cannot possibly write so much for it as for whole
colleges, faculties, and supreme courts of the empire. Is the Literary
Times aware of the terrible amount of my labors? One should have seen
my cupboard full of professional papers, whereon, moreover, not a
word is yet written, because I have only just received them from the
paper-mill; or one should have been in my judicial district of Schwenz,
where the twelve subjects and the feudal lord and judge are themselves
peasants, in order to require of me nothing more than a book a year.
Where is the lawyer throughout all Scheerau, who serves in a suit, that
might shortly--for the devil must have his sport--have been made to
stretch out through the Wetzlar gate under the session table of the
imperial chancery, which knows all about good style? And yet the suit,
like Peter the Great, served from below upward, and mounted, like the
sect of Stylites, higher and higher seats.
Secondly, unless this is still firstly, I can, consequently, like the
Jews, only on the Sabbath, or Sunday, think upon the plastic of my
spiritual embryos; on week days nothing is written, except, to be sure,
biographies also, but only those of rogues, by which is meant protocols
and accusatory libels.
Secondly (or thirdly), I am the inmate of a schoolmaster's
establishment. The good Captain, when his son was out of his door,
undertook to put me under personal arrest, which in my case includes
also real arrest, because my real estate consists of my body, and my
personal property of my soul; he said I should stay in his palace and
advocate and satirize as long as I pleased. It were to be wished his
old judge would fade away, then I should be the new one, for his good
heart--which my knavish one, accustomed to court subtleties, cannot
always forgive for its want of them--cannot bear to dismiss anybody.
Still keep thy sound north-east breath; still keep those hands of thine
with their cudgelling-stick of a woe-unto-thee! and thy tongue, with
its two or three _thunders_! and thousand devils! my Falkenberg!
And I stayed with him through the winter; but early in the spring of
this year I moved down to the place where I now write--in the upper
chamber of the Auenthal schoolmaster, Sebastian Wutz.[55] I had,
perhaps, the three weightiest reasons in the world for this step; in
the first place, nowhere do I feel so shrivelled up as in a Vatican
full of dreary caverns, in Sahara wastes of empty apartments; a
dining-hall with its poverty of furniture is to me a Patmos, and only
in little snug sitting-rooms does one feel enlarged. Man should from
year to year creep into smaller and smaller cells, until he slips into
the smallest, _i. e_., into the narrowest hole of this compressed
silver wire ["silver cord"].
The second reason was, Herr Fortins (in Morhof. Poly hist., L.
II., c. 8), who advises literary men to change their towns every
half-year,--and, in fact, one does write better after any change, and
though it were only that of a writing-desk. Without such freshening of
the air the soul writes itself so deeply into its narrow pass that it
is caught there without being able to see sky or earth. The present
work may, perhaps, come to something; but every month and every section
I must write in a different cabin.
The third and soundest reason is my sister. She has come back again
from the Resident Lady von Bouse's, because she had to vacate her place
for a fair book-patient, namely, the good Beata, whom father, doctor,
lover--the stupid Oefel (but he finds not the least favor)--have at
last tempted into this confluence of all enjoyments and visitings.
Secondly, my sister is here, because I would so have it; but Sister,
Sister, why did not I snatch thee sooner out of this overrunning
mineral-whirlpool? Why hast thou so changed? Who can change thee back
again? Who will wipe out of thy heart thy thoughts that forever recur
to strange glances; thy eagerness to be admired but not loved; thy
coquetry, which seeks only to excite love, not to reciprocate it, and
all that distinguishes thy heart from thy former heart and from the
unchangeable heart of Beata? I would not, therefore, with my sister,
make the palace narrower, where, besides, she already, every day, sits
away two or three hours.
I have now explained to the reader what he is about. We return to
Gustavus's carriage, and are all satisfied--reader, printer and writer.
Gustavus, in an intoxication of sorrow, which the lovely heavens
dissolved in tears, drove on to Scheerau, and counted every bee and
every swallow that flew towards our palace, happy. The next ten years
hung down like ten dark curtains before him. "And," he asked himself,
"do skeletons, wild beasts, or paradises lie behind the curtains?" The
thing which, without curtain, sat before him and lectured, he did not
see--namely, the Professor. Two leagues this side of Scheerau he wrote
to me with that flaming gratitude which breaks forth from a man so
radiantly only in his second decade. As in the case of all souls which
alter more from within outwardly than from without inward, the
barometer of the heart stood within him, often immovable at the same
degree. The rain-clouds and the rainbow in his inner heaven he carried
with him to Scheerau; he bore his veiled heart into the wide, echoing
cadet barracks, into the fair-day-tumult on its stairs, and into the
noise of watchwords, as if into the midst of the hammerings of a copper
foundry and a fulling mill. He grew still sadder, but more painfully
so.
The remarkable thing in the chamber which he entered and was to
occupy, was not the presence of three cadets--for they were _current_
men, small change and prosaic souls, _i. e_., jolly, witty, devoid
of feeling, without interest in higher wants, and of moderate
passions--but it was the Ephorus of the chambers, Herr von Oefel, who
skipped about with his sword at his side like an impaled fly with his
needle. Oefel began at once to observe him in order to describe him at
evening; but in company he observed everybody, not in order to overhear
others' tricks, but to exhibit his own. So, too, he praised without
esteeming, and blackened without hating. He wanted merely to shine.
Amidst these circumstances, before Gustavus made the heavy passage
through sorrows to occupations, a solace came to him in the form of
memory, and he saw, what he should not have forgotten--his _Amandus_,
his childhood's friend. But the good youth came before him not in his
first form of a blind boy, but in his last, of a dying man. He had a
nervous consumption, which had sucked all the pith out of the still
standing bark of the tree of life. On the bark there lingered no green
save hanging twigs with pale drooping foliage. He was preparing himself
for no office or life, but was expecting and stood ready to receive at
the threshold of the hereditary sepulchre Death coming up the steps.
But that his soul lay in a living wound[56]--there is nothing in that
to surprise us except his _sex_; for the fairest female souls seldom
live otherwise; but men do not spare such wound; the spectacle does not
soften them towards so soft a sex, that most of them live, not from day
to day, but from sorrow to sorrow and from tear to tear....
In Gustavus the second self (his friend) dwelt almost under one and the
same roof with the first, under the skull and skin of the brain; I
mean, he loved in others less what he saw than what he conceived; his
feelings, in fact, were nearer and more compact about his ideas than
about his senses; hence the flame of friendship which streamed up so
high before the image of a friend, was often bent and blown aside by
his bodily presence. Hence he received his Amandus (since in general an
arrival creates less glow than a departure) with a warmth which did not
quite reach from his inner to his outer man--but Oefel, who observed
it, wormed out the secret with six glances: that the new cadet was
proud of his nobility.
Of all military catechumens Gustavus had the most thorny time. From a
still Carthusian monastery he had been banished to a lumber-room, where
the three cadets bombarded his ears all day long with thrusts of
rapiers, slaps of cards and curses--from a country castle he had been
thrown into a Louvre, where the drum was the organ of speech and the
speaking machine, through which the mastership talks with the scholars,
as the grasshopper makes all his noise with an inborn drum attached to
his belly. To eating, to sleeping and to waking, they were, like the
pit of a village player, drummed together. In march-time and following
the word of command this militia mounted the dining-hall as their wall
and brought nothing away from the fortification but their portion of
victuals for half a day. The gesture of command started them up from
their seats and led them out again from the citadel. One could at night
count the steps of a single cadet, and one knew those of all the rest,
because the word of command like a blast drove all these wheels at
once.--For this very reason, I mean because grace before meat was
regularly commanded, the whole corps had the same devotions, no one
spoke with God a second longer than another. I know not to which of the
Scheerau regiments the fellow belonged who once, at a church parade,
when the officer for once commanded the souls to go to God, which he
generally ordered to go to the Devil, so flagrantly rebelled against
reasonable subordination, as to crook his pious knee before Heaven at
least four minutes longer than the file-leader;--I mention it for this
reason, that I afterward, when the pray-er got a whipping for it,
publicly propounded the question, whether in this same way one might
not train the companies in logic, which is as necessary to them as the
mustache and even more useful, since the latter, but not the former,
needs brushing. Might not one give the command, only leaving out the
word "make": "make the major proposition--make the minor--make the
conclusion?" Thus no one could blame me, if I should buy me a company,
and make them go through the three parts of the Penance somewhat
in this way: Repent--Believe--Reform--namely yourselves, or else
the ---- shall strike you--as younger officers add.
The Austrian soldiers had, until the year 1756, seventy-two manual
movements to learn, not for smiting the enemy, but Satan.
While in this mood towards war and his comrades, Gustavus wrote a
letter to me, of which I omit the beginning, because in that part our
correspondent used always to be as cold as at the reception of a
friend.
* * * * *
"---- Exercising and studying make me quite another man, but not a
happier one. I am often vexed myself at my weakness, at my eyes, from
which I privately seek to wipe away all traces of emotion, and at my
heart, which, at offences such as I now frequently experience, though
certainly without the intention of the offenders, does not boil up with
passion, but compresses itself as if into a great tear over the wicked
world. My chums, among whom I hear nothing but rapier-thrust and
curses, ridicule me in everything. Even this writing I am not doing in
their sight, but under the open heavens in the _Silent Land_[57], at
the feet and on the pedestal of a flower-goddess, whose arm and
flower-basket have been broken off. The worthy Herr von Oefel is meanwhile
at the Resident Lady's, in the old palace.
"Whenever I am not at work, every room, every house, every face
confines and oppresses me. And yet when I resume it--that is, when it
is foul weather, as it was last week, I open my case of mathematical
instruments as fondly as if it were a casket of jewels; but when a
fiery morning, amidst the screaming of all the birds, even the
_imprisoned_ ones, pours down from the roofs into our streets, when the
postillion reminds me with his horn that he has just come out from the
angular, dingy, dilapidated, unorganically glued-together rubbish heaps
of killed nature, which they call a city, into the pulsing, swelling,
budding fullness of unmurdered nature, where one root clambers about
another, where all things grow together and into each other, and all
lesser lives twine together into one great infinite life; then
every drop of blood in my heart recoils from the pitch-hoops,
trench-cavaliers, and from the sponges with which the artillery stuff
and stifle our blue morning hours. Nevertheless, I forget blooming
nature and the counter-mines wherewith they are learning to blow it up
into the air, and see merely the long crapes which stream out on high
from the poles at the house of a dyer opposite, even as nights hang
over the faces of poor mothers, that the dew of grief may fall
in the dark behind the corpses which we are learning to make on the
morrow.----Ah! since I have learned there is no longer any dying _for_,
but only _against_ the fatherland; since I have learned that if I
sacrifice my own life, I save none but only enslave one; since that I
have been compelled to wish that when war one day shall draw me into
the work of killing, it will first burn my eyes blind with powder, that
I may not see the breast I stab, nor pity the fair form which I
mutilate, and may only die, but not kill.... Oh, while I still looked
out into the world from the monastery, from your study chamber, then
did it expand before me in fairer and grander dimensions with waving
woods and flaming capes and meadows painted in thousandfold colors--now
I stand upon that same earth and see the bold needle-pine with miry
roots, the black boggy pond and the pasture of one mowing full of
yellow grass and draining ditches.
"Perhaps, however, I might still better realize my dreams of being
useful to men, if I should strike into another path, and were permitted
to choose, instead of the battle-field, the session-table, and so
ennoble the object of sacrifice.[58] The red sun stands before my pen
and besprinkles my paper with running shadows. O thou workest standing,
heavenly diamond! and illuminatest like the lightning, but without its
murderous knell! All nature is mute when it creates and loud when it
destroys. O great Nature, standing in evening's fire! man should
imitate only thy stillness and be merely thy feeble child, carrying
forth thy blessings to the needy!
"If you look up to-day from Auenthal at the windows of our castle
flickering in the summer-gold, so does my soul also at this moment look
over, but with a sigh," etc....
The officers see clearly that Gustavus never will be one; but he has
against him the whole of his father, who loves only the storming
warrior and scorns more quiet business-men, as they in their turn
despise the still more quiet businessless scholar.