Other Quarreling.--The Still Land.--Beata's Letter.--The
Reconciliation.--The Portrait of Guido.
Up to this present Sunday I have not succeeded in finding out why
Gustavus arrived at Scheerau five days later than he might have done;
he evaded even my inquiries more distressfully than adroitly. Oefel had
all reported to him, and made out of it one or two sections of his
romance, which I and the reader, it is to be hoped, may yet see. I
could wish his might see the light sooner than mine, then I might refer
the reader to it or perhaps extract from it some anecdotes. Gustavus
seemed to have a mental wound-fever. He carried his heart chilled with
recent bleeding to Amandus, to warm it and let it brood again upon his
friend's hot bosom, and to recover the self-respect which he could not
get at first hand, from a second, and there he always got it--for a
peculiar reason. In his character there was a trait, which, if he had
been a member of a Moravian church, would long ago have enrolled him a
missionary therefrom to America for the conversion of the savages: he
was fond of preaching. I can say it in other words: his gushing soul
must either stream or stagnate, but trickle or drop it could not--and
then, when once a friendly ear opened to it, it rained down in
inspiration upon Virtue, Nature and Futurity.--Then did a fresh,
bracing air flow through the world of his ideas--the down-pouring
torrents disclosed the fair, bright, deep-blue heaven of his
inner-being and Amandus stood under the open heaven enraptured. This
youth, to whom the exuberance of his heartily beloved friend was a
pedestal, something that did not oppress but uplifted him, enjoyed in
another's worth his own; nay, in his less enlightened head there arose
a still greater warmth than was in the speaker, somewhat as _dark_
water grows more intensely warm in the sun than that which is _bright_.
Gustavus related to him what had happened, and talked with him so long
upon his rights and wrongs in the case, that at last all his grief
about it had been talked away: such is the way in which friendship
_talks out_ the internal fire of anger. It was merely a sign of love
and a little weakness, that Amandus wiped away with greater sympathy a
tear of sorrow than a tear of joy from the loved eye of another; he,
therefore, by way of prolonging his interest in another's affliction,
came back again to the old subject, and dropped the casual question
where my hero had been the last five days. Gustavus with a troubled and
reddening face would have given the question the go-by--his friend
pressed it the more eagerly--the other embraced him still more
passionately and said: "Ask me not, thou only tormentest thyself for
nothing." Amandus, whose hysterical sensibility was less fine than
spasmodic, now began to be really fired up--Gustavus's heart was
intensely agitated and out of it came the words:--"O my dear friend,
thou can'st never learn it, never from me!"--Amandus, like all
weaklings, was easily inclined to jealousy in friendship and love, and
in an offended mood placed himself at the window. Gustavus, made more
indulgent and warmer to-day by the consciousness of his latest mistake
in the accusation touching the grain-case, went over to him and said
with moist eyes: "If I only had not given my oath to say nothing about
it." But in the soul of Amandus not all parts were invested with that
nice sense of honor in which is found the _lapis infernalis_ that
consumes every breach of word and oath. Moreover in him, as in all
weaklings, the emotions of the soul, even when the occasion for them
was removed, like the waves of the sea when a long-continued wind is
followed by one blowing from the opposite quarter, still retain the old
direction. He continued, therefore, looking out of the window, and
_meant_ to forgive, but was obliged to let the mechanically heaving
waves gradually subside again. If Gustavus had less earnestly begged
his forgiveness, he would have obtained it the sooner; both were silent
and remained as they were. "Amandus!" he cried at length in the
tenderest tone. No answer and no change of position. All at once the
lonely and agonized Gustavus, overcome with grief, drew forth the
portrait of the lost Guido who so closely resembled himself, which in
the fair days of childhood had been hung upon his breast and which he
had intended to-day to show him, and said with melting heart: "O thou
pictured friend, thou beloved colored nothing, thou bearest under thy
painted breast no heart, thou dost not know me, thou requitest me in
nothing--and yet I love thee so dearly. And could I be otherwise than
true to my Amandus?" Suddenly he saw in the glass of this portrait his
own face reflected with its mournful features: "O look here" (he said
in an altered tone); "I am said to look so like this painted stranger,
his face wears one constant smile, but look into mine!"--and he raised
it up, and showed his eyes wide open, but swimming in tears and his
lips quivering. The flood of love snatched both away and bore them up
in a close embrace--and when, not till after that, Amandus in reply to
his half jealous question: "he had supposed the portrait was that of
Gustavus," received an answering No, followed by the whole history:
then no harm was done; for the emotions of his heart settled down again
and flowed on in the bond of friendship.
After such expansions of the soul a sitting-room offers no
proportionate objects; they sought them therefore under _that_ ceiling
from which not a painted, but a living heaven-canopy, not grains of
color, but burning and carbonized worlds depend, and went out into the
_Still Land_, which lies less than half a league from Scheerau. Ah,
they should not have done it, if they had wished to remain reconciled.
Wilt thou have me describe thee here, thou Still Land! over which my
fancy flies so high above the ground and with such yearning--or thou,
still soul! thou that watchest it still in thine, and hast cast only an
earthly image thereof upon the earth?--Neither of the two am I equal
to; but I will point out the way which our friends took through it; and
first I must communicate something further, which gave rise to the
extraordinary issue of their walk.
Besides I could not rightly decide where to put the letter which Beata
immediately after my and her return from Maussenbach wrote to my
sister. She had in the few days which she had spent with my Philippina
at the Resident Lady's become her friend. The friendship of maidens
consists often in their holding each other by the hand or wearing
clothes of the same color; but these two preferred to have like
friendly sentiments. It was fortunate for my sister that Beata had no
opportunity to come in contact with the tinge of coquetry which touched
the surface of her character; for maidens divine nothing more easily
than coquetry and vanity, especially in their own sex.
"Dear Philippina:--I have delayed all this time in order to write you a
real lively letter. But, Philippina, this is not one. My heart lies in
my breast as in an ice-house and trembles all day long; and yet you
were so happy here, and never sad except at our leave taking, which
lasted almost as long as our stay together: am I, perhaps, to blame for
this? I think so very often when I see the laughing faces around the
Resident Lady, or when she herself speaks, and I imagine myself in her
place, and fancy how I must appear to her with my silence and my
speeches. I dare not think any more on the hopes of my solitude, so
sorely am I shamed by the superior advantages of other people's
society. And when a part which is too great for me to play of course
oppresses me, I know no way of raising myself up again, except by
creeping away into the Still Land. Then and there I have sweeter
moments, and often my eyes suddenly run over, because there everything
seems to love me, and because there the tender flower and the innocent
bird do not humiliate me, but respect my love. There I see the spirit
of the mourning Princess make its lonely pilgrimage through her works,
and I walk with her and feel what she feels, and I weep even sooner
than she. When I stand beneath the brightest and bluest day, then I
gaze yearningly up at the sun, and after that round about the horizon
and think: 'Ah! when thou hast gone down thy arch, thou hast shone on
no spot of earth on which I could be wholly happy until thy evening
glow; and when thou art down and the moon comes up, she too finds that
it is not much thou hast given me.' Dearest friend, do not take it ill
of me that I use this tonic; ascribe it to a malady, which always comes
to me preceded by this _avant courier_. O, could I chain thee to me
with my arm, then perhaps I should not be so. Happy Philippina! from
whose mouth wit already flutters forth again smiling, even when the eye
above it is still full of water; as the solitary balsam poplar in our
park breathes out spicy perfumes, while warm rain drops still fall from
it. All forsake me, even images; a dumb, dead picture behind a glass
door was the only brother whom I had to love. You cannot feel what you
have or I miss--this time even his reflection departs from me, and I
have nothing left of my beloved brother, no hope, not a letter, not a
likeness. I have missed this portrait, indeed, only since my return
from Maussenbach; but perhaps it has been gone still longer, for I had
hitherto merely to arrange my things; perhaps I myself packed it up
among the books which I gave you. You will let me know, I am well
aware. In our house there was a second, somewhat less faithful,
likeness of my brother, but that has been missing for a long time,"
etc.
* * * * *
Very naturally! for old Roeper had sold it at public auction, because it
was that of Gustavus. But we will follow our two friends again into the
_Still Land_.
They had to go by the old palace, which, like an Adam's-rib, had
hatched out the new one; which, in its turn, had sent forth new
watershoots--a Chinese cottage, a bathing-house, a garden-saloon, a
billiard-room, etc. In the new palace dwelt the Resident Lady von
Bouse, who did not admire this architectural feature twice in the whole
year. Behind the second rear extension of the palace the English
garden began with a French, which the Princess had let stand, by
way of utilizing the contrast, or of avoiding that which an angular
gala-palace assumes by the side of patriarchal Nature in her pastoral
attire. Any one who cared not to go by the two palaces could reach the
park through a pine grove, coming first into a cloister, of which the
old Prince and his favorite chamberlain had been the fathers. Neither
of them had been alone half a day in all their lives, except when they
were lost on a hunt or _otherwise_; hence they wanted for once to be
alone, and therefore--(what cared they if they did perpetrate a
plagiarism and a copy of the former Baireuth Eremitage?)--they placed
nine small houses first on paper, then on a table, and finally on the
earth, or rather nine moss-grown cords of wood. In these puzzle-houses
of hollow logs there was lodged Chinese furniture, gold and a live
courtier, somewhat as in living trunks of trees one is astonished to
come suddenly upon a live toad, because one does not see where the
creature's hole is. The logs enclosed a cloister which--as not a soul
in the whole court had any disposition to be a living hermit--was
committed to a wooden one, who silently and sensibly sat therein and
meditated and reflected as much as is possible for such a man to do.
They had provided the Anchorite with some ascetic works from the
Scheerau school-library, which suited him well enough and exhorted him
to a mortification of the flesh which he already had. The great, or the
greatest, either are represented or themselves represent something; but
they seldom are anything; others must eat, write, enjoy, love, conquer,
for them, and they themselves, again, do so for others; hence it is
fortunate that, as they have no soul of their own to enjoy a monastic
life and find no other that can, they can at least hunt up among the
carvers wooden business-agents who can enjoy the recluse life for them;
but I only wish that the great ones, who never suffer more _ennui_ than
in their pastimes, would have made and placed before their parks,
before their orchestras, their libraries, and their nurseries, such
solid and inanimate agents and canopy-bearers or _curatores absentis_
of pleasure and _fair_-weather, lightning-conductors, either hewn out
in stone or merely embossed in wax.
Upon the ceiling of the hermitage (as in that of the grotto in the
cloister of Santa Felicita) was to have been represented an adequate
amount of ruin, six cracks and two or three lizards falling through
them. The painter, too, was already on his travels, but stayed so long
upon them, that at last the thing painted itself, and like openhearted
people, was nothing else than what it appeared. Only, when the
artificial hermitage had ennobled itself into a natural one, it had
long since been forgotten by everybody. I hold it, therefore, rather
as persiflage than as pure truth, that the Chamberlain--as so many
Upper-Scheerauers said--had hunted up wood-ticks and had them grafted
into the hermit's chair, so that the creatures might work there
instead of hair-saws and ripping-knives, and make the seat the sooner
antique--in fact the vermin are now gnawing both chair and monk. Still
more ridiculous is the idea of making a reasonable man believe, that
the architectural chamberlain had covered and papered an artificially
running wheelwork with a mouse-skin, in order that the artificial
lizard above might have a mouse-correspondent below, and thus provision
be made for symmetry at either end; and that afterward the proprietor
had approached Nature and drawn over a live, running mouse a second
artificial mouse-skin as frock and overcoat, that Nature and art
might have a mutual indwelling;--ridiculous? It is true, mice are
always capering round the hermit, but certainly only in one skin
under-jacket....
Our two friends are far from us, and are already in the so-called long
evening-vale of the park, through which a wavy stream of gold flowed
from the setting sun. At the western and gently raised end of the vale,
the scattered trees seemed to grow on the dissolving sun itself; at the
eastern end one could look across over the continuation of the park to
the glowing palace, on whose window-panes the sun and the evening
fire-works redoubled their splendor. Here the old Princess always saw
the first setting of the sun; then a path that wound gently upward led
her to the high brow of this park, where day was still dying, and once
more paternally beheld with his expiring sun-eye his great circle of
children, till night closed his eye and took the orphaned earth into
her motherly lap.
Gustavus and Amandus! be reconciled to each other here once more--the
red limb of the sun rests already on the margin of the earth--the water
and life run on and stop down below in the grave--take each other by
the hand, when you look over to the ruined _Place of Rest_,[60] and at
its still standing church, image of unprosperous virtue--or when you
look over to the _Flower Islands_, where every flower trembles alone on
its little green continent, and no relative nods a greeting save its
painted shadow in the water--press each other's hands, when your eyes
fall upon the _Realm of Shadows_, where, to-day, light and shade, like
living and sleeping, fluttered tremblingly beside each other and into
each other--and when ye see Alpine horns and AEolian harps leaning
against the threefold lattice of the _Dumb Cabinet_, your souls must
needs tremble in unison with the harmonies, in echoing vibrations....
It is a wretched rhetorical figure I set up here, as if I had been all
this time addressing and exhorting them; for are not the two friends in
a greater enthusiasm than I myself? Is not Amandus exalted far above
all jealousy of friendship, and is he not with his own hand holding out
before him the portrait, to-day apostrophized, of the unknown friend of
Gustavus, and saying: "Mightest thou be the Third?" Nay, does he not,
in his inspirations, lay the picture on the grass, in order with his
left hand to grasp Gustavus and with his right to point to a chamber of
the new palace, and does he not confess: "Had I also in my right hand
that which I love, then were my hands, my heart and my heaven all full,
and I would die!" And as it is only in the greatest love for a second
that we can speak of that which he cherishes towards a _third_, can we
demand anything more of our Amandus, who here, on the hill-top,
confesses himself in love with Beata?
The misfortune was that at this very moment she herself was coming up,
to stand at the dying-bed of the sun--herself even more lovely than the
object which was the delight of her eyes--walking more and more slowly,
as if she were every moment on the point of stopping--with eyes that
could not see till she had several times in succession shut and opened
them again with a quick winking movement--no living European author
could describe the ecstacy of Amandus, if the thing had remained
so;--but her slight astonishment at seeing the two guests of the
mountain suddenly passed over into a similar sensation at seeing the
third on the grass. A hasty movement put her in possession of the
picture of her brother and she said, turning involuntarily toward
Amandus: "My brother's portrait! and so at last I find it!" But she
could not pass by them, without saying to both--with that fine womanly
instinct which has got through ten sheets in such documents before we
have read the first leaf:--"She thanked them, if it was they who had
found the picture." Amandus made a low and bitter obeisance, Gustavus
was far away, as if his soul stood on Mount Horeb, and only his body
was here. She walked on, as if it had been her intention, straight down
over the mountain, with her own eyes on the picture, and with the other
four eyes fixed on her back....
"Now, indeed, the mystery of thy five days is out, and without perjury
on thy part," said Amandus bitterly, and the high opera of sunset
touched him no more; Gustavus, on the contrary, is still more deeply
affected; for the feeling of suffering a wrong, mingled with the
mistaken feeling of having done a wrong--(tender souls in such cases
always justify the other party more than themselves)--melted with it
into one bitter tear and he could not say a word. Amandus, who was now
vexed at his reconciliation, was still more confirmed in his jealous
suspicion by the fact that Gustavus, in his pragmatic relation of the
Maussenbach adventure, had entirely left out Beata; but this omission
had been intentional on the part of Gustavus, because the presence of
the tender soul was just what pained him most in the whole occurrence,
and because perhaps in his innermost heart there was budding a tender
regard for her, which was too delicate and holy to endure the hard open
air of conversation. "And of course she too was present lately in
Maussenbach?" said the jealous one in the most unlucky tone.--"Yes!"
but Gustavus could not add so much as this, that she had not on that
occasion spoken one word to him. This nevertheless unexpected yes, in
an instant contorted the face of the questioner, who would have held on
high his stump (in case his arm had been shot off) and sworn, "it
needed no further proof--Gustavus visibly held Beata in his magnetic
vortex--was he not now speechless? Did he not instantly surrender her
the likeness? Will she not, as she confounded the copies, also confound
the originals, as they are all four so like each other, etc.?"
Amandus loved her, and thought one loved him too, and that one
perceived where his drift lay. He had delicacy enough in his own
_actions_, but not enough in the _presumptions_ he cherished regarding
those of others. He had, namely, in the medical company of his father,
often visited Beata, in her sicknesses, at Maussenbach; he had received
at her hands that frank confidence which many maidens in their sick
days always express, or in well ones, toward young men who appear to
them at once virtuous and indifferent; the good Participle in _dus_,
Amandus, assumed therefore after some reflection, that a letter which
Beata had translated as a specimen, from Rousseau's Heloise, on fine
paper--no maiden writes on coarse--and which had been written to the
deceased Saint Preux, was addressed to the Participle himself. Girls
should never, therefore, translate anything. Amandus was translated
into a lover.
In Gustavus's heaving brain the night settled down at last, which had
already come on in the outer world. Storm and moonshine in his inner
night stood side by side--joy and sorrow. He thought of an innocent
friend eaten up with suspicion, of the forfeited portrait, of the
sister with whom he had played in his childhood, of the unknown
pictured friend, who was therefore the brother of this lovely creature,
and so on. Amandus turned aside to go off; Gustavus followed him
unbidden, because, to-day, he could not do anything but forgive. Even
during the descent hatred and friendship wrestled with equal force in
Amandus, and nothing but an accident could ensure the victory to
either. Hatred won it, and the auxiliary accident was, that Gustavus
walked along parallel to Amandus. Gustavus should have stolen along
ahead (or at most behind), especially with that affectionately dejected
soul of his own. In that case friendship would, by the help of his
back, have conquered, because a human back, by the suggestion of
absence, creates more compassion and less hatred than the face and
breast.... In fact one cannot often enough see his fellow men _from
behind_....
Ye readers of books! scold not at poor Amandus, who is scolding away
his fragile life. You should only see and consider how it is with the
seat of the soul in a nervous weakling, that it is devilishly hard, not
stuffed out with so much as three horse-hairs, and cuts like the seat
of a sleigh. In short, any personality of my acquaintance sits more
softly. Nevertheless my pity for the poor fellow is excited by quite
other things than by his hard, stony, pineal gland of the soul. There
are things which would soften the heart of the reader, and which, alas,
despite my repeated filling of my pen, I have not yet been able to
write up to!
On the whole it is vain for me to attempt concealing how very deficient
my story thus far is in true murder and mortality, pestilence and
famine, and all the pathology of the Litany. I and the circulating
librarian find the whole public in the shop here, waiting, and with the
white handkerchief--that sentimental seton--already taken out,
impatient to weep and wipe away its proper quantity of tears ... and
yet none of us brings on much that is dead and affecting.... On the
other hand I am beset with the peculiar difficulty that the German
public cocks up its head and will not let itself be distressed
by me; for it counts upon this, that I, as a mere plain biographer
(life-writer) cannot go so far as a murder, without which, however,
nothing is to be effected. But is then only the romance-manufacturer
invested with the supreme criminal jurisdiction, and is only _his_
printing paper a place of execution? Nay, newspaper-writers, who
write no romances, have nevertheless, from time immemorial, filled
their pens and slain what they chose, and more than was buried.
Furthermore, historians, those _Great-Crosses_ (of butterflies) among
the _Little-Crosses_ (for out of 100 newspaper annalists I extract and
decoct at most one historian) have gone on and destroyed as many as the
plan of their historic introductions, their _abreges_, their royal and
imperial historiettes absolutely required.... In short, there is no
excuse for me if I do not here make anything at all dead and
interesting; and at the end I slaughter from necessity one or two
lackeys, whom besides, out of Scheerau, no devil knows.
But I proceed with my story and insert out of the Pestilentiary's
_Nouvelle a la main_ the following article in my _Nouvelle a la main_
[handy-volume novel] written for several quarters of the globe:
"It is confirmed by reports from Maussenbach, that the public servant
at that place, Robisch, is dead as his mice. His death has created two
schools of medicine, of which the one contends that his sect-founding
death arose from too much beating, and the other, from too little
eating."
There is not a word of truth in all this; the man has, indeed, stripes
and appetite, but is living up to date, and the newspaper article is
only just this moment been made by myself. But let the rash public draw
from this and for future use the hint, that it should not tease and
provoke any biographer, because even _he_ by poisoning his ink and by
putting rat-powder in his sand box can destroy princes or anybody else,
and send them to the church-yard; and learn hence that an ingenuous
public must always while reading ask with trembling: "how will it fare
with the poor fool (or fair fool) in me next chapter?"