Gustavus's Letter.--The Prince and his Dressing-Comb.
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 men _principles_ thrive; among them
_actions_. Solitary inactivity ripens outside of the glass-bell of the
study to social activity, and among men one grows no _better_, unless
when he comes among them he is already _good_.
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, as _not_ to 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
the _potpourri_ of 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 a _flame_,
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 letter _they_ of 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 antennae 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 the _image_ of 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 Roeper had
transmitted to him in Maussenbach the enclosed _portrait_, 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 the _Still Land_
for her still chamber. It was thus: Our prince is, to be sure, a little
hard, a little avaricious, and tends his flock oftener with the
_shepherd's staff_ than with the _shepherd'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 the
_giving of names_ benefits population, because every one strives to
propagate his own, except my own remark, that _namelessness_ helps it
still better. In fact, it holds in this respect with the most exalted
persons, as with the Greek artists, who, under the finest _statues_
with which their hand decorated _temples_ and 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 old _face_.
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 his _preteuse de tete_, in order to learn
as much upon her head, as he would have to practice upon the head of a
fairer _preteuse_. It was as necessary for one to frizzle as to be
frizzled.
I might say it in a note, that a _preteuse de tete_ in 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 and _fix 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 the _preliminary victories_ in 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 the _mental_ and _material_ images 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.