Paintings.--Resident Lady.
Day before yesterday (the 26th of October) was thy baptismal day,
Amandus! Hast thou, haply, in all thy life, ever celebrated one with
glad eyes? Hast thou ever, at the end of a year, said: May the new one
be like this?--I will not answer these questions, lest I should make
myself more sad....
Gustavus saw no more in the garden anything but what he sought not, the
Prince and his like; he cherished unnecessary, _i. e_. a lover's
reluctance to inquire of any one about Beata's invisibleness--except of
the gardener's two children, who knew nothing, except that Beata, as
well as he, always toyed with them and gave them presents. Perhaps she
gave them, because he did; for he did, because she did. The only relics
of her, her walks, attracted him to them so much the oftener. O, if
only the pebbles under her feet had been softer, or the grass longer,
so that both might have retained an outline of a trace that she had
been there: then would this thorn-garden of his invisible one have
given his wishes still greater wings, and his melancholy deeper sighs.
For I must just confess, once for all, to myself and my readers, that
he is now in that enthusiastic, yearning, dreamy state, which
_precedes_ a declaration of love. This dreamy veil must have hung over
him, when he once, instead of the serpentine brook in the evening-dell
which he was going to draw, sketched the lovely statue of Venus, who
seemed to have risen from those waves; and secondly, when he did not
see who saw him--the Resident Lady. He appeared to her like a fair
child, who had grown five feet tall; with all his inner excellences he
could not yet produce an imposing effect, because on his face there was
still written too much good nature and too little knowledge of the
world. With that playful frankness of the coquette, which is the
first-born daughter of the coquette's disparagement of the male sex,
she said: "I'll give you the _original_ for the _drawing_," and took
the latter and contemplated it with an interesting and thoughtful
admiration (only her thoughts were on another subject.) Oefel, to whom
he related the adventure, scolded at him for not having said neatly:
"_Which original?_" For to the living Venus Gustavus had said nothing.
Nor, in fact, could he have done it, for she stood before him with all
the charms which are left to a Juno, when one takes from her the
gracious hue of the first innocence, with her forest of plumage, which
hundreds in Lower Scheerau wear after her, because they, as well as a
few of my lady readers, who also _put on_ more feathers than they will
_slit_ (pens) in their whole life, have made out so much as this, that
every Juno must be a Goddess, and every Goddess a Juno, and that
ladies'-heads and harpsichords must always be stuck or struck with
_quills_.
She asked him after the name of his drawing-master (the Genius); his
own she herself told him. She could not fail, with all her missteps, to
command a certain respect, and her sins and the Devil seemed to walk
behind her only as Chamber-Moors; her face, like her behavior, bore the
inner consciousness of her remaining virtues and her talents.
Nevertheless she remarked in the shy reverence which Gustavus
manifested less for her rank and worth than for her sex, that he had
little knowledge of the world. She avoided all circumlocution and made
a direct application to him for a drawing of the whole park to send to
her brother in Saxony. I call that a request, which she properly always
framed in addressing men in the jocose tone of a cabinet-order--and one
could oppose her female ukases in no other way than by masculine ones.
Let woman once lay a commission upon thee, then thou art hers, body and
soul; all thy disagreeable steps, all thy irksome services in her
behalf resolve themselves into charms around that image of her
which thou hast spread out on the bony walls of thy brain. To
rescue--avenge--teach--protect a woman is hardly much better (only a
little) than to love her at once. Gustavus never heard a more welcome
request; he sketched the park in a very short time, and could hardly
wait for the forenoon in which he was at liberty to hand it to her. We
all know what he hoped to behold in the Resident Lady's apartment
beside herself--but all he found there beside her was the little pupil
(Laura) of the absent Beata, at the Silvermann's-harpsichord.
The Resident Lady fixed a long look upon the drawing. "Have you,"
said she, "seen any pieces by our Court Painter? You should be his
scholar and he yours--he has never yet painted a fine portrait nor
a poor landscape--in your drawing the statues are finer than the
garden--retain your fault, and continue to beautify persons," she said
and looked upon him. In my slender artistic judgment--for they have
never yet admitted one of all my pieces, as aspirant, into a
picture-gallery, and I seek, with more honor, rather to review publicly
such exhibitions than to enrich them--the precise opposite is true, and
my hero (like his biographer) makes far better landscapes than
portraits. "Try it," she continued, "with a living original"--he seemed
perplexed as to the intention of her advice--"take one that will sit to
you as long as the artist himself sits." Oefers vanity with Gustavus's
impetuosity might, at this point, have got together a stupid piece of
politeness--"Here! this one I mean in here "--and she pointed to a
looking-glass; at this moment he was, after all, on the point of coming
out with the resuscitated flattery, that her figure was beyond his
pencil: when she luckily added: "Paint yourself and show me the
picture." Over an accidentally swallowed _sottise_ one grows quite as
red as over a rejected one--thou beautiful, burning red Gustavus!
I therefore write out here, for children who have never yet danced at
winter balls, this motto from the laws of fashion: When people are
about to make a declaration to you, to put one into their mouths is as
impolite as it is dangerous.
"I will just show you why," said she, and reached her hand half way
to his and drew it back again, and took him with her through her
reading-cabinet, through her library into her picture-gallery. When she
walked, one could hardly walk himself; because one wanted to stand and
look after her. Still harder was it by her side to look at pictures.
She pointed out to him in the gallery a motley row of likenesses which
the most famous painters had taken of themselves, and which the
Resident Lady had had copied from the gallery in Florence. "You see, if
you were a famous painter--and that you must become--I should not have
your portrait yet in my collection." On the window-seat stood upright
the female parasol, a green walking-fan, which he could have taken his
oath before a bench of justice was Beata's--several hay-carts of
Wouwerman's _grass_, several hundredweight of Salvator Rosa's _rocks_,
and a square mile of Everdingen's _grounds_, would he have given for
that mere fan.
But the promise which had been extorted from him, to paint himself,
was, for such a child of nature as he, to whom art had not yet given
vanity, hard to fulfil. Hundreds of youths now-a-days show more ability
to survey themselves before a looking-glass in company, than he had to
do it in solitude. He really feared that he was committing all the time
the sin of vanity.
In this way my hero, who is trying to fetch himself out of the
looking-glass, is beheld and painted by three drawing masters at once:
by the biographer, or myself, by the romancer, or Herr von Oefel, who
inserts in his romance a chapter wherein he treats anonymously
Gustavus's love for the Bouse, and by the painter and hero himself. He
may well, then, be well hit.
Of Oefel's romance of the Grand Sultan nothing more will appear in the
court bookstore at the next fair than the first volume; and it will
gratify the minor public which reads and makes the most of our
romances, to hear that I have looked a little into the Grand Sultan and
that most of the characters therein are taken not out of the wretched
_actual_ world, which, moreover, one has around him every week and
knows as well as he does himself, but mostly out of the _air_,[68] that
arsenal and nursery of the thinking romancer; for if, (according to the
system of dissemination) the _germs_ of the actual man, side by side
with the pollen of flowers, flutter round in the air, and must, out of
it, as the repository of posterity, be precipitated and absorbed by the
fathers: then much more must authors get their _drawings_ of men out of
the air, (where all Epicurus's exfoliations of actual things fly
round,) and shape them on paper, that the reader may not crumble.
For some days the von Bouse was not accessible, when the original
wanted to carry her his copy. At last she sent for both. His face was
very unlike the painted one, when his glance, on entering, fell upon
his physiognomical sister, who was singing with her little Bouse at the
harpsichord, upon Beata. We poor devils, we who have grown up not on
family trees, but on a family bush, are brought by four walls so near
to each other, that we make each other _warm_; on the contrary, the
velveted walls of the great keep their inmates as far apart as city
walls, and it is with us there as in taverns, where our interest
detaches only one or more from the great mass. So Beata kept on; and he
began; to him it was no more than if he saw her through his window in
the garden. His portrait found the most favorable reviewer. She flew on
with it through several rooms. Gustavus could now set his eyes where
his ears had long since been. His only wish was, that the pupil were
extraordinarily stupid and sang everything falsely, merely that the
charming leader might the oftener recite her part. It was that divine
_Idolo del mio_ of Rust's, at hearing which I and my acquaintance
always feel as if we were absorbed by the bland heaven of Italy, and
dissolved by the waves of the tones, and inhaled as a breath by the
Donna who glides along in the same gondola with us under the starry
sky.... By such dangerous fancies I really upset all my stoicism and
become, even before I am yet thirty, eighteen years old.
So much the more easily can I conceive how it was with young Gustavus,
who had his eyes and ears so near to the magnetic sun. Verily, I would
a thousand times rather (I know right well what I undertake) drive all
through Scheerau with the loveliest woman in the whole principality and
lift her not only _into_, but even (what is far more dangerous) out of
the carriage. Nay, more: sooner would I read to her with an impassioned
voice the best we have in the poetic and romantic departments--yea, I
would sooner dance with her at a masquerade ball out of one hall into
another, and as we sit down ask her if she is happy--and finally (I
cannot express it more strongly), I would sooner put on a doctor's hat
and fasten her faint hand with mine to the bleeding-stand, while she,
in order not to see the stream of blood leap over the snowy arm, gazes
with her pale face steadily into my eye--sooner, I promise, will I (to
be sure I shall get more and deeper wounds than the little bled-manikin
in the calendar) do all this than hear the loveliest girl sing; then I
should be melted and gone; who would help me, who would hear my signals
of distress, when in the most tranquil attitude she let the snow of her
right arm fall softly over some black surface or other, half opened the
bud of her rose-lips, let her dew-distilling eyes fall upon--her
thoughts and sink therein, when the soft downy bosom[69] lay heaving
like a white rose-leaf on the waves of the breath, and rose and fell
with them; when her soul, otherwise wrapt in the threefold clothing of
words, of body and of dress, unwound itself out of all wrappages and
plunged into the waves of melody and sank in the sea of longing...? I
should leap after her.----
Gustavus was caught in the very act of leaping after her, when the
Resident Lady came back with _two_ portraits. "Which is the more like?"
she said to Beata, and held up both before her and fixed her eyes not
upon the three faces which were to be compared, but upon the comparing
one. The companion-piece was, namely, the lost one of the real brother,
about which Beata had written to my Philippina. "O my brother!" said
she with too much emotion and accent (which is pardonable, as she had
just come from the harpsichord): and as she hastily snatched it, she
screamed out, until her eye had accidentally glided down over the back
of the picture and found no name there. Upon such particles of earthly
dust often hangs the beating of the human heart: it hears and lifts the
hundred-weight pressure of the whole atmosphere of life, but under the
sultry breath of a social embarrassment it collapses in impotence. He
who has not where to lay his _head_, suffers often less pain than he
who has not where to lay his--_hand_.
"I thought your brother was a distant relative of yours," said the
Resident Lady with perhaps a malicious double meaning, in order to
entangle her in the choice of one or another sense. Certainly the
Resident Lady had so readily at her command all words, ideas and limbs,
that in Gustavus's and Beata's understanding and virtue, _force_ hardly
availed, as in mechanics, to supply the place of _velocity_. But Beata
steadily related, without extenuation and without extravagance, all
about these pictures which the reader has learned from my mouth.
Gustavus could not have delivered such a narrative. The information,
how it had come into the hands of the Resident Lady, the Resident Lady
forgot to give, because she knew a hundred answers to it; Beata forgot
to demand it, because she remarked the same thing.
"For your face,"--she said in the gayest tone, in which, without
hesitation, she said the good about her charms, which others said in
serious tones--"I could give you no other than my own; but that I must
send with the garden to my brother in Saxony--you can paint it in with
the park, so that both pieces may have one master." It is much harder
to refuse anything to the jocose tone than to the serious--or at most
it can be done only in a tone of pleasantry; but for this all the
proper chords in Gustavus had been broken. Beata had not understood the
allusion to the park; Bouse brought the whole landscape-drawing and
asked her what pleased her most. She was for the shadow-realm and the
evening-dell. (Why did she leave out the hermitage-mountain?) "But of
the persons in the garden?"--she continued (the poor subject of
inquisition fixed her still gaze more steadily on the evening
dell)--"particularly the fair Venus here in the evening-dell?" At last
she was obliged to speak, and said, without embarrassment: "The
sculptor will not have to complain of the painter, but perhaps the
painter will of the sculptor; perhaps, too, it is merely the _frost_
that has injured this _Venus_ a little." The Resident Lady, by her
laughter and her _witty_ glances at Gustavus, made a bonmot out of
this, made her a little red, _him_ fiery-red, her by this last again
redder, and completely so by the answer: "So would my brother also
think if he should get the Venus in this way; but you will do me the
favor, my love, also to sit to the gentleman, our painter here, then
there will come into our park a fairer Venus. I am in earnest. The two
coming mornings you will give to our faces, Mr. von Falkenberg!" The
good girl was silent. Gustavus, who had already consented to duplicate
with his pencil Bouse's countenance, came within a hair of breaking out
with the remark that he could not copy Beata's in connection with his.
Fortunately it occurred to him that she would be dressed for the table.
(On Sunday, a week hence, I must begin my section with "For"----.)