Days of Love.--Oefel's Love.--Ottomar's Palace and
the Wax-figures.
I hasten to dip my pen again to-day into my biographic inkstand,
because I shall now soon come up against the present moment with my
building operations--by Christmas I hope to reach it;--furthermore
because to-day is St. Andrew's and because my landlord has, amidst the
screams and shouts of his children, installed a birch-tree in the
sitting-room and in an old pot, that it may bear on Christmas eve the
silver fruit which will be tied to it. In the presence of such things I
forget court-days and law-terms.
Gustavus awoke, on the morning after the declaration of love, not from
his sleep--for into that, after such a _royal-shot_ in human life, only
a human badger or badgeress could fall--but from the ring and roar of
joy in his ears. Raptures danced a reel around his inner eye, and his
consciousness was hardly equal to his enjoyment. What a morning! Never
did the earth come before him in such bridal finery. Everything pleased
him, even Oefel, even Oefel's bragging about Beata's love. Fate had
to-day--except the loss of his love--no poisonous dart, no festering
splinter, which he would not indifferently have received into his
utterly blissful and tightly strung breast. Thus, oftentimes, is the
extreme of warmth replaced by the extreme of coldness or apathy; and
under the diving-bell of an intense idea--be it a fixed idea or a
passionate or a scientific one--we stand panoplied against the whole
outer ocean.
With Beata it fared just so. This soft still-vibrating joy was a second
heart, which filled her veins, animated her nerves and colored her
cheeks. For love--unlike other passions which assail us like
earthquakes, like lightnings--stands in the soul like a still,
transparent after-summer day with its whole heaven undisturbed. It
gives us a foretaste of the blessedness of the poet, whose bosom a
perennial, ever-blooming, singing, sparkling Paradise encircles, into
which he can ascend at any moment, while his external body bears itself
and the Eden over Polish filth, Dutch morasses and Siberian steppes.
Oh, ye voluptuaries in capital cities! When does the _Present_ offer
you so much as one minute of what the _Past_ here presents my couple,
whole days; you, whose hard hearts the highest fire of love, as the
concave mirror does the diamond, only _volatilizes_, but cannot _melt_?
But as the red of evening twilight so floats round in the sky that it
tinges the clouds of morning-redness, so on Beata's cheeks by the side
of the red flush of joy stood that of shame--although no longer than
until the form of the beloved, like an angel, flew through her heaven.
Both longed to see each other; both dreaded to be seen by the Resident
Lady; the discovery and still more the criticism of their emotions,
they would gladly have avoided. There is a certain stinging glance,
which dissolves and destroys soft sensibilities (as that of the sun
does the little Alpine creature, the Sure;) the fairest love shuts the
leaves of its flowers together before its very object, how should it
stand the singeing look of a court?
The biographer, with insight, seizes this opportunity to praise in two
words the marriages of great folk; for he can liken them to the
innocent flowers. Like Flora's variegated children, great folk have no
covering to their love--like them they marry without knowing or loving
each other--like flowers they care not for their offspring--but hatch
their posterity with the same sympathy with which a hatching-oven does
it in Egypt. Their love is even as a flower frozen to the window which
melts away in the heat. Among all chemical and physiological
combinations therefore only the union of two persons in the upper
classes has the advantage, that the parties who fly into a passionate
fondness for each other and exchange rings diffuse a terrible
chilliness; with this exception one finds the same singularity and
coldness only in the union of mineral alkalies with nitric acid and M.
de Morveau says with simplicity: "It is remarkable."
As Beata longed so much to see her hero and mine, accordingly, by way
of _disappointing_ her wish, she went for some days to her mother at
Maussenbach. I will be her vindicator and speak for her. She did it
because she wanted never to come upon him except accidentally; but at
the Resident Lady's it would in any case have been designedly. She did
it, because she loved to afflict herself, and like Socrates emptied the
cup of joy before she put it to her lips. She did it, for a reason that
would seldom have actuated another of her sex--in order to fall upon
her mother's neck and tell her all. Finally she also did it, in order
to hunt up at home the portrait of Gustavus, which the old man had sold
at auction.
I learned all on the very day of her return, when I arrived at
Maussenbach as an entire noble Rota (or juridical circle) not so much
to punish as to examine a poor hostess, who--as in the Parisian opera
they keep two or three sets of players in readiness for important
parts--had taken the precaution to fill the prominent part of her
spouse not with a _double_ merely, but with twelve persons from the
neighborhood, so that it might continue to be played as often as he
himself was absent. And here was a case by which I could infer how
little my manor lord was inclined to matrimonial infidelity, and how
much more to virtue; he was really glad that the whole float of
adulterous parishioners happened to come right by his shore and that he
was made the instrument whereby justice could visit and thrash this
_secret society_. Here he sought out with zest from the hostess, as in
Joecher's Literary Lexicon, the names of important _authors_ and she
was, to his virtuous ear, a Homer singing off the whole body of wounded
heroes by name; he therefore out of sympathy, as she had absolutely
nothing, remitted her entire fine; but the adulterous union and troop
was brought to the tread-mill and the winepress, or pump-chambers and
suction-works were applied to them.
So in Maussenbach at this pressing-out of this adulterous company the
Lady of the Manor related to me what her daughter had related to
her--in order to beg me, as former mentor of the lover, to draw the
couple asunder, because her husband could not bear love. I could not
tell her that I was engaged upon the biography of the couple and her
own, and that love was the sticking-plaster and joiner's glue that held
together the whole biography as well as the pair, and without which my
whole book would fall to pieces, and that I should therefore offend the
Jena reviewers if I should try to take his love away from him.--But so
much I could well say to her: that it was impossible, for the love of
such a couple was fire-proof and water-tight. I seemed to her, with my
feeling, a little simple; for she thought of her own experience. I
added cunningly: that the house of Falkenberg had for some years been
rising and laying in fine capitals. To this she merely answered:
"Fortunately her husband had never known it," (for a multitude of
secrets she told everybody except her husband); "for he had already
meditated for her Beata a different match." More than this I could not
find out.
--But a fine broth is cooked here not merely for the hero, but also for
his biographer; for the latter must certainly at last smart the worse
for it on account of the portrayal of such intense scenes, and must
often over such stormy sections cough away whole weeks. I will just
confess to the reader candidly beforehand: such a steamy heat and
tempest had already, last Friday, roared over the new palace and on
Saturday swept through Auenthal and into my chamber, when Gustavus
entered, all in a turmoil, and instituted the inquiry with me whither
Mrs. Captain von Falkenberg, who with her mezzotinto cat occupies my
first section and who is well known to be Gustavus's mother, whether
she--was really such.... Meanwhile we must drive on briskly; for I
know, too, that when I have built up my biographical Escurial and
Louvre and sit at last on the roof with my dedicatory oration, I shall
have put something into the book-shelves, the like of which the world
does not often become possessed of, and which of course must charm
reviewers as they pass by and make them say: "Day and night, summer and
winter, even on work-days such a _man_ must write; but who can tell
whether it may not be a lady?"
Now, then, on all coming pages the barometer falls from one degree to
another, ere the threatened tempest breaks forth. How Gustavus loved
the absent Beata, everyone can guess, who has known by experience how
love is never more tender, never more disinterested than during the
absence of its object. Daily he went to the grave of his friend as to
the holy sepulchre; to the birth-place of his happiness with a blissful
trembling of every fibre; daily he did it half an hour later, because
the moon, the only open eye at his soul's nuptials, rose half an hour
later every day. The moon was and will forever be the sun of lovers,
that soft decoration-painter of their scenes: she swells their emotions
as she does the seas, and raises in their eyes also a flood-tide.--Herr
von Oefel cast the look of an observer on Gustavus and said: "The
Resident Lady has made of you what I made of Fraulein von Roeper."
Hereupon he reckoned up to my hero the whole pathognomy of love, the
sighing, the silence, the distraction, which he had noticed in Beata
and from which he deduced that her heart was no longer vacant--he
himself was lodged there, he perceived. Oefel was a man whom a woman
might treat as she would, in any case he concluded she was mortally in
love with him.--Did she behave playfully, indulgently, familiarly with
him, he would, say: "Nothing is more certain, but she ought to be a
little more reserved;"--if she went to the opposite extreme, if she
disdained to give him a look, a command, anything at most beyond her
contempt and denied him even trifles; then he would swear, "Among one
hundred men he could undertake to pick out the one she loved; it would
be the only one she wouldn't look at."--If a woman struck into the
middle way of indifference, then he observed: "Women understood so well
the art of dissembling, that only Satan or love could find them out."
It was impossible for him to provide room for all the women that wanted
to get into the _rotunda_ of his heart; hence he thrust the surplus (so
to speak) into the pericardium, or _heart's purse_, wherein the heart
also hangs, as into a partition--in other words, he transferred the
scene of love from the heart to paper, and invented an _epistolary_ and
_paper-love_ corresponding to the letter and paper-nobility. I have had
many such chiromantic temperament-leaves of his in my hands, wherein he
drives love, like butterflies, merely to poetic flowers;--whole volumes
of such madrigals and Anacreontic poems to ladies, as have both the
_sweetness_ and the _coldness_ of jellies. Such is Herr von Oefel and
almost the whole belle-lettristic company.
Inasmuch as one praises himself only before people in whose presence
one does not blush, such as common people, servants, wife and children:
his vanity deserved a louder revenge than Gustavus visited upon him; he
merely pictured to himself in silence how fortunate he was, in that,
while others deceived themselves or made great efforts to gain the
heart of his beloved, he could say confidently to himself, "she has
given it to thee." But as to notifying his rival and messenger, or in
fact any one, of this extra judicial gift, _that_ not merely his
position forbade but also his character; not even to me did he disclose
it until he had quite other things to disclose to me and to disguise
from me. I am well aware that this discretion is a fault, which modern
romances, not unskillfully, labor to counteract; if in them a hero of
romance or the writer has won a heart of a heroine of romance (and that
she gives away as readily as if she had it on in front like a crop);
then the hero or the writer (who are generally one and the same) forces
the heroine to thrust her heart out and in as the cod does its
stomach--nay, the hero himself draws forth the heart out of the breast
that conceals it and shows up the captured globe to more than twenty
persons, as the operator does an amputated excrescence--handles the
ball as if it were a Lawrence's snuff-box--slips it off as if it were a
cane-head, and hides another's heart as little as he does his own. I
confess the traits of such _goddesses_ cannot have been brought
together from any worse models than were those after which the Greek
artists created their goddesses, or the Romish painters their Madonnas,
and it would imply very little knowledge of the world not to see that
the princesses, duchesses, etc., in our romances would surely never
have been hit off so well, if chambermaids, and still other damsels,
had not sat to the author in their place; and thus, when the author had
made himself the duke and his damsel the princess, the romance was done
and his love immortalized, like that of the spiders which are likewise
found paired and immortalized in amber. I say all this not to justify
my Gustavus, but only to excuse him; for these romancers should surely
also consider that the interesting rawness of manners, whose defects I
seek vainly to cover up in him, would with them also show the same
faults, if they, like him, had been spoiled by education, society, too
nice a sense of honor and too fine reading (_e. g_., of the works of
Richardson).
I am ashamed that Gustavus should have had such ignorance in love
matters as to undertake to find out from some of the best romances
whether he must now write a love-letter to Beata--nay, that _her_
absence should have caused him anxiety about her disposition and
embarrassment in regard to his own conduct. But the _strength_ of the
feelings makes the tongue poor and heavy, as well as the _want_ of
them. Fortunately little Laura often came skipping to meet him--not in
the park (for nothing makes more ink-spots and coffee-stains on a fair
skin than fair nature), but within four walls--and the pupil supplied
the place of the teacher.
But a higher and newly risen form now entered upon the land of
his love. Ottomar, of whose amphibious body--inhabitant of two
worlds--there had hitherto been so much talk in ante-chambers, appeared
there with it himself in the apartment of the Lady Resident. His first
word to the latter was: "She must pardon him, for not having appeared
sooner in her ante-chamber--he had been interred and consequently been
unable to do so." But "he was the first," he said, "who so soon after
death had come into Elysium" (here he looked round with a flattering
smile at the landscape pieces of the tapestry), "and into the presence
of the Divinities." This was mere satirical malice. Notoriously it
is already an approved clause in the aesthetics of all elegants that
they--and is my brother in Lyons in any other category?--have to take
away entirely from the flatteries which they are obliged to say to
women, the tone and look of sincerity, wherewith the ancient beaux used
to provide their fleurettes [or flowery speeches]. In this mocking
flattery he dressed up his disgust with women and courts. The women
exasperated him because--as he fancied--they sought nothing in love but
love itself,[79] whereas the man knows how to blend with it still
higher, religious, ambitious sentiments--because their emotions are
only couriers, and every feminine heat is only a transient one, and
because, if Christ himself should be teaching in their presence, in the
midst of the most affecting passages they would turn aside to peep at
his vest and his stockings. The courts enraged him by their
unfeelingness, by their representation in his brother, and by their
oppression of the people, the sight of which filled him with
insuperable pain. Hence his accounts of travels in other countries were
a satire upon his own; and as the French authors in the characters of
the Sultans and Bonzes of the Orient for some time painted and punished
those of the Occident, so in his narratives was the South the bearer
and Pasquino of the North. The mild humane tolerance which he had
proposed to himself in his last letter, he kept no longer than till he
had punctuated and sealed it--or so long as he went to walk--or during
the gentle unscrewing of the nerves after a wine-debauch. Nor did he
care much to be respected by those whom he did not himself respect; in
the midst of great, philosophic, republican ideas or ideals, the
trivialities of the present were to him invisible and contemptible, now
especially, when the future world or worlds obscured the thin one from
which he looked at them, as through the blackened spy-glass one sees no
object but the sun. Thus, _e. g_., he spent five grotesque minutes at
the Lady Resident's in the process--since the proper body of the soul
is made up solely of brain and spinal marrow and nerves--of ideally
stripping off the skin of the most intellectual court-ladies and the
handsomest court-gentlemen, furthermore of drawing out their bones and
removing in thought the little flesh and viscera that clothed them,
till nothing was left sitting on the ottoman but a spinal tail with a
cerebral knob at the top. Thereupon he let these reversed knockers or
erected tails run at each other and act and utter fleurettes, and
laughed inwardly at the most clever people of birth, whom he had
himself scalped and scaled. This is what we may call the philosophic
Pasquill.
From the new palace he hastened out into the old, to Gustavus, who
seemed to shun him. But in what way he had long since become acquainted
with Gustavus, how he had been able to give him the first letter, why
he, like Gustavus (even now) regularly adapted himself to an unknown
place, why he was shunned by him, and what the three hours'
conversation was which they had had with each other in the old palace,
and which closed with the warmest love in the hearts of both--on all
this still rests a long veil, which my conjectures cannot raise; for I
certainly have several different ones, but they sound so extraordinary
that I dare not lay them before the public until I can justify them
better. Every vein, every thought, as well as heart und eye, expanded
and magnified themselves for a new world, as he talked with the genial
man. O what are the hours of the most congenial reading, even the hours
of solitary exaltation, compared with an hour when a great soul works
upon thee livingly, and by its presence redoubles thy soul and thy
ideals and embodies thy thoughts?
Gustavus proposed to himself to repair from the palace to Ottomar, in
order to forget who else was still wanting there. It was a still
disclouded evening, a shadow, not of the already far-withdrawn summer,
but of the after-summer, when Gustavus set forth, after vainly waiting
for the return and society of the Doctor. In the empty air through
which no feathered tones, no beating hearts fluttered any longer, no
living thing showed itself save the eternal sun, whom no earthly autumn
pales and prostrates and who forever looks with open eye upon our ball
of earth, while below him thousands of eyes open and thousands close.
On such an evening the bandage of old wounds which we bear about in us
flies open. Gustavus arrived at the village in silence; at the entrance
of the garden which half enclosed Ottomar's palace, stood a boy,
grinding out the sublime melody of a sublime song[80] on a hand-organ
to the ear of a canary bird, which he was teaching to sing it. "I shall
get a good deal, when he can whistle it," said the winsome organist.
Leaning against a tree stood Ottomar, facing the far evening-redness
and these evening tones; the sun of the outer world sank within him
behind a great leaden cloud. Gustavus, before he reached him, had to
pass by a dense niche and an old gardener who was in it, about whom
there were two things that excited his wonder, first, that he said not
a word of thanks for his Good Evening, and secondly, that so old and
sensible a man had a child's garden in his cap on which his gaze was
steadily fixed. Through the arbor he perceived on a grassy sun dial an
elevation like a child's grave and a rainbow of flowers blooming round
it and embowering it overhead; on the elevation lay the clothes of a
child so arranged as if something lay in them and had them on. Ottomar
received him with a tenderness which one finds in such an irresistible
degree only in intense characters, and said with a low voice: "He
celebrated the dying day of all the seasons, and to-day was that of the
after-summer." On their way to the palace they passed by the gardener,
who did not take off his hat--then by the empty clothes on the grave,
which still lay under the flowers, and by the pianist who was still
playing the song: "O youth adown the brook of time." As we find
solemnity almost alone in books, seldom in life, in the latter it
leaves so much the stronger an impression.
It must be further remarked that in Ottomar the expression of the
strongest feelings, through a certain gentleness, wherewith his
intercourse with the world and his age broke their force, moved on
irresistibly into the silent abyss. He opened (children were the
lackeys) a chamber of the third story. The chief thing there was not
the pictures, with black grounds and white coffins, or the words over
the coffins: "Herein is my father, herein my mother, herein my spring
times," nor yet the very large painted coffin, above which was written:
"Herein lie 6,000 years with all their human beings;" but the most
important thing was the unpainted thing before which Gustavus bowed
low, a fair woman bending down to a child, almost like our Gustavus, as
if she was about to whisper something in his ear; further on he bowed
before an old officer in uniform, who held a torn map, and before a
handsome young Italian, who held an album. The child had a nosegay of
forget-me-nots on his breast, the woman and the two men had a black
bouquet. But what still more surprised him was Dr. Fenk at the window,
with a rose on his breast.
Gustavus hastened up to him, but Ottomar held him back. "It is only
wax," said he, not with the cold tone of one embittered against
destiny, but in a tone of resignation. "All that in my lifetime has
given me love and joy, stands and stays in this chamber--to any one who
has died I give black flowers--in the case of my lost child, I am still
uncertain, and his clothes lie out in the garden. Oh, he into whose
bosom God has breathed peace, that it may enfold his naked heart and
assuage its spasms,--he is as well off as those he mourns--softly and
steadily he opens his eyes, when fate sends him fair forms, and when
they go again and ugly ones come, he calmly closes them again."
O Ottomar! _that_ canst thou not, before the heaving sea of thy powers
has broken on the shore of age! open thy heart wider, as thou wilt, for
three days, to rest and tranquillity; on the fourth the cramp of joy or
sorrow shall contract and crush it to death.
Many people cannot see wax figures without shuddering, and Gustavus was
one of them; he took Ottomar's hand, as if to cling to life against so
many plays and apings of it.... Suddenly something tramped through the
silent palace ... up the stairs into the chamber, .... and fell on
Ottomar's neck.... It was Fenk, who was clasping him here for the first
time since his resurrection from the dead, and to whom, under the close
embrace, no distance from him, between whom and himself lands and years
and death had lain, could now be small enough. Gustavus, whom Ottomar
still held by the hand, was drawn also into the bond of love, and had
Death himself passed by he could not have run his cold sickle through
three closely, warmly, and speechlessly entwined hearts. "Speak,
Ottomar," said the Doctor, "the last time thou wast dumb." Ottomar's
tranquillity was now broken up: "They, too [the wax figures], are
forever silent," he said with subdued voice,--"they are not even with
us--we ourselves are not with each other--fleshy and bony gratings
stand between the souls of men, and yet can man dream that there is an
embracing on the earth, when only gratings come in mutual contact, and
behind them the one soul only _thinks_ the other?"
All were silent--the voice of the evening bell sounded away over the
deepening hush of the village, and the tones went wailing up and down.
Ottomar had again what he calls his terrible moment of annihilation; he
stepped up to the waxen woman and took the black death-bouquet and
placed it over his heart; he surveyed himself and his two friends and
said coldly and monotonously: "So then we three are living--this is the
so-called existence, what we are now doing--how still it is here,
everywhere, all around the earth--an utterly dumb night hangs round
about the earth and up among the fixed stars, it will not at any coming
time be lighter." Fortunately at that moment the Prince came trotting
and trumpeting by through the village with his hunting-retinue, and
scared away the night out of the three men; so much do we depend upon
our hearing, so much does the outer world give light and colors to our
inner.[81]
Of all that they afterward _did_ in other chambers I have nothing
memorable to insert here, and of all they _saw_ there only three
things, viz., that Ottomar had hardly any but children for servants;
had only quite young creatures and only flowers around him; for
vehement characters have a peculiar fondness for what is gentle.
The little schoolmaster, Wutz, has just stepped into my chamber and
says: for his part he has never written so much on any St. Andrew's day
in all his life before. Well, then, it is time we stopped.