Love-Letter.--Comedie.--Bal Pake.--Two Dangerous
Midnight Scenes.--Practical Application.
I have at this joyous season no very joyous feelings; perhaps because
my body, which threatens to fall to pieces, no more goes right than a
longitude-watch or sea-chronometer--perhaps also the contents of this
section lie on my brain--perhaps, too, at the sight of the universal
joy of the children, the blood creeps so mournfully between the
evergreen and autumnal flower age of the remembrance how it once was,
how the joys of man roll away, how they mark their remoteness from us
by a reflection gleaming over from distant shores, and how our longest
days seldom give us so much as the shortest or Christmas night gives
the child in the way of enjoyment or of hope.
I should not have spoken with so much levity as I did fourteen days ago
of Gustavus's hearty letter. It runs thus:
* * * * *
"Before I wrote this, my inexpressibly dear one, you went with Laura up
through the park to enjoy a little while the sinking sun, that shone
down between two great clouds; at your side shadows of clouds flitted
away, but the sunshine went with you. I thanked the foliage that it lay
at your feet and could not hide you from me; but I would fain have
plucked all the thorny leaves from the holly behind which you
disappeared and went from me. 'O could I only'--thought I--'strew her
autumnal way with young flowers and butterflies, could I encircle her
with blossoms and nightingales, and cover the woods and the mountains
before her with spring-time--but, if she then should tremble with joy
and must needs look upon me and thank me.' ... But these blossoms,
these nightingales, these springs you have given me; you have breathed
over my life an eternal May, and wrung from a human eye tears of
joy--but what have I to give? Ah, Beata, what can I give you for this
whole Elysium wherewith you entwine and festoon the dark ground of my
life, and for your whole, whole heart?--Mine--_that_ indeed you already
had for nothing, and that is all I have to give; for all fair hours,
for all your charms, for all your love, for all that you give, have I
nothing but this true, happy, warm heart....
"Yes, I have only this; but if the divine spark of the highest love can
glow in the human heart it dwells in mine, and burns for one whom I can
only love but not repay. Thou, higher spark, wilt gleam on for her in
my heart when tears flood or misfortune crushes it, or death turns it
to ashes.... Beata! no human being can, here on earth, tell another how
he loves him. Friendship and love go with closed lips over this ball,
and the inner man has no tongue. Ah, if man, out in the eternal temple,
which arches upward even to infinity, amidst the circle of singing
choirs, holy places, altars of sacrifice, will fain fall down dazed
before an altar and pray, ah then does he, as well as his tear, sink to
the ground and remain speechless! But the good soul knows who loves her
and is silent; she overlooks not the still eye which follows her, she
forgets not the heart which the more strongly it beats has the less
power to speak, nor the sigh which seeks to hide itself. But, Beata,
believe me!--when once this eye and this heart have ended their
silence, when in the most blissful hour they have dared with all the
energies of the loving nature to say to the beloved soul, 'I love
thee,' then is it hard and painful to be mute again; so painful to
press back again the upheaved, flaming, impetuous heart into a close,
cold breast--then in the innermost soul will the silent joy dissolve
into silent sorrow and gleam sadly into it, as does the moon into a
rainbow which the night uprears.... Beata! I can proffer no petitions,
I dare not have any; I can picture to myself the Eden which Beata's
looks and words might give me, but I dare not crave it; I must with all
my wishes fasten myself to the shore of the silver shadow, which even
in dreams, and at this moment in life, like a broad stream divides us;
but, darling, if I do not sometimes hear to whom the most precious
heart has given itself, how shall I retain the courage to believe it?
When I behold this gracious heart among so many good and exalted
beings, and then am compelled to say to myself, ah, you all,
nevertheless, have failed to deserve it; then does a joyful amazement
come over me, that it has given itself to my soul, and I can hardly
believe it. Beloved! thousands were more worthy of thee; but none could
have been made happier by thee than I am!"
* * * * *
The hardest thing now was, to get the letter, on any other wings
than those of a carrier-dove--Venus probably harnessed a span of
carrier-doves to her gondola--to its destined place. Of such a thing he
saw no possibility, because, among all possibilities, such a one is for
him the hardest to see,--for my sister such a one is the easiest.
All came about in the rehearsal of the play.
Regular plays, we know, are not, like their sisters, the political
ones, produced without rehearsal. I will willingly let as small a
paper-interval as possible come between the rehearsal and the
performance; but the reader must also, on his part, turn the leaves
over nimbly, and not lay his hands in his lap so much as the book.
The rehearsal took place in the old palace. Oefel did his part well
enough--Beata still better--and Gustavus the very worst of all. For the
faces of the Prince and the Fainting Lady, like salt and nitric acid,
almost transformed his heart into an icicle; there are many people
before whom one is nerveless and incapable of having inspired feelings.
Singular! only his, but not Beata's, were chilled by this north-wind
sweeping over the stage. And yet after all it is not singular; for love
throws the young man out of his own self into other personalities
around him, but repels the maiden from others back into her own.
Slightly, if at all, did Beata notice the approaches of the reigning
actor or acting Regent. Oefel, however, saw it, and anticipated his
victory over the exalted rival--who made his approaches to him in no
very large snail-line, as was his custom with the Court ladies, who
only in youth give away their virtue _a la minutia_; in old age, on the
contrary, drive a larger business with it _in grosso_. I said just now
something about a snail-line, because I had in my head a conceit of
this kind, that women of the world and the sun, under the appearance of
leading the planets in a circle round their rays, in fact hurry them
onward in a fine _spiral_ (or snail-line) to their burning surface.
In the midst of the rehearsal, just as Gustavus (or Henry) handed Marie
the blank paper as a certificate declaring their relationship null and
void, something occurred to him as Henry which would have occurred to
another long before as Gustavus, namely, that something might be
written on the blank paper, and in fact the best something--his
love-letter, which we have already long since read. In short, he
proposed to himself to slip his letter into her hands in the play in
the form of that certificate, if it could not be done otherwise. Even
the romantic element in the resolve, to insinuate his real part into
his theatrical one, and to put upon so many spectators another
deception than the poetic one, did not repel, but rather impelled him.
I will just confess, dear Gustavus--and though my confession should
fall into thine own hands--on thy heavenly modesty the honey-dew of
approbation, which in such a place thou wast justified in regarding not
even as flattery, but merely as a _facon_ of speech, had fallen with a
disturbing influence! Of all things human, modesty is the most
fumigated or brimstoned to death, and many a commendation is as harmful
as a calumny. In the madhouse we see that man takes other people's word
for it that he is crazy,[85] and in palaces we see that he takes their
word for it when they call him wise. On the whole Gustavus--(for a man
is often destined on an evening not merely to play one wretched part
after another, but often also mere thoughtless pranks)--on the dramatic
evening, was almost selected for the latter role.
... At length the Bouse's birthday fete has arrived.... O my Gustavus!
To this very day thy eyes are wet with the remembrance!
The fete breaks into three courses--_Comedie_, _Souper_, and _Bal
pare_. In reality, there is still a fourth course--a fall.
On the day of the performance, the new palace emptied itself into that
of the Prince at Ober-Scheerau. Gustavus thought, while on the way (in
Oefel's carriage), of his letter which he was going to deliver, and of
good Doctor Fenk a little; but the shortened days gave him no time for
visiting. His fault was, that for him the present, like a cataract,
always drowned all distant sounds; and he would not perhaps even have
come to me if my crowded legal work-table had allowed me to go to town.
He saw his Marie--ten hundred thousand new charms ... but I will
restrain himself. So much is physiologically true, that a maiden of our
familiar acquaintance in a strange place will appear to us somewhat as
a stranger, but only the more interesting. Beata had this in common
with the brilliant Lady Resident, but a certain breath of modest
shyness adorned her alone with its veil. In what was Gustavus at this
time distinguished from her? In this: man's bashfulness lies merely
in his training and his circumstances; woman's lies deep in her
nature--man has internal courage and often merely external
helplessness; woman has not this, and is nevertheless shy--the former
expresses his respect by pressing forward; the latter hers by drawing
backward.
The Fainting Lady, the so-called _Defaillante_, the Ministress, to-day
excepted! Her winking and blinking, her lisping and whispering, her
wriggling and giggling, her fearing and daring, her coquetry and
mockery--how shall the one-legged Jean Paul biographically copy all
this in poor, common prose? Nevertheless, it is absolutely not
otherwise to be done, and he must. If the variegated heads of _women_
had to represent, in the great garden of nature, the blue, red,
_glass-globes_ on lacquered pedestals (which not one man in a hundred
believes), I would go on in my portrayal thus: that of the Minister's
Lady was hot bad, not gay; this head was a short, practical extract of
ten other heads, that is to say, which had contributed hair, teeth,
features, to the making-up of it. She was an antique of great beauty,
but one which after the devastations of years and men was no more to be
had in a sound state; she had, therefore, to be restored by skilful
sculptors with new members--such as bosom, teeth, etc.
On the cheeks the _alloying_ was done in _red_, the neighboring parts
below were alloyed with _white_.[86]
Those teeth which place man in the class of ruminant animals, the
incisors, were as white as ivory, and all the more so, because
they were really such and came from the mouth of a graminivorous
beast;--whether I mean by that an elephant or a common man, who seldom
applies the teeth which, as scions, he grafts upon a nobler stem, to
anything but vegetables; at all events so much is certain, that no
other concluding clause will fit this period but the following: she had
once more as many teeth as other Christian women, and two gold threads
beside, because the dentist always had one part in the house and under
the brush, while the others pronounced the dental letters.
As, according to the latest text-books trigonometry--and bosoms--can be
divided only into _plane_ and _spherical_, and as she had manifestly
the entire alternative before her, her geometrical genius preferred for
her those magnitudes which afford geometers the greatest power and the
greatest pleasure--the spherical.
Her attire, from shoe-rosettes to hat-rosettes, sought its effect far
less in form than in material, and consequently could be less appraised
by the eyes than on jeweler's scales, less by lines of beauty than
according to carats--there always remained a distinction therefore
between her and her legislative doll; for the rest she, like every
other woman, had to carry herself according to that standard. I will
say just one timely word here on dolls.
* * * * *
The Word upon Dolls.
These bits of wood hold in their hands, as is well known, the
law-giving power over the fairer portion of the female world; for they
are the Legates and Vice-Queens, sent from Paris by the reigning line
in the finery department, to rule over the female German Circles--and
these wooden plenipotentiaries again send down their _heads_ (of caps)
as _missi regii_, to reign over the more common ladies of rank. If
these reigning wooden heads [or blockheads] cannot come themselves,
they then (as living Princes in the privy council supply their places
by their _portraits_) send their _laws_ and _likenesses_ in Schmauss
_corpus_ of all imperial-decrees of fashion, which _corpus_ we all have
in our hands under the name of the _Journal des Modes_. In such
circumstances--as one piece of wood plays into the hands of
another--but more unselfishly than whole colleges; since, furthermore,
new ones are elected annually as Proconsuls--I do not wonder that the
system of government at the toilettes is well arranged and administered
and that the whole female commonwealth which men cannot govern, is, by
the electric female Regents sent in bass-viol cases, who stand and
direct in this aristocracy from Lisbon to St. Petersburg, kept in
excellent order and subjection.
I am not the man that needs to have it told him as a piece of news,
that these dolls are the dressed wooden statues which are set up to (in
the matter of dress) meritorious women;--nay, I am convinced that these
public monuments, which are erected to attiring merit, have already
quickened very many and it is to be hoped will yet stir up many more to
a noble emulation, as a great man seldom does so much good as the
respect paid to his statue; but a main point, without which all else
limps, is manifestly this, that the statues must be--visible. Without
_that_ I would not give a button for the whole of them. What Socrates
did for philosophy, I would do with the best dolls, namely, draw them
down from the heaven of the great to the earth of the common people. I
have a notion that, if one should take the images of the Virgin, or
even the Saints and Apostles, which have hitherto, in Catholic
churches, been dressed and undressed without the least profit or taste
and should dress them up more rationally and advantageously, that is,
just like the French dolls--if the church would regularly every month
receive the _Journal of Fashion_, and according to its colored patterns
re-dress the Marys (as ladies) and the Apostles (as gentlemen) and so
set them around the altar, then would these people be _imitated_ and
venerated with more zest, and one would know, surely, for what one went
to church, and what they wore in Paris and Versailles;--one would learn
the fashions in good season, and even the common people would put on
something more sensible, the Apostles would become the file-leaders of
dress and Mary the true Queen of Heaven to the women. Thus must
ecclesiastical benefits be utilized as state benefits; even so did the
Dominican Monk Rocco in Naples (according to Muenter) apply the
extravagance of burning lamps in the streets at the altar of Mary to
the multiplication of these altars and--the lighting of the streets.
_End of the Word upon Dolls_.
I still owe the reader the reason why the Minister's Lady insisted on
taking the part of Jeanne--it was because that part allowed her a
shorter skirt--or, in other words, because she could then display
more easily her graceful Lilliputian feet. They were the only thing
immortal about her beauty, as in Achilles the feet were the only thing
mortal; in fact, they might, like the fallow-deer's, have served for
tobacco-pipe stoppers.
How much better did Oefel appear by contrast. He is a downright fool,
but in a proper measure. The Resident Lady surpassed the other in every
bending of the arm, which a painter--and in every lifting of the foot,
which a goddess--seemed to move; even in the laying on of the rouge,
whereto the Bouse had to accustom her cheeks under a princess who used
to require this fleeting flesh-tint of all her court-ladies--her rouge,
like the reflection of a red parasol, only tinged her with a slight
mezzotint.... In respect to beauty, hers was distinguished from the
ministerial as virtue is from hypocrisy....
The drama was born into the world, through the five players, not in the
opera house, but in a hall of the palace, which favored the Resident
Lady's coronation. I was not there; but all was reported to me. The
good Marie, Beata, had too much sensibility to show it; she felt that
she was dramatizing the duplicate of her destiny, and she possessed too
many of the good principles of the feminine character, to expose it
before so many eyes. Her best part she therefore played inwardly. Henri
(Gustavus), beside his inner one, played the outward one also very
well, for the same reason. The letter which he was going to deliver
confounded his part with his history which I am writing, and the false
praise which the Minister's Lady had bestowed on his recent rehearsed
part, from the very same unconvinced affectation in which she
exaggerated her own, helped him reap true praise. The man who is the
most bashful when much fancy glimmers under his actions, is the most
courageous when it blazes forth.
It would be ridiculous, if my praise of the warmth of his playing
should include the refinement of his performance; but the spectators
gladly forgave him because poverty in refinement[87] was coupled with
wealth and heartiness, by way of drawing them into the illusion that he
was from the country and merely Henri.
He needed this fervor, when, at the place where he reveals to her
the brotherly relation, he would hand his beloved Beata the real
love-letter--she unfolded it as her part required--with infinite grace
he had spoken those words in which his whole life was infolded: "O
believe me, indeed I am not thy brother"--she glanced at his name
there--she had already half guessed the truth from the manner of his
delivering the paper (for no maiden, be sure, ever yet was found
wanting when she had to complete a man's stratagem)--but it was
impossible for her to fall into a feigned fainting fit--for a true one
seized her--the swoon overdid the part a little. Gustavus took it all
for acting, so did the Minister's Lady, who envied her the gift of
illusion. Henri brought her to merely by the means which his written
part prescribed, and in a state of confusion, produced by the conflict
of all emotions, love, consternation and nervous tension, and in a
quite other than theatrical glorification, she played to the end
Henri's beloved, in order not to play Gustavus's. After the performance
she was obliged to renounce all the remaining festivities of the
evening, and in a chamber which the Prince, as well as the Doctor, with
much _empressement_, urged upon her, to seek rest for her still
agitated nerves and in the letter _unrest_ for her throbbing bosom. I
lift the curtain still higher, dear soul, which then still veiled that
which now robs thy nerves and thy bosom of peace!
Gustavus saw nothing; at the table, where he missed her, he had not the
courage to inquire after her of the ladies sitting near him. Of other
things he asked to-day more boldly; not merely had the applause he had
gained been an iron-and-steel-cure to his courage, but the wine also,
which he did not drink, but ate at the absurd Olla Podridas of the
great folk. This eaten beverage fired him actually to publish the _bon
mots_ which he used once to say only to himself. And here I publicly
testify, how it afflicts me to this very moment that I once on my
entrance into the great world was a similar simpleton, and thought
things which I should have spoken. Particularly do I repent this, that
I did not say to the wife of a trench-major, who had by the hand her
little girl and in her bosom a rose with a little one out of the midst
of it: _Vous voila!_ and point to the rose, though I had the whole _bon
mot_ lying all ready cast in my head. I afterward carried round the
_saillie_ for a long time in the chambers of my brain, watching my
chance, but finally let it off in the stupidest way, and dare not here
so much as name the person.
As there stood among the show-dishes, the optical parade-dishes of the
great folks, a winter-landscape with an artificial frost, which melted
in the warmth of the room and disclosed a leafy spring, Gustavus had a
fine conceit about that, which no one has been able to remember and
report to me. Nevertheless, although he ate under the finest
ceiling-piece and in the neatest chair, he still, as a mere
court-novice, took an interest in all he said and in every one he
talked with; to thee, thou blessed one, no truth and no person were as
yet indifferent. But there yet awaits thee that bitter transition from
hate and love to indifference, which all have to undergo who concern
themselves with many persons or many things to which they must needs
remain cold!
The Resident Lady drew out to-day more than usual his shy talents to
light, and easily graced the interest she took in him with the
acknowledgment of his theatrical claims upon her gratitude. At length
the third spectacle began, wherein more could shine than in either of
the others--the ball came on. Dancing is to the female world what the
play is to the great world--a fine vacation-time of tongues, which
often become awkward, often dangerous. For a brain like Gustavus's,
which to-day for the first time had experienced so many assaults upon
his senses, a ball-room was a New Jerusalem. In fact any ball-room is
something; look into this one, where Gustavus skips round! Every
stringed and wind instrument becomes a lever which lifts the heart out
of this niggardly, mistrustful, every-day life; dances shuffle men and
women like cards in and out among each other, and the ringing
atmosphere around them binds the intoxicated mass into one--so many
human beings, and they linked together for such a joyous purpose, dazed
by the surrounding chiaro-oscuro, inspired by their beating hearts,
must at least commend the cup of joy which Gustavus drained, for he, to
whom every lady is a Dogessa, was inspired by every touch of a hand,
and the outer tumult so awoke one in his whole inner being that the
music, as by reverberation, left its outward birthplace and seemed to
spring up only in his own soul amidst and beside his thoughts, and from
there to sound outward....
Verily, when one bears about his ideas around a blazing chandelier,
they cast back a quite other light than when one crouches with them
before an economical lamp! In men of lively fancy, as in hot lands or
on high mountains, all extremes lie nearer together: with Gustavus
rapture tended every moment to become melancholy; and joy, love, and
all the emotions with which the fair dancers inspired him, he would
fain bear to his one darling, who staid apart in solitude. It seemed to
him, however, as if not all of these made her place good so much as the
Resident Lady. Even the play, which was associated with her and in
which he had acted for her coronation, made her more dear to him; nay,
this her birthday was in his eyes one of her charms. Not otherwise, nor
more reasonably than thus, do man's _feelings_ ever act. In short, the
Resident Lady gained in all respects in which the absence of Beata
to-day bereaved him. To-day was the first time that he had touched
anything more of the Resident Lady, for whom he had an extraordinary
respect, than a glove--to-day he touched her arm and back, in other
words the dress which covered them: on arm and back, but not on the
hands, clothing is as good as none. Gustavus! philosophize and sleep
rather....
The Bal Pare is over--but the devil's play now begins. Oefel's carriage
followed the Bouse's; a neglected axle of the latter took fire from its
unnecessary speed. Of course it was an accident, but certain men know
no such thing as a mischance, and their plans use every one as a
nucleus. Oefel had to offer her his carriage. The good Beata had been
left in her sick chamber with a little circle of female attendants. He
took a horse from the carriage of the Resident Lady; he left with
her (I know not whether from gallantry toward her sex or from
sharp-sightedness and friendship for his own and for his romance) my
hero and hers. I would offer to prove before an academical senate that
nothing is more critical, for one who is meaning yet to become an
angel, than to drive home by night from a ball-room with a woman whom
he regards as one already--nevertheless not a hair of my hero's head
was hurt, nor did he hurt another's.
But he grew more in love, without knowing with whom.
Beata had not quite so dangerous a midnight or after-midnight; but I
will despatch his first. He arrived with the Resident Lady at her
apartment. He could not and would not tear himself away from to-day's
scenes. This room represented to him all that had passed there, and in
the strings of the harpsichord lurked a far-distant and beloved voice,
and behind the foil of the mirror a far-distant and beloved form.
Longing attached itself as a dark flower to the variegated festoon of
joy: the Resident Lady gained a new charm by this dark flower also. She
was not one of the coquettes who seek to move the senses before the
heart; she fell upon this first with the whole array of her charms and
from this afterward, as into an enemy's country, carried the war in to
them. She herself was not to be conquered otherwise than according to
her own tactics. If women of the upper class, like epigrams, are
divisible into those that have wit and those that have sensibility, she
resembled rather the Greek than the Gallic sententious poem, though the
resemblance to the Greek grew daily less. The May air of her earlier
life had once wafted a white blossom of noble love to her heart, as a
blossom-leaf often comes fluttering down into the midst of the
macerated feathers or flower-brilliants of a lady's hat--but her
station soon metamorphosed her bosom into a _pot pourri_, on which are
painted flowers of love and within a decaying heap of leaves. All her
missteps kept, however, within those narrower and fairer limits to
which the invisible hand of an _inextinguishable_ sentiment restricted
them. This sentiment the Minister's Lady had never had, and the tablets
of her heart grew more and more soiled the more she wrote upon them and
rubbed out again. The latter could never possibly delude a noble man;
the former lady could.
After this digression the reader can no longer be perplexed, if the
Bouse's behavior toward Gustavus is neither sincere nor dissembled, but
both. She showed him the night-piece which the Russian-Prince had left
with her, and which for the sake of better light she had hung in her
cabinet. It represented simply a night, a rising moon, an Indian woman
worshipping it on a mountain, and a youth also directing his prayer and
his arms toward the moon, but his eyes upon the beloved suppliant at
his side; in the background a glow faintly lighted a moonless spot.
They remained in the cabinet; the Resident Lady was absorbed in the
pictured night, Gustavus talked about it; at last she suddenly woke out
of her gaze and silence with the drowsy words: "My birthday festivals
always made me sad." In justification she disclosed to him almost all
the darker parts of her history; the mournful picture took its colors
from her eye and lip and its soul from her tone, and she ended by
saying: "_Here_ every one suffers _alone_." In the inspiration of
sympathy he seized her hand and perhaps remonstrated by a slight
pressure.
She left her hand in his with a look of entire indifference; but
presently took up a lute lying near them, as an apparent pretext for
drawing back the fair hand. "I was never unhappy," she continued with
emotion, "while my brother still lived." She now drew forth, after a
slight but unavoidable unveiling, the image of him which she wore on
her sisterly bosom and allowed his eyes a partial view of it, but
devoured it with her own. Although Gustavus at the unveiling of such
different mysteries, looked merely at the painted bust--even this my
Conrector and his fox-skin coat criticise in the most rational manner,
for he conceives that there is no fairer _rounding_ than that of his
periods, and no more modern Eve's _apple_ than that in the Old
Testament. My skin-dressed Conrector may prescribe as he will; but
Gustavus, sitting opposite to the mourning Resident Lady, who, formerly
let only the _form_, never the _color_ of that embowered forbidden
fruit be divined, will have hard work to learn the lesson.
Very few would have been able, like me and the Conrector, to have hung
the picture in its place again with their own hands.
"I love this cabinet," said she, "when I am sad. Here my Alban (name of
the brother) surprised me, when he came from London--here he wrote his
letters--here he wanted to die, but the doctor would not let him leave
his chamber." Unconsciously she let a chord escape from her lute and
die away in the air. She looked dreamily on Gustavus, her eyes assumed
a more and more moist glimmer. "Your sister is still happy," said she
in that sorrowful tone, which is omnipotent when one hears it _for the
first time_ from fair and usually laughing lips. "Ah!" said he with
sympathetic sadness, "would that I had a sister!" She looked at him
with a slightly searching glance of wonder, and said: "On the stage
to-day you played the precisely reverse part toward the same person."
She meant _there_ he had falsely given himself out as a brother to
Beata; here, falsely, as not her brother, or rather here he revealed to
her his love. His inquiring look of astonishment hung on her lips and
hovered anxiously between his tongue and his ear. She went on
indifferently: "To be sure, they say, own brother and sister seldom
love each other; but I am the first exception; you will be the second."
His astonishment became amazement....
It would be just so with the public, did I not make a sudden break and
inform them, that the Resident Lady may well have actually believed (in
fact must have) the lie which she told him. People of her station, into
whose ears the _furioso_ of the concert of gaieties is ever sounding,
hear un-contemporary news with only a deaf, if indeed with more than
half an ear--she may therefore, even more easily than the reader (and
who will answer for him?) have confounded the lost son of Madam Roeper
and Falkenberg with the present son of Falkenberg and the Captain's
lady. Her behavior hitherto is no more against my supposition than that
of the alleged brother and sister was against hers; however I may be
mistaken.
But this mistake is rendered quite improbable by her subsequent
conduct. His embarrassment repeated itself in hers; she regretted her
precipitancy in having praised a brother and sister as loving and happy
who avoided each other and disliked to speak of their mutual relations.
She concealed not with her looks her design, of diverting the
conversation, but took pains to show it; but to her sorrow in having no
brother, was joined the sorrowful reflection that Gustavus had indeed a
sister, but did not love her, and she expressed her sympathy with the
like misfortune more and more touchingly and tenderly on her lute.
Over the soul of Gustavus, above which to-day's festival still hung
with all its splendor, rolled the heaviest and most heterogeneous
waves--mistrust never entered into his heart, although in his head he
thought he had enough of it--at this moment he had the choice between
the throne and the grave of to-day's joy.
For strong souls know no half way between heaven and hell--no
purgatory, no _limbus infantium_.
The Resident Lady decided his wavering soul. She took his chaos of
looks (or it seemed so, for I have not the heart to be the tribunal and
last appeal of so many thousand readers) for the two-fold confusion and
concern at the coldness with which his (alleged) sister treated him,
and at his family history. She had hitherto found in his eyes a
longing which sought finer charms than did other courtly eyes--she had
retained in her sensitive heart the morning when he petitioned for the
grave of Amandus, and the loving eyes, which he had dried in her
presence--accordingly she shed the tenderest look upon his ardent
face--drew from her lute-strings the tenderest voice of her sympathetic
bosom--sought to cover her beating heart--and could not even hide its
beatings--and while he made a movement expressive of the most intense
affection, she fell, transported, lost, with quivering eye, with
overwhelmed heart, with distracted soul and with the single, slow,
deep-drawn sigh: "Brother!"--on his breast.
And he on hers!... For the first time in her court-life she felt such
an embrace; he for the first time a _reciprocated_ one; for on Beata's
pure heart he had never felt her arms around him. O Bouse! couldst thou
only have resembled her and remained a sister! but, thou _gavest_ more
than thou didst get, and thou didst charm thy victim to take what thou
gavest--thou hurriedst him and thyself into a darkening hurricane of
feeling--on thy bosom he lost sight of thy face--thy heart--his
own--and as all the senses assailed with their first energies, he lost
all, all....
Guardian angel of my Gustavus! Thou canst no longer save him; but heal
him, if he is lost, if he has lost all, his virtue and his Beata! Draw
with me the mourning curtain around his fall and say, even to the soul
which is as good as his is: "Be better!"
Before we go to the soul to whom he says it, to Beata, we will hear at
least a single advocate for poor Gustavus, that he may not be so
severely condemned. The Vindicator suggests for our reflection simply
this: if women are so easy to overcome, it is because in all military
relations the assailant has the advantage over the party assailed; but
let the case be once reversed, a temptress come upon the scene instead
of a tempter, then will the same tempted man, who never would have
assailed another's innocence, lose his own in the unwonted reversal of
relations, and indeed the more easily, in proportion as female
temptation is finer, more delicate and penetrating than that of man.
Hence men, it is true, lead astray; but young men are generally in the
beginning led astray--and one seductress creates ten seducers.
Pardon us all, pure Beata, the transition to thyself! Thou keepest at
this late hour of the night a chamber of the princely palace, all
alone, but with joy upon joy; for thou hadst Gustavus's letter to thee
in thy hands and on thy bosom; and in the whole palace the sickest soul
was the happiest; for the letter which she could at length read, kiss,
and without inner and outer tempests enjoy thoroughly, beamed more
mildly on her tender eye than the presence of the object, whose fiery
glow only by distance sank to a fanning warmth; his presence oppressed
her with too great a load of enjoyment, and she then embraced every
moment the genius of her virtue, while she fancied she was merely
embracing her friend. In this spring-time of rapture, when she held the
letter in one hand and by the other the genius of virtue, she was
disturbed by the--Prince of Scheerau. So crawls a toad on his belly
into a bed of flowers.
In such a case a woman only _then_ finds it difficult to decide her
line of conduct, when she still wavers irresolutely between
indifference and love; or else when, despite all coldness, she would
fain from vanity allow just so much, that virtue may lose, and love
gain, nothing;--on the contrary, in the case of a complete virtuous
resolve, she can freely resign herself to the inner virtue which fights
for her, and she needs hardly watch over lips and looks, because these
fall under suspicion precisely when they desire a guard. Beata's way of
putting up the letter was the only little semi-tone in this full
harmony of an armed virtue. The incumbent of the Scheerau throne
excused his appearance on the score of anxiety about her health. He
made up his following conversation out of the French language--the best
when one would talk with the women and witlings--and of those turns of
phrase whereby one can say all one will without boring himself or the
other party, and which communicate all only in half, and of this half
again a quarter in jest, and all more politely than flatteringly and
more boldly than sincerely.
"Thus have I"--he said with a polite admiration--"this whole evening,
in my mind's eye seen you pictured; my fancy has taken nothing from
you, except actual presence. If fate suffered herself to be reasoned
with, I should have scolded at her all through the Ball for having
denied to the person who has given us to-day so much pleasure, the
enjoyment of her own."
"O!" said she, "a kind destiny has given me to deny more pleasure than
I could impart." Although the Prince is one of those persons with whom
one would rather not talk about anything, still she said this with a
feeling which, however, was nothing but a thanking of destiny for the
previous happy reading hour.
"You are," said he with a fine look, which was meant to put another
meaning upon Beata's words, "a little of an egotist--that is not your
talent.--Yours must be not to be alone. You have hitherto concealed
your face as well as your heart; think you that at my court no one is
worthy to admire and to see both?" For Beata, who fancied she had no
need to be modest, but only humble, such a praise was too great for her
not to think of refusing it. His look seemed to require an answer, but
she gave one, on the whole, as seldom as possible, because every step
carries the old noose along with it into a new one. He had at first
sought her hand with the air with which one takes that of a patient;
she had carelessly let him have it, but she had let it lie bedded in
his like a dead glove--all his feelers could not detect in it the least
sensitiveness; she withdrew it at the next opportunity, neither slowly
nor hurriedly, out of the rusty sheath.
The dance, the events of the day, the night, the stillness gave his
words to-day more fire than usual. "The lots," said he, playing, as one
piqued, with a coin in his waist-coat pocket, by way of supplying the
place of the escaped hand, "have fallen unluckily. Persons who have the
talent of inspiring sensations, have unhappily often the disagreeable
one of reciprocating none, themselves." Suddenly he fixed his glance
upon her breast-pin, on which gleamed a pearl with the word, "Amitie;"
from that he turned his eyes to his Bolognese coin, on which, as on all
coins of Bologna, was inscribed the word "Libertas." "You deal with
friendship as Bologna with Freedom--both of you wear that as a legend
which you have not in fact." The nobler class of persons cannot hear
the words _Friendship_, _Feeling_, _Virtue_, even from the most
ignoble, without being reminded by the words of the greatness of which
their hearts are capable. Beata covered with her heaving breast a sigh
which would fain say, only too plainly, what joys and sorrows, feeling
and friendship gave her, but it touched not the Prince.
His searching glance, which was owing not to his sex, but to his
_station_, overtook the sigh which he had not heard. He made at once,
contrary to the nature of an appeal and of nature itself, a leap in the
dialogue: "Do you not understand me?" he said, in a tone full of
expectant homage. She said with more coldness than the sigh promised,
that she could not to-day do anything with her sick head than rest it
on--her arm, and that alone made it difficult for her to express with
equal strength the reverence of a subject, and the difference between
her opinions and his. Like beasts of prey, where creeping effected
nothing, he resorted to leaps. "Oh, believe me," said he, adopting as
his own Henri's declaration of love; "Marie, indeed I am not thy
brother!" A woman gains nothing by long refusing to understand certain
declarations, except--the most unmistakable ones. Besides, he still lay
before her in Henri's attitude. "Permit me," she answered, "the
alternative of regarding it either as earnest or as jest--off the stage
I am less capable of deserving the rose-prize or of neglecting it; but
it is you who in all cases have merely to give it."--"But to whom?"
said he (and this shows that against such persons no reasons are of any
avail)--"I forget in the presence of the beautiful all ugly ones, and
all beauties in the presence of the most beautiful--I give you the
prize of virtue, give me that of sensibility--or may I take it myself?"
and his lips hastily darted toward her cheeks, on which hitherto were
more tears than kisses; but with a cold astonishment, which he had
found warmer in all other women, she drew herself away from him neither
an inch too much nor too little, and in a tone in which were contained
at once the respect of a subject, the repose of a virtuous and the
coldness of an inexorable soul; in short, a tone as if her request had
no connection with what had gone before--She presented to him her
submissive petition that he would most graciously be pleased (inasmuch
as the Doctor had assured her she could not do anything worse than
keep awake) to retire--or as I should have expressed it--go to the
devil. Before going so far he indulged in a little more badinage,
in which he almost got back to his old tone, filed his inhesive
pro-counter-protests and withdrew.
Nothing but the peace which she derived from the hands of virtue and
love and Gustavus's letter ensured her the happy result that this
Jacob, or Jack, sprained his hip in wrestling with this angel--which,
of course, vexed the mortified Jacques so much the more in proportion
as the angel grew more beautiful during the wrestling, as every
excitement in a woman is notoriously a momentary cosmetic.
In your whole life, Gustavus and Beata, never have you opened your eyes
upon a morning with such different feelings as on this, when Beata had
nothing to reproach herself with and Gustavus everything. Over the
whole sunken spring-time of his life there settled down a long winter;
out of himself he had no pleasure, within himself no consolation, and
before him, instead of hope, remorse.
He tore himself away, with as much forbearance as his despair allowed
him, from the objects of his anguish and hurried with his boiling blood
towards Auenthal, to Wutz--into my lodgings. I saw no remaining sign of
life about him, save the rain-storm from his eyes. He made a vain
attempt to begin:--what with blood, ideas and tears, his words were
drowned--at last, in a flame of emotion, he turned away from me toward
the window, and with his eye fixed on one spot related to me how low he
had fallen from himself. Thereupon, in order to avenge himself upon
himself by his mortification, he made himself visible, but only held
out till he came to the name of Beata; here, when for the first time he
brought before me the vanished flower-garden of his first love, he was
compelled to cover his face, and said: "Oh, I was altogether too happy
and am quite too miserable."
The delusion of the Resident Lady in taking him for the brother of
Beata I could easily explain to him by the resemblance between the
likenesses of himself and of the first son. First of all I endeavored
to restore to him the weightiest credit--that which he must find in
himself: whoever ascribes to himself no moral strength, at last
forfeits it in reality. His fall was owing merely to his _new
situation_; nothing is so dangerous about a temptation as its
_novelty_; men and clocks go most correctly in a uniform _temperature_.
For the rest, I beg the romancers, who find it far easier than feeling
and experience attest, for two quite pure, enthusiastic souls to change
their love into a fall, not to take my hero as proof of their position;
for here the _second_ pure soul was wanting; on the contrary, the union
of all the colors of two fair souls (Gustavus's and Beata's) will never
produce any other than the _white_ of innocence.
His determination was this, to tear himself away from Beata forever by
a letter--to leave the palace with all objects that reminded him of his
fair days or his unhappy ones--to live through or sigh through the
winter with his parents, who always spent it in the city, and then in
summer to shuffle the cards anew with Oefel for the game of life, in
order to see what there might still be, when repose of soul is lost, to
gain or to forfeit.... Unhappy darling! why does thy present history,
just at the very moment when I might bring my written one into
coincidence with it, put on a mourning veil? Why must thy short, sad
days fall precisely upon the short, sad days of the almanac? O in this
winter of sorrow no Jacob's ladder of enthusiasm will lift me to the
heights whence I may survey and sketch the blooming landscape of thy
life, and I shall write about thee little, in order to take thee the of
oftener in my arms!
And you, ye frightful souls, who count a misstep of which Gustavus
feels as if he must die, as among your distinctions and delights, you
who, not like him, lose you own innocence, but murder that of others,
dare I defile him by your neighborhood on my paper? What will you yet
make out of our century? You crowned, starred, knighted, mitred
eunuchs! Of you I speak not, and have never complained that you burn
out and precipitate, with as much furnace fire as you can get together,
out of your own ranks the so-called virtue (_i. e_., the semblance of
it), which is so brittle an alloy in your female metals--for in your
rank temptation has no longer a name, no significance, no evil
consequences, and you do little or no harm there--but swoop not down
upon our _middle_ class, upon our lambs, with your vulture claws! With
us you are yet an epidemic (I fall, like you, into a confusion, but
only of metaphors), which sweeps away the more victims by reason of its
newness. Rob and kill there anything else rather than female virtue!
Only in a century like ours, in which all fine feelings are
strengthened _except the sense of honor_, can one trample under foot
that of woman, which consists merely in chastity, and, like the savage
hack down a tree forever in order to get its first and last fruits. The
robbery of a woman's honor is as much as that of a man's, _i. e_., thou
destroyest the escutcheon of a higher nobility, breakest the sword,
takest off the spurs, tearest to shreds the diploma of nobility and the
ancestral register; that which the executioner does to a man thou
executest upon a poor creature who loves this hangman, and only cannot
control her disproportionate imagination. Abominable! And of such
victims, whom men's hands had fastened with an everlasting iron collar
to disgrace, there are in the streets of Vienna two thousand, in those
of Paris thirty thousand, in those of London fifty thousand--Horrible!
Death-angel of vengeance! count not the tears which our sex wrings from
woman's eyes and causes to fall burning on the frail female heart!
Measure not the sighs and the agonies under which the _filles de joie_
expire, and which awaken no regrets in the iron _fils de joie_, except
because he must betake himself to another bed which is not a death-bed!
Tender, true, but weak sex! Why are all the faculties of thy soul so
great and brilliant, that thy considerateness is so small and pale in
the comparison? Why does there stir in thy heart an inborn respect for
a sex which spares not thine own? The more ye adorn your souls, the
more graces you make of your limbs, the more love you have heaving in
your bosoms and beaming from your eyes, the more you transform
yourselves by enchantment into angels; so much the more do we seek to
hurl these angels down out of their heaven, and in the very century of
your highest transfiguration, authors, artists and nobles all conspire
to form a forest of upas-trees under which you are doomed to die, and
we exalt each other in proportion to the number of well-poisonings and
beaker-poisonings we have prepared for your lips!