Night Music.--Farewell Letter.--My Groans and Grievances.
I had planned for to-day to play the joke of calling my biography a
printed New Year's Wish to the reader, and then, instead of wishes,
send out in sport New Year's curses and more of the like. But I cannot
do it, and on the whole shall soon be absolutely unable to do it any
more. What a heavy, burnt-out heart must those people have, who in the
face of the first day which ushers them into the procession of 364
other lowly, serious, wailing and weeping ones, can prefer the noisy,
riotous pleasure of beasts to the still, tender and almost tearful joy
of man! You cannot know what the words _first_ and _last_ say, if in
their presence, whether they refer to a day, a book, or a person, you
do not draw a deeper breath; still less can you know what preeminence
man has over the beast, if within you the interval is so great between
joy and longing, and if both are not within you blended in one tear!
Thou Heaven and thou Earth, your present form is an image (as if a
mother) of such a union; that world of light looking so consolingly
into our freezing eyes--the Sun,--transforms the blue ether around it
into a blue night, which casts a still deeper shadow of itself over the
glittering sun-face of the snow-clad earth, and man sees with yearning
eyes a night sweep across his heaven and one fissure of light, the deep
opening and street stretching away toward brighter worlds....
The past night still leads my pen. It is, namely, in Auenthal, as in
many other places, the custom, that in the last solemn night of the
year there shall be sounded out from the mouths of bugles, as it were
an echo of days that have departed, or a funeral music of the buried
year. When I heard my good Wutz with some assistants in the room below
me making some stir and a few experimental tones, I arose and went with
my sister, who had been long awake, to the narrow window. In the still
night one could hear the steps of the people going up. Above our window
lay that beam under which one must listen and look out in prophetic
night, in order to see and hear the cloudy forms of futurity. And in
fact I saw, in a literal sense, what superstition is fain to see. I
saw, as it does, coffins on roofs, and funeral trains at one door and
wedding-guests and bridal wreath at another, and a human year passed
through the village and held on its right maternal breast the little
joys which play with man, and on its left the sorrows which bark at
him; fain would it nourish both, but they fell off dying, and as often
as a sorrow or a joy withered and dropped, so often did one of the two
clappers strike its signal on the bells of the steeple.... I looked
over toward the white wood behind which lay the dwellings of my
friends, O young year, I said, repair to my friends and lay in their
arms the joys thou hast in thine, and take with thee the lingering and
tenacious sorrows of the old year, which will not die! Go into all the
four quarters of the world and distribute the sucklings of thy right
breast, and leave me only one--health!
The tones of the steeple welled out into the far moonless night, which
was a great summit sprinkled over with starry blossoms. Art thou happy
or unhappy, little Schoolmaster Wutz, that thou standest on thy tower
opposite the White Wall and a white stone of the Auenthal churchyard
and yet thinkest not whom wall and stone enclose, the same namely, who
once, in thy place, in just so still a night greeted like thee the new
year: thy father, who in his turn, just as calmly as thou blew his
bugle-blast out over the deaf and dead ears of his mouldering
kinsfolk?... More tranquil, indeed, art thou, that on this New Year's
eve thinkest on no other diminution than that of the nights; but dearer
to me is my Philippina, who here beside me lives her life over anew and
sure more seriously than the first time, and in whose bosom the heart
is not merely doing lady's work, but sometimes also rises on the swell
of emotion to feel how _little_ man is, how _much_ he comes to be, and
how truly the earth is a church-yard wall and man the detonizing
saltpetre which crystallizes upon it! Good, weeping sister, at this
moment thy brother cares not that thou to-morrow--wilt care very little
about this; at this moment he pardons it in thee and in thy whole sex,
that your hearts so often resemble precious stones, in which the
fairest colors are often found side by side with--a fly or a bit of
moss; for what can man, as he surveys and sighs over this wasting life
and its decaying possessions--what can he do better in the midst of
this feeling than love them right heartily, and cherish a true patience
with them, a true.... Let me embrace thee, Philippina, and if I should
ever fail to forgive thee, remind me of this embrace!...
My biography should now move on again; but I cannot possibly lend my
head and my hand to the work, unless I would on the spot write myself
out of the learned world into the world to come. It is better for me to
make myself merely the compositor of this history and copy off the
painful letter which Gustavus sent to his forfeited friend.
* * * * *
"Faithful, virtuous soul! Let the present dark moment, which I only
have deserved, but not thou, not torment thee long, but soon be veiled
from sight! O! fortunate, indeed, it is, that thou canst not see my
eye, nor my lips quivering with anguish, nor my shattered heart,
wherewith I now make an end to all my fair days. If thou shouldst see
me here as I sit writing, then would the tenderest soul that ever
administered solace on the earth, place itself between me and my
heaving sorrow and seek to cover and comfort me; she would cast upon me
a healing look and ask what ailed me.... Ah, good, true heart! ask it
not of me; I should have to answer: my anguish, my deathless rack, my
viper-wound is lost innocence.... Theefn would _thy_ eternal innocence
turn away affrighted and give me no consolation; I should be left lying
alone, and the sorrow would stand erect beside me with the scourge in
its hand. Ah! I could not once raise my head, to cast a forlorn look
back upon all the good hours which had departed from me in thy
person.--Ah, it is indeed so, and thou art already gone!--Amandus! does
heaven cut me off entirely from thee, and canst thou, who gavest me the
lily-hand of Beata, not see my polluted one, which belongs no more to
that purest?--All, hadst thou been still living, then should I, indeed,
have lost thee also.... O, that there can be hours here below, which
are suffered to bear the full beaker of a whole life's joy, and with
one fall to shatter it to pieces and spill the refreshing draught of
all, all years!
"Beata! now we part; thou deservest a more faithful heart than mine has
been; I deserved not thine--I have nothing left that thou couldst
love--my image in thy heart must be broken in pieces--thine abides
forever immovable in my own; but it looks upon me no longer with the
eye of love, but with a downcast eye that weeps over the place where it
resides.... Ah, Beata, I can hardly end my letter; so soon as its last
line is written, we are torn from one another, and never more hear or
know each other.--Oh, God! how little avail penitence and tears! No one
restores the hot heart of man, when there is nothing left therein, save
the great, hard sorrow, which it strives, as a volcano laboring with a
mass of rock, to cast up and out of itself, and which forever plunges
back again into the blazing kettle; nothing can heal us, nothing can
give back again to leafless man his fallen foliage; Ottomar, after all,
is right in saying that the life of man passes, like a full moon, over
nothing but nights....
"Ah well, it must needs be! Farewell, friend! Gustavus was not worthy
of the hour which thou wilt have. Thy holy heart, which he has wounded,
may an angel bind up, and bear thou it silently in the bond of
friendship! My last, joyful letter, wherein I could not content myself
with my overflowing happiness, lay in this inconsolable one, in which I
have nothing more left me, and burn them both together. Let no
officious person tell thee in future after many years, that I am still
living, that I have pressed the long grief, with which I expiate my
sunken happiness, like thorns into my forlorn bosom, and that in my sad
day of life the night comes the sooner which lies between two worlds!
When one day thy brother falls with a fairer heart upon thy breast,
tell him not, tell it not to thyself, who looked like him--and when one
day thy tearful eye rests upon the white pyramid, turn it away and
forget that I was there so happy. Ah! but I forget not, I turn not my
eyes away, and if man could die of remembrance, I would go to the grave
of Amandus and die--Beata, Beata, in no human breast wilt thou find
stronger love than mine was, though thou easily mayest stronger
virtue--but when thou hast one day found that virtue, then remember not
me, not my fall, repent not our short love, nor do him wrong who once
under the starry heaven reclined upon thy noble breast.... O, thou my,
my Beata! at the _present instant_ thou dost indeed still belong to me,
because thou dost not yet know me; at the present moment my spirit may,
with its hand upon its wounds and stains come before thine and fall
upon it and say to thee with stifled sighs: love me!... _After_ this
moment, no more.--After this moment I am _alone_, without love and
without solace--a long life stretches away before me far and void, and
there is no Thou in it----but this human life and its errors will pass
away. Death will give me his hand and lead me away--the days beyond the
earth will purify me for virtue and thee----then come, Beata, then,
when an angel shall have borne thee through thy earthly evening
twilight into the second world, then at last will a heart, broken here
below, but healed up yonder, meet thine and sink on thy bosom and yet
not die with rapture, and I shall say once more: 'Take me again,
beloved soul, I, too, am blessed!'--all earthly wounds will vanish, the
circle of Eternity will embrace and bind us together!... Ah, we must
indeed first part, and this life still continues--live longer than I,
weep less than I, and--yet do not wholly forget me.--Ah, hast thou,
then, loved me very much, thou precious one, thou whom I have trifled
away?...
"Gustavus F."
At evening while he was in the act of sealing the letter, Beata passed
in at the palace-gate. As he saw her bright form, which was so soon to
be bathed in such a flood of tears, alight from the carriage, he
started back, wrote the address, went to bed and drew the curtains, and
softly----wept. Particularly eager was he to be out of the way of the
romance-builder and stone-mason, Oefel, because his looks and tones
were nothing but ignoble triumphs of his prophetic glance; and even
Gustavus's dejection be still more ignobly counted among his own
triumphs....
Actually, I would the Devil had all the four quarters of the world and
would take them off and himself, too; for he has half got me. Few know
that he will not let me bring this biography to an end. I am now
convinced that I shall not die of apoplexy (as I lately fancied under
my frozen head-piece) nor of consumption (which was a true maggot of
the brain); but insure me against this, that I shall not be wrecked
upon a _polypus of the heart_, to which all human probability
points?--Happily I am not so obstinate as Musaeus in Weimar, who did
not believe in the existence of his, which he fed and fostered as I do
mine, with cold coffee, until the polypus choked his noble heart and
cheated him of all his birthday festivals and all his wishes for those
of his spouse. I say, I note more wisely the forerunners of polypus in
the heart; I do not conceal from myself what lies hid behind a
remittent pulse, namely, this very heart-polypus, the slow-match of
death. The cursed literary secret tribunal, the reviewing-guild, creeps
with its nooses round us good, easy simpletons, who keep on writing,
and like butterflies die in the embrace of the Muses--but not a
penny-piece, not a line, should we publish for such conscienceless
birds of prey; what thanks do I get for setting up scenes which almost
kill the scene-painter, and for writing biographical sketches which
operate upon me not much better than poisoned letters? Who knows--for I
seldom come to Scheerau now-a-days--who knows, except my sister, that
in this biographical summer-house, which will be my mausoleum, I often
paint over chambers and walls, which stop my pulse and breath to such
an extent, that some day I must be found lying dead beside my work?
Must I not, when I thus come within the electric range of death, jump
up, circulate through my chamber, and in the midst of the tenderest or
sublimest passages break off and black the boots on my feet or brush my
hat and breeches, merely that it may not take my breath away, and yet
go at it again, and in this cursed style alternate between emotion and
boot-blacking?--A curse upon you critics in a body!
To this are added also a thousand pieces of drudgery which for some
time have been pestering me all the oftener, because they somehow
perceive that the polypus will soon give me the finishing stroke, and
they will not much longer have any chance with me. My Maussenbach
lobster, who is continually taking me between his legal shears and who
thinks a poor justice has no right to die of anything else than labors,
_exofficio_,--this Egyptian task-master I will pass over; my sister and
Wutz, also, beneath me, both of whom are merry beyond all reason or
measure, and sing me almost to death. But what oppresses me, is the
oppressor of his subjects, the metallic press-work which they call our
Prince.
I came near, lately, writing myself, in a paper of exceptions, into an
honorable arrest. But here on the biographic paper I can even throw my
oranges at the crowned head without danger of imprisonment. Fie! is it
for this thou art Prince, that thou mayst be a waterspout, which sucks
up everything over which it passes into its crater? And if thou wilt
some time rob us, do it with no other hands than thine own, drive round
begging through the country from house to house and raise thyself the
regular taxes into thy carriage; but just as it has always been, our
payments, after the transit-toll which they must give into the hands of
all thy revenue-officers, arrive at last lean as far-traveled herrings
at thy coffers, so that in fact thou dost get no more out of the heavy
sums than convenient _logarithms_. Princes, like the East Indian crabs,
have _one_ gigantic pair of shears for seizing, and one dwarf-pair for
carrying the prey to the mouth.
And so is it with the whole metropolis, where everyone regards himself
as fellow-regent, and yet every one cries out at others meddling with
the administration, and that children creep under the ermine as under
the paternal dressing-gown and jointly act the father--where the
palaces of the great are built of _lapis infernalis_ [lunar caustic],
and like leprous houses eat out smaller ones--where the Minister bears
the Prince on his unfelt hand as the falconer does the falcon on his
gloved one--where one regards the vices of the people as the revels of
their superiors, and merely coat over with wax all moral carrion as the
bees do their material, instead of carrying it out of the hive, _i. e_.
where the police proposes to take the place of morals--where, as at
every court, a _moral_ figure is found to be as intolerable and stiff
as a _geometric_ one is in painting--where the devil is fully loose and
the holy spirit is in the wilderness, and where people who, in Auenthal
or elsewhere, hold crooked probes in their hand, whereby they would
fain draw out foreign bodies and splinters from the wounds of the
State, are told to their faces, they are not quite in their right
minds....
I would it were true, then I should at least be perfectly sound. After
such clump of personalities which, like so many monads, make up a body
politic, mine is too puny to be taken out and looked at. Else I could
now, after my anxieties about the State, enumerate those relating to
myself.
And yet I will communicate to the reader my agonies or seven words on
the cross, although to the very cross under which he will pity me, he
himself has helped nail me. In fact no devil concerns himself much
about my sickness. I sit here and represent to myself, out of
unrequited love to the reader, all day long, that fire may be
cried, which, like an author's stove, shall lay all my biographic
paper in ashes and perhaps the author too. I further torment myself
with imagining that this book may in the mail-coach or in the
printing-office be so spoiled, that the public shall be as good as
cheated out of the whole work, and that even after the printing it may
find its way into a baiting-house and torture-chamber, where a critical
provider and general of the reviewing order has his reviewer sitting
with their long teeth, to tear off from my tender Beata and her lover
clothes and flesh, and whose room is like that room full of spiders
which a certain Parisian kept, and which at his entrance always darted
down from the ceiling to suck the bleeding doves' feathers which he had
pulled out, and from whose operations he with great pains managed to
obtain yearly a silk stocking.... All these torments I put upon myself,
merely on the reader's account, who would be the greatest loser if he
did not have me to read; but it is all one to this hard man, what they
have to undergo who minister to his gratification. When at last I have
freed my hands from these nails of the cross, still life itself wearies
me as such a miserable tedious monochord of a thing that it must
distress every one who reckons up how often he has to draw breath and
heave his breast up and down until it stiffens, or how often before his
death he will be obliged to lift himself up on his boot-jack or stand
before his shaving-glass. I often contemplate the greatest misery in a
whole life, namely, that which results if one had to dispatch all the
shavings, frizzlings, dressings, _sedes_ in succession, which are now
scattered through a life-time. The gloomiest night-thought which broods
over my still somewhat blooming prospect, is this, that death may in
this nocturnal life, where existence and friends move like widely
sundered lights in the dark mine, snatch my precious loved ones out of
my powerless hands and lock them up forever in close coffins, to which
no mortal, but only the greatest and most invisible hand, has the
key.... For hast thou not torn so much from me already? Would I speak
of sorrow or of the vanity of life, if the gay youthful circle were not
yet broken in pieces, if the colored band of friendship, which still
fastens the earth and its enamel to man, had not yet been sawed asunder
to within one or two threads? O thou whom I even now hear weeping from
a far distance, thou art not unhappy on whose breast a beloved heart
has grown cold, but thou art so who thinkest of the corrupting element,
when thou wouldst rejoice in the love of the living friend, and who in
the most blissful embrace askest thyself: "How long shall we continue
to feel each other?"
THIRTY-NINTH, OR 1st EPIPHANY, SECTION.
Now at last the case has become desperate; my disease has taken at once
the biographical and the legal pen out of my hand, and despite all
Easter Fair's and Fatalia, it is impossible for me to put pen to paper
on any subject....
FORTIETH, OR 2d EPIPHANY, SECTION.
An attack of amaurosis, to all appearances, in addition to my other
maladies, is threatening me; for sparks, and specks, and spider-webs
dance for hours about my eyes; and these (according to Plempins and
Chevalier Zimmerman) are premonitory symptoms of the said disease.
Squinting (says Richter, the cataract-operator, not the patient--in his
Surgical Science. B. III p. 426) is an unmistakable forerunner of
amaurosis. How very much I squint, every one can see, because I always
look and aim at everything to the right and left at once. Now when I
actually become as stone-blind as a mole, then it is all up with my bit
of biographical writing....
FORTY-FIRST, OR 3d EPIPHANY, SECTION.
I have a couple of fevers at once, which with other more fortunate
persons cannot generally bear each other's company. The three-days'
fever, the quartan-fever, and then an Autumnal or Spring fever in
general. Meanwhile I will, so long as I am yet uncoffined, write
something every Sunday for the public to _read_, two or three lines at
least, if my _plan_ should _succeed_. Even my style suffers terribly;
here are the two verbs rhyming....
FORTY-SECOND, OR 4th EPIPHANY, SECTION.
Ye pleasant biographical Sundays! I shall never spend another. In
addition to the ills which I have already mentioned, there is a live
lizard has taken up his abode in my stomach, whose spawn I must have
swallowed in an unfortunate draught last summer....
FORTY-THIRD, OR 5th AND 6th EPIPHANY, SECTION.
Of cherry-stones sprouting in the stomach as well as peas in the ear,
there are examples. But I have never yet read of an instance, in which
the seed of gooseberries, which we usually swallow with the fruit, has
germinated in the bowels, when these by constipation had become the
forcing vat of the aforesaid vegetable. Good heavens! what will be the
final upshot of my malady, whose invisible claw seizes, cramps,
distends, rends asunder my nerves and my vitals...!