Sunday Morning.--Open Table.--Tempest.--Love.
What a Sunday!--To-day is Monday. I know no means of discharging
myself, I who (as we all have by our insulation), have become an
electrophorus of joy, except by writing, unless, indeed, I should
dance. Gustavus makes himself heard over here: he has for a conductor a
harpsichord and plays on it. The harpsichord will lighten this section
for me and fling out to me many sparks of thought. I have often wished
only to be rich enough to keep (as the Greeks did) a fellow of my own
who should make music as long as I was writing. Heavens! what _opera
omnia_ would bloom out! The world would at least experience the
pleasurable result, that whereas, hitherto, so many pieces of poetical
patchwork (_e. g_. the Medea) have become the occasion of musical
masterpieces, the case would be reversed, and that musical blanks would
produce poetical prizes.
Yesterday, before day, we rose from our beds, I and my musical
_souffleur_. "We must," I said to him, "stir round out of doors four
good hours before we go to church."--Namely, to _Ruhestatt_, where the
excellent Herr Buerger of Grossenhayn[92] was to appear as invited
preacher. So said, so done. Up to this hour I know not whether to
prefer a tepid summer night or a cold summer morning: in the former the
melted[93] heart dissolves in longing; the latter consolidates the
glowing heart to joy and steels its throbbings. In order to reproduce
our four hours one would have to bring together the minutes from a
hundred summer-houses and hunting-lodges, and even then the description
would limp. Morning twilight is to the day what spring is to summer,
evening twilight to the night, autumn to winter. We saw and heard
and smelt and felt, how one bit of the day gradually woke up after
another--how the morning passed over lawn and garden and perfumed them
like the morning-chambers of the great with flowers and blossoms--how
it opened (so to speak) all windows, that a cooling draught of air
might sweep through the whole theatre--how every throat woke every
other and invited it into the breezy heights, that they might, with
intoxicated bosom, soar to meet the low and rising sun and sing him a
welcome--how the changeable sky ground and melted a thousand colors and
touched and painted its drapery of clouds.... So far had the morning
advanced, when we were still walking in the dewy vale. But when we
passed out from its eastern gate into an immense meadow mosaically laid
out with growing garlands and stirring foliage, whose soft wave-line
sank into deeps and flowed up into heights, so as to keep its charms
and flowers moving upward and downward--when we stood before all
this--then uprose the storm of bliss and of the living day, and the
east wind moved along beside it, and the great sun stood and throbbed
like a heart in heaven and set all streams and drops of life whirling
around him.
(Gustavus plays at this moment more softly, and his tones arrest my
breath which passes over more and more easily into hypochondriacal
intensity.)
Now when the mill of Creation roared and stormed with all its wheels
and streams, in our sweet intoxication we hardly cared to go on,
everywhere we were delighted; we were rays of light, broken on their
way by every medium; we journeyed with the bee and the ant and followed
every fragrance to its very source, and walked around every tree; every
creature was a pole-star that led our needle into deflections and
inflections. We stood in a circle of villages, whose roads were all
bringing out joyous churchgoers and whose bells were ringing in the
holy fair. At last we too followed the devout pilgrimage and entered
the cool Ruhestatt church.
If a _maitre de plaisirs_ should draw up for a Prince a plan of
decoration for an opera-house, to consist of a rising sun, a thousand
Leipsic larks, twenty ringing bells, whole meadows and floras of silken
flowers, the Prince would say, it cost too much~-but the master of
pleasures should reply, costs a walk--or a crown, say I, because such
an entertainment requires not the Prince, but the man.
In the church I seated myself on the organ-stool in order to fire off
the clumsy organ, to the astonishment of most of the souls present.
When Gustavus stepped into a pew of the nobility, there sat in the
opposite one--Beata; for she was as fond of a sermon as other maidens
are of a dance. Gustavus bent down with drooping eyes and rising
blushes before her and was deeply touched by the pale, afflicted form,
which once had glowed before him. She was equally affected by his, on
which she read all the mournful recollections which had been on either
his or her soul. Their four eyes turned back again from the object of
love to that of the general attention, Herrn Brueger of Grossenhayn. He
began--I had intended, as temporary organist, not to give heed to
him at all--a chorister makes as little out of a sermon as a man of
_ton_;--but Herr Brueger with his first words preached the singing-book,
in which I was going to read, out of my hands. He took for his theme
the forgiveness of human faults--how hard men were on one side and how
frail on the other; how surely, too, and how bloodily every fault
avenged itself upon man, and like a hairworm ate its way through him
whom it inhabited; and how little reason, therefore, another had to
exercise the judicial office of inexorableness; how little merit there
was in forgiving faults of heedlessness, little or venial errors, and
now very much all merit centered in the overlooking of such faults as
reasonably exasperated us, etc. When at last he pointed to the
blessedness of love to man, then did the burning and streaming eyes of
Gustavus unconsciously rest on Beata's countenance; and when, finally,
their eyes, directed toward the preacher, filled with the true solvent
of joy and sorrow, and when, during the drying of them, she turned to
Gustavus, then did they open upon each other mutually their eyes and
their innermost being; the two disembodied souls gazed full into each
other and a moment of the tenderest enthusiasm flying over chained
their eyes together by a spell.... But suddenly they sought the old
place again, and Beata's remained fixed upon the pulpit.
I cannot assert whether he, Herr Brueger, has yet inserted this
practical discourse in his printed volume; nevertheless, this
commendation shall not prevent my confessing that his sermons, however
good in themselves, are perhaps wanting in the proper soporific power,
a defect which one perceives in reading as well as in hearing. I will
here, for the benefit of other clergymen, interpolate some extra pages
upon the false style of church architecture.
_Extra lines on the false architecture of Churches_.
I have already delivered this lecture before the Consistory and the
building inspector; but it had no effect. We and they all know that
every church, a cathedral as well as a chapel of ease, has to care for
the head or _brain_ of the diocese, _i. e_., for its _sleep_, because,
according to Brinkmann, nothing strengthens the former so much as the
latter. It were ridiculous if I should set to work to elaborate the
point, that this disorganizing sleep can be induced in a cheaper way
and for fewer pence and less opium, than it is done among the Turks;
for our opium, like quicksilver, is rubbed in outwardly and applied
mainly at the ears. Now, no one knows so well as I what has been
already done in the whole matter. As in Constantinople (according to De
Tott) there are special baths and seats for opium eaters, but only near
the Mosques; so with us they are actually in them and are called
church pews. Further, regular _night-lamps_ burn on the altar. The
window-panes have in Catholic temples, glass paintings, which answer
for shade as well as window-curtains. Sometimes the columns are so
arranged or multiplied that they help toward that darkening of the
church which is such a promoter of sleep. As the sleeping-chambers in
France have only dull and dead colors, so in the great canonical
dormitory is at least so much provision made for sleeping, that those
parts of the church at least on which the eye chiefly rests: altar,
preacher, chorister, and pulpit, are painted black. It will be seen
that I omit no good point, and if I censure it is in no censorious
spirit.
But still much is wanting to make a temple a true dormitory. I have in
Italy and even in Paris, stood (I might say _lain_) in many theater
boxes, which were rationally arranged and furnished; one could in them
(for everything was provided for the purpose) sleep, play, eat, and--so
forth.... One had his female friends with him also. Now this the great
folks have been accustomed to; how shall one expect them to go to
church and sleep there when their money can procure them all friends
sooner than sleep? With the _tiers etat_, with poor and burghers, even
with the college of burgomasters, which wears itself out through the
week with voting, it is no wonder, of course, that it should be easy
enough to induce them to fall asleep in any pew, in any loft; I do not
deny it; but the libertine, the sleeper on eider-down, will not (even
were a Consistorial Counsellor preaching) sleep on any back seat; he
therefore prefers not to go to church at all. For such people of _ton_
regular church-beds must therefore be made up in the boxes, so that the
thing may succeed; just as gaming-tables, eating-tables, ottomans,
_female friends_, and the like, are such indispensable things in a
court-chapel, that they might better be left out in any other place
than there.
One may therefore without offending me and the truth, call it no
flattery if I contend that nothing but the stupid church architecture
and the want of all house and kitchen utensils, all beds, etc., is to
blame, and not the well and philosophically or mystically elaborated
sermons of clever court university--barrack--Vesper-preachers, that
people of rank are able to sleep in them far less than one hopes to.
_End of the Extra Pages_.
After church we all met in the vestry. I pass over trivialities and
come at once to the point, that we all withdrew in a body and that
Gustavus gave his arm to our fair Dauphiness and took hers. It was a
quiet walk under the festal sun and beneath the blossoms of the bushes.
The finery of the female peasantry, the wainscoted foreheads, the front
locks stretched across them like the hairs of the fiddle-bow, the
frocks lying one over another in layers, like the skins of an onion,
all this, together with their laughing faces prefigured Sunday to us
more vividly than whole parueres of city dames could. On Sunday, too, I
find much more beautiful faces than on the six work days which disguise
everything in smut.
The conversation must have been indifferent, I think, even at the
forget-me-not. Beata, namely, found one lying in the grass, and ran up
to it and--lo, it was made of silk: "Oh, it's a false one," said she.
"Only a dead one," said Gustavus, "but a durable." Among persons of a
certain refinement everything easily turns to allusion! Good nature is
therefore indispensable to them, that they may infer no allusions but
kindly ones. Nothing delighted me so much all through the little
pilgrimage as the feeling that I was the back-ground and fair wind that
followed them; for if I had gone ahead I should have failed to see the
most beautiful gait in which the most beautiful female soul that ever
was manifested itself through the body--Beata's. Nothing is more
characteristic than a woman's gait, especially when it has to be
accelerated.
In the vale we found, beside shade and noontide, something still finer,
Doctor Fenk. He had arranged a little dinner-_concert_-_spirituel_
among the flowers, where we all, like princes and players, kept open
table, but only before seated and musical spectators, the birds. We
made no complaint, that occasionally a blossom fluttered down into the
saucepan, or a leaf into the vinegar cruet, or that a puff of wind blew
the powdered sugar sidewise out of the sugar-bowl; _per contra_, the
greatest _plat de menage_, Nature, lay around our joyous table, and we
were ourselves a part of the show-dish. Fenk said, as he played with a
branch which he had drawn down: "Our table had at least one advantage
over the tables of the great world, that the guests at ours knew each
other, whereas the great ones in Scheerau and Italy, _i. e_., feasted
more people than they became acquainted with; as in the fat of the
animal which was so much abhorred and irritated by the Jews mice lived,
without the creatures noticing it."
A physician may be ever so delicate in expression, he is so only to the
mind of physicians.
During the coffee my dear Pestilentiary asserted that all pots, like
coffee-pots, chocolate-pots, tea-pots, pitchers, etc., had a
physiognomy which was too little studied; and if Melancthon[94] had
been the missionary and cabinet preacher of pots, still they stood in
need of a Lavater.
He had once known a coffee-pot in Holland, the nose of which was so
faint and flat, its profile so shallow and Dutch, that he told the
ship's-physician with whom he was drinking, there certainly must be
just as miserable a soul in that pot, or all physiognomy was mere wind;
on pouring it out, he found the stuff was not fit to drink. He said, in
his own house, not a milk pitcher was bought of which he had not at
first, as Pythagoras did of his pupils, made a physiognomical
inspection.
"To whom have we to ascribe it," he went on in his humorous enthusiasm,
"that around our faces and figures not so many lines of beauty are
described as around the Greek,--unless it be to the cursed tea-pots and
coffee-pots, which often have hardly human conformation, and which
nevertheless our women gaze at all through the week and thereby copy in
their children? The Greek women, on the other hand, were watched only
by beautiful statues, nay, the Spartan women had the _likenesses_ of
fair youths hung up even in their sleeping-chambers."--(I must however
say in justification of many hundred dames, that they certainly do the
same with the _originals_, and that something is to be done even in
that way.)--
As in this family-spectacle I have respect for no Goddess but that of
Truth; I cannot sacrifice her even to my sister, although her sex and
her youth place her, too, among the Goddesses. It vexes me, that it
will not vex her, to read herself here _printed_ and _censured_,
because she makes more account of the gain to her vanity by the
printing, than of the loss to her pride by the censure.
Pride is in our strategic century the most faithful patron-saint and
guardian of female virtue. No one, to be sure, will require me to name
publicly the ladies of my acquaintance who would certainly like Milan
(according to Keissler) have been besieged forty times and taken
twenty, had they not been bravely proud, nay, had not one of them, in a
single evening full of dances, been proud two and a half times; but I
could not name her, if I would.
Thou teachest me, dear Philippina, that the noblest feelings do not
always exclude vanity, and that, except the business of loving thee, I
can have no better than that of scolding thee--and thy medical adviser,
Fenk, too, who indulges toward thee in too great a degree his reckless
humor; fortunately she is still at an age, when maidens always love the
one they have talked with longest, and when their heart, like the
magnet, lets the old iron drop, when one applies to it a new one.
Beata and Gustavus touched each other's sore souls like two
snow-flakes; even in the voice and in the movement was pictured a
tender, forbearing, honorable, self-sacrificing reserve. O if even the
denials of coquetry itself give so much, how much more must the present
ones of virtue give!
The afternoon had sped away on the wings of the butterflies, which
sought by our side their lower flowers; the conversation like the eyes,
increased in interest, and we sauntered (or shall I write
sawntered?)[95] along on the terraced alley which winds round the
mountain like a girdle and in which the eye can pass over the hedges of
the vale into the pastures. Toward the west a tempest strode across the
heavens with its thunder-tread and hung its bier-cloth of black cloud
over the sun. The country looked like the life of a great but unhappy
man; one mountain glowed under the sun's fiery glance, the other
darkled under the descending night of a cloud--over in the western
region there pealed forth in the heavens instead of the song of birds
the heavenly pedal, the thunder, and in rows of white water-columns the
warm rain came down from heaven and filled again its flower-cups and
summits out of which it had ascended--it was to the soul as solemn as
if a throne were set up for God and all were waiting for him to come
down and sit thereon.
Gustavus and Beata, swallowed up in this heaven, went forward on the
terrace; the Doctor, my sister, and I at a little distance behind them.
At last single rain drops pattered down on the foliage of the alley,
which flew and fell over us out of the border of the broad storm-cloud;
thus does a thundering, lightning-flashing calamity of a neighborhood
only sprinkle the distant lands with a few tears, that steal from the
eye of sympathy. We all betook ourselves to the shelter of the nearest
trees. Gustavus and Beata stood, for the first time, again in many
months, alone beside each other, without ear-witnesses, though with
eye-witnesses not far off. They faced the west and were silent. There
are situations, in which man feels himself too great to start a
conversation, or to be polite or to make allusions. Both remained mute,
till Gustavus in the hottest solstice of his emotions turned round from
the deluged western country toward the eyes of Beata--hers raised
themselves slowly and openly to his and the lips beneath them remained
quiet and her soul was with no one but God and virtue.
The cloud had emptied itself and disappeared. The Doctor had to hurry
home. No one could break from his blissful silence. In this perfect
silence we had all come down the terrace--and everything had already
gone from under its leafy umbrella--when, all at once, the low sun
blazed through the black cloud canopy and rent it asunder, and flung
the funereal veil of the tempest far back and gleamed over us and over
the glistening thickets and every fiery bush.... All birds screamed,
all human creatures were mute--the earth became a sun--the heavens
trembled tearfully over the earth for joy and embraced her with hot,
immeasurable rays of light.
The landscape burned around us in the heavenly rain of fire; but our
eyes saw it not and hung blindly on the great sun. In the effort
to set the heart free from blood and joy, Gustavus's hand sank into
Beata's--he knew not what he took--she knew not what she gave--and
their present feelings were exalted far above insignificant refusals.
At last the thunder-beset sun laid himself down like a philosopher
under the cool earth, his evening glow calmly reposed under the flashes
of the retiring tempest, he seemed like a soul gone to God and a clap
of thunder followed his death.
Twilight came on.... Nature was a mute prayer.... Man stood more
sublime therein, like a sun; for his heart apprehended the speech of
God.... But when that language comes into the heart and it grows too
great for its breast and its world, then does the great genius whom it
thinks and loves breathe the tranquillizing love of humanity into the
stormy bosom and the infinite lets himself be tenderly loved by us in
the person of the finite....
Gustavus felt the hand which pulsed in his and struggled to escape
from it--he held it more faintly and looked back into the loveliest
eyes--his own begged Beata in an infinitely touching manner for
forgiveness of the past days and seemed to say: "O! in this blissful
hour take my last sorrow away also!"--And now when, in a tone that was
as much as a good deed, he asked softly: "Beata?" and when he could say
no more and she turned her blushing face to the earth and ceased to
draw her hand out of his, and with deep emotion looked up again and
showed him the tear that said to him: "I will forgive thee;" then the
two souls which were still greater than the nature around them became
two angels and they felt the heaven of the angels; they stood silent,
lost in endless gratitude and rapture. At length, agitated with
reverent joy, he took her trembling arm and joined us.
The Sabbath closed with silent thoughts, silent raptures, silent
recollections and a still rain out of _all_ discharged tempests.