Chapter XIII: Part 13

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.

THIRTY-SIXTH, OR II ADVENT, SECTION.

Conic Sections of the Bodies of Eminent Persons.--Birthday-Drama.--
Rendezvous (or, as Campe Expresses it, "Make Your Appearance") in
the Looking-glass.

In the causeway to the new palace Beata feared she should find there her Gustavus; in the palace itself she wished the contrary, so soon as she heard he was in the Place of Rest. Her mother, while with her assistance she partly cut down, partly over-completed regiments of robes, mantles, etc., had meantime proved to her this much, that Beata was deceived by her _own_ feelings and that the paradise of her most innocent love was, according to her _maternal_ feeling, desperately bad, and, in fact, a Pontine marsh--the blossoming trees thereon were upas trees--the flower-carpet consisted partly of poisonous copper, partly of false porcelain flowers--on the grass banks therein one caught cold by sitting, and the gentle rocking of the enchanted ground was an earthquake. This forewarning against the oath _after_ the oath of love might yet be heard; but when she went on to object Beata's youth--the most common, most simple, most ineffectual, and most exasperating objection to a live feeling--this began to weaken the slight impression of her week-day sermon, which the _practical application_ entirely washed away; namely, that her father had already half and half chosen for her the object of her affections.... My manor-lady was very clever; but when she undertook to please my manor-lord, she was also very stupid.

Beata therefore brought with her over the causeway to Gustavus a heart which this dissection had made extremely soft and tender, and he, too, came with one of those wounded ones, on which not a trace of a callus longer remains. Ottomar's sermons-of-Solomon upon and against life had filled his veins and arteries with an infinite longing to love poor perishable human beings, and with his two arms, before they fell to the earth, to draw and press the fairest heart to his bosom, ere it sank under the earthly clods. Love fastens its parasitical roots to all other feelings.

It was time they came, on account of Herr von Oefel. For at Court one missed them, and in fact anyone, very little. A Russian Prince von * * *--a mestizzo and deponent between courtier and beast, whose visible extremes ended in the invisible extremes of culture and savageness--had been there, together with a herd of Frenchmen and Italians, who as a body had, like their head-master, the common-place singularity of the great world, that they--were not _whole_; for a man of the world now-a-days nothing is harder than not to make of his person what I properly make in my biography--a sector or section. In fact, this fragmentary division looked like a phalanx of cripples on their journey to a wonder-worker. Of the principal members which we do not recover at the resurrection, _e. g_., hair, stomach, flesh, etc.,[82]--whence, of course, the great Connor can easily demonstrate that a risen Christian will turn out no longer than a gad-fly--of such members the amputated Junta had already before the resurrection wholly, or in great part, relieved themselves.

I have often reflected upon the question, why the great folks do this and make them in a physical sense the small; but I was too ignorant to guess any other reasons than the following: The seat of anger (which, according to Winckelmann, the Greeks held to be the nose), cannot decay soon enough, because neither a courtier nor a Christian should show anger. Secondly, diminutive bodies are little different from crooked ones, even in size; but the latter, as we see in Esop, Pope, Scarron, Lichtenberg and Mendelssohn, have much wit. Now the man of the world ingeniously draws off the _spirit_ out of the strong vessels of our progenitors into little corporeal bottles, and such sections and optical abridgements and _electorates_ of the body make it impossible to be otherwise than witty, or at most stupid; so a flute which has become _cracked_, can give out no other tones but _fine_ and _high_ ones. But in the great world wit is notoriously prized, if not more, certainly not less than immorality. Thirdly, as the old patriarchs received a _long_ life in order that they might people the earth, so with the same design have these cosmopolites proposed to themselves a _short_ one, and cheerfully purchased the life of other beings by a Curtius'-leap into the fatal abyss. But it may still be questioned whether I am right. The fourth reason I learn from certain secret and mystic societies, whence these very segments of humanity have themselves derived it. Now-a-days every soul of rank must be _disorganized_ and _disembodied_. For this now there are only two entirely different operations. The shortest and worst, in my opinion, is for a man--to hang himself, and for the soul thus to separate the body from itself like a wen. I should not blame any great man for this, did I not know that he has in view the far better and easier operation, whereby he can detach his body, as if it were the mould wherein the spiritual statue is cast, piece by piece. I will not fall here into the fault of brevity, but rather into the opposite. Thus, the body is, according to philosophers, who have also a soul, merely an instrument for developing their own and ours, and accustoming them to the renunciation of this instrument. The soul must gradually nibble off all the threads that bind it to the clod. This is to the soul what the cork cuirass[83] is to children learning to swim: it must seek daily to lessen this cuirass and finally to swim without it. The philosophic man of the world and the fellow of secret _deorganizing societies_ at first therefore puts off of this swimming-panoply only the flesh on his legs and cheek-bones. Thus far little is done. Thereupon he burns away in a _furnace-fire_ nerves and other stuff, because they have withstood the _kitchen-fire_. The hair or human fur every one gets rid of without difficulty. The most important step in this cuirass-reduction is this, that one can without Origen's razor effect as much as he did--only more gently. When this is done, one is not far from that perfect extinction, in which the whole cuirass is clean gone and the soul has learned at last to swim in the sea of existence, without the necessity of having on even so much of the swimming dress as one needs to cork a bottle. After that one is buried. Thus at least they set forth in secret societies of _ton_ the process of human disembodiment.

This broken society covered our and every court as beautifully as broken porcelain vessels do Dutch garden beds; secondly, it had the politest way in the world of being coarse. If a certain _je ne sais quoi_ did not constitute the difference in this gentry between humor and coarseness, between politeness and impudence, then there was none at all.

I said above that it was time our couple arrived, on Herr von Oefel's account. For the birthday _fete_ of the Lady Resident was drawing near, and yet not a soul had memorized a page of his part. The reader, too, has quite as little of the birthday drama in his head as the players; therefore a thin decoction of this plant of Oefel's shall be set before him.

* * * * *

_Decoction from the Birthday Drama_.

"In a French village were two sisters, so good that each deserved to be the Rose-girl, and so disinterested that each wished the other to be. The day before the distribution of the prize-medal of roses they contended together who should--reject it; for they knew from good authority that to one of them alone the rose-crown would fall. Jeanne--played by the Minister's Lady--slipped away from under the leafy crown by the pretty conceit that she had her lover, _Perrin_--represented by Oefel--too often and too openly about her to entitle her to be a rose-competitor. Marie (Beata's part) could not therefore, it seemed, avert the crown from her head; however she begged her brother Henri (that was Gustavus) who was particularly fond of her, and who since his childhood had been away from their home on his travels,--she begged him to get her the victory in this disinterested rivalry. He sought to persuade her to the opposite victory; but at last, seeing the inexorableness of her sisterly love so decided, he promised, for a proper reward,--to spare her own feelings. 'But thou must have still greater love for me,' he said;--'a sister's,' said she;--'a still stronger,' said he;--'the most friendly affection,' said she;--'a far stronger yet,' said he;--'there cannot be a greater,' said she;--'O surely! I am not really thy brother,' said he, and with love-intoxicated eyes fell flown before her and gave her a paper, which relieved her of her former error and plunged her instead into a little swoon of joy. They all four appeared before the lord of the manor and crown-bestower (the Prince played this part even on the--boards) and each anticipated his choice by a petition and eulogy for her sister, and by neat invectives upon herself. The coquettish wight, Perrin, inquired: Could love need other roses than her own?--Marie gave a flying delineation of the merits to which such a coronation belonged, and which were in fact fine traits from the image of the Bouse. His Lordship said: 'This sisterly impartiality, which is as much to be admired as the merits which it seeks to reward, deserved two rose-crowns, one to receive, and one to confer, as a reward;' (no one, remarked Oefel seemingly in flattery of the ladies, but really of the Prince, more fitly distributes crowns than he who himself wears them and they would be distinguished from him in nothing but _impartiality_ and beauty, if they in his place should happily choose as he would, upon whom the rose-wreath, ere the butterfly flew from it)--(one of the brilliants had been stuck with an egrette into the largest rose)--should be placed.... 'Upon our Rose Queen!' cried the sisters, and presented the crown to the lady Resident."

So far the Drama. To Oefel nothing was more agreeable and felicitous than the foil afforded by flattery bestowed on another. For the rest his piece looked like an idyl of Fontanelle's. The fancy that is to please people ground thin by culture must sparkle, but not burn; must tickle, but not move the heart; the boughs of such a fancy are not bowed down by the heavy mass of _fruits_, but by the weight of _snow_. In such court-poets and in _earwigs_ the wings are, one may say, invisible and minute, but both find more easily the way to the ear. In German poems there is nothing; on the contrary most of the French smell not of the study lamp and economical light, but rather of perfumed garters, gloves, etc., and the less they have in them that interests man, so much the more they have that charms the man of the world, because they no longer depict Nature and Heaven and Hell, but one or two salons, and so not without ingenuity draw themselves back into narrower and narrower windings of the snail-house.

Oefel was at once theatre-poet, player and writer of the parts. He gave prominence in the drama to the role of Beata, which he had, with the most delicate allusions to their mutual understanding (he thought), or to his individual understanding (I think), set forth to the world. The most delicate hints he had disguised in those passages where he and Beata played together. He drew, therefore, in the transcribing, under many a fine declaration of love, or kindred sentiment, an exegetic line, and figured intelligently his thoroughbass. "The cunning jade will read this over a thousand times," he said to himself.

Thereupon, soon after her arrival he handed her her part, with far more respectful shyness than he was himself aware. Unfortunately for our good dramatizing poltroon, Beata fell into two faults at once, for a reason. The reason simply was, that Cupid had set up in her heart his laboratory and put in his chemical stoves and all; hence must needs arise her first fault, that she looked more beautiful than formerly without this glow; for every emotion and every inner conflict assumed on her face the form of a charm. From love came also her second mistake, that she demeaned herself to-day towards Oefel far more familiarly and frankly than usual; for a maiden who is in love has, in regard to other objects (_i. e_., from her own feelings in regard to them) nothing more to fear. But Herr von Oefel figured out on his parchment a quite different result; he took all as a sign of joy, that he was now again--to be had. He went on accordingly with a heart which Cupid had shot as full with his Lilliputian arrows as a pin-cushion with needles.

He said that very day: "When once the heart of a woman is so wide open, one has nothing to do, but just let her do." That was a charming thing for him; for it saved him--what might cause him some scruples--the trouble of inveigling her. As often as he read Lovelace's or the Chevalier's[84] letters, he wished his simple conscience would allow him to lead away a perfectly innocent and resisting maiden after a fine plan. But his conscience would hear no reason, and he was obliged to confine his piratical or privateering pleasures to the beguiling of such innocent persons as he caused to act in his head or in his romance; to such a degree, in weak people, does feeling prevail over the decisions of reason, even in philosophical women. Consequently Oefel's knowledge of women left him only the power of laying snares, not for innocence, but for guilt, and the only thing in which he could labor with renown was to be the seducer of seductresses.

Allow me to make a shrewd observation. The distinction between _Lovelace_ and the _Chevalier_ is the moral difference between their nations and decades. The Chevalier is a devil with such a philosophic coldness that he is to be ranked among those devils of Klopstock's, who cannot be converted. Lovelace, on the contrary, is a quite different man, a mere vain Alcibiades, whom a position in the State or a nuptial one might half amend. Even then, when his inexorableness to imploring, wrestling, weeping, kneeling innocence seems to give him a nearer likeness to models from hell, he softened his hypocritical blackness by a stroke of art which does some credit to his own conscience and the greatest honor to the genius of the poet, namely, that by way of beautifying his inexorableness, he regards the actual object of compassion, the kneeling, etc., Clarissa, as a theatrical, picturesque work of art, and in order not to be affected will not observe the bitterness of her tears, but only her beauty; not the distress, but only the picturesqueness of her attitude. In this way one can take pleasure in hardening himself against anything; hence _beaux esprits_, painters and their connoisseurs often have no tears or too many for _actual_ misery, for the mere reason that they regard it as _artistic_.

But I must hasten on more speedily to the festal day of the Resident Lady, whose web touches and entangles our Gustavus with so many kinds of threads.

He committed to memory with great delight his part in the Drama, of which much will yet have to be said, and wished nothing, except that he did not yet know it by heart. Beata had the same feeling about hers: the reason was, that their parts on the stage were directed to each other, consequently their thoughts, now, were so, too; and for the shy Beata it was especially delicious, that she could with good conscience memorize tender thoughts of love for him, which she hardly dared to have, not to say express. In order not to be always thinking of him, she often diverted her mind by the labor of learning by heart the aforesaid part. Good soul! try always to deceive thyself; it is better to will it, than not to care about it at all! Her adoptive brother had hitherto been utterly unable to devise any way of meeting her; the Resident Lady had forgotten him and thereby the means of bringing it about, in her attention to the Russian section and torso; he himself had not persistency enough, still less the dignity which would make it piquant and charming--till Herr von Oefel said to him with a significant expression of countenance, that the Lady Resident wished to have him see some pictures which Knaese had left there. "Yes, I have been wanting this long time to begin copying in the cabinet," said he, and deceived hardly anyone except himself. Noticing his blush of confusion, Oefel said to himself: "I know all, my dear man!"

At last a fine forenoon brought the two souls, that could more easily find each other than their bodies could, together at the Lady Resident's. The light of day, their previous separation, the new situation, and love, made all the charms of both new, all their features fairer, and their heaven greater than their expectations--but do not look at each other too much, nor yet too little, for they are glancing at your glances! Well, do it as much as you like; thou canst not hide it from a Bouse, Gustavus, that thine eye which is not contracted by penetration, but opened wide with love, always detains itself among objects in the neighborhood of one at whom it would fain steal side glances;--nor does it help thee, Beata, that thou avoidest more than usual standing near him or giving him occasion for his voice and cheeks to be his traitors! It availed thee, naught, as thou thyself sawest, to seek to escape the repetition of the _idolo del mio_ at his arrival; for did not the Lady Resident beg him to glide after thy voice with his fingers on the harpsichord, and to publish his inner storm of joy by the gleam of the eye and the pressure of the keys and the sins against time? Those of my readers who have frizzled or served or spoken with the Resident Lady, or actually loved her, can testify for me against other readers, that among other mantel-ornaments of her toilette-chamber--inasmuch as the grandees like nothing but finery to eat, occupy, wear, sit on and sleep on--there were also Swiss scenes, and among these a tragacanth copy of the hermitage-mountain; this Olympus of joy, before the eyes of Gustavus, Beata's could no longer climb, often as they had formerly shone upon this very mountain--at last the eyes of both grew moist, when the name of Amandus rang through both of them, with a sweeter and livelier emotion than one feels for a departed soul. In short, like all lovers, they would have betrayed themselves less, if they had concealed themselves less. The Lady Resident seemed to-day, what she always seemed; she had in her power a still, thoughtful, not impassioned dissimulation, and one saw not on her face the false looks chase away the true ones. The finest picture in the collection left by the Russian was not at home, but under the copying-paper of the Prince.

So dumb and yet so near was Gustavus compelled to remain _vis-a-vis_ with his beloved; with only three words, with only a passing pressure of the hand; oh, if he only knew how to discharge his soul electrified with emotions!--Why do we long to transfer all our feelings from our own hearts into another's?--And why has the dictionary of sorrow so many quires, and that of rapture and of love so few leaves?--Only a tear, a pressure of the hand and a singing voice the genius of the universe gave to love and to rapture and said: "Speak with these!"--But had Gustavus's love a tongue, when (during a seven seconds' turning aside of the Resident Lady) in the looking-glass, to which he sat opposite at the harpsichord, with his thirsting eyes he kissed the hovering image of his dear songstress--and when the image looked upon him--and when the shy image under the fire-stream of his eyes shut its eyelids--and when he suddenly wheeled round toward the near original of the colored shadow that was looking away again, and as he sat there penetrated with his love into the drooping eye of his friend standing by him, and when in a moment which languages cannot paint, he dared not pour himself out in _one_, not so much as in one sound?--For there are moments when the treasure upraised, out of the depths of another's soul sinks back again, and disappears in the innermost recesses, if one speaks--nay, in which the tender, tremulous, swimming, burning picture of the whole soul can hardly protect itself _in_ or _beneath_ the transparent eye, as the fading pastel-form does under the glass....

For this reason he did just right in my view, to sit down at home and compose his love-letter forthwith. By such an insurance-policy of the heart the biographer has always in a proper sense deeded his love. But when Gustavus had finished it, he knew not how he should insinuate it, by what penny-post. He carried it round with him so long that at last he grew dissatisfied with it--then he wrote a new and better one and again carried that round until he had written the best one, which I will insert in the next section. I take this opportunity to announce to the public for next Easter my "expeditious and always ready love-letter-writer," which all parents should procure for their children. Apropos! The fur courier's-boot and the mustard-plaster and the icy-crown have happily sent the blood into my feet, and left no more in my head than it needs, in order to draw up agreeable abstracts or extracts for a German people.

THIRTY-SEVENTH, OR CHRISTMAS-EVE, SECTION.

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.