Chapter VIII: Part 8

"Dear Philippina:--I have delayed all this time in order to write you a real lively letter. But, Philippina, this is not one. My heart lies in my breast as in an ice-house and trembles all day long; and yet you were so happy here, and never sad except at our leave taking, which lasted almost as long as our stay together: am I, perhaps, to blame for this? I think so very often when I see the laughing faces around the Resident Lady, or when she herself speaks, and I imagine myself in her place, and fancy how I must appear to her with my silence and my speeches. I dare not think any more on the hopes of my solitude, so sorely am I shamed by the superior advantages of other people's society. And when a part which is too great for me to play of course oppresses me, I know no way of raising myself up again, except by creeping away into the Still Land. Then and there I have sweeter moments, and often my eyes suddenly run over, because there everything seems to love me, and because there the tender flower and the innocent bird do not humiliate me, but respect my love. There I see the spirit of the mourning Princess make its lonely pilgrimage through her works, and I walk with her and feel what she feels, and I weep even sooner than she. When I stand beneath the brightest and bluest day, then I gaze yearningly up at the sun, and after that round about the horizon and think: 'Ah! when thou hast gone down thy arch, thou hast shone on no spot of earth on which I could be wholly happy until thy evening glow; and when thou art down and the moon comes up, she too finds that it is not much thou hast given me.' Dearest friend, do not take it ill of me that I use this tonic; ascribe it to a malady, which always comes to me preceded by this _avant courier_. O, could I chain thee to me with my arm, then perhaps I should not be so. Happy Philippina! from whose mouth wit already flutters forth again smiling, even when the eye above it is still full of water; as the solitary balsam poplar in our park breathes out spicy perfumes, while warm rain drops still fall from it. All forsake me, even images; a dumb, dead picture behind a glass door was the only brother whom I had to love. You cannot feel what you have or I miss--this time even his reflection departs from me, and I have nothing left of my beloved brother, no hope, not a letter, not a likeness. I have missed this portrait, indeed, only since my return from Maussenbach; but perhaps it has been gone still longer, for I had hitherto merely to arrange my things; perhaps I myself packed it up among the books which I gave you. You will let me know, I am well aware. In our house there was a second, somewhat less faithful, likeness of my brother, but that has been missing for a long time," etc.

* * * * *

Very naturally! for old Roeper had sold it at public auction, because it was that of Gustavus. But we will follow our two friends again into the _Still Land_.

They had to go by the old palace, which, like an Adam's-rib, had hatched out the new one; which, in its turn, had sent forth new watershoots--a Chinese cottage, a bathing-house, a garden-saloon, a billiard-room, etc. In the new palace dwelt the Resident Lady von Bouse, who did not admire this architectural feature twice in the whole year. Behind the second rear extension of the palace the English garden began with a French, which the Princess had let stand, by way of utilizing the contrast, or of avoiding that which an angular gala-palace assumes by the side of patriarchal Nature in her pastoral attire. Any one who cared not to go by the two palaces could reach the park through a pine grove, coming first into a cloister, of which the old Prince and his favorite chamberlain had been the fathers. Neither of them had been alone half a day in all their lives, except when they were lost on a hunt or _otherwise_; hence they wanted for once to be alone, and therefore--(what cared they if they did perpetrate a plagiarism and a copy of the former Baireuth Eremitage?)--they placed nine small houses first on paper, then on a table, and finally on the earth, or rather nine moss-grown cords of wood. In these puzzle-houses of hollow logs there was lodged Chinese furniture, gold and a live courtier, somewhat as in living trunks of trees one is astonished to come suddenly upon a live toad, because one does not see where the creature's hole is. The logs enclosed a cloister which--as not a soul in the whole court had any disposition to be a living hermit--was committed to a wooden one, who silently and sensibly sat therein and meditated and reflected as much as is possible for such a man to do. They had provided the Anchorite with some ascetic works from the Scheerau school-library, which suited him well enough and exhorted him to a mortification of the flesh which he already had. The great, or the greatest, either are represented or themselves represent something; but they seldom are anything; others must eat, write, enjoy, love, conquer, for them, and they themselves, again, do so for others; hence it is fortunate that, as they have no soul of their own to enjoy a monastic life and find no other that can, they can at least hunt up among the carvers wooden business-agents who can enjoy the recluse life for them; but I only wish that the great ones, who never suffer more _ennui_ than in their pastimes, would have made and placed before their parks, before their orchestras, their libraries, and their nurseries, such solid and inanimate agents and canopy-bearers or _curatores absentis_ of pleasure and _fair_-weather, lightning-conductors, either hewn out in stone or merely embossed in wax.

Upon the ceiling of the hermitage (as in that of the grotto in the cloister of Santa Felicita) was to have been represented an adequate amount of ruin, six cracks and two or three lizards falling through them. The painter, too, was already on his travels, but stayed so long upon them, that at last the thing painted itself, and like openhearted people, was nothing else than what it appeared. Only, when the artificial hermitage had ennobled itself into a natural one, it had long since been forgotten by everybody. I hold it, therefore, rather as persiflage than as pure truth, that the Chamberlain--as so many Upper-Scheerauers said--had hunted up wood-ticks and had them grafted into the hermit's chair, so that the creatures might work there instead of hair-saws and ripping-knives, and make the seat the sooner antique--in fact the vermin are now gnawing both chair and monk. Still more ridiculous is the idea of making a reasonable man believe, that the architectural chamberlain had covered and papered an artificially running wheelwork with a mouse-skin, in order that the artificial lizard above might have a mouse-correspondent below, and thus provision be made for symmetry at either end; and that afterward the proprietor had approached Nature and drawn over a live, running mouse a second artificial mouse-skin as frock and overcoat, that Nature and art might have a mutual indwelling;--ridiculous? It is true, mice are always capering round the hermit, but certainly only in one skin under-jacket....

Our two friends are far from us, and are already in the so-called long evening-vale of the park, through which a wavy stream of gold flowed from the setting sun. At the western and gently raised end of the vale, the scattered trees seemed to grow on the dissolving sun itself; at the eastern end one could look across over the continuation of the park to the glowing palace, on whose window-panes the sun and the evening fire-works redoubled their splendor. Here the old Princess always saw the first setting of the sun; then a path that wound gently upward led her to the high brow of this park, where day was still dying, and once more paternally beheld with his expiring sun-eye his great circle of children, till night closed his eye and took the orphaned earth into her motherly lap.

Gustavus and Amandus! be reconciled to each other here once more--the red limb of the sun rests already on the margin of the earth--the water and life run on and stop down below in the grave--take each other by the hand, when you look over to the ruined _Place of Rest_,[60] and at its still standing church, image of unprosperous virtue--or when you look over to the _Flower Islands_, where every flower trembles alone on its little green continent, and no relative nods a greeting save its painted shadow in the water--press each other's hands, when your eyes fall upon the _Realm of Shadows_, where, to-day, light and shade, like living and sleeping, fluttered tremblingly beside each other and into each other--and when ye see Alpine horns and AEolian harps leaning against the threefold lattice of the _Dumb Cabinet_, your souls must needs tremble in unison with the harmonies, in echoing vibrations.... It is a wretched rhetorical figure I set up here, as if I had been all this time addressing and exhorting them; for are not the two friends in a greater enthusiasm than I myself? Is not Amandus exalted far above all jealousy of friendship, and is he not with his own hand holding out before him the portrait, to-day apostrophized, of the unknown friend of Gustavus, and saying: "Mightest thou be the Third?" Nay, does he not, in his inspirations, lay the picture on the grass, in order with his left hand to grasp Gustavus and with his right to point to a chamber of the new palace, and does he not confess: "Had I also in my right hand that which I love, then were my hands, my heart and my heaven all full, and I would die!" And as it is only in the greatest love for a second that we can speak of that which he cherishes towards a _third_, can we demand anything more of our Amandus, who here, on the hill-top, confesses himself in love with Beata?

The misfortune was that at this very moment she herself was coming up, to stand at the dying-bed of the sun--herself even more lovely than the object which was the delight of her eyes--walking more and more slowly, as if she were every moment on the point of stopping--with eyes that could not see till she had several times in succession shut and opened them again with a quick winking movement--no living European author could describe the ecstacy of Amandus, if the thing had remained so;--but her slight astonishment at seeing the two guests of the mountain suddenly passed over into a similar sensation at seeing the third on the grass. A hasty movement put her in possession of the picture of her brother and she said, turning involuntarily toward Amandus: "My brother's portrait! and so at last I find it!" But she could not pass by them, without saying to both--with that fine womanly instinct which has got through ten sheets in such documents before we have read the first leaf:--"She thanked them, if it was they who had found the picture." Amandus made a low and bitter obeisance, Gustavus was far away, as if his soul stood on Mount Horeb, and only his body was here. She walked on, as if it had been her intention, straight down over the mountain, with her own eyes on the picture, and with the other four eyes fixed on her back....

"Now, indeed, the mystery of thy five days is out, and without perjury on thy part," said Amandus bitterly, and the high opera of sunset touched him no more; Gustavus, on the contrary, is still more deeply affected; for the feeling of suffering a wrong, mingled with the mistaken feeling of having done a wrong--(tender souls in such cases always justify the other party more than themselves)--melted with it into one bitter tear and he could not say a word. Amandus, who was now vexed at his reconciliation, was still more confirmed in his jealous suspicion by the fact that Gustavus, in his pragmatic relation of the Maussenbach adventure, had entirely left out Beata; but this omission had been intentional on the part of Gustavus, because the presence of the tender soul was just what pained him most in the whole occurrence, and because perhaps in his innermost heart there was budding a tender regard for her, which was too delicate and holy to endure the hard open air of conversation. "And of course she too was present lately in Maussenbach?" said the jealous one in the most unlucky tone.--"Yes!" but Gustavus could not add so much as this, that she had not on that occasion spoken one word to him. This nevertheless unexpected yes, in an instant contorted the face of the questioner, who would have held on high his stump (in case his arm had been shot off) and sworn, "it needed no further proof--Gustavus visibly held Beata in his magnetic vortex--was he not now speechless? Did he not instantly surrender her the likeness? Will she not, as she confounded the copies, also confound the originals, as they are all four so like each other, etc.?"

Amandus loved her, and thought one loved him too, and that one perceived where his drift lay. He had delicacy enough in his own _actions_, but not enough in the _presumptions_ he cherished regarding those of others. He had, namely, in the medical company of his father, often visited Beata, in her sicknesses, at Maussenbach; he had received at her hands that frank confidence which many maidens in their sick days always express, or in well ones, toward young men who appear to them at once virtuous and indifferent; the good Participle in _dus_, Amandus, assumed therefore after some reflection, that a letter which Beata had translated as a specimen, from Rousseau's Heloise, on fine paper--no maiden writes on coarse--and which had been written to the deceased Saint Preux, was addressed to the Participle himself. Girls should never, therefore, translate anything. Amandus was translated into a lover.

In Gustavus's heaving brain the night settled down at last, which had already come on in the outer world. Storm and moonshine in his inner night stood side by side--joy and sorrow. He thought of an innocent friend eaten up with suspicion, of the forfeited portrait, of the sister with whom he had played in his childhood, of the unknown pictured friend, who was therefore the brother of this lovely creature, and so on. Amandus turned aside to go off; Gustavus followed him unbidden, because, to-day, he could not do anything but forgive. Even during the descent hatred and friendship wrestled with equal force in Amandus, and nothing but an accident could ensure the victory to either. Hatred won it, and the auxiliary accident was, that Gustavus walked along parallel to Amandus. Gustavus should have stolen along ahead (or at most behind), especially with that affectionately dejected soul of his own. In that case friendship would, by the help of his back, have conquered, because a human back, by the suggestion of absence, creates more compassion and less hatred than the face and breast.... In fact one cannot often enough see his fellow men _from behind_....

Ye readers of books! scold not at poor Amandus, who is scolding away his fragile life. You should only see and consider how it is with the seat of the soul in a nervous weakling, that it is devilishly hard, not stuffed out with so much as three horse-hairs, and cuts like the seat of a sleigh. In short, any personality of my acquaintance sits more softly. Nevertheless my pity for the poor fellow is excited by quite other things than by his hard, stony, pineal gland of the soul. There are things which would soften the heart of the reader, and which, alas, despite my repeated filling of my pen, I have not yet been able to write up to!

On the whole it is vain for me to attempt concealing how very deficient my story thus far is in true murder and mortality, pestilence and famine, and all the pathology of the Litany. I and the circulating librarian find the whole public in the shop here, waiting, and with the white handkerchief--that sentimental seton--already taken out, impatient to weep and wipe away its proper quantity of tears ... and yet none of us brings on much that is dead and affecting.... On the other hand I am beset with the peculiar difficulty that the German public cocks up its head and will not let itself be distressed by me; for it counts upon this, that I, as a mere plain biographer (life-writer) cannot go so far as a murder, without which, however, nothing is to be effected. But is then only the romance-manufacturer invested with the supreme criminal jurisdiction, and is only _his_ printing paper a place of execution? Nay, newspaper-writers, who write no romances, have nevertheless, from time immemorial, filled their pens and slain what they chose, and more than was buried. Furthermore, historians, those _Great-Crosses_ (of butterflies) among the _Little-Crosses_ (for out of 100 newspaper annalists I extract and decoct at most one historian) have gone on and destroyed as many as the plan of their historic introductions, their _abreges_, their royal and imperial historiettes absolutely required.... In short, there is no excuse for me if I do not here make anything at all dead and interesting; and at the end I slaughter from necessity one or two lackeys, whom besides, out of Scheerau, no devil knows.

But I proceed with my story and insert out of the Pestilentiary's _Nouvelle a la main_ the following article in my _Nouvelle a la main_ [handy-volume novel] written for several quarters of the globe:

"It is confirmed by reports from Maussenbach, that the public servant at that place, Robisch, is dead as his mice. His death has created two schools of medicine, of which the one contends that his sect-founding death arose from too much beating, and the other, from too little eating."

There is not a word of truth in all this; the man has, indeed, stripes and appetite, but is living up to date, and the newspaper article is only just this moment been made by myself. But let the rash public draw from this and for future use the hint, that it should not tease and provoke any biographer, because even _he_ by poisoning his ink and by putting rat-powder in his sand box can destroy princes or anybody else, and send them to the church-yard; and learn hence that an ingenuous public must always while reading ask with trembling: "how will it fare with the poor fool (or fair fool) in me next chapter?"

TWENTY-FOURTH, OR XIX TRINITY, SECTION.

Oefel's Intrigues.--The Degradation.--The Departure.

It fares badly enough with him, if, indeed, inquiring Germany meant our Gustavus. It is Oefel's fault. But I will explain to affrighted Germany the whole matter; the fewest people therein know how he comes to be a Romance-writer and a Counsellor of Legation.

No sensitive officer--in the cadet-barracks he wore uniform--has exchanged fewer balls, and more shirts and letters, than Oefel. These last he insisted on writing to all sorts of people; for his letters could be read, because he himself read, and indeed things in the belles-lettres line, which he also imitated. For he was, it must be known, a _bel-esprit_, but had no other [_esprit_]. French booksellers in a body are said to have sent him a ridiculous letter of thanks, because he bought up all their stuff--even the present biography, wherein he himself appears, will one day reappear with him, when he hears of its publication and of its translation into French. Himself, body and soul I mean, he had already translated into all languages out of his French mother-patois. The _bel-esprits_ in Scheerau (including me perhaps) and in Berlin and Weimar despised the fool, not merely because he was from Vienna, where to be sure no earthquake ever heaved up a Parnassus, but still the mole-snouts of a hundred brochurists have thrown up duodecimo-petty-Parnassuses, and where the Viennese citizens who stand on them think envy is looking up, because pride is peering down--but he despised us in a mass, because he had money, fashion, connections and courtly taste. Prince Kaunitz once invited him (if it is true) to a _souper_ and ball, where there was such a crowd and all went off so brilliantly, that the old man never knew at all that Oefel had eaten and danced at his house. As his brother was the chief court-marshal and himself very rich, accordingly no one in all Scheerau had taste enough to read his verses, except the court; for it they were made; it could run over such verses as over the grassy parts of the park without hindrance, so short, soft and clean shorn was their growth; secondly, he published them not on printing-paper, but on silk ribbons, garters, bracelets, visiting-cards and rings. Among other fleas which skip up and down and make themselves audible on the membrane of the public's ear-drum, I too am found and help the thunder; but Oefel imitated none of us and greatly despised thee, my public, and set thee below courts; "_me_" (he said) "no one shall read who has not a yearly income of over 7000 livres."

Next summer he is to set out as envoye to the Court of ----, in order to resume the negotiations respecting the bride of the Prince, which had already been spun at her cradle, and broken off, and to knit them again at the side of her Graham's bed.[61] The Prince must needs, in fact, marry her, because a certain third court, which one is not permitted to name, would fain withhold her thereby from a fourth, which I should be glad to name. But let my word be taken for it, no man in the bridegroom's whole court believes that the reason of his being despatched to the court of the bride is that there fine _esprits_ and fine persons are perhaps articles in demand; verily, in both of these charms he could be outbidden by any one; but in a third charm unfortunately he could not, and one which to an envoye is dearer and more needful than moral ones--money. At an insolvent court the Prince has the first, and the millionaire the second crown. I have often cursed the confounded hereditary misfortune of the Principality of Scheerau, and perceived that there is seldom enough in its treasury, and we would gladly help ourselves by a national bankruptcy, if we could only first get national credit. But, excepting this Principality, I have never in all my travels found the following four regions anywhere but on Etna itself: first, the _fruitful_, and secondly, the _wooded_ region at the foot of the throne, where fruits and grazing and game-cattle, namely, the populace, are to be found; thirdly, the _icy region_ of the court, which yields nothing but glitter; fourthly, the _torrid_ region of the throne-peak, where there is little to be found except the crater. A throne-crater can swallow up and calcine even gold mountains, and eject them as lava.

Unluckily Gustavus pleased him, because he regarded the young man's youthful good nature as an exclusive attachment to himself, his modesty as lowliness before the Oefelian grandeur, his virtues as weaknesses. He was pleased with him because Gustavus had a taste for poetry, and consequently, he inferred, the greatest for his own; for Oefel's _noble bloody_ contrary to nature, ran in a thin _poetic vein_, and in a _satirical_ one, too, he thought. Perhaps also, Gustavus, in these years of taste, when youth is enraptured with the lesser beauties and faults of poetry, may sometimes have thought even Oefel's good. Now, as even Rousseau says, he can choose no one for a friend who is not pleased with his Heloise; so belletrists can give their hearts only to such people as have a similarity of heart, mind and consequently taste, to themselves, and who accordingly have a sense of the beauties of their poetic effusions as lively as their own.

Meanwhile what Oefel valued most highly in Gustavus was that he could be planted in his romance. He had studied in the cadet ark sixty-seven specimens, but he could not promote one of them to be the hero of his book, to be the _Grand Sultan_, except the sixty-eighth, Gustavus.

And he is just my hero, too. But that may in time furnish an unprecedented pleasure in the reading, and I would that I could read my things and another write them.

He wished to train up my Gustavus to be the future heir of the Ottoman throne, but not to say a word to him about his being Grand Seignor--either in the romance or in life--he meant to write down all the workings of his pedagogical leading-string and transfer them from the living Gustavus to the printed one. But here there planted himself in the way of the Balaam and his ass a cursed angel; namely, Gustavus. Oefel intended and was obliged to go back from the cadet barracks where his objects were accomplished, to the old palace, where new ones awaited him. In the first place he could more easily from the old palace make him leap over into the Cartesian vortices of the new, its visitings and enjoyments, and be whirled about in them; secondly, he could there better enjoy the company of his beloved, the Minister's lady, who came thither daily, and who sacrificed to love virtue and the love of the assembly hunting-ground; thirdly, the second reason is not strictly true, but he only made believe it was to the Minister's lady, because he had still a third, which was Beata, whom he designed, from his palace, to shoot, or at least blockade in hers. Go he must, then; but Gustavus must go too.

"This is to be done instanter," thought Oefel, "he shall at last himself beg of me that which I beg of him." Nothing gratified him more than an opportunity of leading some one to his object, the leading was still more agreeable to him than the object, as in love he preferred the campaigns to the spoils. He would, as ambassador, have made peace out of war, and war out of peace again, merely for the pleasure of negotiating. He drew, by way of approaching Gustavus, his first parallels, _i. e_., he etched out to him with his sharp tongue a charming picture of courts, that they alone could teach _savoir vivre_ and all that, and the art of talking, as even dogs, the more cultivated they are, bark so much the more, the lap-dog more than the shepherd-dog, the wild one not at all; that through them there murmurs a river-of-paradise of pleasures; that one finds himself there at the fountain head of his felicity, at the ear of the Prince, and at the knot of the greatest connections; that one can intrigue, conquer, etc. It was in Oefel's plan not to betray to the little Grand Sultan even so much as the possibility of his going with him to the old palace. "All the more shall I entice him," he thought. But he did not get on with the enticing, because Gustavus had not yet passed over from the poetic and idyllic years, in which the ingenuous youth hates courts and dissimulations, to the cooler years in which he seeks them. Oefel, like courtiers and women, studied only men, not man.

Now the second parallel was drawn and a still nearer approach made to the fortress. One forenoon he took a walk with him in the park, just when he knew he should find there the Resident Lady. While conversing with her, he observed Gustavus's observation, or rather blushing astonishment, who, never before in his life had stood before such a lady, around whom all charms entwined, redoubled, lost each other, like triple rainbows spanning heaven. And thou, too, Beata, thou flower soul, whose roots so seldom find on the sandy ground of earth the right flower soil, thou wast standing by, with an attention fixed upon the Resident Lady, which was meant to be an innocent mask of thy slight confusion. Gustavus could contrive no mask for his greater embarrassment. Oefel ascribed this mutual confusion, not as I do to the mutual recollection of the Guido-iconoclasm, but Gustavus's to the Resident Lady, and that on the female side to himself. "So then I have him where I want him!" said he, and let him accompany him even to the old palace. "Apropos! supposing now we should both stay here," said he. The responsive sigh of impossibility grounded upon other reasons was just what he desired. "All the same! You will be my Secretary of Legation!" he continued, with his keen glance on the watch for surprise, a glance which he never properly covered with an eyelid, because he always fancied he surprised everybody.

But it turned out stupidly for Oefel. Gustavus declined and said: "_Never!_" whether from a dread of courts, fear of his father, from being ashamed to change, or from love of quiet; in short Oefel stood there dumbfounded gazing after the floating fragments of his wrecked building-plan. It is true, there was still left him this advantage from it all, that he could work the whole shipwreck into his romance, only, however, the Secretary was gone! He had also, not unreasonably, voted him already in advance to the Secretaryship of the Embassy; for the throne of Scheerau has a ladder leaning against it, with the lowest and the highest rungs of honor, but the steps are so near together that one can place his left foot on the lowest round and yet reach with his right the highest--once indeed we might almost have created an upper field marshal. Secondly, in courts, as in nature, all things hang and join together, and professors might properly call it the cosmological nexus: every one is at once bearer and burden; thus the iron ruler sticks to the magnet, a little ruler to that, to that a needle, and to that steel-filings. At most only what sits upon the throne and what lies down below under it, has not nexus enough with the efficient company; so in the French opera only the flying gods and the shuffling _beasts_ are made of Savoyards, all the rest of the regular company.

So Oefel must needs draw a third parallel, and therefrom shoot at the cadet. Namely--he made his uniform every day a thumbs breadth snugger and tighter, by way of tormenting him out of it. He had, with this view, already and recently been the means of sending him off to the grain-cordon, where the warm-hearted youth, accustomed only to mercy and charity, found stern and sharp no's, new and hard duties; but now the service, from below upward, was still more aggravated, and the military exercises almost crushed his fine porcelain frame, so often and so severely did the _Romancier_ drag him into the society of the father of all peace-treaties, namely, War.

How painfully must the rude external world have galled his wounded inner man! Before his eyes, ever since his falling-out with his dying darling, stood evermore that mournful evening, with its tears, and would not stir; on his desolate heart the blood-red sun still glimmered and would not go down. The dumb departure of his Amandus, who lost him and so many wishes beside; the waning autumn-days of his life and their former love, wrung tears of sorrow from his eyes and heart. Friendship can endure misunderstandings less than love; with the latter they tickle the heart, with the former they tear it asunder. Amandus, who had so misinterpreted and grieved him, and yet whose innermost love had not lost him, forgave him all until five o'clock in the evening--then he heard (or it was enough for him if he only imagined it) that Gustavus had visited the park (and consequently the fair promenader)--then he took back his reconciliation till eleven at night--then night and dream flung once more a mantle over all human failings, and over this one. At five o'clock the next evening it began again as before. Laugh at him, if you will, but without pride, and at me and yourselves likewise; for all our emotions--without their lion and maniac-keeper. Reason--are just as crazy, if not in our outward lives, yet in our inner being! But at last he had taken back his forgiveness so often, that he determined to let it stay, provided only that Gustavus should knock and hear from him all the grievances which he intended to pardon him. One often postpones forgiveness because one is compelled to postpone the repetition of the charges. But, friend Amandus, could Gustavus come then, and would the Romancier let him?

The latter carried on his game still further and cunningly planned that this Grand Sultan, this hero of two well-written books, should, on a certain evening, when the Cadet-General gave a great _souper_, stand before his house as--sentry. Deuce take it! when the loveliest of ladies pass by him:--the well-known Resident--who, with a casual glance set up our good sentry all skinned and stuffed as an image in her brain--and her maid-of-honor Beata--and when one has to present arms before such faces: one would much rather lay them down, and, in fact, instead of standing, kneel down to wound not so much the foe as the (female) friend.... Heavens! I shall have had more wit here than one may well give me credit for; but let a live man once try it, and write upon love and refrain from wit! It is almost impracticable. I neither affirm nor deny that Oefel may perhaps, from the dreams of Gustavus, which were always talkative, and often prolonged their effect after waking, have caught the names of the aforesaid double-lottery-number of beauty. The Romancier has therefore an advantage over the Biographer (which is I): he keeps close by his hero.

He disgusted his and our hero, who, however, was such only in the aesthetic, not in the military sense, with the great Autumn-review: for every little prince imitates the still smaller children in playing soldier after the great soldiers in the streets; hence we Scheerauers have a neat pocket-land-force, a portable artillery and a juvenile cavalry. Besides, a sovereign makes a joke, when he makes a man a recruit; it does no harm to the fellow, all he needs is to be in motion, because now-a-days [namely in 1791] our more important wars, as the Italian once did, consist of nothing but marchings out of countries into countries. So also in the theatre campaigns consist merely in repeated marches round the stage, only shorter ones. I walked along, a year ago, for a joke, half a league beside a regiment, and made believe to myself: "Now thou art in fact joining in a campaign of half a league against the enemy: but the newspapers hardly mention thee, although thou and the regiment by this warlike sham-procession ward off as many plagues from the country as the clerisy do by their spiritual singing processions."

He disgusted him, I said: he pictured the review namely in this style: "Frederick the Great did smaller wonders than will be expected of the cadet-corps! There will be more wounded than wounding! In all tents and barracks they will talk of the last Scheerau grand-review!" Gustavus had long since got so far along in the minor service that he was in a condition, through the fortification of his body, to wound at least one, namely that body itself. I shall surely not lessen the apprehensions of the world, when I go on to relate that Gustavus regularly every seven weeks has leave of absence for five days, wherefrom his friends and the Biographer himself will derive just as much light as the oldest readers--that Oefel by secret intriguing made his furlough so disagreeable, that he could not at such price desire a repetition of it--that Gustavus from his last journey brought home to Dr. Fenk a letter from Ottomar, which we shall not indeed withhold from the reader, but of the reception whereof we can disclose nothing to him, because we ourselves know nothing.

From all these thorns and from the wounds of the Review our Gustavus was rescued by another's degradation. After the aforementioned march homeward an officer in Upper Scheerau, whose name and regiment one will here suppress out of regard for his distinguished family, was declared under disgrace, because he had associated with low company. When the Provost in the middle of the regiment which he had dishonored, broke his sword and weapons and tore off his uniform, and stripped him of everything which helps a man to stand upright when bowed by calamity, Gustavus, whose sense of honor bled even out of the wounds of a stranger, and who had never yet witnessed the black spectacle of a public punishment, sank into a swoon; his first exclamation on coming-to was: "Done with soldiering forever!--If the poor officer was innocent or if he is reformed, who shall give back to him his murdered honor?--Only the Omniscient God can take it away; the court-martial should take nothing but life!--No; the bullet, but not disgrace!" he cried as in a spasm. I think he is right. For two days he was sick and his fancies transported him into the robbers'-caves and catacombs of the degraded----a new proof that the fever images of poor mortals persecuted by their torments from the sick bed into the grave are not always the warrants and transcripts of their inner selves!--Martyred brothers! how I love you and the tender-hearted Gustavus at this moment, when my fancy peers in among you all and sees how, driven about in the zig-zag of destiny, you stand with your wounds and tears, wearily beside each other, embracing, bewailing--burying one another!

So long as he was sick and wandering, Amandus hung upon his glowing eyes and suffered as much as he and forgave him all. When Dr. Fenk assured them that on the morrow he would be well, the next morning Amandus came not, but meant to be hard-hearted again.

Oefel enjoyed the victory of his place. He took upon himself the setting matters right with old Falkenberg, and wrote to the man with his own hand. As he placed with his inky wand the good father on the Mosaic mountain, beyond the mountain the promised land of the embassy, and in the midst of the Canaan the young Secretary of Legation: then did the old man share the joy of many parents, who are glad to see their children become what they themselves hated to be or could not. He came to me with the letter and rode under my window.--All that Gustavus had inwardly to say still further against his removal to the old palace was that the fair Beata lived in the new one, which was separated from the old merely by a bisected wall, and that he should be confirming Amandus's suspicion. But fortunately, after the conclusion he fell upon the original motive which had suggested it and which gave dignity and expansion to its sphere of action: "He might," (he said) "after his release from the post of the embassy, be appointed to a board, and there help up the prostrate country, etc." In short, the highest beauty of Beata could not now have brought him to the point of--avoiding her.

In fact, the romance writer shelled him so effectually out of his military skin, that, inasmuch as he, like married men and princes, oftener had the bridle in the passive _mouth_ than in the active _hand_--one would have thought he was led in order to lead; but that is not my idea.

Gustavus paid his farewell visit to Amandus. A good way of forgiving one whom an imaginary offence has exasperated against us is to commit a real one. Gustavus, in the circuit of streets which he voluntarily made on the way to his aggrieved Amandus, thought of Beata, who was now to be his next-door neighbor, of the love and suspicion of his friend, of the impossibility of removing that suspicion, and when, exactly at 6 o'clock, the evening music-of-the-spheres floated down into the streets from the iron orchestra and the St. Stephen's tower, his heart melted into the tones, and he imparted to his friend the tenderest feeling that existed outside of the breast of Beata. I and the reader have our thoughts on the subject; this very placable tenderness was ascribable merely to the covert consciousness that he half deserved the suspicion of rivalry, for otherwise he would, elevated by pride, have, to be sure, forgiven the other; but not on that account loved him the more intensely. He found him in the worst mood for his purpose, namely, in a friendly one; for in sensitive invalids every feeling is a sure forerunner of its opposite, and all have alternating voices. Amandus was in his father's anatomical chamber; the last ray of the setting sun darted into the empty eye-socket of a skull; there hung in vials human fluids, little ground strokes, according to which fate would absolutely draw out man; manikins with great protruding head and heart, but without an error in the great head or a pang in the great heart. On a table lay the black hand of a dyer, upon whose color the Doctor was about to make experiments.... What a scene for a _reconciliation_ and a _leave taking_; three looks made and sealed the _former_,--even looks, in this naked disembodiment of souls, speak too loud a language--but when Gustavus, transported by the finest enthusiasm above fear and suspicion, announced to his friend the _latter_; when he made known to him, who had till now no idea of it, his new neighborhood and the loss of the old one, the friend had flown away and a black foe sprang up out of the ashes. Of this moment death availed himself and absolutely tore asunder the last root-fibres of his trembling life.... Gustavus stood too high to be angry; but he must needs place himself still higher; he fell on his neck and said with clear, resolute voice, "be angry and hate me, but I must forgive thee and love thee. My whole heart with every vein remains true to thine and seeks it out in thy breast, and even if thou henceforward misunderstandest me, still I will come every week. I will look on thee; I will listen to thee when thou speakest with a stranger, and if thou then lookest on me with hatred, I will go with a sigh, but still love thee. Ah, I shall think of this then, that thy eyes when they were still lacerated looked upon me more sweetly, and recognized me more truly.... O do not thus thrust me from thee, only give me thy hand and look away!"

"There!" said the shattered Amandus, and gave him the cold, black--dyer's fist.... Hatred ran down like a shower over the most affectionate heart that ever bled to death in a human breast. Gustavus stamped his love and his hatred under his feet, and with choked emotions went silently out of the house, and the next day out of Upper Scheerau.

Hardly had Amandus seen his maltreated youthful friend stagger along the street, than he went into his chamber, buried himself in the pillows and, without accusing or excusing himself, let his eyes weep as much as they could. We shall hear whether he raised his sick head from the pillow again, and when he was again _accompanied_ by Gustavus into the Silent Land, from which he once sought to thrust him back. O man!--why will thy heart, so soon to crumble into salt, water and earth, crush another crumbling heart?--Ah, before thou strikest a blow with thy uplifted dead-man's-hand, it falls off into the grave--Ah, before thou hast inflicted the wound upon thy foeman's bosom he sinks and feels it not, and thy hatred is dead or thou art dead thyself.

TWENTY-FIFTH, OR XX TRINITY, SECTION.

Ottomar's Letter.

When we have read Ottomar's letter, we will take our places at Gustavus's new theatre and look at him. In the following letter a spirit reigns and riots, which, like an Alp, oppresses and often possesses all men of the higher and nobler quality, and which--much as it outweighs even Holland spirits--a _higher_ spirit only can overpower and crowd out. Many men live in the _Perigee_, some in the _Apogee_, few in the _Perihelion_.--Fenk so often yearned for his Ottomar, especially since his complete silence of some years' standing, and spoke of him so often to Gustavus, that it was well the address of the letter was from a strange hand and to Doctor Zoppo in Pavia: else the Doctor had sinned at once against the first line of the letter.

* * * * *

"Name not my name, oh eternal friend, to the bearer: I must do it. On the last year of my life there lies a great black seal; break it not, count the past as the future--I make it for thee the present, only not just yet--and if I should die I would appear before and tell thee my last mystery of earth.

"I write to thee, simply that thou mayst know that I am living and am coming in autumn. My thirst for traveling is quenched with Alpine ice and sea-water; I repair home now to my resting-place, and if there, at my street-door, a tempting voice of secret desire should call me again to cross the mountains, I should say to myself: the same panting and pining human heart gazes down into the waters of the Gaudiana and the Volga, which sighs in thee beside the Rhine stream, and that which climbs the Alps and Caucasus, is what thou art, and turns a longing eye over toward thy street-door.[62] But if I sit here, and every morning go to the close-stool, and am glad to be hungry, and afterward that my appetite is satisfied, and if I daily put on and pull out breeches and hair pins, ah! what in the end does all amount to? What was it then I wanted, when in my childhood I sat upon the stone in my gateway, and gazed yearningly in the direction of the long road and thought how it ran on and on, shot over the mountains, still onward and onward ... and at last?... Ah, all roads lead to nothing, and where they break off, there stands another looking longingly back over the hills to where we sit. What was it then I would have, when my little eye swam along with the waves of the Rhine, that it might waft me to a promised land, whither all streams, I thought, were flowing, not knowing, meanwhile, that the same river, which bore in its bosom many a heavy heart, murmured along by many a crushed form, which it alone could release from its anguish, that then, like man, it frittered and crumbled itself away, and filtered itself at last into Holland sands?--Orient land! morning land! toward thy fields also did my soul once lean as trees do toward the East:--'Ah! how must it be there, where the sun rises!' I thought; and when I traveled with my mother to Poland, and at last into the land lying toward morning, and came among its nobles, Jews and slaves--.... But there is no other sunny land of the morning to be found on this optical ball, than that one which all our steps can neither _remove_ nor _reach_. Ah, ye joys of earth, none of you can do more than satisfy the breast with sighs and the eye with water, and into the poor heart, which opens under your heaven, ye only pour one more wave of blood! And yet these two or three wretched pleasures lame us as poisonous flowers do children who play with them, in arm and limb. Only let there be no music, that mocker of our wishes; do not, at her call, all the fibres of my heart fly asunder and stretch themselves out like so many sucking polypus's-arms and tremble with longing and seek to embrace--whom? what?... An unseen something waiting in other worlds. I often think, perhaps it is, after all, nothing; perhaps, after death, all goes on just as now, and thy longings will reach forward out of one heaven toward another[63]--and then I crush under this fantastic nonsense the strings of my harpsichord, as if I would bring a fountain out of them, as if it were not enough that the pressure of this yearning untunes and snaps the thin strings of my inner musical system.

"In Rome there lived opposite the Church of St. Adrian a painter, who during a rain always placed himself under the spouts, and laughed till he was crazy, and who often said to me: 'There is no dog's death, but only a dog's life.' Fenk! take at least what man is or does: so very, very little! What power, then, is wholly developed in us, or in harmony with the other powers? Is it not a piece of good fortune, if so much as one faculty gets drawn in like a branch into the hot-house of a lecture-room or library and is forced by partial warmth to bloom, while the whole tree stands outside in the snow with hard black twigs? Heaven snows two or three flakes together to make one inner snow-man, which we call our education; the earth melts or muddies a quarter of it, the tepid wind loosens the snow man's head off--that is our cultured inner man, such an abominable patch-work in all our knowings and willings! From individuals to universal humanity I have no desire to pass; I care not to think, how a century is ploughed and harrowed under to manure the next--how nothing will round itself to anything--how the eternal writing in books and stratifying of the _Scibile_ has no aim, no end, and all dig and drive in opposite directions! What does man do? Even less than he knows and becomes. Tell me, what then does thy penetration, thy heart, thy swiftness effect before the princely portrait over the President's chair, or in fact before an emasculated reigning face? The crooked twigs pressed back into each other are squeezed against the window of the winter-house, the Regent causes their fruit to pass by his dish in the _compotiere_, the blue sky is denied them, the cleverest thing at last is, that they rot! What, then, do the noblest faculties avail in thee, when weeks and months glide away, which do not use, do not call out, do not exercise them? When I have thus contemplated, as I often do, the impossibility, in all our monarchical offices, of being a whole, a really active, a universally useful man--even the monarch cannot, with those innumerable black subaltern claws and hands which he must first fasten to his own hands as fingers or pincers, do anything completely good--as often as I have contemplated this, I have wished I were hanged with my robbers, but were first their captain, and with them ran down the old constitution!... Beloved Fenk! _Thy_ heart no one can tear out of _my_ breast, it propels my best blood and never canst _thou_ misunderstand me, let me be as unknowable as I will! But, oh friend, the times are coming on, when for thee this misunderstanding may after all grow easier!

"Veiled Genius of our overshadowed globe! ah, had I only been something, had the globe of my brain and had my heart, like Luther's, only earned by some lasting and far-rooting deed the blood which reddens and feeds them; then would my _hungry pride_ become _satisfied lowliness_, four humble walls would be large enough for me, I should no longer sigh for anything great except death, and first for the autumn of life and age, in which man, when the birds of youth are dumb, when over the _earth_ lies haze and flying gossamer-summer, when the heavens hang bright, but not blazing, over all, lays himself down to sleep upon the withered leaves.----Farewell, my friend, upon an earth where one can no further do any good except to lie down in it; _next_ autumn we shall be with one another!"

* * * * *

To this letter, which takes possession of my whole soul and renews my errors as well as my wishes, I can add nothing more, than that to-day the first man in this history has been buried on a mountain. When, after four or five sections, I come to speak of his evening-euthanasy, then will the outlines of his form already have grown paler and fainter, as well in the coffin as in the hearts of his friends!

EXTRA-LEAF.

Concerning Lofty Men, and Evidence that the Passions
belong to the Next Life, and Stoicism to this.