The Invisible Lodge Part 13

Gustavus's Letter.--The Prince and his Dressing-Comb.

Gustavus is now in the old palace--thus far his theatre has been daily rising, from the subterranean cell to a knightly manor, thence to a military academy, and finally to a princely castle. The rich Oefel hired it, because it adjoined the new palace, where lay the Blocksberg of the great world of Scheerau. The Lady Resident von Bouse had inherited both from her brother, who had here, amidst her tears and kisses, departed this life. Nature had given her all that exalts one's own heart and wins the hearts of others; but art had given her too much and her rank had taken too much away from her--she had too many talents to retain at a court any other than masculine virtues; she combined friends.h.i.+p and coquetry--sensibility and satire--she united respect for virtue and worldly philosophy--herself and our Prince. For the latter was her avowed lover, to whom she surrendered her heart more from ambition than inclination. She was made for something better than to s.h.i.+ne; only as she had no opportunity for any thing else than s.h.i.+ning, she forgot that there was anything better. But anyone who is born for something higher than worldly or courtly happiness feels in better hours the forfeiture of his destiny. It will be proper here to a.s.sign a new reason which sent Oefel out of Scheerau: he was called upon and was pleased at the princely behest to knead out on the potter-wheel of his desk a drama for the birthday of the Lady Resident. The drama was to have applications. On the amateur-stage at Upper-Scheerau--where the Prince was, not as on the war-theatre a mere supernumerary, but first actor, and where he filled the place and saved the expense of a regular court troop--it was to be played by the Prince, Oefel and some others.

The Prince still had eyes to look upon the Resident Lady; still a tongue to love her; still, days to prove it to her; still a theatre to pay her homage: nevertheless he already hated her, because she was too n.o.ble for him; for his theatrical part (as shall be printed further on) was to do more service to him than to her. Oefel (who was amba.s.sador, court theatre-poet and actor in one, because there is miserably little difference among them) worked into his drama a portrait of Beata and would fain flatter her by this likeness of her, and hoped she would be one of the actors and make her portrait her part. All this he hoped of Gustavus too; but we shall see below how it was.

Gustavus, in the old palace--while all visiting-wheels rattled over his nerves of hearing and all processions of visitors swarmed around his eyes--still felt himself as lonesome as death. He worked his way to his future destination. More than fifty secretaries of legation will conclude, therefore, that he learned to open letters and hearts, to decipher women and reports, to make love, pay court and execute knaveries--the fifty are in error; they will furthermore think he learned to write a fine hand, in order to lighten his portfolio, item to know whose name should stand first in a public instrument which goes to three Powers, and that each Power should stand first in its instrument--they are right; but he did more: he learned in solitude to endure and enjoy society. Far from men _principles_ thrive; among them _actions_. Solitary inactivity ripens outside of the gla.s.s-bell of the study to social activity, and among men one grows no _better_, unless when he comes among them he is already _good_.

His occupations gradually experienced pleasant interruptions. For out of doors before his windows stood lovely and almost coquettish Nature hung round with Paris's apples, and in the midst of all a fair promenader who deserved the whole of them. Who can it be but--Beata?

Did she walk into the park, it was quite as impossible for him to walk after her, as _not_ to look after her through the window, and his eyes sought out from among the bushes all the ribbons that went twinkling by through them. Did she come back on her walk with her face toward his windows, then he stepped back as far as possible not only from them, but even from the curtains, so as to see without being seen. Perhaps (but hardly) the parts were reversed, if he ventured to follow her in her walks, which to him were ways to heaven. A rose that had dropped from its stem and which he once in the darkest night picked up under her window, was to him the rose of an order; its withered honey-cup was the _potpourri_ of his sweetest dreams and his flora of pleasure:--thus dost thou, lofty Destiny, oftentimes place immortal man's heaven under a faded rose-leaf, often on the blossom-cup of a forget-me-not, often in a piece of land 305,000 miles square.

He who has been too forgiving, will afterward avenge himself.

Gustavus's friends.h.i.+p towards Amandus has mounted to so high a _flame_, that it must necessarily burn down to ashes upon its material. When he looked after Beata, he looked back to Amandus, and blamed himself so often that he must needs begin to justify himself. What was carried away from the ash-heap under which his love glimmered, was thrown upon the ash-heap of his friends.h.i.+p. Nevertheless he would at any hour have sacrificed for Amandus all that people call pleasures;--for in the new time of a first friends.h.i.+p sacrifices are more ardently sought, than at a later time they are offered, and the giver is more blessed than the receiver. O! the rightly-disposed soul has not only the power, but also the yearning, to sacrifice.--The life which Gustavus, encompa.s.sed with spring and gardens and wishes of love, now enjoyed, he shall himself paint in a letter to me. This letter _they_ of course will throw aside, who stand before the spectacle of Nature as cold spectators, as absentee-box-proprietors; but there are better and rarer men, who feel themselves irresistibly drawn in as players, and regard every spear of gra.s.s as animated, every chafer as eternal, and the illimitable whole as an infinite pulsing venous system in which every creature throbs as an absorbing and dropping twig between lesser and greater ones and whose full heart is G.o.d.

_Gustavus's Letter_.

"To-day, for the second time, I have come up out of my cavern into the infinite world; all my veins are still flooded with the afternoon's influence--it seems as if my blood would revolve with the worlds around their suns, and my heart with the suns around the sparkling goal, which stands beside the Creator....

"The night-air which bends my light cools me off in vain, unless I can open my burning bosom to the heart of a friend, and tell him all. In the afternoon I took my instruments with which I had hitherto been obliged to create, instead of landscapes, the fortifications which disfigure and desolate them, and went out into the Silent Land. This ball of earth glided away through the ethereal ocean as softly as did the swan among the flowery islands, on which I reclined; the friendly heaven bent down lower toward the earth--it seemed as if my heart would melt away in the still expanse of blue, as if it must hear in the distance the echo of a shout of exultation, and it yearned for Arcadian lands and for a friend before whom it might expire. I seated myself with my drawing pen upon an artificial rock near the lake and prepared to draw the scene: the mutually embracing alders which veiled and embowered the end of the winding lake--the variegated row of flowery islands around each of which floated a double flower-piece of its beauteous islander, namely the gay flower-image which went down under the water to the mirrored heaven, and the silhouette which rocked on the trembling silver-ground--and the living gondola, the swan, that wheeled at my feet in hungry expectation:--but when all Nature in full height sat to me and dazzled me with its rays that reach from sun, to sun, then did I adore what I would have copied, and sank at the feet of G.o.ddess and G.o.d....

"I rose with lamed hand and surrendered myself to the sea which bore me up. I went from corner to corner of the vast table with its million covers for giant guests and for guests invisible, for my bosom was not yet full, and I pa.s.sively suffered the billows which rolled in to rise within me. I penetrated into the deepest shadow of the shadowy world, in which the sun, that had shrunk into a star, more remotely glimmered.--I went out through the firwood by the jangling of the coal-mouse and the lonely desolate cry of the thrush till I stood under the singing lark.--I went up through the long evening valley to the populous brook, and an enraptured choir of beings moved along with me, the sun which had dipped its head in the waves, and the fly with its skate-like feet ran along beside me on the water, the large-eyed dragonfly floated along on a willow-leaf.--I waded through green, inhaling und exhaling life, with glad children of short, warm moments flying, singing, skipping, creeping around me.--I climbed the hermitage-hill and my bosom was not yet full of the world-stream to which it lay pa.s.sively open.... But there stood the giantess Nature no longer rec.u.mbent, but erect before me, bearing in her arms thousands and thousands of nursing children; and when my soul, amidst the throng of innumerable souls, now set in the gold of insect wings, now encased in armor of wing-sh.e.l.ls, now dusted over with b.u.t.terfly-down, now enclosed in flower-chrysales, was enfolded in an immense and infinite embrace, and when the earth lay before me with its mountains and streams, and pastures, and forests, and when I thought, all this is full of hearts, which are moved by joy and love; and from the great human heart with four cavities to the shrunk-up insect's heart with one, and down to the gullets of the worm, there leaps from generation to generation a perpetually creating, eternal, rapture-kindling spark of love--....

"Ah! then did I spread out my arms into the fluttering, quivering, throbbing air, which brooded over the earth, and all my thoughts cried out: 'O wert thou she, in whose broad, billowy bosom the globe rests; O couldst thou, like her, enfold all souls; oh, could thy arms reach around all like hers, which bend the antennae of the chafer and the quivering plumage of the lily-b.u.t.terfly and the tough woods, that stroke with their hands the hair of the caterpillar and all the flowery meadows and the seas of the earth; oh, couldst thou, like her, rest on every lip which burns with joy, and hover with cooling breath over every agonized bosom that longs to relieve itself with a sigh! All, has man, then, so slender, so narrow a heart, that of the whole realm of G.o.d enthroned around him he can love nothing, feel nothing, but what his ten fingers grasp and feel? must he not wish that all human beings and all beings had only one neck, one bosom, that he might embrace them all with a single arm, that he might forget none, and in his satisfied love no longer know but two hearts, the loving and the loved?--To-day I became linked to the whole creation and gave all beings my heart....

"I turned eastward in the direction of the new palace and of Auenthal.

Behind the Auenthal woods swept roaring through a ragged arch of rain-cloud a precipitous ocean. I stood here alone in a wide silence. I turned toward the sunken sun; I reflected that I had once taken it for G.o.d, and it fell heavily upon my heart to-day, I had so seldom thought on Him who was G.o.d. 'O Thou! Thou!' my whole being cried out to Him who was now so near me--but all languages and all hearts and all emotions lose their tongue before Him and prayer is profound silence, not merely of the lips, but of the thoughts.... But the Great Spirit, who knows the weakness of good-hearted man, has sent down to him brother-companions, that man may open his heart before man, and complete before them the prayer in which he was struck dumb.

"O friend of my fairest years! thou that hast implanted grat.i.tude and humility in my innermost being, both of these I felt, when on the mountain of the hermitage I felt myself exalted in my loneliness above the created worms and felt what man feels, but only he upon earth--when I could kneel in solitude with human eyes before the great mirror stretching out into nothingness, at which the insect dashes his feelers, before the mirror out of which flames the infinite giant, the sun.... No! in earthly colors and on a canvas of animal-skins and on all that lies before me, is merely the _image_ of the arch-genius; but in man is not His image, nay, it is Himself....

"Half of the sun still blazed above the rim of the earth, which cut it asunder; but I saw it no more through my dissolving eye,--smothered, silenced, sunk, extinguished as I was, in the sweeping, flaming, rus.h.i.+ng sh.o.r.eless sea around me....

"The sun has carried the enraptured day down with him; and now that diamond of the ether which night sets in black--the moon--stands above these veiled scenes and radiates, like other diamonds, the borrowed brilliancy.... O thou still midnight sun! Thou beamest and man reposes; thy rays appease the earthly turmoil, thy falling shower of sparks, like a s.h.i.+mmering brook, lulls reclining man to slumber, and sleep then covers, like a grave-mound, the resting heart, the drying eye and the painless face.... Fare thee well and may the white disk of Luna show thee all Paradises of thy past and all Paradises of thy future youth.

"Gustavus."

So far had he gone, when Oefel's servant came into his chamber with a parcel which more effectually than the coldest night-air or the warmest letter arrested and cooled off the emotions of his soul. It contained a letter from the Doctor with the intelligence that Madam von Roper had transmitted to him in Maussenbach the enclosed _portrait_, which her daughter had taken for the one she had lost, on the back of which, however, stood the name of Falkenberg, which refuted all remaining correspondences. Much as he prized the portrait, just in that degree did it vex him, as it was a fresh proof of his supposition that mother and daughter hated him on account of the exposure in the grain affair.

The spider of hatred, that in every man hangs its web over a corner of the heart chamber--only in many a one great cankers (or crab-spiders) spin over all four chambers with their five teats--ran out on its threads which Amandus had agitated, in quest of prey: in a word, the cold dyer's-hand touched his heart and made it a little colder toward his Amandus, whose own the returning portrait had made warmer. Not disturbed, but only happy love makes the best man better.

In seven minutes all was over, for in the spiritual man the same admirable arrangement holds as in the physical, namely, that around a sharp, bitter idea other ideas flow in as milder juices until they have thinned and drowned out its sharpness. The portrait was now the finding of a second rose; it had a new life and rose-fragrance breathed over it by the fairest eyes and lips. And now, for some time he no longer saw Beata in the garden, but instead the Prince, with and without the Resident Lady. Go, both of you out of the Still Land into your noisy one! You enjoy fair nature, after all, only as a larger landscape, which hangs in your picture-gallery or on the curtain of your opera-house, or as a merely broader table-and-chimney ornament, in which the rocks appear to you as formed of pumice-stone and the trees of moss, or at most as the largest English park, which is to be found at any court of modern times in all Europe.--In all session-chambers, on account of the dog-day vacation, there was a lull of labor--in winter, on account of the cold, one could allow frost-holidays, and give opportunity for a winter-sleep of business as well as for a summer siesta, just as the well-known animals must on account of both extremes stay at home from dread of their hydrophobia--consequently the minister could more easily get away with the Prince and both remained here longer. But for me the reader would never learn how the presence of the Prince came to be the occasion of Beata's exchanging the _Still Land_ for her still chamber. It was thus: Our prince is, to be sure, a little hard, a little avaricious, and tends his flock oftener with the _shepherd's staff_ than with the _shepherd's pipe_; but he loves quite as well to be a shepherd in a finer sense, and gladly goes down from the throne, where his subjects adore him, to any one of its steps in order to adore a fair one--he can bear, indeed, to hear the people sigh, but not a single beauty; he is more eager to avert a social embarra.s.sment than a famine; he would rather be in debt to the estates than to a rival player, and has no care to build up a burned town, but takes great pains to repair a torn head-dress. In short, the sovereign and the man-of-society are, in his heart's-chambers, next-door neighbors, but deadly foes. This man-of-society subdivided himself again into two lovers, the short and the long. His long or perennially blooming love consists in a cold, contemptuous gallantry, and in enjoying the refinement, the wit, and the grace wherewith he and the beloved object know how to adorn their reciprocal conquests. His short love consists in his enjoyment of these victories, in so far as they have not those decorations. In order that this innocent pasquil upon one may not be taken for a satire upon most of the great, I will proceed as follows:

Long love he cherished for the Resident Lady, of whose testimonials of affection one could not say, this is the most innocent--the first--the last. Such an immovable [or real estate] love he interwove simultaneously with a hundred cursory marriages of a second or amours, and over the creeping month-hand of the long fixed love or marriage the flying third-hand of the abbreviated marriages whirled round innumerable times.

Against this the Resident Lady had nothing to say--she could carry on the same kind of interweaving--against that he had nothing to say.

In these short marriages the great folk do, perhaps, many a good thing, which moralists too easily overlook, who would rather fill their printed pages than their birth-lists. Like young authors, young grandees let their first copies appear anonymously or under borrowed names, and I can add nothing to Montesquieu's observation, that the _giving of names_ benefits population, because every one strives to propagate his own, except my own remark, that _namelessness_ helps it still better. In fact, it holds in this respect with the most exalted persons, as with the Greek artists, who, under the finest _statues_ with which their hand decorated _temples_ and roads, were not allowed to place their patronymic; while the cunning Phidias also finds his imitators, who instead of his name foisted in on the statue of Minerva his old _face_.

The Prince had in his mind to offer Beata, who seemed to him to have too much innocence and too little coquetry, a short love. Her resistance led him to think of a longer. Under the eyes of the Resident Lady all her senses were secured against him, only not the ear; in the park, none of them. The Resident Lady--who knew that her spirit could for every moment transfer itself into a new body, while her rival had no more than one, in which, moreover, was lodged nothing but innocence and love--looked upon the whole affair with no other than satirical eyes. So far had things gone when the Prince in the dog-day interregnum arrived, and the next morning, instead of the sceptre had in his hand nothing but the frizzling-comb and the Resident Lady's head. He had established it as a fas.h.i.+on at his court, every chamberlain down to the court-dentist had thenceforth his _preteuse de tete_, in order to learn as much upon her head, as he would have to practice upon the head of a fairer _preteuse_. It was as necessary for one to frizzle as to be frizzled.

I might say it in a note, that a _preteuse de tete_ in Paris is a damsel who is frizzled a hundred times in a day, because the fraternity would learn the art by her--it is impossible that so many changes and trials should go on under her skull as over it--the coalition and affiliation of the most unlike frisures is so great, combings and curlings follow each other so swiftly, or building up and tearing down, that only on the head of the G.o.ddess of Truth can it fare worse, which the philosophers frizzle and _fix up_, or in whole bodies politic, upon which regents practice.

On the same morning when ours frizzled the Resident Lady, he said to the dreamy Beata that the next day he was coming with the friseur to her. The Resident Lady said nothing but "the men can do anything; but seldom what is easy: they can more easily entangle ten law-suits than ten hairs." Beata could not speak, at night she could not sleep. Her whole soul curdled with horror at the Prince's frosty face and stinging fiery glance, which (however little she entertained the thought distinctly) burned to abridge the _preliminary victories_ in the new palace, just as if he were in the Palais Royal. The next morning her wish to be sick had almost grown into the conviction that she was so.

She looked with life-weary vacancy out of the window into the Still Land in which two children of the court-gardener were rolling round a variegated gla.s.s-ball, when the canary bird who lived on the shoulders of the Prince, and flew round him like a fly, came fluttering from his head, which was separated from her by six windows, and alighted upon hers. She drew in her head with the bird--but with the proprietor of the creature also, who came up to her at once without ceremony and said: "With you one is fated to lose--but from my bird you cannot take away--liberty;" for people of his sort let all this slip out without accent; they speak in the same tone of the starry canopy and of the coach canopy, and of the motion of both.

Without ceremony he was about to put on her the powder-mantle; she took it however and put it on herself with other purposes and said she was already dressed for the whole day, even to powdering. Only she would fain still invest her refusals in the fairest forms, which her station and the respect for his s.e.x, to which her mother had trained her, dictated; in the end she saw that his remonstrances were not much better than his hair-dressing. When he began this latter, and stood so close to her, she then, again, perceived the opposite. Every hair upon her head grew to a feeler, and it seemed to her as if he touched her sore nerves, as if, with him, a flaming h.e.l.l traveled round her. All at once, according to the laws of the female nature, her agony welled up from the middle stage to the highest--I should be glad to know, whether it arose from his a.s.sumed att.i.tudes, which availed him nothing, or from a kiss, as the receipt of the benefit-play which he was performing for his advantage, or from her glance at the pyramid of the hermitage-mountain, which filled to overflowing her trembling bosom with the _mental_ and _material_ images of her brother--suffice it, she sprang up feverishly, and after saying: "She had promised the Resident Lady so faithfully to help her put on her hat, and now she was still here!" she certainly expected that this modestly-formed rebuke would drive him away. He was not to be driven away. This disappointment shattered her tender forces and she leaned, trembling, her arm and frizzled head against the arras. He, perhaps, tired of waiting, or glad to have accustomed her to his neighborhood, took his bird and her and led her himself to the Resident Lady's; here he repeated with her his laughter at the benefit-play, and so on.

Meanwhile the torments of the outer head had resolved themselves into the migraine of the inner; she stayed away from the table and--so long as he remained there this time--from the park also.

Which latter was not so much to be stated as to be explained.

TWENTY-EIGHTH, OR SIMON AND JUDAS, SECTION.

Paintings.--Resident Lady.

Day before yesterday (the 26th of October) was thy baptismal day, Amandus! Hast thou, haply, in all thy life, ever celebrated one with glad eyes? Hast thou ever, at the end of a year, said: May the new one be like this?--I will not answer these questions, lest I should make myself more sad....

Gustavus saw no more in the garden anything but what he sought not, the Prince and his like; he cherished unnecessary, _i. e_. a lover's reluctance to inquire of any one about Beata's invisibleness--except of the gardener's two children, who knew nothing, except that Beata, as well as he, always toyed with them and gave them presents. Perhaps she gave them, because he did; for he did, because she did. The only relics of her, her walks, attracted him to them so much the oftener. O, if only the pebbles under her feet had been softer, or the gra.s.s longer, so that both might have retained an outline of a trace that she had been there: then would this thorn-garden of his invisible one have given his wishes still greater wings, and his melancholy deeper sighs.

For I must just confess, once for all, to myself and my readers, that he is now in that enthusiastic, yearning, dreamy state, which _precedes_ a declaration of love. This dreamy veil must have hung over him, when he once, instead of the serpentine brook in the evening-dell which he was going to draw, sketched the lovely statue of Venus, who seemed to have risen from those waves; and secondly, when he did not see who saw him--the Resident Lady. He appeared to her like a fair child, who had grown five feet tall; with all his inner excellences he could not yet produce an imposing effect, because on his face there was still written too much good nature and too little knowledge of the world. With that playful frankness of the coquette, which is the first-born daughter of the coquette's disparagement of the male s.e.x, she said: "I'll give you the _original_ for the _drawing_," and took the latter and contemplated it with an interesting and thoughtful admiration (only her thoughts were on another subject.) Oefel, to whom he related the adventure, scolded at him for not having said neatly: "_Which original?_" For to the living Venus Gustavus had said nothing.

Nor, in fact, could he have done it, for she stood before him with all the charms which are left to a Juno, when one takes from her the gracious hue of the first innocence, with her forest of plumage, which hundreds in Lower Scheerau wear after her, because they, as well as a few of my lady readers, who also _put on_ more feathers than they will _slit_ (pens) in their whole life, have made out so much as this, that every Juno must be a G.o.ddess, and every G.o.ddess a Juno, and that ladies'-heads and harpsichords must always be stuck or struck with _quills_.

She asked him after the name of his drawing-master (the Genius); his own she herself told him. She could not fail, with all her missteps, to command a certain respect, and her sins and the Devil seemed to walk behind her only as Chamber-Moors; her face, like her behavior, bore the inner consciousness of her remaining virtues and her talents.

Nevertheless she remarked in the shy reverence which Gustavus manifested less for her rank and worth than for her s.e.x, that he had little knowledge of the world. She avoided all circ.u.mlocution and made a direct application to him for a drawing of the whole park to send to her brother in Saxony. I call that a request, which she properly always framed in addressing men in the jocose tone of a cabinet-order--and one could oppose her female ukases in no other way than by masculine ones.

Let woman once lay a commission upon thee, then thou art hers, body and soul; all thy disagreeable steps, all thy irksome services in her behalf resolve themselves into charms around that image of her which thou hast spread out on the bony walls of thy brain. To rescue--avenge--teach--protect a woman is hardly much better (only a little) than to love her at once. Gustavus never heard a more welcome request; he sketched the park in a very short time, and could hardly wait for the forenoon in which he was at liberty to hand it to her. We all know what he hoped to behold in the Resident Lady's apartment beside herself--but all he found there beside her was the little pupil (Laura) of the absent Beata, at the Silvermann's-harpsichord.

The Resident Lady fixed a long look upon the drawing. "Have you,"

said she, "seen any pieces by our Court Painter? You should be his scholar and he yours--he has never yet painted a fine portrait nor a poor landscape--in your drawing the statues are finer than the garden--retain your fault, and continue to beautify persons," she said and looked upon him. In my slender artistic judgment--for they have never yet admitted one of all my pieces, as aspirant, into a picture-gallery, and I seek, with more honor, rather to review publicly such exhibitions than to enrich them--the precise opposite is true, and my hero (like his biographer) makes far better landscapes than portraits. "Try it," she continued, "with a living original"--he seemed perplexed as to the intention of her advice--"take one that will sit to you as long as the artist himself sits." Oefers vanity with Gustavus's impetuosity might, at this point, have got together a stupid piece of politeness--"Here! this one I mean in here "--and she pointed to a looking-gla.s.s; at this moment he was, after all, on the point of coming out with the resuscitated flattery, that her figure was beyond his pencil: when she luckily added: "Paint yourself and show me the picture." Over an accidentally swallowed _sottise_ one grows quite as red as over a rejected one--thou beautiful, burning red Gustavus!

I therefore write out here, for children who have never yet danced at winter b.a.l.l.s, this motto from the laws of fas.h.i.+on: When people are about to make a declaration to you, to put one into their mouths is as impolite as it is dangerous.

"I will just show you why," said she, and reached her hand half way to his and drew it back again, and took him with her through her reading-cabinet, through her library into her picture-gallery. When she walked, one could hardly walk himself; because one wanted to stand and look after her. Still harder was it by her side to look at pictures.

She pointed out to him in the gallery a motley row of likenesses which the most famous painters had taken of themselves, and which the Resident Lady had had copied from the gallery in Florence. "You see, if you were a famous painter--and that you must become--I should not have your portrait yet in my collection." On the window-seat stood upright the female parasol, a green walking-fan, which he could have taken his oath before a bench of justice was Beata's--several hay-carts of Wouwerman's _gra.s.s_, several hundredweight of Salvator Rosa's _rocks_, and a square mile of Everdingen's _grounds_, would he have given for that mere fan.

But the promise which had been extorted from him, to paint himself, was, for such a child of nature as he, to whom art had not yet given vanity, hard to fulfil. Hundreds of youths now-a-days show more ability to survey themselves before a looking-gla.s.s in company, than he had to do it in solitude. He really feared that he was committing all the time the sin of vanity.

In this way my hero, who is trying to fetch himself out of the looking-gla.s.s, is beheld and painted by three drawing masters at once: by the biographer, or myself, by the romancer, or Herr von Oefel, who inserts in his romance a chapter wherein he treats anonymously Gustavus's love for the Bouse, and by the painter and hero himself. He may well, then, be well hit.

Of Oefel's romance of the Grand Sultan nothing more will appear in the court bookstore at the next fair than the first volume; and it will gratify the minor public which reads and makes the most of our romances, to hear that I have looked a little into the Grand Sultan and that most of the characters therein are taken not out of the wretched _actual_ world, which, moreover, one has around him every week and knows as well as he does himself, but mostly out of the _air_,[68] that a.r.s.enal and nursery of the thinking romancer; for if, (according to the system of dissemination) the _germs_ of the actual man, side by side with the pollen of flowers, flutter round in the air, and must, out of it, as the repository of posterity, be precipitated and absorbed by the fathers: then much more must authors get their _drawings_ of men out of the air, (where all Epicurus's exfoliations of actual things fly round,) and shape them on paper, that the reader may not crumble.

For some days the von Bouse was not accessible, when the original wanted to carry her his copy. At last she sent for both. His face was very unlike the painted one, when his glance, on entering, fell upon his physiognomical sister, who was singing with her little Bouse at the harpsichord, upon Beata. We poor devils, we who have grown up not on family trees, but on a family bush, are brought by four walls so near to each other, that we make each other _warm_; on the contrary, the velveted walls of the great keep their inmates as far apart as city walls, and it is with us there as in taverns, where our interest detaches only one or more from the great ma.s.s. So Beata kept on; and he began; to him it was no more than if he saw her through his window in the garden. His portrait found the most favorable reviewer. She flew on with it through several rooms. Gustavus could now set his eyes where his ears had long since been. His only wish was, that the pupil were extraordinarily stupid and sang everything falsely, merely that the charming leader might the oftener recite her part. It was that divine _Idolo del mio_ of Rust's, at hearing which I and my acquaintance always feel as if we were absorbed by the bland heaven of Italy, and dissolved by the waves of the tones, and inhaled as a breath by the Donna who glides along in the same gondola with us under the starry sky.... By such dangerous fancies I really upset all my stoicism and become, even before I am yet thirty, eighteen years old.