Never have I begun a section or a Sunday so sadly as to-day; my declining body and the following letter to Fenk hang on me like a mourning hat-band. I could wish I did not understand the letter.--Ah in that case never would there have entered into my life a never-to-be-forgotten November hour, which, after so many others have pa.s.sed away from me, still stands before me and gazes upon me forevermore. Gloomy hour! thou stretchest out thy shadow over whole years! Thou so picturest thyself before me, that I cannot see the phosph.o.r.escing nimbus of the earth glimmer and smoke behind thee!
The eighty years of man look in thy shadow like the movement of the second-hand--ah take not so much away from me!... Ottomar had this same hour _after_ his burial and describes it to the Doctor thus:
"I have since that been buried alive. I have talked with death and he has a.s.sured me, there is nothing else than he. When I was out of my coffin, he laid in the whole earth in my place and my little mite of joy on the top of it.... Ah, good Fenk! how am I altered! since that moment all hours have stretched on before me like empty graves, that are to catch me or my friends! I heard who it was that pressed my hand once more in the coffin.... Come right soon, dear man!
"Hast thou forgotten how I always dreaded a living burial? In the midst of going to sleep I often started up, because it occurred to me I might sink into a swoon and so be buried and then the lid of the coffin would hold down my upward-struggling arms. On journeys I always threatened, when I fell sick, that if they laid me away within eight days I would appear to them and haunt them as a ghost. This fear was my fortune; else had my coffin killed me.
"Weeks ago my old malady returned upon me: the burning fever. I hastened with it to my chamber and my first word to my housekeeper--as I could not have thee--was, _so soon_ as I was lifeless to inter me, because the air of the vault more easily awakens one, but not to fasten either coffin or tomb--besides, the solitary church in the park stands always open. I also told him in any case to let my dog who never leaves me, go with me. That very night the fever came to its crisis; but my memory breaks off at the blood-letting. All I further remember is that I shuddered a little as I saw the blood curl round my arm and that I thought: "That is the human blood, which we hold so sacred, which cements the card-house and frame-work of our personality, and in which the invisible wheels of life and our impulses move." This blood sprinkled after that over all the fancies of my feverish nights; the immersed universe came up out of it blood-red and all human beings together seemed to me to shed a stream of blood upon a long sh.o.r.e, which leaped out over the earth down into a roaring deep--thoughts, odious thoughts pa.s.sed along grinning before me, such as no healthy man knows, none can represent, none can endure and which bark only at souls prostrate with sickness. Were there no Creator, I must needs have quaked before the hidden chords of agony which are stretched in man and at which a malignant being might storm. But no! thou all gracious Being! Thou holdest thy hand upon our capacity for anguish and dissolvest the earthly heart over which these chords are stretched, when they tremble too violently!...
"The conflict of my nature pa.s.sed over at last into a trance, out of which so many awake only to die under the ground. In that state I was carried to the solitary church. The Prince and my dog were with me there; but the former, only, went away again. I lay, it may have been half the night, before life thrilled through me. My first thought almost rent my soul asunder. By chance the dog stepped on my face; suddenly there came in upon me a sense of suffocation as if a giant hand bent my breast, and a coffin lid seemed to stand like an upheaved wheel above me.... The very description is painful, because the possibility of recovery distresses me.... I rose out of the hexagonal brooding-cell of the next life; death lay stretched far out before me with his thousand limbs, heads and bones. I seemed to myself to be standing in a chaotic abyss and far above me the earth moved on with its living men. Life and death alike disgusted me. Upon what lay near me, even on my mother, I looked coldly and rigidly as the eye of death, when he looks a life to atoms. A round iron grating in the church wall cut out of the whole heaven nothing but the glimmering, broken disk of the moon, which hung down like a heavenly coffin-lamp upon the coffin which is called the earth. The deserted church, that former market-place of a buzzing throng, stood there, dead and undermined with dead men--the tall church windows stretched their long shadows, projected by the moon, over the latticed pews--in the sacristy stood erect the black funeral crucifix, the cross of the order of death--the swords and spears of the knights reminded one of the crumbled limbs which no longer nerved them or themselves, and the death dance of the suckling with false flowers had accompanied hither the poor suckling, whose hand death had broken off, ere it could pluck any more--stone monks and knights imitated the long silenced prayer on the wall with their weatherwasted hands--no living thing spoke in the church save the iron movement of the pendulum of the clock in the tower, and it seemed to me as if I heard how Time with heavy step strode over the world and left graves as his foot-prints.... I sat down on a step of the altar; around me lay the moonlight with fleeting, saddening cloud-shadows; my spirit stood on high: I addressed the personality which I still was: "What art thou? what is it that sits here and recollects itself and suffers torment?--Thou, I, something--whither, then, is it gone, the colored cloud, which for thirty years has swept by over this _I_ and which I called childhood, youth, life?" Myself drifted along through this painted mist--but I could not overtake it,--at a distance from me it seemed something solid; close upon me drizzling mist-drops or so called moments--to live them, means to drop from one moment (that mist-globule of time) into another.... If, now, I had remained dead, then would all that which I now am have been the object on account of which I was created for this luminous earth and it for me? That were the end of the scenes?--and beyond the end----? Joy is perhaps yonder--here is none, because a past joy is none, and our moments thin out that present into thousand past ones--virtue, rather, is here; it is above _time_. Below me all sleeps; but I shall, also; and if I still make believe thirty years longer that I am living, still they will lay me here again--this night will return again, but I shall remain in my coffin: and then?... If now I had three minutes, one for birth, one for life, one for death, for what purpose then would I have them--this is what I would say?--But all that stands between the past and the future, is a moment--we, none of us, have but three.... Great Being of beings--I began and was about to pray--Thou hast eternity.... but before the thought of Him who is nothing but present, no human soul can stand erect, but bows itself down to the earth again. "Oh ye departed loves," I thought, "you could not be too great for me; appear to me!
lift oft the sense of nothingness from my heart, and show me the eternal breast which I can love, which can warm me." Just then I happened to see my poor dog who was gazing at me; and this creature so moved me with his still briefer, still duller life, that I was softened even to tears and yearned for something with which I might increase and allay them.
"That something I found in the organ over my head. I went up to it as to a thirst-quenching fountain. And when with its mighty tones I shook the nightly church and the deaf and dumb dead, and when the dust flew around me which had hitherto lain upon their mute lips then did all the transitory beings that I had loved, with their transitory scenes, pa.s.s along before me; thou camest, and Milan, and the Still Land; I related to them in organ tones what had become a bare narration, I loved them all once more in their fleeting life, and would fain for love have died upon their bosoms and pressed my soul into their hands--but my hand pressed only wooden keys. I struck out fewer and fewer tones, which circled around me like a magnetic whirlpool--at last I laid the choral book upon a low tone and continued to press the bellows in order not to have to endure the mute interval between the tones--there streamed forth a humming sound, as if it were pursuing the wings of time--it bore all my memories and hopes, on its waves floated my throbbing heart.... As far back as I can remember a continued tremulous tone has always made me sad.
"I left my place of resurrection and looked toward the white pyramid of the hermitage-mountain, where nothing rose again and where life more soundly slept; the pyramid stood steeped in the moon-light and a long cloud-shadow traveled on with me.
"Leaves and trees were bent by the touch of autumn; over the p.r.i.c.kly stubbles of the pastures the flowers danced no longer, it had perished in the mouths of the cattle; the snail encoffined itself in its house and bed with spittle; and when in the morning the earth turned round with full-blooded flecked clouds, toward the faint sun, I felt that I had no longer my former glad earth, but that I had left it forever in the sepulchre, and the people whom I found again seemed to me corpses, which Death had lent the upper world, and which Life set up and shoved along, in order to act with these figures in Europe, Asia, Africa and America....
"So I still think. And so long as I live, I shall carry round with me the mournful impression of this certainty, that I must die. For I have only known this within eight days; although I formerly gave myself very great credit for my sensibility at death-beds, theatres and funeral sermons. The child has no conception of death; every minute of his sportive existence interposes its dazzling light between him and his little grave. Busy men and pleasurelings comprehend it quite as little, and it is incomprehensible with what coldness thousands of people can say, life is short. It is incomprehensible, that one should not be able to get the benumbed mult.i.tude, whose talk is an articulate snoring, to lift up their heavy eyelids when one demands of them. Pray look through thy two or three years of life to the bed wherein thou art to lie--see thyself with the heavy hanging dead hand, with the mountainous sick face, with the white marble eye, let thy ear draw over into the present hour the jangling fancies of the last night--that great night which is ever stalking on to meet thee, and which every hour comes an hour nearer, and beneath which thou, the ephemeron, whether thou now hoverest round in the gleam of the evening sun or in the glow of the evening twilight, wilt certainly be crushed. But the two eternities tower up on both sides of our earth, and we creep and grub on in our deep narrow pa.s.s, stupid, blind, deaf, chewing, wriggling, without seeing any greater path than that which we plough with our chafer-heads into one ball of dirt.
"But since that there is also an end of my plans; one can complete nothing here below. Life is so small a thing to me, that it is almost the least thing I can sacrifice for a fatherland; I am merely moving on with a greater or lesser retinue of years toward the grave-yard. But with joy it is all over, as well; my rigid hand, which death has once touched like an electric eel, too easily rubs the b.u.t.terfly dust from its four wings, and I merely let it flutter round me without seizing it. Only misfortune and occupation are opaque enough to shut out the future; and you shall be welcome to my house, especially if you come out from another, where the landlord would rather take in joy.--Oh! ye poor pale images made out of earthly colors, ye human creatures, I have now a redoubled love and toleration for ye; for what power but love raises us up again through the feeling of immortality out of the ashes of death? Who would make your two December days, which you call eighty years, still colder and shorter? Ah! we are only trembling shadows! and yet will one shadow tear another to pieces?
"Now I understand why a man, a king, in his latter days, goes into a cloister; what would he do at a court or on "change, when the world of sense recedes from him and all looks like a great outstretched veil, while only the upper world, the world to come, hangs with its rays down into this blackness. Thus does the sky when one beholds from high mountains, lay aside its blue and become black, because the former is not its own color, but that of our atmosphere; but the sun is then stamped upon this night like a burning seal and keeps on blazing.
"I have just looked up to the starry heaven; but it no longer illumines my soul as once; its suns and planets wither just as this one does into which I crumble. Whether a minute insert its mite"s tooth, or a millenium its shark"s-tooth into a world, is all one, it is crushed in either case. Not merely the earth is vanity, but all which flies beside it through the heavens and is distinguished from it only in size. And thou thyself, fair sun, thou that like a mother, when her child says good-night, regardest us so tenderly, when the earth carries us away and draws the curtain of night around our beds, thou too shalt sink at last into thy night, into thy bed, and shalt need a sun to give thee rays!
"It is singular, therefore, that one should make higher stars or indeed planets and their daughter-lands to be the flower-pots, into which Death is to plant us, somewhat as the American hopes after death to go to Europe.[77] The European would reciprocate his delusion and hold America to be the Walhalla of the departed, if our second hemisphere, instead of being only one thousand miles[78] off, hung at a distance of sixty thousand, as that of the moon notoriously does. Oh my spirit craves something different from a warmed-over, newly laid-out earth, a different satisfaction from what grows on any dung-heap or fire-mound of the heavens, a longer life than a crumbling planet bears upon it; but I have no conception of it at all....
"Only come right down to my head from which thou hast taken the lock; so long as I live shall _that_ side, on which thou hast committed the Rape of the Lock, in memory of what I was and am to be, remain undressed, etc."
"Ottomar."
Poetizing geniuses are in youth renegades and persecutors of taste, but afterward its proselytes and apostles, and age grinds down the distorting microscopic and macroscopic concave mirror to a flat one which merely duplicates nature, while painting it. Thus will the _practical_ and _pa.s.sive_ geniuses from being enemies of principles and stormers of virtue, become greater friends of both than faultless people can ever be. Ottomar will one day surpa.s.s those who now may censure him. For the rest, I shall not in the sequel of this multo-biography treat him knavishly, but honorably, although he does not expect it; for before his journey, when I sometimes found myself in the hot focus of his faults, we fell out a little with each other.
Since then he thinks I heartily hate him; but I think I heartily love him, only, like a hundred others, I take a peculiar pleasure in cherishing a secret and suffering love.
THIRTY-FIFTH, OR ST. ANDREW"S, SECTION.
Days of Love.--Oefel"s Love.--Ottomar"s Palace and the Wax-figures.
I hasten to dip my pen again to-day into my biographic inkstand, because I shall now soon come up against the present moment with my building operations--by Christmas I hope to reach it;--furthermore because to-day is St. Andrew"s and because my landlord has, amidst the screams and shouts of his children, installed a birch-tree in the sitting-room and in an old pot, that it may bear on Christmas eve the silver fruit which will be tied to it. In the presence of such things I forget court-days and law-terms.
Gustavus awoke, on the morning after the declaration of love, not from his sleep--for into that, after such a _royal-shot_ in human life, only a human badger or badgeress could fall--but from the ring and roar of joy in his ears. Raptures danced a reel around his inner eye, and his consciousness was hardly equal to his enjoyment. What a morning! Never did the earth come before him in such bridal finery. Everything pleased him, even Oefel, even Oefel"s bragging about Beata"s love. Fate had to-day--except the loss of his love--no poisonous dart, no festering splinter, which he would not indifferently have received into his utterly blissful and tightly strung breast. Thus, oftentimes, is the extreme of warmth replaced by the extreme of coldness or apathy; and under the diving-bell of an intense idea--be it a fixed idea or a pa.s.sionate or a scientific one--we stand panoplied against the whole outer ocean.
With Beata it fared just so. This soft still-vibrating joy was a second heart, which filled her veins, animated her nerves and colored her cheeks. For love--unlike other pa.s.sions which a.s.sail us like earthquakes, like lightnings--stands in the soul like a still, transparent after-summer day with its whole heaven undisturbed. It gives us a foretaste of the blessedness of the poet, whose bosom a perennial, ever-blooming, singing, sparkling Paradise encircles, into which he can ascend at any moment, while his external body bears itself and the Eden over Polish filth, Dutch mora.s.ses and Siberian steppes.
Oh, ye voluptuaries in capital cities! When does the _Present_ offer you so much as one minute of what the _Past_ here presents my couple, whole days; you, whose hard hearts the highest fire of love, as the concave mirror does the diamond, only _volatilizes_, but cannot _melt_?
But as the red of evening twilight so floats round in the sky that it tinges the clouds of morning-redness, so on Beata"s cheeks by the side of the red flush of joy stood that of shame--although no longer than until the form of the beloved, like an angel, flew through her heaven.
Both longed to see each other; both dreaded to be seen by the Resident Lady; the discovery and still more the criticism of their emotions, they would gladly have avoided. There is a certain stinging glance, which dissolves and destroys soft sensibilities (as that of the sun does the little Alpine creature, the Sure;) the fairest love shuts the leaves of its flowers together before its very object, how should it stand the singeing look of a court?
The biographer, with insight, seizes this opportunity to praise in two words the marriages of great folk; for he can liken them to the innocent flowers. Like Flora"s variegated children, great folk have no covering to their love--like them they marry without knowing or loving each other--like flowers they care not for their offspring--but hatch their posterity with the same sympathy with which a hatching-oven does it in Egypt. Their love is even as a flower frozen to the window which melts away in the heat. Among all chemical and physiological combinations therefore only the union of two persons in the upper cla.s.ses has the advantage, that the parties who fly into a pa.s.sionate fondness for each other and exchange rings diffuse a terrible chilliness; with this exception one finds the same singularity and coldness only in the union of mineral alkalies with nitric acid and M.
de Morveau says with simplicity: "It is remarkable."
As Beata longed so much to see her hero and mine, accordingly, by way of _disappointing_ her wish, she went for some days to her mother at Maussenbach. I will be her vindicator and speak for her. She did it because she wanted never to come upon him except accidentally; but at the Resident Lady"s it would in any case have been designedly. She did it, because she loved to afflict herself, and like Socrates emptied the cup of joy before she put it to her lips. She did it, for a reason that would seldom have actuated another of her s.e.x--in order to fall upon her mother"s neck and tell her all. Finally she also did it, in order to hunt up at home the portrait of Gustavus, which the old man had sold at auction.
I learned all on the very day of her return, when I arrived at Maussenbach as an entire n.o.ble Rota (or juridical circle) not so much to punish as to examine a poor hostess, who--as in the Parisian opera they keep two or three sets of players in readiness for important parts--had taken the precaution to fill the prominent part of her spouse not with a _double_ merely, but with twelve persons from the neighborhood, so that it might continue to be played as often as he himself was absent. And here was a case by which I could infer how little my manor lord was inclined to matrimonial infidelity, and how much more to virtue; he was really glad that the whole float of adulterous parishioners happened to come right by his sh.o.r.e and that he was made the instrument whereby justice could visit and thrash this _secret society_. Here he sought out with zest from the hostess, as in Jocher"s Literary Lexicon, the names of important _authors_ and she was, to his virtuous ear, a Homer singing off the whole body of wounded heroes by name; he therefore out of sympathy, as she had absolutely nothing, remitted her entire fine; but the adulterous union and troop was brought to the tread-mill and the winepress, or pump-chambers and suction-works were applied to them.
So in Maussenbach at this pressing-out of this adulterous company the Lady of the Manor related to me what her daughter had related to her--in order to beg me, as former mentor of the lover, to draw the couple asunder, because her husband could not bear love. I could not tell her that I was engaged upon the biography of the couple and her own, and that love was the sticking-plaster and joiner"s glue that held together the whole biography as well as the pair, and without which my whole book would fall to pieces, and that I should therefore offend the Jena reviewers if I should try to take his love away from him.--But so much I could well say to her: that it was impossible, for the love of such a couple was fire-proof and water-tight. I seemed to her, with my feeling, a little simple; for she thought of her own experience. I added cunningly: that the house of Falkenberg had for some years been rising and laying in fine capitals. To this she merely answered: "Fortunately her husband had never known it," (for a mult.i.tude of secrets she told everybody except her husband); "for he had already meditated for her Beata a different match." More than this I could not find out.
--But a fine broth is cooked here not merely for the hero, but also for his biographer; for the latter must certainly at last smart the worse for it on account of the portrayal of such intense scenes, and must often over such stormy sections cough away whole weeks. I will just confess to the reader candidly beforehand: such a steamy heat and tempest had already, last Friday, roared over the new palace and on Sat.u.r.day swept through Auenthal and into my chamber, when Gustavus entered, all in a turmoil, and inst.i.tuted the inquiry with me whither Mrs. Captain von Falkenberg, who with her mezzotinto cat occupies my first section and who is well known to be Gustavus"s mother, whether she--was really such.... Meanwhile we must drive on briskly; for I know, too, that when I have built up my biographical Escurial and Louvre and sit at last on the roof with my dedicatory oration, I shall have put something into the book-shelves, the like of which the world does not often become possessed of, and which of course must charm reviewers as they pa.s.s by and make them say: "Day and night, summer and winter, even on work-days such a _man_ must write; but who can tell whether it may not be a lady?"
Now, then, on all coming pages the barometer falls from one degree to another, ere the threatened tempest breaks forth. How Gustavus loved the absent Beata, everyone can guess, who has known by experience how love is never more tender, never more disinterested than during the absence of its object. Daily he went to the grave of his friend as to the holy sepulchre; to the birth-place of his happiness with a blissful trembling of every fibre; daily he did it half an hour later, because the moon, the only open eye at his soul"s nuptials, rose half an hour later every day. The moon was and will forever be the sun of lovers, that soft decoration-painter of their scenes: she swells their emotions as she does the seas, and raises in their eyes also a flood-tide.--Herr von Oefel cast the look of an observer on Gustavus and said: "The Resident Lady has made of you what I made of Fraulein von Roper."
Hereupon he reckoned up to my hero the whole pathognomy of love, the sighing, the silence, the distraction, which he had noticed in Beata and from which he deduced that her heart was no longer vacant--he himself was lodged there, he perceived. Oefel was a man whom a woman might treat as she would, in any case he concluded she was mortally in love with him.--Did she behave playfully, indulgently, familiarly with him, he would, say: "Nothing is more certain, but she ought to be a little more reserved;"--if she went to the opposite extreme, if she disdained to give him a look, a command, anything at most beyond her contempt and denied him even trifles; then he would swear, "Among one hundred men he could undertake to pick out the one she loved; it would be the only one she wouldn"t look at."--If a woman struck into the middle way of indifference, then he observed: "Women understood so well the art of dissembling, that only Satan or love could find them out."
It was impossible for him to provide room for all the women that wanted to get into the _rotunda_ of his heart; hence he thrust the surplus (so to speak) into the pericardium, or _heart"s purse_, wherein the heart also hangs, as into a part.i.tion--in other words, he transferred the scene of love from the heart to paper, and invented an _epistolary_ and _paper-love_ corresponding to the letter and paper-n.o.bility. I have had many such chiromantic temperament-leaves of his in my hands, wherein he drives love, like b.u.t.terflies, merely to poetic flowers;--whole volumes of such madrigals and Anacreontic poems to ladies, as have both the _sweetness_ and the _coldness_ of jellies. Such is Herr von Oefel and almost the whole belle-lettristic company.
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 _G.o.ddesses_ cannot have been brought together from any worse models than were those after which the Greek artists created their G.o.ddesses, or the Romish painters their Madonnas, and it would imply very little knowledge of the world not to see that the princesses, d.u.c.h.esses, 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 embarra.s.sment 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 pa.s.sages 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 uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g 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-gla.s.s 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 k.n.o.b 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 pa.s.s 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 gra.s.sy 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 pa.s.sed 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 alb.u.m. 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 G.o.d has breathed peace, that it may enfold his naked heart and a.s.suage 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 sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sed 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.