The Word upon Dolls.
These bits of wood hold in their hands, as is well known, the law-giving power over the fairer portion of the female world; for they are the Legates and Vice-Queens, sent from Paris by the reigning line in the finery department, to rule over the female German Circles--and these wooden plenipotentiaries again send down their _heads_ (of caps) as _missi regii_, to reign over the more common ladies of rank. If these reigning wooden heads [or blockheads] cannot come themselves, they then (as living Princes in the privy council supply their places by their _portraits_) send their _laws_ and _likenesses_ in Schmauss _corpus_ of all imperial-decrees of fashion, which _corpus_ we all have in our hands under the name of the _Journal des Modes_. In such circ.u.mstances--as one piece of wood plays into the hands of another--but more unselfishly than whole colleges; since, furthermore, new ones are elected annually as Proconsuls--I do not wonder that the system of government at the toilettes is well arranged and administered and that the whole female commonwealth which men cannot govern, is, by the electric female Regents sent in ba.s.s-viol cases, who stand and direct in this aristocracy from Lisbon to St. Petersburg, kept in excellent order and subjection.
I am not the man that needs to have it told him as a piece of news, that these dolls are the dressed wooden statues which are set up to (in the matter of dress) meritorious women;--nay, I am convinced that these public monuments, which are erected to attiring merit, have already quickened very many and it is to be hoped will yet stir up many more to a n.o.ble emulation, as a great man seldom does so much good as the respect paid to his statue; but a main point, without which all else limps, is manifestly this, that the statues must be--visible. Without _that_ I would not give a b.u.t.ton for the whole of them. What Socrates did for philosophy, I would do with the best dolls, namely, draw them down from the heaven of the great to the earth of the common people. I have a notion that, if one should take the images of the Virgin, or even the Saints and Apostles, which have hitherto, in Catholic churches, been dressed and undressed without the least profit or taste and should dress them up more rationally and advantageously, that is, just like the French dolls--if the church would regularly every month receive the _Journal of Fashion_, and according to its colored patterns re-dress the Marys (as ladies) and the Apostles (as gentlemen) and so set them around the altar, then would these people be _imitated_ and venerated with more zest, and one would know, surely, for what one went to church, and what they wore in Paris and Versailles;--one would learn the fashions in good season, and even the common people would put on something more sensible, the Apostles would become the file-leaders of dress and Mary the true Queen of Heaven to the women. Thus must ecclesiastical benefits be utilized as state benefits; even so did the Dominican Monk Rocco in Naples (according to Munter) apply the extravagance of burning lamps in the streets at the altar of Mary to the multiplication of these altars and--the lighting of the streets.
_End of the Word upon Dolls_.
I still owe the reader the reason why the Minister"s Lady insisted on taking the part of Jeanne--it was because that part allowed her a shorter skirt--or, in other words, because she could then display more easily her graceful Lilliputian feet. They were the only thing immortal about her beauty, as in Achilles the feet were the only thing mortal; in fact, they might, like the fallow-deer"s, have served for tobacco-pipe stoppers.
How much better did Oefel appear by contrast. He is a downright fool, but in a proper measure. The Resident Lady surpa.s.sed the other in every bending of the arm, which a painter--and in every lifting of the foot, which a G.o.ddess--seemed to move; even in the laying on of the rouge, whereto the Bouse had to accustom her cheeks under a princess who used to require this fleeting flesh-tint of all her court-ladies--her rouge, like the reflection of a red parasol, only tinged her with a slight mezzotint.... In respect to beauty, hers was distinguished from the ministerial as virtue is from hypocrisy....
The drama was born into the world, through the five players, not in the opera house, but in a hall of the palace, which favored the Resident Lady"s coronation. I was not there; but all was reported to me. The good Marie, Beata, had too much sensibility to show it; she felt that she was dramatizing the duplicate of her destiny, and she possessed too many of the good principles of the feminine character, to expose it before so many eyes. Her best part she therefore played inwardly. Henri (Gustavus), beside his inner one, played the outward one also very well, for the same reason. The letter which he was going to deliver confounded his part with his history which I am writing, and the false praise which the Minister"s Lady had bestowed on his recent rehea.r.s.ed part, from the very same unconvinced affectation in which she exaggerated her own, helped him reap true praise. The man who is the most bashful when much fancy glimmers under his actions, is the most courageous when it blazes forth.
It would be ridiculous, if my praise of the warmth of his playing should include the refinement of his performance; but the spectators gladly forgave him because poverty in refinement[87] was coupled with wealth and heartiness, by way of drawing them into the illusion that he was from the country and merely Henri.
He needed this fervor, when, at the place where he reveals to her the brotherly relation, he would hand his beloved Beata the real love-letter--she unfolded it as her part required--with infinite grace he had spoken those words in which his whole life was infolded: "O believe me, indeed I am not thy brother"--she glanced at his name there--she had already half guessed the truth from the manner of his delivering the paper (for no maiden, be sure, ever yet was found wanting when she had to complete a man"s stratagem)--but it was impossible for her to fall into a feigned fainting fit--for a true one seized her--the swoon overdid the part a little. Gustavus took it all for acting, so did the Minister"s Lady, who envied her the gift of illusion. Henri brought her to merely by the means which his written part prescribed, and in a state of confusion, produced by the conflict of all emotions, love, consternation and nervous tension, and in a quite other than theatrical glorification, she played to the end Henri"s beloved, in order not to play Gustavus"s. After the performance she was obliged to renounce all the remaining festivities of the evening, and in a chamber which the Prince, as well as the Doctor, with much _empress.e.m.e.nt_, urged upon her, to seek rest for her still agitated nerves and in the letter _unrest_ for her throbbing bosom. I lift the curtain still higher, dear soul, which then still veiled that which now robs thy nerves and thy bosom of peace!
Gustavus saw nothing; at the table, where he missed her, he had not the courage to inquire after her of the ladies sitting near him. Of other things he asked to-day more boldly; not merely had the applause he had gained been an iron-and-steel-cure to his courage, but the wine also, which he did not drink, but ate at the absurd Olla Podridas of the great folk. This eaten beverage fired him actually to publish the _bon mots_ which he used once to say only to himself. And here I publicly testify, how it afflicts me to this very moment that I once on my entrance into the great world was a similar simpleton, and thought things which I should have spoken. Particularly do I repent this, that I did not say to the wife of a trench-major, who had by the hand her little girl and in her bosom a rose with a little one out of the midst of it: _Vous voila!_ and point to the rose, though I had the whole _bon mot_ lying all ready cast in my head. I afterward carried round the _saillie_ for a long time in the chambers of my brain, watching my chance, but finally let it off in the stupidest way, and dare not here so much as name the person.
As there stood among the show-dishes, the optical parade-dishes of the great folks, a winter-landscape with an artificial frost, which melted in the warmth of the room and disclosed a leafy spring, Gustavus had a fine conceit about that, which no one has been able to remember and report to me. Nevertheless, although he ate under the finest ceiling-piece and in the neatest chair, he still, as a mere court-novice, took an interest in all he said and in every one he talked with; to thee, thou blessed one, no truth and no person were as yet indifferent. But there yet awaits thee that bitter transition from hate and love to indifference, which all have to undergo who concern themselves with many persons or many things to which they must needs remain cold!
The Resident Lady drew out to-day more than usual his shy talents to light, and easily graced the interest she took in him with the acknowledgment of his theatrical claims upon her grat.i.tude. At length the third spectacle began, wherein more could shine than in either of the others--the ball came on. Dancing is to the female world what the play is to the great world--a fine vacation-time of tongues, which often become awkward, often dangerous. For a brain like Gustavus"s, which to-day for the first time had experienced so many a.s.saults upon his senses, a ball-room was a New Jerusalem. In fact any ball-room is something; look into this one, where Gustavus skips round! Every stringed and wind instrument becomes a lever which lifts the heart out of this n.i.g.g.ardly, mistrustful, every-day life; dances shuffle men and women like cards in and out among each other, and the ringing atmosphere around them binds the intoxicated ma.s.s into one--so many human beings, and they linked together for such a joyous purpose, dazed by the surrounding chiaro-oscuro, inspired by their beating hearts, must at least commend the cup of joy which Gustavus drained, for he, to whom every lady is a Dogessa, was inspired by every touch of a hand, and the outer tumult so awoke one in his whole inner being that the music, as by reverberation, left its outward birthplace and seemed to spring up only in his own soul amidst and beside his thoughts, and from there to sound outward....
Verily, when one bears about his ideas around a blazing chandelier, they cast back a quite other light than when one crouches with them before an economical lamp! In men of lively fancy, as in hot lands or on high mountains, all extremes lie nearer together: with Gustavus rapture tended every moment to become melancholy; and joy, love, and all the emotions with which the fair dancers inspired him, he would fain bear to his one darling, who staid apart in solitude. It seemed to him, however, as if not all of these made her place good so much as the Resident Lady. Even the play, which was a.s.sociated with her and in which he had acted for her coronation, made her more dear to him; nay, this her birthday was in his eyes one of her charms. Not otherwise, nor more reasonably than thus, do man"s _feelings_ ever act. In short, the Resident Lady gained in all respects in which the absence of Beata to-day bereaved him. To-day was the first time that he had touched anything more of the Resident Lady, for whom he had an extraordinary respect, than a glove--to-day he touched her arm and back, in other words the dress which covered them: on arm and back, but not on the hands, clothing is as good as none. Gustavus! philosophize and sleep rather....
The Bal Pare is over--but the devil"s play now begins. Oefel"s carriage followed the Bouse"s; a neglected axle of the latter took fire from its unnecessary speed. Of course it was an accident, but certain men know no such thing as a mischance, and their plans use every one as a nucleus. Oefel had to offer her his carriage. The good Beata had been left in her sick chamber with a little circle of female attendants. He took a horse from the carriage of the Resident Lady; he left with her (I know not whether from gallantry toward her s.e.x or from sharp-sightedness and friendship for his own and for his romance) my hero and hers. I would offer to prove before an academical senate that nothing is more critical, for one who is meaning yet to become an angel, than to drive home by night from a ball-room with a woman whom he regards as one already--nevertheless not a hair of my hero"s head was hurt, nor did he hurt another"s.
But he grew more in love, without knowing with whom.
Beata had not quite so dangerous a midnight or after-midnight; but I will despatch his first. He arrived with the Resident Lady at her apartment. He could not and would not tear himself away from to-day"s scenes. This room represented to him all that had pa.s.sed there, and in the strings of the harpsichord lurked a far-distant and beloved voice, and behind the foil of the mirror a far-distant and beloved form.
Longing attached itself as a dark flower to the variegated festoon of joy: the Resident Lady gained a new charm by this dark flower also. She was not one of the coquettes who seek to move the senses before the heart; she fell upon this first with the whole array of her charms and from this afterward, as into an enemy"s country, carried the war in to them. She herself was not to be conquered otherwise than according to her own tactics. If women of the upper cla.s.s, like epigrams, are divisible into those that have wit and those that have sensibility, she resembled rather the Greek than the Gallic sententious poem, though the resemblance to the Greek grew daily less. The May air of her earlier life had once wafted a white blossom of n.o.ble love to her heart, as a blossom-leaf often comes fluttering down into the midst of the macerated feathers or flower-brilliants of a lady"s hat--but her station soon metamorphosed her bosom into a _pot pourri_, on which are painted flowers of love and within a decaying heap of leaves. All her missteps kept, however, within those narrower and fairer limits to which the invisible hand of an _inextinguishable_ sentiment restricted them. This sentiment the Minister"s Lady had never had, and the tablets of her heart grew more and more soiled the more she wrote upon them and rubbed out again. The latter could never possibly delude a n.o.ble man; the former lady could.
After this digression the reader can no longer be perplexed, if the Bouse"s behavior toward Gustavus is neither sincere nor dissembled, but both. She showed him the night-piece which the Russian-Prince had left with her, and which for the sake of better light she had hung in her cabinet. It represented simply a night, a rising moon, an Indian woman worshipping it on a mountain, and a youth also directing his prayer and his arms toward the moon, but his eyes upon the beloved suppliant at his side; in the background a glow faintly lighted a moonless spot.
They remained in the cabinet; the Resident Lady was absorbed in the pictured night, Gustavus talked about it; at last she suddenly woke out of her gaze and silence with the drowsy words: "My birthday festivals always made me sad." In justification she disclosed to him almost all the darker parts of her history; the mournful picture took its colors from her eye and lip and its soul from her tone, and she ended by saying: "_Here_ every one suffers _alone_." In the inspiration of sympathy he seized her hand and perhaps remonstrated by a slight pressure.
She left her hand in his with a look of entire indifference; but presently took up a lute lying near them, as an apparent pretext for drawing back the fair hand. "I was never unhappy," she continued with emotion, "while my brother still lived." She now drew forth, after a slight but unavoidable unveiling, the image of him which she wore on her sisterly bosom and allowed his eyes a partial view of it, but devoured it with her own. Although Gustavus at the unveiling of such different mysteries, looked merely at the painted bust--even this my Conrector and his fox-skin coat criticise in the most rational manner, for he conceives that there is no fairer _rounding_ than that of his periods, and no more modern Eve"s _apple_ than that in the Old Testament. My skin-dressed Conrector may prescribe as he will; but Gustavus, sitting opposite to the mourning Resident Lady, who, formerly let only the _form_, never the _color_ of that embowered forbidden fruit be divined, will have hard work to learn the lesson.
Very few would have been able, like me and the Conrector, to have hung the picture in its place again with their own hands.
"I love this cabinet," said she, "when I am sad. Here my Alban (name of the brother) surprised me, when he came from London--here he wrote his letters--here he wanted to die, but the doctor would not let him leave his chamber." Unconsciously she let a chord escape from her lute and die away in the air. She looked dreamily on Gustavus, her eyes a.s.sumed a more and more moist glimmer. "Your sister is still happy," said she in that sorrowful tone, which is omnipotent when one hears it _for the first time_ from fair and usually laughing lips. "Ah!" said he with sympathetic sadness, "would that I had a sister!" She looked at him with a slightly searching glance of wonder, and said: "On the stage to-day you played the precisely reverse part toward the same person."
She meant _there_ he had falsely given himself out as a brother to Beata; here, falsely, as not her brother, or rather here he revealed to her his love. His inquiring look of astonishment hung on her lips and hovered anxiously between his tongue and his ear. She went on indifferently: "To be sure, they say, own brother and sister seldom love each other; but I am the first exception; you will be the second."
His astonishment became amazement....
It would be just so with the public, did I not make a sudden break and inform them, that the Resident Lady may well have actually believed (in fact must have) the lie which she told him. People of her station, into whose ears the _furioso_ of the concert of gaieties is ever sounding, hear un-contemporary news with only a deaf, if indeed with more than half an ear--she may therefore, even more easily than the reader (and who will answer for him?) have confounded the lost son of Madam Roper and Falkenberg with the present son of Falkenberg and the Captain"s lady. Her behavior hitherto is no more against my supposition than that of the alleged brother and sister was against hers; however I may be mistaken.
But this mistake is rendered quite improbable by her subsequent conduct. His embarra.s.sment repeated itself in hers; she regretted her precipitancy in having praised a brother and sister as loving and happy who avoided each other and disliked to speak of their mutual relations.
She concealed not with her looks her design, of diverting the conversation, but took pains to show it; but to her sorrow in having no brother, was joined the sorrowful reflection that Gustavus had indeed a sister, but did not love her, and she expressed her sympathy with the like misfortune more and more touchingly and tenderly on her lute.
Over the soul of Gustavus, above which to-day"s festival still hung with all its splendor, rolled the heaviest and most heterogeneous waves--mistrust never entered into his heart, although in his head he thought he had enough of it--at this moment he had the choice between the throne and the grave of to-day"s joy.
For strong souls know no half way between heaven and h.e.l.l--no purgatory, no _limbus infantium_.
The Resident Lady decided his wavering soul. She took his chaos of looks (or it seemed so, for I have not the heart to be the tribunal and last appeal of so many thousand readers) for the two-fold confusion and concern at the coldness with which his (alleged) sister treated him, and at his family history. She had hitherto found in his eyes a longing which sought finer charms than did other courtly eyes--she had retained in her sensitive heart the morning when he pet.i.tioned for the grave of Amandus, and the loving eyes, which he had dried in her presence--accordingly she shed the tenderest look upon his ardent face--drew from her lute-strings the tenderest voice of her sympathetic bosom--sought to cover her beating heart--and could not even hide its beatings--and while he made a movement expressive of the most intense affection, she fell, transported, lost, with quivering eye, with overwhelmed heart, with distracted soul and with the single, slow, deep-drawn sigh: "Brother!"--on his breast.
And he on hers!... For the first time in her court-life she felt such an embrace; he for the first time a _reciprocated_ one; for on Beata"s pure heart he had never felt her arms around him. O Bouse! couldst thou only have resembled her and remained a sister! but, thou _gavest_ more than thou didst get, and thou didst charm thy victim to take what thou gavest--thou hurriedst him and thyself into a darkening hurricane of feeling--on thy bosom he lost sight of thy face--thy heart--his own--and as all the senses a.s.sailed with their first energies, he lost all, all....
Guardian angel of my Gustavus! Thou canst no longer save him; but heal him, if he is lost, if he has lost all, his virtue and his Beata! Draw with me the mourning curtain around his fall and say, even to the soul which is as good as his is: "Be better!"
Before we go to the soul to whom he says it, to Beata, we will hear at least a single advocate for poor Gustavus, that he may not be so severely condemned. The Vindicator suggests for our reflection simply this: if women are so easy to overcome, it is because in all military relations the a.s.sailant has the advantage over the party a.s.sailed; but let the case be once reversed, a temptress come upon the scene instead of a tempter, then will the same tempted man, who never would have a.s.sailed another"s innocence, lose his own in the unwonted reversal of relations, and indeed the more easily, in proportion as female temptation is finer, more delicate and penetrating than that of man.
Hence men, it is true, lead astray; but young men are generally in the beginning led astray--and one seductress creates ten seducers.
Pardon us all, pure Beata, the transition to thyself! Thou keepest at this late hour of the night a chamber of the princely palace, all alone, but with joy upon joy; for thou hadst Gustavus"s letter to thee in thy hands and on thy bosom; and in the whole palace the sickest soul was the happiest; for the letter which she could at length read, kiss, and without inner and outer tempests enjoy thoroughly, beamed more mildly on her tender eye than the presence of the object, whose fiery glow only by distance sank to a fanning warmth; his presence oppressed her with too great a load of enjoyment, and she then embraced every moment the genius of her virtue, while she fancied she was merely embracing her friend. In this spring-time of rapture, when she held the letter in one hand and by the other the genius of virtue, she was disturbed by the--Prince of Scheerau. So crawls a toad on his belly into a bed of flowers.
In such a case a woman only _then_ finds it difficult to decide her line of conduct, when she still wavers irresolutely between indifference and love; or else when, despite all coldness, she would fain from vanity allow just so much, that virtue may lose, and love gain, nothing;--on the contrary, in the case of a complete virtuous resolve, she can freely resign herself to the inner virtue which fights for her, and she needs hardly watch over lips and looks, because these fall under suspicion precisely when they desire a guard. Beata"s way of putting up the letter was the only little semi-tone in this full harmony of an armed virtue. The inc.u.mbent of the Scheerau throne excused his appearance on the score of anxiety about her health. He made up his following conversation out of the French language--the best when one would talk with the women and witlings--and of those turns of phrase whereby one can say all one will without boring himself or the other party, and which communicate all only in half, and of this half again a quarter in jest, and all more politely than flatteringly and more boldly than sincerely.
"Thus have I"--he said with a polite admiration--"this whole evening, in my mind"s eye seen you pictured; my fancy has taken nothing from you, except actual presence. If fate suffered herself to be reasoned with, I should have scolded at her all through the Ball for having denied to the person who has given us to-day so much pleasure, the enjoyment of her own."
"O!" said she, "a kind destiny has given me to deny more pleasure than I could impart." Although the Prince is one of those persons with whom one would rather not talk about anything, still she said this with a feeling which, however, was nothing but a thanking of destiny for the previous happy reading hour.
"You are," said he with a fine look, which was meant to put another meaning upon Beata"s words, "a little of an egotist--that is not your talent.--Yours must be not to be alone. You have hitherto concealed your face as well as your heart; think you that at my court no one is worthy to admire and to see both?" For Beata, who fancied she had no need to be modest, but only humble, such a praise was too great for her not to think of refusing it. His look seemed to require an answer, but she gave one, on the whole, as seldom as possible, because every step carries the old noose along with it into a new one. He had at first sought her hand with the air with which one takes that of a patient; she had carelessly let him have it, but she had let it lie bedded in his like a dead glove--all his feelers could not detect in it the least sensitiveness; she withdrew it at the next opportunity, neither slowly nor hurriedly, out of the rusty sheath.
The dance, the events of the day, the night, the stillness gave his words to-day more fire than usual. "The lots," said he, playing, as one piqued, with a coin in his waist-coat pocket, by way of supplying the place of the escaped hand, "have fallen unluckily. Persons who have the talent of inspiring sensations, have unhappily often the disagreeable one of reciprocating none, themselves." Suddenly he fixed his glance upon her breast-pin, on which gleamed a pearl with the word, "Amitie;"
from that he turned his eyes to his Bolognese coin, on which, as on all coins of Bologna, was inscribed the word "Libertas." "You deal with friendship as Bologna with Freedom--both of you wear that as a legend which you have not in fact." The n.o.bler cla.s.s of persons cannot hear the words _Friendship_, _Feeling_, _Virtue_, even from the most ign.o.ble, without being reminded by the words of the greatness of which their hearts are capable. Beata covered with her heaving breast a sigh which would fain say, only too plainly, what joys and sorrows, feeling and friendship gave her, but it touched not the Prince.
His searching glance, which was owing not to his s.e.x, but to his _station_, overtook the sigh which he had not heard. He made at once, contrary to the nature of an appeal and of nature itself, a leap in the dialogue: "Do you not understand me?" he said, in a tone full of expectant homage. She said with more coldness than the sigh promised, that she could not to-day do anything with her sick head than rest it on--her arm, and that alone made it difficult for her to express with equal strength the reverence of a subject, and the difference between her opinions and his. Like beasts of prey, where creeping effected nothing, he resorted to leaps. "Oh, believe me," said he, adopting as his own Henri"s declaration of love; "Marie, indeed I am not thy brother!" A woman gains nothing by long refusing to understand certain declarations, except--the most unmistakable ones. Besides, he still lay before her in Henri"s att.i.tude. "Permit me," she answered, "the alternative of regarding it either as earnest or as jest--off the stage I am less capable of deserving the rose-prize or of neglecting it; but it is you who in all cases have merely to give it."--"But to whom?"
said he (and this shows that against such persons no reasons are of any avail)--"I forget in the presence of the beautiful all ugly ones, and all beauties in the presence of the most beautiful--I give you the prize of virtue, give me that of sensibility--or may I take it myself?"
and his lips hastily darted toward her cheeks, on which hitherto were more tears than kisses; but with a cold astonishment, which he had found warmer in all other women, she drew herself away from him neither an inch too much nor too little, and in a tone in which were contained at once the respect of a subject, the repose of a virtuous and the coldness of an inexorable soul; in short, a tone as if her request had no connection with what had gone before--She presented to him her submissive pet.i.tion that he would most graciously be pleased (inasmuch as the Doctor had a.s.sured her she could not do anything worse than keep awake) to retire--or as I should have expressed it--go to the devil. Before going so far he indulged in a little more badinage, in which he almost got back to his old tone, filed his inhesive pro-counter-protests and withdrew.
Nothing but the peace which she derived from the hands of virtue and love and Gustavus"s letter ensured her the happy result that this Jacob, or Jack, sprained his hip in wrestling with this angel--which, of course, vexed the mortified Jacques so much the more in proportion as the angel grew more beautiful during the wrestling, as every excitement in a woman is notoriously a momentary cosmetic.
In your whole life, Gustavus and Beata, never have you opened your eyes upon a morning with such different feelings as on this, when Beata had nothing to reproach herself with and Gustavus everything. Over the whole sunken spring-time of his life there settled down a long winter; out of himself he had no pleasure, within himself no consolation, and before him, instead of hope, remorse.
He tore himself away, with as much forbearance as his despair allowed him, from the objects of his anguish and hurried with his boiling blood towards Auenthal, to Wutz--into my lodgings. I saw no remaining sign of life about him, save the rain-storm from his eyes. He made a vain attempt to begin:--what with blood, ideas and tears, his words were drowned--at last, in a flame of emotion, he turned away from me toward the window, and with his eye fixed on one spot related to me how low he had fallen from himself. Thereupon, in order to avenge himself upon himself by his mortification, he made himself visible, but only held out till he came to the name of Beata; here, when for the first time he brought before me the vanished flower-garden of his first love, he was compelled to cover his face, and said: "Oh, I was altogether too happy and am quite too miserable."
The delusion of the Resident Lady in taking him for the brother of Beata I could easily explain to him by the resemblance between the likenesses of himself and of the first son. First of all I endeavored to restore to him the weightiest credit--that which he must find in himself: whoever ascribes to himself no moral strength, at last forfeits it in reality. His fall was owing merely to his _new situation_; nothing is so dangerous about a temptation as its _novelty_; men and clocks go most correctly in a uniform _temperature_.
For the rest, I beg the romancers, who find it far easier than feeling and experience attest, for two quite pure, enthusiastic souls to change their love into a fall, not to take my hero as proof of their position; for here the _second_ pure soul was wanting; on the contrary, the union of all the colors of two fair souls (Gustavus"s and Beata"s) will never produce any other than the _white_ of innocence.
His determination was this, to tear himself away from Beata forever by a letter--to leave the palace with all objects that reminded him of his fair days or his unhappy ones--to live through or sigh through the winter with his parents, who always spent it in the city, and then in summer to shuffle the cards anew with Oefel for the game of life, in order to see what there might still be, when repose of soul is lost, to gain or to forfeit.... Unhappy darling! why does thy present history, just at the very moment when I might bring my written one into coincidence with it, put on a mourning veil? Why must thy short, sad days fall precisely upon the short, sad days of the almanac? O in this winter of sorrow no Jacob"s ladder of enthusiasm will lift me to the heights whence I may survey and sketch the blooming landscape of thy life, and I shall write about thee little, in order to take thee the of oftener in my arms!
And you, ye frightful souls, who count a misstep of which Gustavus feels as if he must die, as among your distinctions and delights, you who, not like him, lose you own innocence, but murder that of others, dare I defile him by your neighborhood on my paper? What will you yet make out of our century? You crowned, starred, knighted, mitred eunuchs! Of you I speak not, and have never complained that you burn out and precipitate, with as much furnace fire as you can get together, out of your own ranks the so-called virtue (_i. e_., the semblance of it), which is so brittle an alloy in your female metals--for in your rank temptation has no longer a name, no significance, no evil consequences, and you do little or no harm there--but swoop not down upon our _middle_ cla.s.s, upon our lambs, with your vulture claws! With us you are yet an epidemic (I fall, like you, into a confusion, but only of metaphors), which sweeps away the more victims by reason of its newness. Rob and kill there anything else rather than female virtue!
Only in a century like ours, in which all fine feelings are strengthened _except the sense of honor_, can one trample under foot that of woman, which consists merely in chast.i.ty, and, like the savage hack down a tree forever in order to get its first and last fruits. The robbery of a woman"s honor is as much as that of a man"s, _i. e_., thou destroyest the escutcheon of a higher n.o.bility, breakest the sword, takest off the spurs, tearest to shreds the diploma of n.o.bility and the ancestral register; that which the executioner does to a man thou executest upon a poor creature who loves this hangman, and only cannot control her disproportionate imagination. Abominable! And of such victims, whom men"s hands had fastened with an everlasting iron collar to disgrace, there are in the streets of Vienna two thousand, in those of Paris thirty thousand, in those of London fifty thousand--Horrible!
Death-angel of vengeance! count not the tears which our s.e.x wrings from woman"s eyes and causes to fall burning on the frail female heart!
Measure not the sighs and the agonies under which the _filles de joie_ expire, and which awaken no regrets in the iron _fils de joie_, except because he must betake himself to another bed which is not a death-bed!
Tender, true, but weak s.e.x! Why are all the faculties of thy soul so great and brilliant, that thy considerateness is so small and pale in the comparison? Why does there stir in thy heart an inborn respect for a s.e.x which spares not thine own? The more ye adorn your souls, the more graces you make of your limbs, the more love you have heaving in your bosoms and beaming from your eyes, the more you transform yourselves by enchantment into angels; so much the more do we seek to hurl these angels down out of their heaven, and in the very century of your highest transfiguration, authors, artists and n.o.bles all conspire to form a forest of upas-trees under which you are doomed to die, and we exalt each other in proportion to the number of well-poisonings and beaker-poisonings we have prepared for your lips!