The Invisible Lodge Part 14

So much the more easily can I conceive how it was with young Gustavus, who had his eyes and ears so near to the magnetic sun. Verily, I would a thousand times rather (I know right well what I undertake) drive all through Scheerau with the loveliest woman in the whole princ.i.p.ality and lift her not only _into_, but even (what is far more dangerous) out of the carriage. Nay, more: sooner would I read to her with an impa.s.sioned voice the best we have in the poetic and romantic departments--yea, I would sooner dance with her at a masquerade ball out of one hall into another, and as we sit down ask her if she is happy--and finally (I cannot express it more strongly), I would sooner put on a doctor's hat and fasten her faint hand with mine to the bleeding-stand, while she, in order not to see the stream of blood leap over the snowy arm, gazes with her pale face steadily into my eye--sooner, I promise, will I (to be sure I shall get more and deeper wounds than the little bled-manikin in the calendar) do all this than hear the loveliest girl sing; then I should be melted and gone; who would help me, who would hear my signals of distress, when in the most tranquil att.i.tude she let the snow of her right arm fall softly over some black surface or other, half opened the bud of her rose-lips, let her dew-distilling eyes fall upon--her thoughts and sink therein, when the soft downy bosom[69] lay heaving like a white rose-leaf on the waves of the breath, and rose and fell with them; when her soul, otherwise wrapt in the threefold clothing of words, of body and of dress, unwound itself out of all wrappages and plunged into the waves of melody and sank in the sea of longing...? I should leap after her.----

Gustavus was caught in the very act of leaping after her, when the Resident Lady came back with _two_ portraits. "Which is the more like?"

she said to Beata, and held up both before her and fixed her eyes not upon the three faces which were to be compared, but upon the comparing one. The companion-piece was, namely, the lost one of the real brother, about which Beata had written to my Philippina. "O my brother!" said she with too much emotion and accent (which is pardonable, as she had just come from the harpsichord): and as she hastily s.n.a.t.c.hed it, she screamed out, until her eye had accidentally glided down over the back of the picture and found no name there. Upon such particles of earthly dust often hangs the beating of the human heart: it hears and lifts the hundred-weight pressure of the whole atmosphere of life, but under the sultry breath of a social embarra.s.sment it collapses in impotence. He who has not where to lay his _head_, suffers often less pain than he who has not where to lay his--_hand_.

"I thought your brother was a distant relative of yours," said the Resident Lady with perhaps a malicious double meaning, in order to entangle her in the choice of one or another sense. Certainly the Resident Lady had so readily at her command all words, ideas and limbs, that in Gustavus's and Beata's understanding and virtue, _force_ hardly availed, as in mechanics, to supply the place of _velocity_. But Beata steadily related, without extenuation and without extravagance, all about these pictures which the reader has learned from my mouth.

Gustavus could not have delivered such a narrative. The information, how it had come into the hands of the Resident Lady, the Resident Lady forgot to give, because she knew a hundred answers to it; Beata forgot to demand it, because she remarked the same thing.

"For your face,"--she said in the gayest tone, in which, without hesitation, she said the good about her charms, which others said in serious tones--"I could give you no other than my own; but that I must send with the garden to my brother in Saxony--you can paint it in with the park, so that both pieces may have one master." It is much harder to refuse anything to the jocose tone than to the serious--or at most it can be done only in a tone of pleasantry; but for this all the proper chords in Gustavus had been broken. Beata had not understood the allusion to the park; Bouse brought the whole landscape-drawing and asked her what pleased her most. She was for the shadow-realm and the evening-dell. (Why did she leave out the hermitage-mountain?) "But of the persons in the garden?"--she continued (the poor subject of inquisition fixed her still gaze more steadily on the evening dell)--"particularly the fair Venus here in the evening-dell?" At last she was obliged to speak, and said, without embarra.s.sment: "The sculptor will not have to complain of the painter, but perhaps the painter will of the sculptor; perhaps, too, it is merely the _frost_ that has injured this _Venus_ a little." The Resident Lady, by her laughter and her _witty_ glances at Gustavus, made a bonmot out of this, made her a little red, _him_ fiery-red, her by this last again redder, and completely so by the answer: "So would my brother also think if he should get the Venus in this way; but you will do me the favor, my love, also to sit to the gentleman, our painter here, then there will come into our park a fairer Venus. I am in earnest. The two coming mornings you will give to our faces, Mr. von Falkenberg!" The good girl was silent. Gustavus, who had already consented to duplicate with his pencil Bouse's countenance, came within a hair of breaking out with the remark that he could not copy Beata's in connection with his.

Fortunately it occurred to him that she would be dressed for the table.

(On Sunday, a week hence, I must begin my section with "For"----.)

TWENTY-NINTH, OR XXIII TRINITATIS, SECTION.

The Minister's Lady and her Fainting-fits--and so forth.

For it was only in the forenoon that he was in that green vault which contained Scheerau's greatest beauties--in the Bouse's apartment; in the afternoon and later the rivers of pleasure roared through it, poured out by the Naiads of pleasure from their chalices of joy. Half the court drove out thither from Scheerau. The court, as is well known, while the people have only Sabbath days, has whole Sabbatical years, and the nearer ministers of the court are distinguished from the ministers of the State in this, that they do no work whatever; so, too, in ancient times, only those beasts were laid upon the altars as offerings to the G.o.ds, which had never yet labored. I know full well, that more than one requires of the paralytic great world a certain labor, namely that of amusing itself and others in one continued stretch; but this is so herculean a task and so severely strains all the faculties, that it is enough if they collectively after a fete, on driving off in the morning dissemble and say, as they part from one another, or the next day on meeting each other: "After all we spent a delicious evening, and altogether things were so brilliant!" Great Quarto-Theologians have long since proved that Adam _before the fall_ took no pleasure in eating or other enjoyments--our grandees before their fall are just as badly off and go through all these things in their state of innocence without having the least fun out of them. I wish I could help the Court.

A man who has a stated working-hour (and though it were only thirty minutes long) regards himself as more industrious than one who has just this day interrupted his twelve hours'-stint for thirty minutes. Oefel reproached himself for his overstrained exertion, and said he knew not how to excuse himself for writing one full hour every morning at the "Grand Sultan." Not till after that were the serious occupations of the day at an end; then _for the first time_ he had himself frizzled and powdered, in order to flutter round as a day-b.u.t.terfly before all toilet-mirrors; on the flowery head of the _Defaillante_ (so the Minister's Lady was called) he alighted. There he let himself a _second_ time be frizzled and be plumed, in order as a _well-powdered_ twilight-and-night-b.u.t.terfly to sweep round among the counters and show-dishes and their counterparts. I should not have happened upon this simile, had not his hair dressed for the evening in the shape of a horn and drawn up together into a capsule led me to think of the caterpillars of the night-b.u.t.terflies, which have a horn or queue attached to them on behind--the day-caterpillars have nothing on them, just as his abbreviated stuck-up morning-hair required, in order to bear out their mutual resemblance.

As I have named the Minister's Lady the _Defaillante_, and as one might on the whole give her credit for the simplicity of being more faithful to the Counsellor of Legation than he was to her, I will tell the whole story and speak in her behalf. Vanity, which ruled over him as a limited monarch, held over her an unlimited monarchy--she had and made Italian verses, epigrams and all things belonging to the fine arts, and it is town-talk that, inasmuch as she had ceased to belong to fine _Nature_, she threw herself into the works of the fine _arts_, and from a model exalted herself by paint into a picture, by pantomime, into an actress by swooning into a _statue_.

This last is the cardinal-point--she died weekly and oftener, like every true Christian woman, not for the sake of her chast.i.ty, but even _before_ her chast.i.ty; I mean a minute or two--she and her virtue swooned one after the other. If I am not copious on such a subject, I am not worth cutting a pen, and the deuce may take my productions.

Virtue then, fared as badly with the Minister's Lady as a favorite young cat with a child. I will not speak of seasons of the day--but only of days of the week: I will suppose that on each day a different antichrist and arch-enemy of her virtue had, for visiting-card, sent his person: in that case it might have run somewhat thus: On Monday her virtue was in the beaming new moon for Herrn von A.,--on Tuesday, in full-moon for Herrn von B., who said: Between her and a _Devote_ the only difference was age,--on Wednesday, in the last quarter for Herrn von C., who says: "_je la touche de'ja_," namely her arm,--on Thursday in the first quarter for Herrn von D., who says: "_peutetre que_"--and so on with the remaining enemies throughout the week; for each adversary saw on her, as his own rainbow, his own virtue. Honor and virtue were with her no empty words, but signified (quite in opposition to the school of Kant) _the interval of time between her No and her Yes_,--often merely _the interval of s.p.a.ce_. I said above, she always had a swoon, when it was the _Monday_ of her virtue. But this admits an explanation: her body and her virtue were born on the same day and of the same mother, and are true twins, like the brothers Castor and Pollux. Now the first, like Castor, is human and mortal, and the other, like Pollux, divine and immortal, and as that mythological brotherhood by a cunning device _went halves_ in mortality and immortality, so as to share each other's society for a while, dead, and again for a while, living this cunning trick is repeated by her body and her virtue: both always die simultaneously, in order afterward to come to life again together. The artistic dying of such ladies may be regarded, on still another side: Such a woman can experience a _joy_ over the strength and the proofs of her virtue, which may reach even the point of a swoon; moreover, a _grief_ at the sufferings and defeats of the same, which may also amount to a swoon. Now one can imagine, whether under the combined attacks of two emotions, each of which alone may be mortal, a woman can still remain erect. Notoriously the honor of women of the world dies as little as the King of France, and that is a well-known fiction; at least the death of that honor is, like that of the Saints, a sleep which does not last over 12 hours. I know at one Court a kind of honor or virtue, which, like a polypus, nothing can kill: like the ancient G.o.ds, it may be wounded, but not annihilated--like the horn-beetle it continues to writhe and wriggle on the needle and without any nourishment. Naturalists of rank often inflict upon such a virtue, as Fontana did to the infusoria, a thousand torments, under which citizenly female virtue would instantly give up the ghost,--not a bit! no thought of dying. It is a beneficent arrangement of Nature that precisely in the higher cla.s.s of ladies virtue has such an Achillean power of life or of regeneration, that it may, in the first place, the more easily endure the simple and compound fractures, bone-shatterings and amputations, and generally the battlefield of that rank. Secondly, that those ladies (in reliance upon the immortality and long line of life belonging to their virtue) may need to set to their pleasures, whose physical limits are, besides, so narrow, at least no moral ones.

I come back to the virtuous swoons or erotic dying of the Minister's Lady; I will not, however, confine myself to remarking that as the ancient philosophy was the art of learning how to die, so also is the French Court philosophy, only of a more agreeable sort--nor will I merely say in a witty way: _qui_ (_quae_) _scit mori, cogi nequit_--nor will I merely apply Seneca's expression about Cato to the Minister's Lady: _majori animo repet.i.tur mora quam initur_; but I simply state the reason why she is universally called in Scheerau the _Defaillante_ [or Fainting Lady]--and it is this: that a certain gentleman, on being asked how she had gained a certain weighty case despite the postponement of the term of closure, replied: _en defaillante_.

I return.... But I were a lucky man, if Time would sit down and let me come up with him; but as it is, I still follow him at a distance of several months, my freight of venture grows daily heavier; I must have paper enough for a double history--that which is already written and that which is all the time occurring. I worry myself to death and at last people have hard work to read me! But is there any help for it?----

Amandus, meanwhile, lay on the hardest bed in the world--the th.o.r.n.y and stony mattresses of the old monks feel like eider-down in the comparison--namely, on the sick bed: his desolate eve rested often on the door of his chamber, to see whether no Gustavus would open it, whether death might not enter in the form of a joy, a reconciliation, and with a love-pressure softly crush the flower of his life; but Gustavus, on his part, lay upon a magic bed to which a better G.o.d than Vulcan fastened him down with invisible fetters; he could hardly stir under his wiry coverlet.

On the morning when he was making ready to take the portrait and pay the visit to the Resident Lady, Oefel let off all around him a mult.i.tude of rockets of wit, and confessed to him, with the contentment with which a Belletrist always bears poverty in bodily goods and the sorer poverty in spiritual ones, in intellect and the like, so much as this,--that he had himself detected in Gustavus his penchant for the--Resident Lady, sooner perhaps than either of the two interested parties themselves. Every denial on the part of Gustavus was a new leaf in his laurel crown. "I will be more honest," he said; "I will be my own traitor, since I have no one outside of me. In the apartment where _you_ have an altar, stands one for me; it is a Pantheon;[70] you kneel more before a G.o.d than a G.o.ddess--but I find there my Venus (Beata).

She wants nothing to make her a Venus de Medici than--position; but I know not _which_ hand, in that position, I should kiss to her." ...

Before Gustavus's pure soul, this lump of _boue de Paris_, happily flew by, into which at courts even good men step without reflection; even authors of this zone have something of this mud still sticking to them.

What pleased him about Beata (and in every maiden) was simply this, that he, as he thought, pleased her; of all the five hundred million women on the earth he would have loved every one if he had pleased them all; on the contrary not one of them, if not one of them liked him. He now related to Gustavus, through what window in the greenhouse of Beata's heart he had seen her love to him bloom out. Except a certain blockhead whom I knew in Leipsic, and a cat, who has nine lives, no man had more lives than this man; did he forfeit one--forthwith he had a fresh one; I mean he had more swoons than another had fancies. Such a mock suicide he could perpetrate at will, and whenever he needed it in his dramas, as an affecting theatre poet; oftenest, however, he and the Leipsic blockhead inflicted this death upon themselves in effigy, when among a lot of ladies they had singled out to visit that one who was most in love with them. For the whole body were distinguished from each other, the two blockheads said, not in the existence but simply in the degree of their love for both of the two fainting subjects. The highest degree of terror at the pantomimic apoplexy, said the swooning couple, is the notary's seal of the highest love. When, therefore, Oefel three weeks ago acted his masquerade death before Beata, under all the neckerchiefs present there beat no heart so tender and sympathetic as hers, which knew neither hardness of its own nor deception on the part of another. Indifferently Oefel put himself to the optical death; in love he rose again and with his pretended swoon had almost effected a real one. "Since then I have not been able so much as to speak to her on the subject," he said. Gustavus struggled with a great sigh, not at Oefel's unfeeling vanity, but over himself and Oefel's good fortune. "O Beata, in this bosom"--(his inner being addressed her)--"wouldst thou have found a more reserved and sincere heart, than is this which thou preferrest to it--it would have concealed its happiness, and now it does its sighs--it would have remained forever true to thee--ah, it will remain true to thee still!" Nevertheless he did not quite feel the disgusting element in Oefel's vanity, because a friend inoculates himself into our personality and grows into it to such an extent that we overlook his vanity as easily as our own and on like grounds.

As it may fare with Gustavus in my book as in real life, I ought to have made even before this the following observation: No one was easier to be misunderstood than he; all rays of his soul were broken by the cloudy veil of mild humility; nay, since Oefel had reproached him with wearing pride upon his countenance he had sought to appear just as humble as he was--his exterior was quiet, simple, full of love, without a.s.sumption, but also without any outburst of wit or humor.

Fancy and understanding wrought in him, as in a solitary temple, altar-pieces in great ma.s.ses, and consequently did not, like others, let snuff-box-pictures and medallions drop from the tongue--he was, as Descartes supposes the earth, an incrusted sun, but under the phosph.o.r.escing lights of the Court a dark earthly body--he was the extreme opposite of Ottomar, whose sun had burnt through his crust, and now stood before the people glistening, crackling, rending, calcining and hatching, Gustavus's soul was a temperate clime without storms, full of sunshine without solar heat, all overspread with green and blossoms, a magic Italy in Autumn; but Ottomar's was a polar land through which there pa.s.sed in succession long scorching days, long frozen nights, hurricanes, ice-mountains, and luxuriant vales of Tempe.

To Gustavus's modesty, therefore, nothing appeared more natural than that Beata should place one who knew so well how to show off his mind and person, above him who could do neither, and who besides, had once vexed her father almost to death. Accordingly his blood crept slowly and sadly as he stole to the Resident Lady's. It seemed to him as if he could, to-day, look upon her as his friend--which he actually half did, when she, too, came to meet him with so mournful an air and face, like that in which a woman, a week after the loss of her beloved, with vacant eyes and cold cheeks, touches us most deeply. It was, she said, the anniversary day of her youngest brother's death, whom she most loved, and who loved her the most of all. She had herself painted in her mourning dross. Nothing has a greater effect than a gay person who for once falls into the semitones of sorrow. Gustavus had, indeed, too much predilection for persons in whose ears vibrated the knell of some bereavement; an unhappy person was to him a virtuous one. The Resident Lady told him she hoped he would paint away to-day's grief from her actual face and charm it into the pictured one--she had on that account a.s.signed to-day for this distraction; to-morrow she would certainly be the better--she played carelessly, and merely with her right hand, a few dances, but only one or two measures, and with a vain struggle against her sadness. He must tell her some story before beginning, that he might not give to a face which she wore only one or two days in a year, an eternal life in his colors. But he had not yet acquired at Court either matter or manner for story-telling--at last she came upon the subject of his subterranean education. Only to her _to-day's_ face was he capable, in the cloud-burst of heart-effusion, which since Amandus's grudge had been denied him, of such a narration. When he had ended, she said: "Now paint away; you should have told me something different."

She took her little Laura in her lap. To the Prince, who is an enthusiastic animal-painter, she must sit with a silk-haired poodle instead of the little girl. But what a group now falls upon his eye, his heart and his brush, to distract all three! At least they all tremble, while the mother arranges the little hands of Laura into a picturesque and child-like embrace--while she, silently and sadly, contending with the waves of the lips against the sorrow of the eye, looks pensively into his, and with the nearest hand playfully curls the hair of the little one--verily, he thought, ten times over! if an angel would fain put on a body, the human were not too poor for the purpose, and he might in this _traveling-uniform_ make his appearance on any sun!

This sketch was so striking, that to the Resident Lady one or two unlikenesses would perhaps have been more agreeable--they would have announced a greater resemblance to her second image in him. She now pa.s.sed on by gentle, not, as usual, sudden and sportive, transitions from his professional compensation and from the disadvantages of his training to his role in the legation--she disclosed to him, but with slow and confidential hand, his want of knowledge of the world--she offered him admission to her society and invited him to _souper_ for to-morrow. But in the forenoon, she added smiling, you must not come; Beata absolutely refuses to be painted.

----The reader has not yet, in the whole book, been allowed to speak or write three words: I will now let him come up to the grating or into the _parloir_ and will write down his questions. "What, then,"--he asks--"is in the Resident Lady's mind? Will she cut out of Gustavus a toothed cog-wheel, which she may put into some unknown machine or other?--Or is she constructing the hunter's screen and twisting the elastic net, to pounce upon and catch him? Is she, as does every coquette, becoming like him, who will not be like her, as, according to Plattner man becomes to such a degree that which he feels, that he bends down with the flower and lifts himself with the rocks?"

Let the reader observe, that the reader himself has wit, and proceed!

"Or," he therefore continues, "does the Resident Lady not go so far, but will she, from magnanimity, for the sake of which one often pardons the optical tricks of her coquetry, seek out and train up the most beautiful and disinterested youth on the most beautiful and disinterested grounds?--Or may not all be mere accidents--(and nothing is so obvious to me)--to which she, as racer through pleasure-groves, fastens, as she flies, the fluttering la.s.so of a half-formed plan, without taking the least look, the next day after the strangled prey of her snare?--Or am I wholly wrong, dear Author, and is perhaps not one of all these possibilities true?"--Or come, dear Reader, come, are they all true at once, and was this the cause of thy not guessing a capricious woman, that thou givest her credit for fewer contradictions than charms?--The reader confirms me in my observation, that persons who could never have the opportunity to give the great world lessons on the piano-forte (for example, unfortunately, the otherwise excellent reader) are capable, indeed, of pre-calculating all _possible_ cases of any given character, but not of singling out the _real_ one. For the rest, let the reader rely on me (one who would hardly without reason extenuate distinctions which attach to himself)--for the rest, he has far less cause to mourn his poverty in certain conventional graces, in certain light, fashionable and poisonous charms, which a court never denies, than other courtiers--the author could wish he were not reckoned among them--have really to bewail their wealth of the like species of poison; for in this way he remains an honest and healthy man, the respected reader; but whoever knows him would have stood security for it, that, in case all bands and bridles of the great world had tugged and pulled at him, he would, besides his honesty, have retained also his unlikeness to the fashionable gentry, who atone for the maltreatment of the fairest s.e.x with loss of _voice_ and loss of _calves_, as (according to the oldest theologians) that woman-tempter, the serpent, who could previously _speak_ and _walk_, by his seductive industry played away speech and legs....

THIRTIETH, OR XXIV TRINITATIS, SECTION.

Souper and Cow-Bells.

To-day I am working in my shirt-sleeves like a blacksmith, so abominably long and heavy is this thirtieth section. When Gustavus learned from Oefel that a little _souper_ at the Resident Lady's meant as much as the greatest does with us, he had already distributed in his head, before he began to dress it, persons and parts, and to himself the longest of all;--this single fault he always committed, that when, at last, he came upon the stage and had to play, he did not play.

Before going into a large company he knew word for word what he meant to say; when he came out again he knew also (in the green-room) what he should have said--but in the salon itself he had really said nothing.

It arose not from fear of man, for it was almost easier to him to say anything bold than anything witty; but it came from this, that he was the opposite of a woman. A woman lives more out of than in herself; her feeling snail of a soul, attaches itself almost _externally_ to her variegated bodily conchylia, never draws back its threads and horns of feelers into itself, but touches with them every breath of air and curls up around every smallest leaflet--in three words, the sense which Dr. Stahl ascribes to the soul, of the whole const.i.tution and condition of its body, is with her so lively, that she _feels continuously_ how she sits or stands, how the lightest ribbon lies or sits upon her, what are the curves her hat-feather describes; in two words, her soul feels not only the _tonus_ of all perceptible parts of the body, but also of the imperceptible, the hair and the dress; in _one_ word, her inner world is only a hemisphere, an impression, of the outer.

But not so with Gustavus; his inner world stands far apart and abruptly separated from the outer; he cannot pa.s.s from either to the other; the outer is only the satellite and companion-planet of the inner. From his soul--imprisoned in the earthly globe which the hat covers--the diversified individual growths on which it cradles and forgets itself, shut out the view of objects external to its body, which cast only their shadows upon its fields of thought; it therefore _sees_ the outer world then only when it _remembers_ it; then the latter is transposed and transformed into the inner world. In short, Gustavus observes only what he thinks, not what he feels. Hence he never knows how to amalgamate his words and ideas with the words and ideas of other people that fly by him. The courtier winds up and turns his screws, and the cascades of his wit leap and sparkle--Gustavus, on the other hand, first throws the bucket into the well and proposes to draw up the draught at a proper time. A finer reason I a.s.sign below.

On the morning of this momentous _souper_ Oefel boasted to him so much about Beata, how he would today see her _c[oe]ur_ so perfectly balanced against the _esprit_ of the Resident Lady--that he cursed all _seeing_, and got a second reason for carrying his heavy heart into the _Still Land_. His first was, that he always prepared himself for a great company by going first into the greatest--under the broad, blue heavens. Here, beneath the colossal stars, on the bosom of Infinity, one learns to exalt himself above metallic stars, sewed on beside the b.u.t.ton-hole; from the contemplation of the earth one brings back with him thoughts through which one hardly sees the particles of dust, called men, whirling about; and the colored gold-bugs wherewith the realm of vegetable nature is mosaically spangled, are not surpa.s.sed by the gold-and-gem-embroidery of court splendor, but only imitated. The present author always paid a visit to the great terrestial and celestial circle _before_ and _after_ paying one to a smaller circle, that the great one might prevent and extinguish the impressions of the little.

I grow red, when I think how helplessly my Gustavus may have suffered himself to be ushered through two ante-chambers into a salon, where already sat opponents around at least seven card tables. Refinement of thought is a soil, refinement of expression is a fruit, to which not exactly court-gardeners are necessary; but finish of external behavior is nowhere to be gained but there, where it tells for everything--in the _great_ world, full of _microcosms_. Should I have more to show up of the latter refinement than one commonly looks for in my legal cla.s.s, I am never so vain as to trace it to any other source than my life at the Court of Scheerau. The Resident Lady (Beata never) played seldom, and very properly: a lady who can with her face take other hearts than those painted on cards, and who can take from men other heads than those stamped on metal, does ill if she contents herself with the lesser, unless she can shuffle and cut with the fairest fingers that I have yet seen in female gloves and rings. No lady should play before fifty, and after that only she whom her husband and daughter had cause to lose in the game. On the contrary, the poetical gladiator, Herr von Oefel, served in the army which (according to the _Journal des Modes_) every winter night is 12,000 strong in the front German Imperial Circles--namely with and against L'Hombre players. The Resident Lady was a brilliant _Sun_, whom Beata ever followed as _Evening Star_. Soft and gracious Hesper in Heaven! thou throwest the silver spangles of thy rays upon our earthly foliage and gently openest our hearts to charms which are as tender as thine! All the summer evenings which my eye has in dreams and remembrances lived through on thy lawns of innocence stretching high over my head, I repay thee for, fairest silvered dew-drop in the blue ethereal bell-flower of Heaven, when I make thee a type of the beautiful Beata! Oh! could I only project her saintly form out of my heart and present it here on these pages, that the reader might see, and not merely conceive, how from the Junonian Bouse, from whom all womanly charms stream forth, even rare disinterestedness, but not, however, _innocence_ nor modest womanly _reserve_,--how all these wooden rays fall off from her, when by her side Beata not so much shows as veils herself,--Beata, who has gained the inner victory over the most pa.s.sionate female wishes and yet betrays neither victory nor conflict,--who, without the Bouse's mourning array, and play of grief, gives thee a softened heart and irresistibly enchains thy sight, and with whom thou canst walk by moonlight, without enjoying _her_ or the night-heavens upon the earth one whit the less! Gustavus felt even more than I; and I feel all again in my biographical hours more than I did once in my musical ones.

All in good time! When they are at table I shall take the opportunity to describe also the remaining guests. Amidst the social tumult, which bewildered Gustavus's senses as well as ideas, of course only half the sunny image of Beata sank into his soul. But afterward to be sure! At first, however, they were both standing under the arch of the window with the Resident Lady (who ironically excused Gustavus before Beata for not having brought his brush with him to-day),--not to mention a crowd of accidental interlocutors. Presently the Resident Lady was s.n.a.t.c.hed away from them; their mutual nearness and the solitude of their position obliged both to talk, and Beata to stay. Gustavus, who had already, before the a.s.semblee, had it in his head what he would say, said nothing. But Beata finished the previous conversation about the sketching, and said: "Unless _you_ have already excused me, I cannot excuse myself." Another person of more presence of mind would have said directly, "No," and so, in jest, which would have allowed no embarra.s.sment, have wound the threads of the bird-spider around the poor humming-bird. Gustavus's feelings were too strong to let him jest here. With a mult.i.tude of weighty materials, of which you find all the handles break off, only that of jest holds fast, and with that you can manage them; particularly when you are talking with young women under a window arch.

Gustavus had long sought an opportunity to show other sides of his soul than had come to light in that affair of the corn; now he would have had the opportunity, but not the means, had not the park, with its evening splendors, lain encamped before the window. But the beauty of Nature was the only thing of which he could speak with inspiration with other _beauties_;--and he could with the most freshness compress all the charms of the universe into one morning, if he should describe his coming up out of the earth into the lofty world-mansion. Upon every word and image he uttered, or she uttered in reply, was stamped a soul which they had confided to each other. Suddenly he remained silent, with wide open, radiant eyes--it seemed to him as if in his soul a magic moon rose and shone over a broad twilight-land, and an angel of his childhood took him in his arms and clasped him so tightly to his bosom, that the heart of him dissolved.... And whereon rested this inner landscape-piece? Upon what the famed Stra.s.sburg clock-work rests on--namely, on the neck of an animal; the latter rests, as is well known, on the back of a Pegasus; his own was borne upon the necks of the herd of cows just then happening to pa.s.s by the palace on their way homeward, upon which hung bells that sounded like those of Regina's herd, and that consequently brought back the whole scene of youthful days with its tones before his soul.... In such a mood he could have _discoursed_ in the National a.s.sembly; the tumult also which enclosed them made both more solitary and confidential: in short, he narrated to her, with fire and with historical omissions, his pastoral time with one lamb on the mountain. This enthusiasm infected her (as all enthusiasm does all women) to such a degree that she began--to be silent.

Necessity now compelled both to bring some outward object (like a sword in the princely bed) between their confluent souls--they looked down at the two children of the gardener below, and indeed so eagerly did they gaze at them, that they saw nothing. The boy was saying: "The young lady [Beata] loves _me_ so much," stretching apart his two arms to their full extent. The girl said: "The young gentleman [Gustavus] loves me with a love as big--as the palace." "And me," he replied, "with one as big as the garden." "And me," the girl rejoined, "with one as big as the whole world." Beyond that the boy's wings could not soar, though his tail-feathers had surmounted the eyrie of the Cathedral. Each enumerated to the other the love tokens which they had received from the party who were the delighted overhearers of their own several praises, and each said at every article: "Canst thou beat that?"

With the sudden jump children always take to a new game, the little girl said: "Now thou must be the gentleman [Gustavus]; and I will be the lady [Beata]. Now I will make love to thee; afterward thou must to me." She softly stroked his cheeks and then his eye-brows and finally his arm, and manipulated the gentleman. "Now me!" she said, suddenly dropping her arms. The youth threw his arms round her neck so tightly, that the two elbows crossed each other and formed a knot and extended beyond the love-knot as superfluous bows; he gave her a sound smack.

Suddenly her critical file found a confounded anachronism in this historical play, and she said, inquiringly: "Yes, are not the young gentleman and lady really in love with each other?"

That was too much for the front box overhead, which was at once the auditory and the _original_ of the little players, and was in great danger of becoming a _copy_ of the same. Gustavus kept his eyelids open with all his might, in order that the water which stood in his eyes might not form into a visible tear and roll down his cheek, and the agitated Beata, with or without design, let her rose, broken off, fall fluttering to the ground; he stooped down for it and remained in that position long enough to let his tear melt away un.o.bserved; but, as he handed the rose back to her, and both timidly hid and buried their sunken eyes in the flower, and when a ninny dancing along suddenly interrupted them--then, all at once, their uplifted eyes stood over against each other like the rising full moon confronting the setting sun, and then sank into each other, and in a moment of inexpressible tenderness their souls saw that they--were seeking each other.

The dancing ninny was Oefel, who wanted Beata's arm, to conduct her to the dining-room. And now, Reader, I serve up to thee, instead of living roses (such as our pair of souls is), nothing but roses seethed in b.u.t.ter. Twenty-six or twenty-seven covers, I think, there were. I will here furnish, instead of a bill of fare, a way-bill of the pa.s.sengers.

First; there were at table and in the palace two chaste persons--Beata and Gustavus; a proof that fair souls grow in all places, even the _highest_: thus the Emperor Joseph had several nightingales thrown every year into the park, that something might be heard there.

No. 2 was the Prince, who in his short life had seen more women around him than the _ox apis_, whose own life was as long as the Egyptian alphabet. He was, at this table, what he could not be at many a _table d'hote_ on his travels, Brother Orator and Cardinal Wind among sixty-three other side-winds. His crown had upon it ladies in ma.s.s.

No. 3 was his appanaged brother, whom the crowned one hated, not because he had and deserved too much love from his people, but because he was once mortally sick and did not die but lived on upon his portion. The skeleton of this brother would have persuaded the Prince, as every skeleton did the Greeks and Egyptians, to a more cheerful enjoyment of the banquet.

No. 4 was a Knight of the Order of St. Michael from Spa (Herr von D.), whose star of order still sent out rays in Scheerau after it had long been extinguished in Paris. So, according to Euler, a fixed star in the heavens may still, on account of its distance, continue to transmit its light, though it has long since been consumed to ashes.

No. 5 was Cagliostro, who, among so many playing heads, shared the fate of physicians and ghosts and lawyers, that his public deriders were at the same time his secret _disciples_ and clients.

No. 6 was my manor Lord, von Roper, who, because he had something to say to the Prince, had remained behind. He was the only one in the whole gastronomic a.s.sembly who did these two things: first, he had submitted to him every sort of wine in the Bousian wine inventory, in order to convey to his stomach that distinct and clear idea, whereon the older logics so much insist, of all vinous goods of the Resident Lady--secondly, he made as much account of the frica.s.seed, pickled and the like viands, as if he gave instead of receiving the dinner, and he grew more and more courteous and obeisant in proportion as his obesity increased, like a sausage which crooks up when it is _filled_.

Nos. 7, 8 and 9 were two coa.r.s.e government councillors * * * and a coa.r.s.e president of exchequer * * * whereof the first two despised the whole court, because it had no other than literary Pandects, and the third because he pictured to himself how many pensions and salaries the whole court would have without the Chamber of Finance, _i. e_., without him, and all three because in their own opinion, they upheld the throne, though in reality they could have borne nothing except, in Solomon's Temple, the--Brazen sea.