The Invisible Lodge Part 20

THIRTY-EIGHTH, OR NEW YEAR'S, SECTION.

Night Music.--Farewell Letter.--My Groans and Grievances.

I had planned for to-day to play the joke of calling my biography a printed New Year's Wish to the reader, and then, instead of wishes, send out in sport New Year's curses and more of the like. But I cannot do it, and on the whole shall soon be absolutely unable to do it any more. What a heavy, burnt-out heart must those people have, who in the face of the first day which ushers them into the procession of 364 other lowly, serious, wailing and weeping ones, can prefer the noisy, riotous pleasure of beasts to the still, tender and almost tearful joy of man! You cannot know what the words _first_ and _last_ say, if in their presence, whether they refer to a day, a book, or a person, you do not draw a deeper breath; still less can you know what preeminence man has over the beast, if within you the interval is so great between joy and longing, and if both are not within you blended in one tear!

Thou Heaven and thou Earth, your present form is an image (as if a mother) of such a union; that world of light looking so consolingly into our freezing eyes--the Sun,--transforms the blue ether around it into a blue night, which casts a still deeper shadow of itself over the glittering sun-face of the snow-clad earth, and man sees with yearning eyes a night sweep across his heaven and one fissure of light, the deep opening and street stretching away toward brighter worlds....

The past night still leads my pen. It is, namely, in Auenthal, as in many other places, the custom, that in the last solemn night of the year there shall be sounded out from the mouths of bugles, as it were an echo of days that have departed, or a funeral music of the buried year. When I heard my good Wutz with some a.s.sistants in the room below me making some stir and a few experimental tones, I arose and went with my sister, who had been long awake, to the narrow window. In the still night one could hear the steps of the people going up. Above our window lay that beam under which one must listen and look out in prophetic night, in order to see and hear the cloudy forms of futurity. And in fact I saw, in a literal sense, what superst.i.tion is fain to see. I saw, as it does, coffins on roofs, and funeral trains at one door and wedding-guests and bridal wreath at another, and a human year pa.s.sed through the village and held on its right maternal breast the little joys which play with man, and on its left the sorrows which bark at him; fain would it nourish both, but they fell off dying, and as often as a sorrow or a joy withered and dropped, so often did one of the two clappers strike its signal on the bells of the steeple.... I looked over toward the white wood behind which lay the dwellings of my friends, O young year, I said, repair to my friends and lay in their arms the joys thou hast in thine, and take with thee the lingering and tenacious sorrows of the old year, which will not die! Go into all the four quarters of the world and distribute the sucklings of thy right breast, and leave me only one--health!

The tones of the steeple welled out into the far moonless night, which was a great summit sprinkled over with starry blossoms. Art thou happy or unhappy, little Schoolmaster Wutz, that thou standest on thy tower opposite the White Wall and a white stone of the Auenthal churchyard and yet thinkest not whom wall and stone enclose, the same namely, who once, in thy place, in just so still a night greeted like thee the new year: thy father, who in his turn, just as calmly as thou blew his bugle-blast out over the deaf and dead ears of his mouldering kinsfolk?... More tranquil, indeed, art thou, that on this New Year's eve thinkest on no other diminution than that of the nights; but dearer to me is my Philippina, who here beside me lives her life over anew and sure more seriously than the first time, and in whose bosom the heart is not merely doing lady's work, but sometimes also rises on the swell of emotion to feel how _little_ man is, how _much_ he comes to be, and how truly the earth is a church-yard wall and man the detonizing saltpetre which crystallizes upon it! Good, weeping sister, at this moment thy brother cares not that thou to-morrow--wilt care very little about this; at this moment he pardons it in thee and in thy whole s.e.x, that your hearts so often resemble precious stones, in which the fairest colors are often found side by side with--a fly or a bit of moss; for what can man, as he surveys and sighs over this wasting life and its decaying possessions--what can he do better in the midst of this feeling than love them right heartily, and cherish a true patience with them, a true.... Let me embrace thee, Philippina, and if I should ever fail to forgive thee, remind me of this embrace!...

My biography should now move on again; but I cannot possibly lend my head and my hand to the work, unless I would on the spot write myself out of the learned world into the world to come. It is better for me to make myself merely the compositor of this history and copy off the painful letter which Gustavus sent to his forfeited friend.

"Faithful, virtuous soul! Let the present dark moment, which I only have deserved, but not thou, not torment thee long, but soon be veiled from sight! O! fortunate, indeed, it is, that thou canst not see my eye, nor my lips quivering with anguish, nor my shattered heart, wherewith I now make an end to all my fair days. If thou shouldst see me here as I sit writing, then would the tenderest soul that ever administered solace on the earth, place itself between me and my heaving sorrow and seek to cover and comfort me; she would cast upon me a healing look and ask what ailed me.... Ah, good, true heart! ask it not of me; I should have to answer: my anguish, my deathless rack, my viper-wound is lost innocence.... Theefn would _thy_ eternal innocence turn away affrighted and give me no consolation; I should be left lying alone, and the sorrow would stand erect beside me with the scourge in its hand. Ah! I could not once raise my head, to cast a forlorn look back upon all the good hours which had departed from me in thy person.--Ah, it is indeed so, and thou art already gone!--Amandus! does heaven cut me off entirely from thee, and canst thou, who gavest me the lily-hand of Beata, not see my polluted one, which belongs no more to that purest?--All, hadst thou been still living, then should I, indeed, have lost thee also.... O, that there can be hours here below, which are suffered to bear the full beaker of a whole life's joy, and with one fall to shatter it to pieces and spill the refreshing draught of all, all years!

"Beata! now we part; thou deservest a more faithful heart than mine has been; I deserved not thine--I have nothing left that thou couldst love--my image in thy heart must be broken in pieces--thine abides forever immovable in my own; but it looks upon me no longer with the eye of love, but with a downcast eye that weeps over the place where it resides.... Ah, Beata, I can hardly end my letter; so soon as its last line is written, we are torn from one another, and never more hear or know each other.--Oh, G.o.d! how little avail penitence and tears! No one restores the hot heart of man, when there is nothing left therein, save the great, hard sorrow, which it strives, as a volcano laboring with a ma.s.s of rock, to cast up and out of itself, and which forever plunges back again into the blazing kettle; nothing can heal us, nothing can give back again to leafless man his fallen foliage; Ottomar, after all, is right in saying that the life of man pa.s.ses, like a full moon, over nothing but nights....

"Ah well, it must needs be! Farewell, friend! Gustavus was not worthy of the hour which thou wilt have. Thy holy heart, which he has wounded, may an angel bind up, and bear thou it silently in the bond of friendship! My last, joyful letter, wherein I could not content myself with my overflowing happiness, lay in this inconsolable one, in which I have nothing more left me, and burn them both together. Let no officious person tell thee in future after many years, that I am still living, that I have pressed the long grief, with which I expiate my sunken happiness, like thorns into my forlorn bosom, and that in my sad day of life the night comes the sooner which lies between two worlds!

When one day thy brother falls with a fairer heart upon thy breast, tell him not, tell it not to thyself, who looked like him--and when one day thy tearful eye rests upon the white pyramid, turn it away and forget that I was there so happy. Ah! but I forget not, I turn not my eyes away, and if man could die of remembrance, I would go to the grave of Amandus and die--Beata, Beata, in no human breast wilt thou find stronger love than mine was, though thou easily mayest stronger virtue--but when thou hast one day found that virtue, then remember not me, not my fall, repent not our short love, nor do him wrong who once under the starry heaven reclined upon thy n.o.ble breast.... O, thou my, my Beata! at the _present instant_ thou dost indeed still belong to me, because thou dost not yet know me; at the present moment my spirit may, with its hand upon its wounds and stains come before thine and fall upon it and say to thee with stifled sighs: love me!... _After_ this moment, no more.--After this moment I am _alone_, without love and without solace--a long life stretches away before me far and void, and there is no Thou in it----but this human life and its errors will pa.s.s away. Death will give me his hand and lead me away--the days beyond the earth will purify me for virtue and thee----then come, Beata, then, when an angel shall have borne thee through thy earthly evening twilight into the second world, then at last will a heart, broken here below, but healed up yonder, meet thine and sink on thy bosom and yet not die with rapture, and I shall say once more: 'Take me again, beloved soul, I, too, am blessed!'--all earthly wounds will vanish, the circle of Eternity will embrace and bind us together!... Ah, we must indeed first part, and this life still continues--live longer than I, weep less than I, and--yet do not wholly forget me.--Ah, hast thou, then, loved me very much, thou precious one, thou whom I have trifled away?...

"Gustavus F."

At evening while he was in the act of sealing the letter, Beata pa.s.sed in at the palace-gate. As he saw her bright form, which was so soon to be bathed in such a flood of tears, alight from the carriage, he started back, wrote the address, went to bed and drew the curtains, and softly----wept. Particularly eager was he to be out of the way of the romance-builder and stone-mason, Oefel, because his looks and tones were nothing but ign.o.ble triumphs of his prophetic glance; and even Gustavus's dejection be still more ign.o.bly counted among his own triumphs....

Actually, I would the Devil had all the four quarters of the world and would take them off and himself, too; for he has half got me. Few know that he will not let me bring this biography to an end. I am now convinced that I shall not die of apoplexy (as I lately fancied under my frozen head-piece) nor of consumption (which was a true maggot of the brain); but insure me against this, that I shall not be wrecked upon a _polypus of the heart_, to which all human probability points?--Happily I am not so obstinate as Musaeus in Weimar, who did not believe in the existence of his, which he fed and fostered as I do mine, with cold coffee, until the polypus choked his n.o.ble heart and cheated him of all his birthday festivals and all his wishes for those of his spouse. I say, I note more wisely the forerunners of polypus in the heart; I do not conceal from myself what lies hid behind a remittent pulse, namely, this very heart-polypus, the slow-match of death. The cursed literary secret tribunal, the reviewing-guild, creeps with its nooses round us good, easy simpletons, who keep on writing, and like b.u.t.terflies die in the embrace of the Muses--but not a penny-piece, not a line, should we publish for such conscienceless birds of prey; what thanks do I get for setting up scenes which almost kill the scene-painter, and for writing biographical sketches which operate upon me not much better than poisoned letters? Who knows--for I seldom come to Scheerau now-a-days--who knows, except my sister, that in this biographical summer-house, which will be my mausoleum, I often paint over chambers and walls, which stop my pulse and breath to such an extent, that some day I must be found lying dead beside my work?

Must I not, when I thus come within the electric range of death, jump up, circulate through my chamber, and in the midst of the tenderest or sublimest pa.s.sages break off and black the boots on my feet or brush my hat and breeches, merely that it may not take my breath away, and yet go at it again, and in this cursed style alternate between emotion and boot-blacking?--A curse upon you critics in a body!

To this are added also a thousand pieces of drudgery which for some time have been pestering me all the oftener, because they somehow perceive that the polypus will soon give me the finishing stroke, and they will not much longer have any chance with me. My Maussenbach lobster, who is continually taking me between his legal shears and who thinks a poor justice has no right to die of anything else than labors, _exofficio_,--this Egyptian task-master I will pa.s.s over; my sister and Wutz, also, beneath me, both of whom are merry beyond all reason or measure, and sing me almost to death. But what oppresses me, is the oppressor of his subjects, the metallic press-work which they call our Prince.

I came near, lately, writing myself, in a paper of exceptions, into an honorable arrest. But here on the biographic paper I can even throw my oranges at the crowned head without danger of imprisonment. Fie! is it for this thou art Prince, that thou mayst be a waterspout, which sucks up everything over which it pa.s.ses into its crater? And if thou wilt some time rob us, do it with no other hands than thine own, drive round begging through the country from house to house and raise thyself the regular taxes into thy carriage; but just as it has always been, our payments, after the transit-toll which they must give into the hands of all thy revenue-officers, arrive at last lean as far-traveled herrings at thy coffers, so that in fact thou dost get no more out of the heavy sums than convenient _logarithms_. Princes, like the East Indian crabs, have _one_ gigantic pair of shears for seizing, and one dwarf-pair for carrying the prey to the mouth.

And so is it with the whole metropolis, where everyone regards himself as fellow-regent, and yet every one cries out at others meddling with the administration, and that children creep under the ermine as under the paternal dressing-gown and jointly act the father--where the palaces of the great are built of _lapis infernalis_ [lunar caustic], and like leprous houses eat out smaller ones--where the Minister bears the Prince on his unfelt hand as the falconer does the falcon on his gloved one--where one regards the vices of the people as the revels of their superiors, and merely coat over with wax all moral carrion as the bees do their material, instead of carrying it out of the hive, _i. e_.

where the police proposes to take the place of morals--where, as at every court, a _moral_ figure is found to be as intolerable and stiff as a _geometric_ one is in painting--where the devil is fully loose and the holy spirit is in the wilderness, and where people who, in Auenthal or elsewhere, hold crooked probes in their hand, whereby they would fain draw out foreign bodies and splinters from the wounds of the State, are told to their faces, they are not quite in their right minds....

I would it were true, then I should at least be perfectly sound. After such clump of personalities which, like so many monads, make up a body politic, mine is too puny to be taken out and looked at. Else I could now, after my anxieties about the State, enumerate those relating to myself.

And yet I will communicate to the reader my agonies or seven words on the cross, although to the very cross under which he will pity me, he himself has helped nail me. In fact no devil concerns himself much about my sickness. I sit here and represent to myself, out of unrequited love to the reader, all day long, that fire may be cried, which, like an author's stove, shall lay all my biographic paper in ashes and perhaps the author too. I further torment myself with imagining that this book may in the mail-coach or in the printing-office be so spoiled, that the public shall be as good as cheated out of the whole work, and that even after the printing it may find its way into a baiting-house and torture-chamber, where a critical provider and general of the reviewing order has his reviewer sitting with their long teeth, to tear off from my tender Beata and her lover clothes and flesh, and whose room is like that room full of spiders which a certain Parisian kept, and which at his entrance always darted down from the ceiling to suck the bleeding doves' feathers which he had pulled out, and from whose operations he with great pains managed to obtain yearly a silk stocking.... All these torments I put upon myself, merely on the reader's account, who would be the greatest loser if he did not have me to read; but it is all one to this hard man, what they have to undergo who minister to his gratification. When at last I have freed my hands from these nails of the cross, still life itself wearies me as such a miserable tedious monochord of a thing that it must distress every one who reckons up how often he has to draw breath and heave his breast up and down until it stiffens, or how often before his death he will be obliged to lift himself up on his boot-jack or stand before his shaving-gla.s.s. I often contemplate the greatest misery in a whole life, namely, that which results if one had to dispatch all the shavings, frizzlings, dressings, _sedes_ in succession, which are now scattered through a life-time. The gloomiest night-thought which broods over my still somewhat blooming prospect, is this, that death may in this nocturnal life, where existence and friends move like widely sundered lights in the dark mine, s.n.a.t.c.h my precious loved ones out of my powerless hands and lock them up forever in close coffins, to which no mortal, but only the greatest and most invisible hand, has the key.... For hast thou not torn so much from me already? Would I speak of sorrow or of the vanity of life, if the gay youthful circle were not yet broken in pieces, if the colored band of friendship, which still fastens the earth and its enamel to man, had not yet been sawed asunder to within one or two threads? O thou whom I even now hear weeping from a far distance, thou art not unhappy on whose breast a beloved heart has grown cold, but thou art so who thinkest of the corrupting element, when thou wouldst rejoice in the love of the living friend, and who in the most blissful embrace askest thyself: "How long shall we continue to feel each other?"

THIRTY-NINTH, OR 1st EPIPHANY, SECTION.

Now at last the case has become desperate; my disease has taken at once the biographical and the legal pen out of my hand, and despite all Easter Fair's and Fatalia, it is impossible for me to put pen to paper on any subject....

FORTIETH, OR 2d EPIPHANY, SECTION.

An attack of amaurosis, to all appearances, in addition to my other maladies, is threatening me; for sparks, and specks, and spider-webs dance for hours about my eyes; and these (according to Plempins and Chevalier Zimmerman) are premonitory symptoms of the said disease.

Squinting (says Richter, the cataract-operator, not the patient--in his Surgical Science. B. III p. 426) is an unmistakable forerunner of amaurosis. How very much I squint, every one can see, because I always look and aim at everything to the right and left at once. Now when I actually become as stone-blind as a mole, then it is all up with my bit of biographical writing....

FORTY-FIRST, OR 3d EPIPHANY, SECTION.

I have a couple of fevers at once, which with other more fortunate persons cannot generally bear each other's company. The three-days'

fever, the quartan-fever, and then an Autumnal or Spring fever in general. Meanwhile I will, so long as I am yet uncoffined, write something every Sunday for the public to _read_, two or three lines at least, if my _plan_ should _succeed_. Even my style suffers terribly; here are the two verbs rhyming....

FORTY-SECOND, OR 4th EPIPHANY, SECTION.

Ye pleasant biographical Sundays! I shall never spend another. In addition to the ills which I have already mentioned, there is a live lizard has taken up his abode in my stomach, whose sp.a.w.n I must have swallowed in an unfortunate draught last summer....

FORTY-THIRD, OR 5th AND 6th EPIPHANY, SECTION.

Of cherry-stones sprouting in the stomach as well as peas in the ear, there are examples. But I have never yet read of an instance, in which the seed of gooseberries, which we usually swallow with the fruit, has germinated in the bowels, when these by constipation had become the forcing vat of the aforesaid vegetable. Good heavens! what will be the final upshot of my malady, whose invisible claw seizes, cramps, distends, rends asunder my nerves and my vitals...!

FORTY-FOURTH, OR SEPTUAGESIMA, SECTION.

If there is a malady which is a compilation of all maladies, all chapters of pathology at once, n.o.body has it but I.

Apoplexy--hectic--cramp in the stomach or a lizard--three kinds of fever--polypus in the heart--sprouting gooseberry bushes:--such are the few _visible_ const.i.tuents and ingredients which I have thus far been able to announce of my malady; a judicious deeper section of my poor body will, when both cla.s.ses of const.i.tuents shall have laid it low, add to these the invisible ones also....

FORTY-FIFTH, OR s.e.xAGESIMA, SECTION.