Holy Supper.--Succeeding Love-feast and Kiss of Love.
Oh, beloved Gustavus! the wintered days of our love burst forth and bloom again from my ink-stand, as I delineate them! Hast thou, reader, ever had a spring-time of life, and does its image still hang in thy memory; then lay it, in the winter-month of life, to thy warm bosom and give its colors life, as the heating of the stove discloses and animates its invisible spring-pictures--and then think of thy flowery days, while I depict one.... Our four walls were the railings of a richer paradise than any pleasure park exhibits, the cherry tree at our window was our Dessian School-grove[[35]] and Kindergarten, and two human beings were happy, although one commanded and the other obeyed. The machinery of praise, which was so emphatically extolled in the regulations for my tutor, I laid aside, because it was not applicable to one, but to a whole school; my chain-pump-work was his love for me. Children love so easily, so heartily; how poorly must he manage who makes them hate him! On the scale of my punitory Carolina or Theresiana--instead of the usual pedagogic disgraces and corporal inflictions--stood coldness--a mournful look--a mournful reproof--and, severest of all, the threat of going away. Children like Gustavus, of tender heart, and of a fancy that flutters at every breath of wind, are easily diverted and directed; but at the same time a single false twitch at the rein will confuse and bring them to a stand-still forever. Especially are the honeymoon weeks of such an education as dangerous as those after marriage to a woman of fine feelings, with whom a single cacochymic[[36]] afternoon is not to be effaced again by any subsequent seasons of day or year. I will just confess: on such a sensitive woman's account was I made tutor. As women (so it ran in my mind) have, in a striking degree, all the perfections of children--their faults somewhat less:--accordingly a man, who knows how to attach and fasten his web to the widely diverging boughs of childhood, i. e., who can adapt himself to a child, cannot possibly fare so ill as others when he--marries.
Where censure would hurt the child's sense of honor and self-respect, there I suppressed it, in order to teach my colleagues round about by example, that the sense of honor and character which our days do not sufficiently educate, is the best thing in man--that all other feelings, even the noblest, let him fall out of their arms at hours when the sentiment of honor holds him up in its own--that among men whose principles are silent and whose passions scream into each other's ears, their sense of honor alone imparts to the friend, the creditor and the beloved an iron security.
Seven days earlier than the regular time my Gustavus communed; for the Consistory--the Westphalian tribunal[[37]] [or Star Chamber], of the parsons, the Penitentiary of the churches and the counterpoise of the government, sent out to us at the castle with pleasure these seven days which his communion-age wanted of its full weight, tor the same number of guilders, as a spiritual fast-dispensation or remission on account of age, (venia ætatis). My pupil had therefore--while the most competent religious teacher sat idle at home--to march out twice a week to the stupid senior parson Setzmann in Auenthal, who fortunately was no jurist as I was, and in whose parsonage a herd of catechumens were obliged to thrust their noses into the coagulated catechismal milk;--Gustavus instead of the beast's tapering snout brought with him a too short muzzle.
Nevertheless, senior Setzmann was not bad; on a parliamentary wool-sack he might have sat till he became an orator, i. e., a creature who, among the persons who in the beginning do not believe him, persuades himself first of all. An orator is as easy to be persuaded as he is able to persuade. The senior, in the first hour after the sermon each Sunday, was pious enough; he might indeed incur damnation, but it would be merely for want of sermons and of beer. A reasonable intoxication stands instead, to an incredible degree, of both the ascetic and the poetic enthusiasm. The readers are no friends of mine who say it is out of mere envy and chagrin that my Gustavus heard his lectures, if I record and send it out into the world that the cellar was the Parson's church of St. Paul and St. Peter--that his soul, like the flying fish, soared upward only so long as its wings were oiled--that he appeared always intoxicated and tenderly affected at once, and never aspired to enter heaven, until he could no longer see it. Hermes and Oemler say that I should avoid offence--although the example of Setzmann must give a greater than the making fun of it--if I should deliver in Latin, that the aquæ supercelestes of his eyes always accompanied his two-inches-deeper humores peccantes.
Gustavus went out to him on breezy spring-afternoons over the young grass, enjoying on his way the prospect of two charming things. The first was this missionary of the young village heathen himself, whose enthusiastic breath stirred like a tempest Gustavus's ideas, every one of which was a sail, and who, especially in the last and sixth week, when he stretched the young subjects of the six weeks' confinement on the last of the sixth article, so lengthened the ears of my Gustavus that there grew out from them a pair of wings that flew away with his little head. Secondly, his heart was set upon a broad band above a broad neckerchief and a corresponding apron, all of which, moreover, was as blossom-white as he, and adorned the fairest body in the whole parish--namely, that of Regina--who was preparing herself there for the second communion. Such a phenomenon, my Gustavus, quite naturally attracted more than distracted thee; and if the school-government had set over against me only half of such a muse on the seat of instruction in the place of my pot-bellied leaky conrector--Heavens! I should have learned, furthermore memorized, furthermore declined, likewise conjugated, and finally expounded! It was, therefore, secondly, no witchcraft, Gustavus--inasmuch as thine ear only was turned to the windward side of the pastor, but thine eye to the sunny side of Regina--that thou shouldst have made small account of the extra half hour which the senior gave, by way of befooling his conscience. He made, in order to quiet that assessor and judge and summoner in the heart, the conscience, his catechizings half an hour,[[38]] and his sermons three quarters longer than the whole diocese. Man likes to do more than his duty better than to do his duty.
As Gustavus did not know that girls overlook nothing and overhear everything, the whole catechism was to him a love letter, in which he conversed with her. When she had to answer the senior, he grew red; "the senior" (he thought), "cannot answer for his questioning and tormenting," and his optic nerve took root in her face.
As the Falkenbergs had no special communion-chamber with velvet floor, my god-father, the Captain, went at the head of his vassals up round the altar; and, therefore, Gustavus did too.
On the eve of Confession-Sunday--Oh ye tranquil days of my purest raptures, pass by again before me and give me your childish hand, that I may faithfully describe you in all your beauty!--on Saturday, after dinner, Gustavus--who even during the meal had hardly been able to look upon his parents for love and emotion--went up stairs in order, after so beautiful a custom, to beg pardon of his parents for his faults. Man is never so beautiful as when he begs or grants forgiveness. He went up slowly, in order that his eyes might grow dry and his voice steadier; but when he came before the parental eyes, he quite broke down again; he held for a long time in his glowing hand the paternal one, with the intention of saying something, were it only the three words: "Father, forgive me!" but he could not find any voice, and parents and child transformed words into silent embraces.
He came to me also.... in certain moods one is glad that another is in the same, and therefore forgives one.... I would, Gustavus, that I had thee at this moment in my chamber. If children conceive of God--not (as grown up people do), as one like themselves, that is as a child--but as a man: for a child's heart, that is enough. Gustavus, after these confessions, went--reeling, trembling, stupefied, as if he saw, what he thought, namely, God--down into the deserted cavern of his childhood, where below the earth's surface he had been trained up, and where his first days and first plays and wishes lay buried. Here he would fain kneel down, and, in this state of confused devotion, wherein the genius of suns and worlds in that perhaps holiest time of our life beholds all warm hearted children, transform his whole soul into a single sound, a single sigh, and offer it up on the altar of thanksgiving; but this greatest human thought tore itself away like a new soul from his, and overmastered it--Gustavus lay prostrate, and even his thoughts were dumb ... But the voice is heard that remains in the bosom, and the thought is seen that sinks back under the rays of the genius; and in the other world, man gives voice to prayers which were stifled here below....
On the evening of this sacredly blissful day, peace, as a tender nurse,[[39]] bore on her secure hands his overfreighted heart; he did not violently throw his short childish and human arms around the goddess of joy, but she gently folded her maternal arms round him. This zephyr of tranquillity--instead of that hurricane of exultation which hurries man through and against everything--still continued on Whitsuntide to play around his blossoming young life, and his being lay as if wafted on a soft cloud when the radiant Whitsunday sun found him; but when the flower-fragrance of the decorated breast, the feeling and the pressure of the rustling attire, the pealing of the bells whose prolonged vibrations ran like golden threads around all individual scenes and bound them together in one, the odor of the birch trees and the green claro-oscuro of the church, even the fasting--when all this flung his feelings and the globules of his blood into flying circles, then did there stand in his bosom a kindled sun; never did the image and ideal of a virtuous man burn before him in so great cloud-transcending outlines as then!
But the evening! Then did the little communicants stroll round in modest groups with lighter heart and fuller stomach and with a distinct sense of food and finery. Gustavus--of whose flames the supper had smothered some portion, though a soft glow still lingered--roamed slowly up and down his garden, (for his brain was no dancing-place, but a moss-bank of joyous feelings), and tore open the tulip-leaves which had closed in slumber, in order to let loose from their flowery prison many a belated bee. At last, he leaned against the post of the rear garden gate and looked down longingly over the meadows into the village, where the rows of parents were chatting together and with eyes of motherly vanity following their children,--parents who to-day walked out for the first and haply for the last time, because peasants and orientals love best to sit. At that moment there moved cautiously around the garden-wall a shy picket of peasants' children, whose object was to hear more nearly the old starling, which Gustavus had to-day brought in its cage out into open air, and amuse themselves with the racy and saucy words the bird would utter in his tone of genuine irony. Children in strange clothes, and strange places, are strangers to each other; but Gustavus had fortunately his key-note at hand by which to pass over into conversation with them, the starling, and had only to begin one with him. And the plan succeeded; the rhetorical arts of the bird soon made the conversation so general and unembarrassed, that one could talk with every one about everything. Gustavus began to tell stories, but before a younger and fairer public than mine; his stories he invented and related at the same moment, and his fancy's wings hit against nothing in the immeasurable careering-ground. In fact, one invents more ingenious contes in talking than in writing, and Madame D'Aunoy, whom I would rather marry than read, would have given us grown-up children better fairy tales if she had invented them before the ears of the little ones.
Under the pretext of sitting down, he invited and entreated his whole audience and public to come up to a terrace which, with a stairway, was woven and arched around a linden-tree in the garden.... I do not let my readers sit down so quickly; for bees, carvers, and I, love lindens exceedingly, those for the honey, these for the soft wood, and I for the sake of the name and the fragrance.
But here is still something quite different to love--three maiden communicants were listening at the open garden gate, and reinforced the audience at a distance; in a word, Regina was down below, and her brother was already in the party above; the gallery or the boxes must needs at last--since calling up availed nothing--drag up the female parterre. I myself narrate now with more fire; no wonder that Gustavus did so too. Regina seated herself farthest off from him, but opposite to him. He began an entirely fresh history, because the bureau d'esprit had become much stronger. He depicted a poor, miserable little girl--children love best stories about children--one without supper, without parents, without bed, without a hood, and without sins, but who, when a star had dressed itself in finery and journeyed down, found on the ground a bright dollar, on which was set a silver angel, which angel grew even brighter and broader, till he actually spread his wings and flew up from the dollar to heaven, and then brought down to the little one from all the stars up there everything she wanted, and indeed magnificent things, whereupon the angel set himself back on the silver again, and very neatly pressed himself down there. What flames, during this creation, burst forth from Gustavus's words, from his eyes and features into his auditory! And then, too, the moon meanwhile embroidered the linden-night on the floor with wavering points of silver--a belated bee cruised through the glowing circle, and a bumming hawk-moth around a crowned head--on the double ground of linden-green and sky-blue leaves quivered among stars--the night-breeze rocked itself on their foliage, and on gold-spangles of the decorated Regina, and washed with cool waves her fiery cheek and Gustavus's breath of flame.... But, verily, I assert, the pulpit he needed not, so magnificent were pulpit and orator. How could that be necessary for him, when he was narrating to the bride of Christ and his own; when the whole past day rose again with its dazzling nimbus; when he infused pity into the breasts of the unpreoccupied and unsophisticated children, and wrung it forth again from their eyes; and when he saw certain maidenly ones grow moist.... His own melted into ecstasy, and he expanded his smile more and more broadly, in order to cover therewith his eye, which had already veiled itself more tenderly.... "Gustavus!" the call had twice come from the Castle; but in this blissful hour no one heard it, till the voice rang out for the third time, nearer down in the garden. The stupefied Secret Society rolled down the steps--only Regina still lingered by the side of Gustavus, under the dark foliage, in order, as hastily as possible, to remove with her apron the traces of the story from her eyes, and to pin herself up a little--he stood so near to the face on which so many fair evening twilights of his life had gone down--so near and so dumb, and held her back a little when she offered to follow the rest--had she stood still, he could not have held her, but when she tore herself away, then he clasped her more tightly and in a larger embrace--her struggling drew both more closely together, but to his intoxicated soul nearness supplied the place of the kiss--the struggle brought his trembling lips to hers--but still it was not till, as she pushed back his breast from hers, and pricked his with the pin, that with inexpressible love, intensified by his own blood, he clasped her to himself, as if he would fain drain out her soul from her lips and pour in his own--they stood on two distant heavens, leaning over to each other above the abyss, and clinging to each other on the trembling ground, in order not, by letting go, to plunge down headlong between the heavens into the abyss beneath....
.... Could I depict his first kiss in a thousand times more burning colors, I would do it; for it is one of the first impressions taken of the soul, one of the May-flowers of love; it is the best dephlegmation [or distillation] known to me of the earthly man. Only in this German and Belgic life is it impossible to bring it about that man shall take the first kiss for more than five or six times. By and bye he always consults his technical definition, which he carries in his head, of a kiss, and cites the paragraph in which it is found; but the sum and substance of the stupid paragraph is, that the thing is properly a mutual pressure of red skins. Verily, an author of feeling cannot sit down and reflect that a kiss is one of the few things that can be enjoyed only when the bodily taste does not make itself prominent under the spiritual--but that such an author of feeling (who is no other than myself)--falls to upbraiding those who have not so much understanding as himself;--he upbraids not merely Messrs. Veit Weber and Kotzebue, in whose writings so many kisses occur, but other people also, in whose lives so many occur, especially whole picnic-parties who, after the blessing, wipe and cup each other's cheeks with their lips. If the thing is carried so far, that this fine lip-bloom of one face must be rumpled against skins of sheep and of silk-worms, against gloves (hand-sandals)[[40]]--then will an author of so much sensibility want to cut off the hands of the suffering party and the lips of the acting one....
My reason for showering the reader whom the last kiss has heated with this cold douche is not, assuredly, that I may deal with him as fate does with me; for she has made it a rule, every time that I find myself in the midst of the oil of gladness with which such scenes as that of Gustavus--or even the mere description of them--anoints me, to plunge me forthwith into brine and oil of vitriol. But I would do precisely the reverse, and halve with the reader the odious feeling at the exchange of opposite scenes, which poor Gustavus experienced to the full, when the voice called down: "Will you instantly--!" The Captain's lady threw into her tone a more offensive gravity than my innocent Gustavus had as yet understanding enough to feel. The loving maiden, in such surprises, loses the courage which the lover gains. The first verses of the fulminated penal psalm pierced the ear of the guiltless Regina, who stole, mute and weeping, out of the garden, and thus closed in darkness her day of joy. The softer verses took hold of the narrative-poet, who had it in mind to wind up his contes moraux æsthetically and pathetically,[[41]] and was now himself arrested by another's pathos.
Ernestina's heart, lips and oars had been trained behind the strictest grating; hence her soul, melodious as it was, lapsed (at a mere kiss) into a strange, harsh key; she admitted, in regard to the most beautiful maiden no more than: "She is a good girl." In general, the woman who judges very indulgently certain missteps of a sister is with all her toleration suspicious; a perfectly pure female soul puts on, at most, the air of this tolerance for one less pure.
On innocent lips Gustavus imprinted the first and last kiss; for in Whitsuntide-week the shepherdess went back to Maussenbach as messenger to the castle. We shall hear no more of her. And so it will go on through the book, which, like life, is full of scenes that never occur again. Even now the sun is rising higher in Gustavus's day of life and begins to scorch--one flower of joy after another bows its head already in the forenoon to slumber, and by 10 o'clock at night the drooping flora with its vanished beauty will be asleep.