New Contract Between the Reader and the Biographer.--Gustavus's Letter.
"Go thy way, beloved," said I, "whom the world-sea bears along with it; may the solar image of thy shy and sensitive heart smile up out of the watery depths and swim along with thee! Thy young heart thou wilt bring to Auenthal no more! Alas, that the fruits of man's life must have a different weather from that of his blossoms, instead of the breath of Spring the sting of August and the autumnal tempest!" Such were my thoughts so long as his carriage remained in sight; after that I went down into the garden-vault to the two monks, and as I thought: in your cold stony breasts dwells no wish, no longing, no sorrow, and--no heart: "for that very reason," said I in another sense.
To-day is Michaelmas, and to-day--I can no longer dissemble--his departure is a year old. To-day begins, between me and the reader, a wholly new life, and we will quietly settle it all with one another beforehand.
In the first place, it is true, I am a year behind Gustavus's life; but I think in eight weeks to have written up to it. I expected, indeed, half a year ago, that now I should overtake him; but a life is easier to lead than to picture, especially in a good style. On the whole an author--a good one--can more easily reckon the stars in heaven than his future sheets, which are also stars. Finally, one expects that the Literary Times will consider at least so much as this, that I, as a counsellor-at-law, cannot possibly write so much for it as for whole colleges, faculties, and supreme courts of the empire. Is the Literary Times aware of the terrible amount of my labors? One should have seen my cupboard full of professional papers, whereon, moreover, not a word is yet written, because I have only just received them from the paper-mill; or one should have been in my judicial district of Schwenz, where the twelve subjects and the feudal lord and judge are themselves peasants, in order to require of me nothing more than a book a year. Where is the lawyer throughout all Scheerau, who serves in a suit, that might shortly--for the devil must have his sport--have been made to stretch out through the Wetzlar gate under the session table of the imperial chancery, which knows all about good style? And yet the suit, like Peter the Great, served from below upward, and mounted, like the sect of Stylites, higher and higher seats.
Secondly, unless this is still firstly, I can, consequently, like the Jews, only on the Sabbath, or Sunday, think upon the plastic of my spiritual embryos; on week days nothing is written, except, to be sure, biographies also, but only those of rogues, by which is meant protocols and accusatory libels.
Secondly (or thirdly), I am the inmate of a schoolmaster's establishment. The good Captain, when his son was out of his door, undertook to put me under personal arrest, which in my case includes also real arrest, because my real estate consists of my body, and my personal property of my soul; he said I should stay in his palace and advocate and satirize as long as I pleased. It were to be wished his old judge would fade away, then I should be the new one, for his good heart--which my knavish one, accustomed to court subtleties, cannot always forgive for its want of them--cannot bear to dismiss anybody. Still keep thy sound north-east breath; still keep those hands of thine with their cudgelling-stick of a woe-unto-thee! and thy tongue, with its two or three thunders! and thousand devils! my Falkenberg!
And I stayed with him through the winter; but early in the spring of this year I moved down to the place where I now write--in the upper chamber of the Auenthal schoolmaster, Sebastian Wutz.[[55]] I had, perhaps, the three weightiest reasons in the world for this step; in the first place, nowhere do I feel so shrivelled up as in a Vatican full of dreary caverns, in Sahara wastes of empty apartments; a dining-hall with its poverty of furniture is to me a Patmos, and only in little snug sitting-rooms does one feel enlarged. Man should from year to year creep into smaller and smaller cells, until he slips into the smallest, i. e., into the narrowest hole of this compressed silver wire ["silver cord">[.
The second reason was, Herr Fortins (in Morhof. Poly hist., L. II., c. 8), who advises literary men to change their towns every half-year,--and, in fact, one does write better after any change, and though it were only that of a writing-desk. Without such freshening of the air the soul writes itself so deeply into its narrow pass that it is caught there without being able to see sky or earth. The present work may, perhaps, come to something; but every month and every section I must write in a different cabin.
The third and soundest reason is my sister. She has come back again from the Resident Lady von Bouse's, because she had to vacate her place for a fair book-patient, namely, the good Beata, whom father, doctor, lover--the stupid Oefel (but he finds not the least favor)--have at last tempted into this confluence of all enjoyments and visitings. Secondly, my sister is here, because I would so have it; but Sister, Sister, why did not I snatch thee sooner out of this overrunning mineral-whirlpool? Why hast thou so changed? Who can change thee back again? Who will wipe out of thy heart thy thoughts that forever recur to strange glances; thy eagerness to be admired but not loved; thy coquetry, which seeks only to excite love, not to reciprocate it, and all that distinguishes thy heart from thy former heart and from the unchangeable heart of Beata? I would not, therefore, with my sister, make the palace narrower, where, besides, she already, every day, sits away two or three hours.
I have now explained to the reader what he is about. We return to Gustavus's carriage, and are all satisfied--reader, printer and writer.
Gustavus, in an intoxication of sorrow, which the lovely heavens dissolved in tears, drove on to Scheerau, and counted every bee and every swallow that flew towards our palace, happy. The next ten years hung down like ten dark curtains before him. "And," he asked himself, "do skeletons, wild beasts, or paradises lie behind the curtains?" The thing which, without curtain, sat before him and lectured, he did not see--namely, the Professor. Two leagues this side of Scheerau he wrote to me with that flaming gratitude which breaks forth from a man so radiantly only in his second decade. As in the case of all souls which alter more from within outwardly than from without inward, the barometer of the heart stood within him, often immovable at the same degree. The rain-clouds and the rainbow in his inner heaven he carried with him to Scheerau; he bore his veiled heart into the wide, echoing cadet barracks, into the fair-day-tumult on its stairs, and into the noise of watchwords, as if into the midst of the hammerings of a copper foundry and a fulling mill. He grew still sadder, but more painfully so.
The remarkable thing in the chamber which he entered and was to occupy, was not the presence of three cadets--for they were current men, small change and prosaic souls, i. e., jolly, witty, devoid of feeling, without interest in higher wants, and of moderate passions--but it was the Ephorus of the chambers, Herr von Oefel, who skipped about with his sword at his side like an impaled fly with his needle. Oefel began at once to observe him in order to describe him at evening; but in company he observed everybody, not in order to overhear others' tricks, but to exhibit his own. So, too, he praised without esteeming, and blackened without hating. He wanted merely to shine.
Amidst these circumstances, before Gustavus made the heavy passage through sorrows to occupations, a solace came to him in the form of memory, and he saw, what he should not have forgotten--his Amandus, his childhood's friend. But the good youth came before him not in his first form of a blind boy, but in his last, of a dying man. He had a nervous consumption, which had sucked all the pith out of the still standing bark of the tree of life. On the bark there lingered no green save hanging twigs with pale drooping foliage. He was preparing himself for no office or life, but was expecting and stood ready to receive at the threshold of the hereditary sepulchre Death coming up the steps. But that his soul lay in a living wound[[56]]--there is nothing in that to surprise us except his sex; for the fairest female souls seldom live otherwise; but men do not spare such wound; the spectacle does not soften them towards so soft a sex, that most of them live, not from day to day, but from sorrow to sorrow and from tear to tear....
In Gustavus the second self (his friend) dwelt almost under one and the same roof with the first, under the skull and skin of the brain; I mean, he loved in others less what he saw than what he conceived; his feelings, in fact, were nearer and more compact about his ideas than about his senses; hence the flame of friendship which streamed up so high before the image of a friend, was often bent and blown aside by his bodily presence. Hence he received his Amandus (since in general an arrival creates less glow than a departure) with a warmth which did not quite reach from his inner to his outer man--but Oefel, who observed it, wormed out the secret with six glances: that the new cadet was proud of his nobility.
Of all military catechumens Gustavus had the most thorny time. From a still Carthusian monastery he had been banished to a lumber-room, where the three cadets bombarded his ears all day long with thrusts of rapiers, slaps of cards and curses--from a country castle he had been thrown into a Louvre, where the drum was the organ of speech and the speaking machine, through which the mastership talks with the scholars, as the grasshopper makes all his noise with an inborn drum attached to his belly. To eating, to sleeping and to waking, they were, like the pit of a village player, drummed together. In march-time and following the word of command this militia mounted the dining-hall as their wall and brought nothing away from the fortification but their portion of victuals for half a day. The gesture of command started them up from their seats and led them out again from the citadel. One could at night count the steps of a single cadet, and one knew those of all the rest, because the word of command like a blast drove all these wheels at once.--For this very reason, I mean because grace before meat was regularly commanded, the whole corps had the same devotions, no one spoke with God a second longer than another. I know not to which of the Scheerau regiments the fellow belonged who once, at a church parade, when the officer for once commanded the souls to go to God, which he generally ordered to go to the Devil, so flagrantly rebelled against reasonable subordination, as to crook his pious knee before Heaven at least four minutes longer than the file-leader;--I mention it for this reason, that I afterward, when the pray-er got a whipping for it, publicly propounded the question, whether in this same way one might not train the companies in logic, which is as necessary to them as the mustache and even more useful, since the latter, but not the former, needs brushing. Might not one give the command, only leaving out the word "make": "make the major proposition--make the minor--make the conclusion?" Thus no one could blame me, if I should buy me a company, and make them go through the three parts of the Penance somewhat in this way: Repent--Believe--Reform--namely yourselves, or else the ---- shall strike you--as younger officers add.
The Austrian soldiers had, until the year 1756, seventy-two manual movements to learn, not for smiting the enemy, but Satan.
While in this mood towards war and his comrades, Gustavus wrote a letter to me, of which I omit the beginning, because in that part our correspondent used always to be as cold as at the reception of a friend.
* * * * *
"---- Exercising and studying make me quite another man, but not a happier one. I am often vexed myself at my weakness, at my eyes, from which I privately seek to wipe away all traces of emotion, and at my heart, which, at offences such as I now frequently experience, though certainly without the intention of the offenders, does not boil up with passion, but compresses itself as if into a great tear over the wicked world. My chums, among whom I hear nothing but rapier-thrust and curses, ridicule me in everything. Even this writing I am not doing in their sight, but under the open heavens in the Silent Land[[57]], at the feet and on the pedestal of a flower-goddess, whose arm and flower-basket have been broken off. The worthy Herr von Oefel is meanwhile at the Resident Lady's, in the old palace.
"Whenever I am not at work, every room, every house, every face confines and oppresses me. And yet when I resume it--that is, when it is foul weather, as it was last week, I open my case of mathematical instruments as fondly as if it were a casket of jewels; but when a fiery morning, amidst the screaming of all the birds, even the imprisoned ones, pours down from the roofs into our streets, when the postillion reminds me with his horn that he has just come out from the angular, dingy, dilapidated, unorganically glued-together rubbish heaps of killed nature, which they call a city, into the pulsing, swelling, budding fullness of unmurdered nature, where one root clambers about another, where all things grow together and into each other, and all lesser lives twine together into one great infinite life; then every drop of blood in my heart recoils from the pitch-hoops, trench-cavaliers, and from the sponges with which the artillery stuff and stifle our blue morning hours. Nevertheless, I forget blooming nature and the counter-mines wherewith they are learning to blow it up into the air, and see merely the long crapes which stream out on high from the poles at the house of a dyer opposite, even as nights hang over the faces of poor mothers, that the dew of grief may fall in the dark behind the corpses which we are learning to make on the morrow.----Ah! since I have learned there is no longer any dying for, but only against the fatherland; since I have learned that if I sacrifice my own life, I save none but only enslave one; since that I have been compelled to wish that when war one day shall draw me into the work of killing, it will first burn my eyes blind with powder, that I may not see the breast I stab, nor pity the fair form which I mutilate, and may only die, but not kill.... Oh, while I still looked out into the world from the monastery, from your study chamber, then did it expand before me in fairer and grander dimensions with waving woods and flaming capes and meadows painted in thousandfold colors--now I stand upon that same earth and see the bold needle-pine with miry roots, the black boggy pond and the pasture of one mowing full of yellow grass and draining ditches.
"Perhaps, however, I might still better realize my dreams of being useful to men, if I should strike into another path, and were permitted to choose, instead of the battle-field, the session-table, and so ennoble the object of sacrifice.[[58]] The red sun stands before my pen and besprinkles my paper with running shadows. O thou workest standing, heavenly diamond! and illuminatest like the lightning, but without its murderous knell! All nature is mute when it creates and loud when it destroys. O great Nature, standing in evening's fire! man should imitate only thy stillness and be merely thy feeble child, carrying forth thy blessings to the needy!
"If you look up to-day from Auenthal at the windows of our castle flickering in the summer-gold, so does my soul also at this moment look over, but with a sigh," etc....
The officers see clearly that Gustavus never will be one; but he has against him the whole of his father, who loves only the storming warrior and scorns more quiet business-men, as they in their turn despise the still more quiet businessless scholar.