The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

Other Quarreling.--The Still Land.--Beata's Letter.--The Reconciliation.--The Portrait of Guido.

Up to this present Sunday I have not succeeded in finding out why Gustavus arrived at Scheerau five days later than he might have done; he evaded even my inquiries more distressfully than adroitly. Oefel had all reported to him, and made out of it one or two sections of his romance, which I and the reader, it is to be hoped, may yet see. I could wish his might see the light sooner than mine, then I might refer the reader to it or perhaps extract from it some anecdotes. Gustavus seemed to have a mental wound-fever. He carried his heart chilled with recent bleeding to Amandus, to warm it and let it brood again upon his friend's hot bosom, and to recover the self-respect which he could not get at first hand, from a second, and there he always got it--for a peculiar reason. In his character there was a trait, which, if he had been a member of a Moravian church, would long ago have enrolled him a missionary therefrom to America for the conversion of the savages: he was fond of preaching. I can say it in other words: his gushing soul must either stream or stagnate, but trickle or drop it could not--and then, when once a friendly ear opened to it, it rained down in inspiration upon Virtue, Nature and Futurity.--Then did a fresh, bracing air flow through the world of his ideas--the down-pouring torrents disclosed the fair, bright, deep-blue heaven of his inner-being and Amandus stood under the open heaven enraptured. This youth, to whom the exuberance of his heartily beloved friend was a pedestal, something that did not oppress but uplifted him, enjoyed in another's worth his own; nay, in his less enlightened head there arose a still greater warmth than was in the speaker, somewhat as dark water grows more intensely warm in the sun than that which is bright. Gustavus related to him what had happened, and talked with him so long upon his rights and wrongs in the case, that at last all his grief about it had been talked away: such is the way in which friendship talks out the internal fire of anger. It was merely a sign of love and a little weakness, that Amandus wiped away with greater sympathy a tear of sorrow than a tear of joy from the loved eye of another; he, therefore, by way of prolonging his interest in another's affliction, came back again to the old subject, and dropped the casual question where my hero had been the last five days. Gustavus with a troubled and reddening face would have given the question the go-by--his friend pressed it the more eagerly--the other embraced him still more passionately and said: "Ask me not, thou only tormentest thyself for nothing." Amandus, whose hysterical sensibility was less fine than spasmodic, now began to be really fired up--Gustavus's heart was intensely agitated and out of it came the words:--"O my dear friend, thou can'st never learn it, never from me!"--Amandus, like all weaklings, was easily inclined to jealousy in friendship and love, and in an offended mood placed himself at the window. Gustavus, made more indulgent and warmer to-day by the consciousness of his latest mistake in the accusation touching the grain-case, went over to him and said with moist eyes: "If I only had not given my oath to say nothing about it." But in the soul of Amandus not all parts were invested with that nice sense of honor in which is found the lapis infernalis that consumes every breach of word and oath. Moreover in him, as in all weaklings, the emotions of the soul, even when the occasion for them was removed, like the waves of the sea when a long-continued wind is followed by one blowing from the opposite quarter, still retain the old direction. He continued, therefore, looking out of the window, and meant to forgive, but was obliged to let the mechanically heaving waves gradually subside again. If Gustavus had less earnestly begged his forgiveness, he would have obtained it the sooner; both were silent and remained as they were. "Amandus!" he cried at length in the tenderest tone. No answer and no change of position. All at once the lonely and agonized Gustavus, overcome with grief, drew forth the portrait of the lost Guido who so closely resembled himself, which in the fair days of childhood had been hung upon his breast and which he had intended to-day to show him, and said with melting heart: "O thou pictured friend, thou beloved colored nothing, thou bearest under thy painted breast no heart, thou dost not know me, thou requitest me in nothing--and yet I love thee so dearly. And could I be otherwise than true to my Amandus?" Suddenly he saw in the glass of this portrait his own face reflected with its mournful features: "O look here" (he said in an altered tone); "I am said to look so like this painted stranger, his face wears one constant smile, but look into mine!"--and he raised it up, and showed his eyes wide open, but swimming in tears and his lips quivering. The flood of love snatched both away and bore them up in a close embrace--and when, not till after that, Amandus in reply to his half jealous question: "he had supposed the portrait was that of Gustavus," received an answering No, followed by the whole history: then no harm was done; for the emotions of his heart settled down again and flowed on in the bond of friendship.

After such expansions of the soul a sitting-room offers no proportionate objects; they sought them therefore under that ceiling from which not a painted, but a living heaven-canopy, not grains of color, but burning and carbonized worlds depend, and went out into the Still Land, which lies less than half a league from Scheerau. Ah, they should not have done it, if they had wished to remain reconciled.

Wilt thou have me describe thee here, thou Still Land! over which my fancy flies so high above the ground and with such yearning--or thou, still soul! thou that watchest it still in thine, and hast cast only an earthly image thereof upon the earth?--Neither of the two am I equal to; but I will point out the way which our friends took through it; and first I must communicate something further, which gave rise to the extraordinary issue of their walk.

Besides I could not rightly decide where to put the letter which Beata immediately after my and her return from Maussenbach wrote to my sister. She had in the few days which she had spent with my Philippina at the Resident Lady's become her friend. The friendship of maidens consists often in their holding each other by the hand or wearing clothes of the same color; but these two preferred to have like friendly sentiments. It was fortunate for my sister that Beata had no opportunity to come in contact with the tinge of coquetry which touched the surface of her character; for maidens divine nothing more easily than coquetry and vanity, especially in their own sex.

"Dear Philippina:--I have delayed all this time in order to write you a real lively letter. But, Philippina, this is not one. My heart lies in my breast as in an ice-house and trembles all day long; and yet you were so happy here, and never sad except at our leave taking, which lasted almost as long as our stay together: am I, perhaps, to blame for this? I think so very often when I see the laughing faces around the Resident Lady, or when she herself speaks, and I imagine myself in her place, and fancy how I must appear to her with my silence and my speeches. I dare not think any more on the hopes of my solitude, so sorely am I shamed by the superior advantages of other people's society. And when a part which is too great for me to play of course oppresses me, I know no way of raising myself up again, except by creeping away into the Still Land. Then and there I have sweeter moments, and often my eyes suddenly run over, because there everything seems to love me, and because there the tender flower and the innocent bird do not humiliate me, but respect my love. There I see the spirit of the mourning Princess make its lonely pilgrimage through her works, and I walk with her and feel what she feels, and I weep even sooner than she. When I stand beneath the brightest and bluest day, then I gaze yearningly up at the sun, and after that round about the horizon and think: 'Ah! when thou hast gone down thy arch, thou hast shone on no spot of earth on which I could be wholly happy until thy evening glow; and when thou art down and the moon comes up, she too finds that it is not much thou hast given me.' Dearest friend, do not take it ill of me that I use this tonic; ascribe it to a malady, which always comes to me preceded by this avant courier. O, could I chain thee to me with my arm, then perhaps I should not be so. Happy Philippina! from whose mouth wit already flutters forth again smiling, even when the eye above it is still full of water; as the solitary balsam poplar in our park breathes out spicy perfumes, while warm rain drops still fall from it. All forsake me, even images; a dumb, dead picture behind a glass door was the only brother whom I had to love. You cannot feel what you have or I miss--this time even his reflection departs from me, and I have nothing left of my beloved brother, no hope, not a letter, not a likeness. I have missed this portrait, indeed, only since my return from Maussenbach; but perhaps it has been gone still longer, for I had hitherto merely to arrange my things; perhaps I myself packed it up among the books which I gave you. You will let me know, I am well aware. In our house there was a second, somewhat less faithful, likeness of my brother, but that has been missing for a long time," etc.

* * * * *

Very naturally! for old Röper had sold it at public auction, because it was that of Gustavus. But we will follow our two friends again into the Still Land.

They had to go by the old palace, which, like an Adam's-rib, had hatched out the new one; which, in its turn, had sent forth new watershoots--a Chinese cottage, a bathing-house, a garden-saloon, a billiard-room, etc. In the new palace dwelt the Resident Lady von Bouse, who did not admire this architectural feature twice in the whole year. Behind the second rear extension of the palace the English garden began with a French, which the Princess had let stand, by way of utilizing the contrast, or of avoiding that which an angular gala-palace assumes by the side of patriarchal Nature in her pastoral attire. Any one who cared not to go by the two palaces could reach the park through a pine grove, coming first into a cloister, of which the old Prince and his favorite chamberlain had been the fathers. Neither of them had been alone half a day in all their lives, except when they were lost on a hunt or otherwise; hence they wanted for once to be alone, and therefore--(what cared they if they did perpetrate a plagiarism and a copy of the former Baireuth Eremitage?)--they placed nine small houses first on paper, then on a table, and finally on the earth, or rather nine moss-grown cords of wood. In these puzzle-houses of hollow logs there was lodged Chinese furniture, gold and a live courtier, somewhat as in living trunks of trees one is astonished to come suddenly upon a live toad, because one does not see where the creature's hole is. The logs enclosed a cloister which--as not a soul in the whole court had any disposition to be a living hermit--was committed to a wooden one, who silently and sensibly sat therein and meditated and reflected as much as is possible for such a man to do. They had provided the Anchorite with some ascetic works from the Scheerau school-library, which suited him well enough and exhorted him to a mortification of the flesh which he already had. The great, or the greatest, either are represented or themselves represent something; but they seldom are anything; others must eat, write, enjoy, love, conquer, for them, and they themselves, again, do so for others; hence it is fortunate that, as they have no soul of their own to enjoy a monastic life and find no other that can, they can at least hunt up among the carvers wooden business-agents who can enjoy the recluse life for them; but I only wish that the great ones, who never suffer more ennui than in their pastimes, would have made and placed before their parks, before their orchestras, their libraries, and their nurseries, such solid and inanimate agents and canopy-bearers or curatores absentis of pleasure and fair-weather, lightning-conductors, either hewn out in stone or merely embossed in wax.

Upon the ceiling of the hermitage (as in that of the grotto in the cloister of Santa Felicita) was to have been represented an adequate amount of ruin, six cracks and two or three lizards falling through them. The painter, too, was already on his travels, but stayed so long upon them, that at last the thing painted itself, and like openhearted people, was nothing else than what it appeared. Only, when the artificial hermitage had ennobled itself into a natural one, it had long since been forgotten by everybody. I hold it, therefore, rather as persiflage than as pure truth, that the Chamberlain--as so many Upper-Scheerauers said--had hunted up wood-ticks and had them grafted into the hermit's chair, so that the creatures might work there instead of hair-saws and ripping-knives, and make the seat the sooner antique--in fact the vermin are now gnawing both chair and monk. Still more ridiculous is the idea of making a reasonable man believe, that the architectural chamberlain had covered and papered an artificially running wheelwork with a mouse-skin, in order that the artificial lizard above might have a mouse-correspondent below, and thus provision be made for symmetry at either end; and that afterward the proprietor had approached Nature and drawn over a live, running mouse a second artificial mouse-skin as frock and overcoat, that Nature and art might have a mutual indwelling;--ridiculous? It is true, mice are always capering round the hermit, but certainly only in one skin under-jacket....

Our two friends are far from us, and are already in the so-called long evening-vale of the park, through which a wavy stream of gold flowed from the setting sun. At the western and gently raised end of the vale, the scattered trees seemed to grow on the dissolving sun itself; at the eastern end one could look across over the continuation of the park to the glowing palace, on whose window-panes the sun and the evening fire-works redoubled their splendor. Here the old Princess always saw the first setting of the sun; then a path that wound gently upward led her to the high brow of this park, where day was still dying, and once more paternally beheld with his expiring sun-eye his great circle of children, till night closed his eye and took the orphaned earth into her motherly lap.

Gustavus and Amandus! be reconciled to each other here once more--the red limb of the sun rests already on the margin of the earth--the water and life run on and stop down below in the grave--take each other by the hand, when you look over to the ruined Place of Rest,[^[60]] and at its still standing church, image of unprosperous virtue--or when you look over to the Flower Islands, where every flower trembles alone on its little green continent, and no relative nods a greeting save its painted shadow in the water--press each other's hands, when your eyes fall upon the Realm of Shadows, where, to-day, light and shade, like living and sleeping, fluttered tremblingly beside each other and into each other--and when ye see Alpine horns and Æolian harps leaning against the threefold lattice of the Dumb Cabinet, your souls must needs tremble in unison with the harmonies, in echoing vibrations.... It is a wretched rhetorical figure I set up here, as if I had been all this time addressing and exhorting them; for are not the two friends in a greater enthusiasm than I myself? Is not Amandus exalted far above all jealousy of friendship, and is he not with his own hand holding out before him the portrait, to-day apostrophized, of the unknown friend of Gustavus, and saying: "Mightest thou be the Third?" Nay, does he not, in his inspirations, lay the picture on the grass, in order with his left hand to grasp Gustavus and with his right to point to a chamber of the new palace, and does he not confess: "Had I also in my right hand that which I love, then were my hands, my heart and my heaven all full, and I would die!" And as it is only in the greatest love for a second that we can speak of that which he cherishes towards a third, can we demand anything more of our Amandus, who here, on the hill-top, confesses himself in love with Beata?

The misfortune was that at this very moment she herself was coming up, to stand at the dying-bed of the sun--herself even more lovely than the object which was the delight of her eyes--walking more and more slowly, as if she were every moment on the point of stopping--with eyes that could not see till she had several times in succession shut and opened them again with a quick winking movement--no living European author could describe the ecstacy of Amandus, if the thing had remained so;--but her slight astonishment at seeing the two guests of the mountain suddenly passed over into a similar sensation at seeing the third on the grass. A hasty movement put her in possession of the picture of her brother and she said, turning involuntarily toward Amandus: "My brother's portrait! and so at last I find it!" But she could not pass by them, without saying to both--with that fine womanly instinct which has got through ten sheets in such documents before we have read the first leaf:--"She thanked them, if it was they who had found the picture." Amandus made a low and bitter obeisance, Gustavus was far away, as if his soul stood on Mount Horeb, and only his body was here. She walked on, as if it had been her intention, straight down over the mountain, with her own eyes on the picture, and with the other four eyes fixed on her back....

"Now, indeed, the mystery of thy five days is out, and without perjury on thy part," said Amandus bitterly, and the high opera of sunset touched him no more; Gustavus, on the contrary, is still more deeply affected; for the feeling of suffering a wrong, mingled with the mistaken feeling of having done a wrong--(tender souls in such cases always justify the other party more than themselves)--melted with it into one bitter tear and he could not say a word. Amandus, who was now vexed at his reconciliation, was still more confirmed in his jealous suspicion by the fact that Gustavus, in his pragmatic relation of the Maussenbach adventure, had entirely left out Beata; but this omission had been intentional on the part of Gustavus, because the presence of the tender soul was just what pained him most in the whole occurrence, and because perhaps in his innermost heart there was budding a tender regard for her, which was too delicate and holy to endure the hard open air of conversation. "And of course she too was present lately in Maussenbach?" said the jealous one in the most unlucky tone.--"Yes!" but Gustavus could not add so much as this, that she had not on that occasion spoken one word to him. This nevertheless unexpected yes, in an instant contorted the face of the questioner, who would have held on high his stump (in case his arm had been shot off) and sworn, "it needed no further proof--Gustavus visibly held Beata in his magnetic vortex--was he not now speechless? Did he not instantly surrender her the likeness? Will she not, as she confounded the copies, also confound the originals, as they are all four so like each other, etc.?"

Amandus loved her, and thought one loved him too, and that one perceived where his drift lay. He had delicacy enough in his own actions, but not enough in the presumptions he cherished regarding those of others. He had, namely, in the medical company of his father, often visited Beata, in her sicknesses, at Maussenbach; he had received at her hands that frank confidence which many maidens in their sick days always express, or in well ones, toward young men who appear to them at once virtuous and indifferent; the good Participle in dus, Amandus, assumed therefore after some reflection, that a letter which Beata had translated as a specimen, from Rousseau's Heloise, on fine paper--no maiden writes on coarse--and which had been written to the deceased Saint Preux, was addressed to the Participle himself. Girls should never, therefore, translate anything. Amandus was translated into a lover.

In Gustavus's heaving brain the night settled down at last, which had already come on in the outer world. Storm and moonshine in his inner night stood side by side--joy and sorrow. He thought of an innocent friend eaten up with suspicion, of the forfeited portrait, of the sister with whom he had played in his childhood, of the unknown pictured friend, who was therefore the brother of this lovely creature, and so on. Amandus turned aside to go off; Gustavus followed him unbidden, because, to-day, he could not do anything but forgive. Even during the descent hatred and friendship wrestled with equal force in Amandus, and nothing but an accident could ensure the victory to either. Hatred won it, and the auxiliary accident was, that Gustavus walked along parallel to Amandus. Gustavus should have stolen along ahead (or at most behind), especially with that affectionately dejected soul of his own. In that case friendship would, by the help of his back, have conquered, because a human back, by the suggestion of absence, creates more compassion and less hatred than the face and breast.... In fact one cannot often enough see his fellow men from behind....

Ye readers of books! scold not at poor Amandus, who is scolding away his fragile life. You should only see and consider how it is with the seat of the soul in a nervous weakling, that it is devilishly hard, not stuffed out with so much as three horse-hairs, and cuts like the seat of a sleigh. In short, any personality of my acquaintance sits more softly. Nevertheless my pity for the poor fellow is excited by quite other things than by his hard, stony, pineal gland of the soul. There are things which would soften the heart of the reader, and which, alas, despite my repeated filling of my pen, I have not yet been able to write up to!

On the whole it is vain for me to attempt concealing how very deficient my story thus far is in true murder and mortality, pestilence and famine, and all the pathology of the Litany. I and the circulating librarian find the whole public in the shop here, waiting, and with the white handkerchief--that sentimental seton--already taken out, impatient to weep and wipe away its proper quantity of tears ... and yet none of us brings on much that is dead and affecting.... On the other hand I am beset with the peculiar difficulty that the German public cocks up its head and will not let itself be distressed by me; for it counts upon this, that I, as a mere plain biographer (life-writer) cannot go so far as a murder, without which, however, nothing is to be effected. But is then only the romance-manufacturer invested with the supreme criminal jurisdiction, and is only his printing paper a place of execution? Nay, newspaper-writers, who write no romances, have nevertheless, from time immemorial, filled their pens and slain what they chose, and more than was buried. Furthermore, historians, those Great-Crosses (of butterflies) among the Little-Crosses (for out of 100 newspaper annalists I extract and decoct at most one historian) have gone on and destroyed as many as the plan of their historic introductions, their abregès, their royal and imperial historiettes absolutely required.... In short, there is no excuse for me if I do not here make anything at all dead and interesting; and at the end I slaughter from necessity one or two lackeys, whom besides, out of Scheerau, no devil knows.

But I proceed with my story and insert out of the Pestilentiary's Nouvelle à la main the following article in my Nouvelle à la main [handy-volume novel] written for several quarters of the globe:

"It is confirmed by reports from Maussenbach, that the public servant at that place, Robisch, is dead as his mice. His death has created two schools of medicine, of which the one contends that his sect-founding death arose from too much beating, and the other, from too little eating."

There is not a word of truth in all this; the man has, indeed, stripes and appetite, but is living up to date, and the newspaper article is only just this moment been made by myself. But let the rash public draw from this and for future use the hint, that it should not tease and provoke any biographer, because even he by poisoning his ink and by putting rat-powder in his sand box can destroy princes or anybody else, and send them to the church-yard; and learn hence that an ingenuous public must always while reading ask with trembling: "how will it fare with the poor fool (or fair fool) in me next chapter?"