Paintings.--Resident Lady.
Day before yesterday (the 26th of October) was thy baptismal day, Amandus! Hast thou, haply, in all thy life, ever celebrated one with glad eyes? Hast thou ever, at the end of a year, said: May the new one be like this?--I will not answer these questions, lest I should make myself more sad....
Gustavus saw no more in the garden anything but what he sought not, the Prince and his like; he cherished unnecessary, i. e. a lover's reluctance to inquire of any one about Beata's invisibleness--except of the gardener's two children, who knew nothing, except that Beata, as well as he, always toyed with them and gave them presents. Perhaps she gave them, because he did; for he did, because she did. The only relics of her, her walks, attracted him to them so much the oftener. O, if only the pebbles under her feet had been softer, or the grass longer, so that both might have retained an outline of a trace that she had been there: then would this thorn-garden of his invisible one have given his wishes still greater wings, and his melancholy deeper sighs. For I must just confess, once for all, to myself and my readers, that he is now in that enthusiastic, yearning, dreamy state, which precedes a declaration of love. This dreamy veil must have hung over him, when he once, instead of the serpentine brook in the evening-dell which he was going to draw, sketched the lovely statue of Venus, who seemed to have risen from those waves; and secondly, when he did not see who saw him--the Resident Lady. He appeared to her like a fair child, who had grown five feet tall; with all his inner excellences he could not yet produce an imposing effect, because on his face there was still written too much good nature and too little knowledge of the world. With that playful frankness of the coquette, which is the first-born daughter of the coquette's disparagement of the male sex, she said: "I'll give you the original for the drawing," and took the latter and contemplated it with an interesting and thoughtful admiration (only her thoughts were on another subject.) Oefel, to whom he related the adventure, scolded at him for not having said neatly: "Which original?" For to the living Venus Gustavus had said nothing.
Nor, in fact, could he have done it, for she stood before him with all the charms which are left to a Juno, when one takes from her the gracious hue of the first innocence, with her forest of plumage, which hundreds in Lower Scheerau wear after her, because they, as well as a few of my lady readers, who also put on more feathers than they will slit (pens) in their whole life, have made out so much as this, that every Juno must be a Goddess, and every Goddess a Juno, and that ladies'-heads and harpsichords must always be stuck or struck with quills.
She asked him after the name of his drawing-master (the Genius); his own she herself told him. She could not fail, with all her missteps, to command a certain respect, and her sins and the Devil seemed to walk behind her only as Chamber-Moors; her face, like her behavior, bore the inner consciousness of her remaining virtues and her talents. Nevertheless she remarked in the shy reverence which Gustavus manifested less for her rank and worth than for her sex, that he had little knowledge of the world. She avoided all circumlocution and made a direct application to him for a drawing of the whole park to send to her brother in Saxony. I call that a request, which she properly always framed in addressing men in the jocose tone of a cabinet-order--and one could oppose her female ukases in no other way than by masculine ones.
Let woman once lay a commission upon thee, then thou art hers, body and soul; all thy disagreeable steps, all thy irksome services in her behalf resolve themselves into charms around that image of her which thou hast spread out on the bony walls of thy brain. To rescue--avenge--teach--protect a woman is hardly much better (only a little) than to love her at once. Gustavus never heard a more welcome request; he sketched the park in a very short time, and could hardly wait for the forenoon in which he was at liberty to hand it to her. We all know what he hoped to behold in the Resident Lady's apartment beside herself--but all he found there beside her was the little pupil (Laura) of the absent Beata, at the Silvermann's-harpsichord.
The Resident Lady fixed a long look upon the drawing. "Have you," said she, "seen any pieces by our Court Painter? You should be his scholar and he yours--he has never yet painted a fine portrait nor a poor landscape--in your drawing the statues are finer than the garden--retain your fault, and continue to beautify persons," she said and looked upon him. In my slender artistic judgment--for they have never yet admitted one of all my pieces, as aspirant, into a picture-gallery, and I seek, with more honor, rather to review publicly such exhibitions than to enrich them--the precise opposite is true, and my hero (like his biographer) makes far better landscapes than portraits. "Try it," she continued, "with a living original"--he seemed perplexed as to the intention of her advice--"take one that will sit to you as long as the artist himself sits." Oefers vanity with Gustavus's impetuosity might, at this point, have got together a stupid piece of politeness--"Here! this one I mean in here "--and she pointed to a looking-glass; at this moment he was, after all, on the point of coming out with the resuscitated flattery, that her figure was beyond his pencil: when she luckily added: "Paint yourself and show me the picture." Over an accidentally swallowed sottise one grows quite as red as over a rejected one--thou beautiful, burning red Gustavus!
I therefore write out here, for children who have never yet danced at winter balls, this motto from the laws of fashion: When people are about to make a declaration to you, to put one into their mouths is as impolite as it is dangerous.
"I will just show you why," said she, and reached her hand half way to his and drew it back again, and took him with her through her reading-cabinet, through her library into her picture-gallery. When she walked, one could hardly walk himself; because one wanted to stand and look after her. Still harder was it by her side to look at pictures. She pointed out to him in the gallery a motley row of likenesses which the most famous painters had taken of themselves, and which the Resident Lady had had copied from the gallery in Florence. "You see, if you were a famous painter--and that you must become--I should not have your portrait yet in my collection." On the window-seat stood upright the female parasol, a green walking-fan, which he could have taken his oath before a bench of justice was Beata's--several hay-carts of Wouwerman's grass, several hundredweight of Salvator Rosa's rocks, and a square mile of Everdingen's grounds, would he have given for that mere fan.
But the promise which had been extorted from him, to paint himself, was, for such a child of nature as he, to whom art had not yet given vanity, hard to fulfil. Hundreds of youths now-a-days show more ability to survey themselves before a looking-glass in company, than he had to do it in solitude. He really feared that he was committing all the time the sin of vanity.
In this way my hero, who is trying to fetch himself out of the looking-glass, is beheld and painted by three drawing masters at once: by the biographer, or myself, by the romancer, or Herr von Oefel, who inserts in his romance a chapter wherein he treats anonymously Gustavus's love for the Bouse, and by the painter and hero himself. He may well, then, be well hit.
Of Oefel's romance of the Grand Sultan nothing more will appear in the court bookstore at the next fair than the first volume; and it will gratify the minor public which reads and makes the most of our romances, to hear that I have looked a little into the Grand Sultan and that most of the characters therein are taken not out of the wretched actual world, which, moreover, one has around him every week and knows as well as he does himself, but mostly out of the air,[[68]] that arsenal and nursery of the thinking romancer; for if, (according to the system of dissemination) the germs of the actual man, side by side with the pollen of flowers, flutter round in the air, and must, out of it, as the repository of posterity, be precipitated and absorbed by the fathers: then much more must authors get their drawings of men out of the air, (where all Epicurus's exfoliations of actual things fly round,) and shape them on paper, that the reader may not crumble.
For some days the von Bouse was not accessible, when the original wanted to carry her his copy. At last she sent for both. His face was very unlike the painted one, when his glance, on entering, fell upon his physiognomical sister, who was singing with her little Bouse at the harpsichord, upon Beata. We poor devils, we who have grown up not on family trees, but on a family bush, are brought by four walls so near to each other, that we make each other warm; on the contrary, the velveted walls of the great keep their inmates as far apart as city walls, and it is with us there as in taverns, where our interest detaches only one or more from the great mass. So Beata kept on; and he began; to him it was no more than if he saw her through his window in the garden. His portrait found the most favorable reviewer. She flew on with it through several rooms. Gustavus could now set his eyes where his ears had long since been. His only wish was, that the pupil were extraordinarily stupid and sang everything falsely, merely that the charming leader might the oftener recite her part. It was that divine Idolo del mio of Rust's, at hearing which I and my acquaintance always feel as if we were absorbed by the bland heaven of Italy, and dissolved by the waves of the tones, and inhaled as a breath by the Donna who glides along in the same gondola with us under the starry sky.... By such dangerous fancies I really upset all my stoicism and become, even before I am yet thirty, eighteen years old.
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 principality 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 impassioned 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 attitude 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 snatched 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 embarrassment 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 embarrassment: "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"----.)