Souper and Cow-Bells.
To-day I am working in my shirt-sleeves like a blacksmith, so abominably long and heavy is this thirtieth section. When Gustavus learned from Oefel that a little souper at the Resident Lady's meant as much as the greatest does with us, he had already distributed in his head, before he began to dress it, persons and parts, and to himself the longest of all;--this single fault he always committed, that when, at last, he came upon the stage and had to play, he did not play. Before going into a large company he knew word for word what he meant to say; when he came out again he knew also (in the green-room) what he should have said--but in the salon itself he had really said nothing. It arose not from fear of man, for it was almost easier to him to say anything bold than anything witty; but it came from this, that he was the opposite of a woman. A woman lives more out of than in herself; her feeling snail of a soul, attaches itself almost externally to her variegated bodily conchylia, never draws back its threads and horns of feelers into itself, but touches with them every breath of air and curls up around every smallest leaflet--in three words, the sense which Dr. Stahl ascribes to the soul, of the whole constitution and condition of its body, is with her so lively, that she feels continuously how she sits or stands, how the lightest ribbon lies or sits upon her, what are the curves her hat-feather describes; in two words, her soul feels not only the tonus of all perceptible parts of the body, but also of the imperceptible, the hair and the dress; in one word, her inner world is only a hemisphere, an impression, of the outer.
But not so with Gustavus; his inner world stands far apart and abruptly separated from the outer; he cannot pass from either to the other; the outer is only the satellite and companion-planet of the inner. From his soul--imprisoned in the earthly globe which the hat covers--the diversified individual growths on which it cradles and forgets itself, shut out the view of objects external to its body, which cast only their shadows upon its fields of thought; it therefore sees the outer world then only when it remembers it; then the latter is transposed and transformed into the inner world. In short, Gustavus observes only what he thinks, not what he feels. Hence he never knows how to amalgamate his words and ideas with the words and ideas of other people that fly by him. The courtier winds up and turns his screws, and the cascades of his wit leap and sparkle--Gustavus, on the other hand, first throws the bucket into the well and proposes to draw up the draught at a proper time. A finer reason I assign below.
On the morning of this momentous souper Oefel boasted to him so much about Beata, how he would today see her cœur so perfectly balanced against the esprit of the Resident Lady--that he cursed all seeing, and got a second reason for carrying his heavy heart into the Still Land. His first was, that he always prepared himself for a great company by going first into the greatest--under the broad, blue heavens. Here, beneath the colossal stars, on the bosom of Infinity, one learns to exalt himself above metallic stars, sewed on beside the button-hole; from the contemplation of the earth one brings back with him thoughts through which one hardly sees the particles of dust, called men, whirling about; and the colored gold-bugs wherewith the realm of vegetable nature is mosaically spangled, are not surpassed by the gold-and-gem-embroidery of court splendor, but only imitated. The present author always paid a visit to the great terrestial and celestial circle before and after paying one to a smaller circle, that the great one might prevent and extinguish the impressions of the little.
I grow red, when I think how helplessly my Gustavus may have suffered himself to be ushered through two ante-chambers into a salon, where already sat opponents around at least seven card tables. Refinement of thought is a soil, refinement of expression is a fruit, to which not exactly court-gardeners are necessary; but finish of external behavior is nowhere to be gained but there, where it tells for everything--in the great world, full of microcosms. Should I have more to show up of the latter refinement than one commonly looks for in my legal class, I am never so vain as to trace it to any other source than my life at the Court of Scheerau. The Resident Lady (Beata never) played seldom, and very properly: a lady who can with her face take other hearts than those painted on cards, and who can take from men other heads than those stamped on metal, does ill if she contents herself with the lesser, unless she can shuffle and cut with the fairest fingers that I have yet seen in female gloves and rings. No lady should play before fifty, and after that only she whom her husband and daughter had cause to lose in the game. On the contrary, the poetical gladiator, Herr von Oefel, served in the army which (according to the Journal des Modes) every winter night is 12,000 strong in the front German Imperial Circles--namely with and against L'Hombre players. The Resident Lady was a brilliant Sun, whom Beata ever followed as Evening Star. Soft and gracious Hesper in Heaven! thou throwest the silver spangles of thy rays upon our earthly foliage and gently openest our hearts to charms which are as tender as thine! All the summer evenings which my eye has in dreams and remembrances lived through on thy lawns of innocence stretching high over my head, I repay thee for, fairest silvered dew-drop in the blue ethereal bell-flower of Heaven, when I make thee a type of the beautiful Beata! Oh! could I only project her saintly form out of my heart and present it here on these pages, that the reader might see, and not merely conceive, how from the Junonian Bouse, from whom all womanly charms stream forth, even rare disinterestedness, but not, however, innocence nor modest womanly reserve,--how all these wooden rays fall off from her, when by her side Beata not so much shows as veils herself,--Beata, who has gained the inner victory over the most passionate female wishes and yet betrays neither victory nor conflict,--who, without the Bouse's mourning array, and play of grief, gives thee a softened heart and irresistibly enchains thy sight, and with whom thou canst walk by moonlight, without enjoying her or the night-heavens upon the earth one whit the less! Gustavus felt even more than I; and I feel all again in my biographical hours more than I did once in my musical ones.
All in good time! When they are at table I shall take the opportunity to describe also the remaining guests. Amidst the social tumult, which bewildered Gustavus's senses as well as ideas, of course only half the sunny image of Beata sank into his soul. But afterward to be sure! At first, however, they were both standing under the arch of the window with the Resident Lady (who ironically excused Gustavus before Beata for not having brought his brush with him to-day),--not to mention a crowd of accidental interlocutors. Presently the Resident Lady was snatched away from them; their mutual nearness and the solitude of their position obliged both to talk, and Beata to stay. Gustavus, who had already, before the Assemblée, had it in his head what he would say, said nothing. But Beata finished the previous conversation about the sketching, and said: "Unless you have already excused me, I cannot excuse myself." Another person of more presence of mind would have said directly, "No," and so, in jest, which would have allowed no embarrassment, have wound the threads of the bird-spider around the poor humming-bird. Gustavus's feelings were too strong to let him jest here. With a multitude of weighty materials, of which you find all the handles break off, only that of jest holds fast, and with that you can manage them; particularly when you are talking with young women under a window arch.
Gustavus had long sought an opportunity to show other sides of his soul than had come to light in that affair of the corn; now he would have had the opportunity, but not the means, had not the park, with its evening splendors, lain encamped before the window. But the beauty of Nature was the only thing of which he could speak with inspiration with other beauties;--and he could with the most freshness compress all the charms of the universe into one morning, if he should describe his coming up out of the earth into the lofty world-mansion. Upon every word and image he uttered, or she uttered in reply, was stamped a soul which they had confided to each other. Suddenly he remained silent, with wide open, radiant eyes--it seemed to him as if in his soul a magic moon rose and shone over a broad twilight-land, and an angel of his childhood took him in his arms and clasped him so tightly to his bosom, that the heart of him dissolved.... And whereon rested this inner landscape-piece? Upon what the famed Strassburg clock-work rests on--namely, on the neck of an animal; the latter rests, as is well known, on the back of a Pegasus; his own was borne upon the necks of the herd of cows just then happening to pass by the palace on their way homeward, upon which hung bells that sounded like those of Regina's herd, and that consequently brought back the whole scene of youthful days with its tones before his soul.... In such a mood he could have discoursed in the National Assembly; the tumult also which enclosed them made both more solitary and confidential: in short, he narrated to her, with fire and with historical omissions, his pastoral time with one lamb on the mountain. This enthusiasm infected her (as all enthusiasm does all women) to such a degree that she began--to be silent.
Necessity now compelled both to bring some outward object (like a sword in the princely bed) between their confluent souls--they looked down at the two children of the gardener below, and indeed so eagerly did they gaze at them, that they saw nothing. The boy was saying: "The young lady [Beata] loves me so much," stretching apart his two arms to their full extent. The girl said: "The young gentleman [Gustavus] loves me with a love as big--as the palace." "And me," he replied, "with one as big as the garden." "And me," the girl rejoined, "with one as big as the whole world." Beyond that the boy's wings could not soar, though his tail-feathers had surmounted the eyrie of the Cathedral. Each enumerated to the other the love tokens which they had received from the party who were the delighted overhearers of their own several praises, and each said at every article: "Canst thou beat that?"
With the sudden jump children always take to a new game, the little girl said: "Now thou must be the gentleman [Gustavus]; and I will be the lady [Beata]. Now I will make love to thee; afterward thou must to me." She softly stroked his cheeks and then his eye-brows and finally his arm, and manipulated the gentleman. "Now me!" she said, suddenly dropping her arms. The youth threw his arms round her neck so tightly, that the two elbows crossed each other and formed a knot and extended beyond the love-knot as superfluous bows; he gave her a sound smack. Suddenly her critical file found a confounded anachronism in this historical play, and she said, inquiringly: "Yes, are not the young gentleman and lady really in love with each other?"
That was too much for the front box overhead, which was at once the auditory and the original of the little players, and was in great danger of becoming a copy of the same. Gustavus kept his eyelids open with all his might, in order that the water which stood in his eyes might not form into a visible tear and roll down his cheek, and the agitated Beata, with or without design, let her rose, broken off, fall fluttering to the ground; he stooped down for it and remained in that position long enough to let his tear melt away unobserved; but, as he handed the rose back to her, and both timidly hid and buried their sunken eyes in the flower, and when a ninny dancing along suddenly interrupted them--then, all at once, their uplifted eyes stood over against each other like the rising full moon confronting the setting sun, and then sank into each other, and in a moment of inexpressible tenderness their souls saw that they--were seeking each other.
The dancing ninny was Oefel, who wanted Beata's arm, to conduct her to the dining-room. And now, Reader, I serve up to thee, instead of living roses (such as our pair of souls is), nothing but roses seethed in butter. Twenty-six or twenty-seven covers, I think, there were. I will here furnish, instead of a bill of fare, a way-bill of the passengers. First; there were at table and in the palace two chaste persons--Beata and Gustavus; a proof that fair souls grow in all places, even the highest: thus the Emperor Joseph had several nightingales thrown every year into the park, that something might be heard there.
No. 2 was the Prince, who in his short life had seen more women around him than the ox apis, whose own life was as long as the Egyptian alphabet. He was, at this table, what he could not be at many a table d'hôte on his travels, Brother Orator and Cardinal Wind among sixty-three other side-winds. His crown had upon it ladies in mass.
No. 3 was his appanaged brother, whom the crowned one hated, not because he had and deserved too much love from his people, but because he was once mortally sick and did not die but lived on upon his portion. The skeleton of this brother would have persuaded the Prince, as every skeleton did the Greeks and Egyptians, to a more cheerful enjoyment of the banquet.
No. 4 was a Knight of the Order of St. Michael from Spa (Herr von D.), whose star of order still sent out rays in Scheerau after it had long been extinguished in Paris. So, according to Euler, a fixed star in the heavens may still, on account of its distance, continue to transmit its light, though it has long since been consumed to ashes.
No. 5 was Cagliostro, who, among so many playing heads, shared the fate of physicians and ghosts and lawyers, that his public deriders were at the same time his secret disciples and clients.
No. 6 was my manor Lord, von Röper, who, because he had something to say to the Prince, had remained behind. He was the only one in the whole gastronomic assembly who did these two things: first, he had submitted to him every sort of wine in the Bousian wine inventory, in order to convey to his stomach that distinct and clear idea, whereon the older logics so much insist, of all vinous goods of the Resident Lady--secondly, he made as much account of the fricasseed, pickled and the like viands, as if he gave instead of receiving the dinner, and he grew more and more courteous and obeisant in proportion as his obesity increased, like a sausage which crooks up when it is filled.
Nos. 7, 8 and 9 were two coarse government councillors * * * and a coarse president of exchequer * * * whereof the first two despised the whole court, because it had no other than literary Pandects, and the third because he pictured to himself how many pensions and salaries the whole court would have without the Chamber of Finance, i. e., without him, and all three because in their own opinion, they upheld the throne, though in reality they could have borne nothing except, in Solomon's Temple, the--Brazen sea.
No. 10 was the Resident Lady, who tuned herself after every one else's tone, and yet by her own was distinguished from all women;--like King Mithridates, she spoke the languages of all her subjects.
Nos. 11 and 12 were an abbess temporarily stopping on a journey and a widowed Princess von * *, who by virtue of their rank were monosyllabic and hautain.
No. 13 was the Defaillante whose greatest charms and powers of attraction were reduced to her small feet, where they resided, as in the two feet of an armed magnet. The head, her second pole, repelled what the lower attracted.
Nos. 00000 do not interest me; they were old female visages pickled in the saltpetre of rouge, to whom nothing was left from the shipwreck of their sunken life but a hard board on which they still sit and cruise round--namely, the gaming-table.
Nos. 00000 also have no interest for me, they were a sheaf of court dames, trimmed wall-plants on the tapestry, or rather borders set around fruit-bearing beds--they had wit, beauty, taste and behavior, and when one was out of the folding-doors, one had already forgotten them.
Nos. 0000 were a company of courtiers intersected with the red and blue order ribbons, which served a similar purpose on them to that of the red and blue colors of the spirit in the thermometer, that one might better see the height to which they rose,--who, like silver, shone and made everything they touched black--who could not imagine any higher or broader canopy of heaven than the throne canopy, or any greater day in the year than a court day--who were never in their lives fathers or children or husbands or brothers, but merely courtiers,--who had understanding without principles, knowledge without faith, passions without powers, complaisance without love and free-thinking as a joke--whose genuineness is tested like that of the emerald, by remaining cold, when one would warm it with the lips--and whom, to tell the truth, Satan may depict, not I....
Oefel was wedged in between Beata and the Swooning Sister; Gustavus sat opposite to them between two little witty ladies: but he forgot the neighborhood of his arms in that of his eyes. From Oefel's limbs shot sparks of wit, as if the silk in which he was enclosed helped electrize him. The Swooning Sister was so sure of her liege lordship over him, that she counted it no violation of allegiance, if her vassal said to Beata, his next-plate neighbor, the sweetest things; "He will," she thought, "be vexed enough, that out of politeness he cannot do otherwise." As to Herr von Oefel, he was concerned at bottom about nothing except Herr von Oefel; he praised, not in order to display his regard, but only his wit and taste; he suppressed neither flatteries nor satires, when they were good and groundless; he censured women, because he wanted to prove that he saw through them, and because he held that to be a difficult matter; and I held him to be a fool.
He generally applied to a maiden's heart three mountain-borers, in order to drill a hole into it, where he might insert the gunpowder with which he proposed to blow the mineralized vein of love into the air. His first mining-pit which he to-day, as always, loaded in the female heart, in the case of Beata, was, to talk with her a long time about her dress--it is all one to them, he asserted, whether one talks of their limbs or their clothes; but I affirm, the ugly woman wears her dress as her fruit, the coquette as the mere garden-ladder or the fruit-gatherer, and the good woman as the protecting foliage, Beata, like Eve, wore hers as leaf-work.
Secondly, he set up around Beata the cloth-and-yarn-walls of metaphor, in order to chase her into them--he asserted that maidens would sing what they never would say, (like those who cease to stutter the moment they begin to sing); thus they suffer in figures and allegories all those confessions of their inner being to be wormed out of them, which one could never bring from them with literal words, although they meant the same thing--I, on the contrary assert that such women are good-for-nothings, and that those who are worth as much as Beata cannot be caught with words, because their thoughts are never worse than their words. Of course, from a chamber (or heart) where there is fire and smoke within, the flame will blaze out through the first opening you make for it.
His third assertion and artifice was, that men felt the value of simplicity and the sublimity of ingenuousness and of the direct assurance: "I am in love with thee;" whereas maidens wanted tournure and refinement and circumlocution to be worked into this assurance; the Turkish mode of correspondence through natural flowers was more agreeable to them than that by flowers of poetic speech, a practical flattering more pleasing than a verbal--I, however, assert that--he is right. Hence, e. g., he made his repeating-watch always repeat before the Fainting Lady the hour of their last rendezvous, and pleased her thereby infinitely; hence he always looked upon a woman, when it was to be done and to be noticed, by peeping at her behind her back in the mirror--hence he was with Beata brimfull of deviltries, almost all of which I ought to name. I mention two only. In the first place he remembered that he had to forget himself, and in the fire of conversation to lay his hand on hers; thereupon he made believe recollect himself, and as if he reduced the weight of his hand half an ounce at a time with the intention of withdrawing it unobserved, so soon as it weighed no more than a finger-joint--"thus," he says to himself, "the finer delicatesse always manages; and I will see what it catches." His second piece of deviltry was, to squint at her face in the plate mirror at which he sat (his own he gave instead of the first prize only the second) and to admire it, when all the while, he had the original still nearer to him. Above the mirror a porcelain shepherdess was driving sheep: "I have never yet seen a lovelier shepherdess under glass," he said with double meaning; "but a lovelier sheep," said the Defaillante, meaning him.
This mirror-plate with its shepherdess, looking across a flowery shore into the glassy water, and with its lamb and shepherd, came very near to a likeness of Gustavus's childish play. Beata's eye involuntarily lost itself among these flowers, and took her ear with it, into which the Legation Counsellor with his military manœuvres of wit sought vainly to effect a breach. Gustavus's eyes sought and shunned only--eyes, not scenes; out of the social whirl under which his inner wings lay buried, he could fling himself upward only by some outward leaping-pole. For all, except those who were like him, so sorely tore and teased his inner being with their table-talk, that he was never in greater agony of embarrassment than to-day. I will set down the flying table-talk, so far as related to virtue, in divisions marked off by dashes, because several speakers joined in it, as in the peasant's table-grace the whole family pray antiphoniously.
"People have no virtue, but only virtues--Women have it, men wage war upon it--Virtue is nothing but an unwonted civility--Virtue is un pen de pavilion joint a beaucoup de culasse;[[71] ]mats le moyen de n'être que l'un ou que l'autre?--It is, like Beauty, a different thing everywhere; here heads are peaked, there broad; so with the hearts that are below them--Beauty and Virtue scold and love each other like a pair of sisters and yet give each other their finery (an allusion)--One never thinks of Virtue with so much pleasure, as when one sees the rose-girls[[72]] in Salency." It is also crowned in other places (a second allusion) etc. In short, every tone and glance, not proved, but simply assumed, that virtue was nothing more than--the economus of the stomach, the refectorist of the senses, the officiating priestess and daughter of the body. Love fared like virtue. "The Julie of Jean Jacques," said one, "is like a thousand Julies, or like Jean Jacques himself; she begins with enthusiasm, ends with piety, but the fall is between the two."
No one but he who has once been in Gustavus's situation, who has once endured the desolating storm of an assault upon the possibility and divinity of virtue in a circle of witty and dogmatic people of rank; who, under such agitations, each of which was a breach into his soul, has been sickened by his own powerlessness to shame, to say nothing of converting, such besiegers of virtue and the saints; who under these Herodian revilings of his Saviour has not had even that pride to uphold him, which indeed loves to eat with us in our private apartment, but hurries to the table d'hôte out of our inner sanctum--only he, then, who has gasped and panted in such conditions can conceive the Alpine load which lay upon Gustavus in his.
Even Beata's countenance, which took the part of love and virtue, could not shield him from the frosty faces of those men of persiflage, out of which, as from the fissures of the glaciers at a change of weather, came blasts of cutting wind, and which philosophized the heart to pieces and annihilated all self-respect. At Gustavus's age the Gustavuses make two fundamentally false inferences--they seek, in the first place, under every virtuous tongue a virtuous heart, but, secondly, also, under every bad tongue a bad heart.
Gustavus would have been very little troubled at not being able to answer much, to say nothing of counter-questioning, had there not been sitting opposite to him two ears, that deserved better things than what they were compelled to hear. He always slipped off from the right key and struck consonances where dissonances stood written on the score, and vice versâ. Now he was astounded at other people's frank licenses, and anon his neighbors were astounded at his; and wit would have been easier for him than to hit a tone which seemed to him now too bold and now too cowardly. But this was not properly the trouble; his essential fault, which held his feet like the stocks, was--that his thoughts were logically correct.
This fault many have; and I myself have had to drill myself many a forenoon and go through ground and lofty tumblings of the soul, before I could in some degree think disconnectedly and with a hop-skip-and-jump, just as if I were half a fool. And even then it would at last all have come to nothing, had I not gone to school and sat on the seat of a pupil to women. They think far less logically, and whoso does not learn under them a good tone is one of whom nothing can be made--except a German metaphysician. Do they even, haply, answer Yes or No, instead of what does not pertain to the matter in hand? Do they express themselves upon the weightiest subject considerately and with lawyerlike diffuseness, or on the most frivolous subject frivolously? Do they dislike to use or to hear persiflage, or do they haply--ball-queens and governesses of the bureaux d'esprit of course excepted--ever lay the least accent or sign of value on their table talk, after-dinner talk, looking-glass talk, and the like? Or do they lay any upon truths? Happily this refinement of tone, which is the faculty-seal and tradesman's-salutation of women, increases with the fineness of the materials one has on. One or two little German towns, such as an Unter-Scheerau, or the like, must not set themselves up as objections to my position, where, of course, the women of the place, who would rather be called ladies, give out no audible sound except with the articulated fan and sweeping train, like insects, whose voice whizzes forth not out of the mouth, but from the whirring wing-work and belly-tympanum.
Many will expect of me that I should demonstrate in detail this resemblance of the female- and the court-tones: indeed, I have the pen in my hand and need only to dip it into the inkstand. A sopranist in the good style (I shall for the sake of euphony use the terms court style and good style interchangeably) will always know how to lead off and exhaust by points the lightning of truth, as the electric spark is by metallic ones. The practical sopranist cuts out of the eternal circle of truth fanciful arcs and segments, which hang and rest upon nothing, like the many-colored fragments cut out of a rainbow. He it is of whom one requires, that like the quicksilver of the looking-glass, he shall shadow forth in its shades of color all that glances by him; other people's characters and his own opinions; show everything without and hide everything within. Will it be enough for a man of the world--let it answer as it may for a man of learning--to be a field stuck round with satirical thorns, and must not these rather, instead of the enclosing ditch, fill all furrows and be more the fruit than the hedge of the lot? And who else but he and the sulphurate of potash--which, however, confines itself solely to metals--must know how to precipitate all saints and all devils black? Only, people who dare to make such lofty demands, do not always consider, that only a latitudinarian and indifferentist to all truths can satisfy them, i. e., a man who perhaps for years keeps the same opinions and breeches. Nothing so narrows the playground of wit as when individual opinions and love of truth stand therein as fixed, solid pillars.
These are just the means whereby the world's people understand how to represent others as well as themselves in the finest ridiculous light. The courtier can certainly make it a ground of reproach to the German theatrical managers, that they for the most part suffer the Attic salt and the fine comic element, which he contrives always to have about his person, to evaporate under their sweltering hands. He, the courtier, always makes himself ridiculous in a refined, never in a low way, and easily spices his person with a genuine high comic quality, suited to his high standing; but he may well ask, "Do the German dunces study me, or does Terence, whom they do study, salt his characters so delicately as I do my own?" ...
I think I have by my digressions adequately accounted for the circumstance in my story, that Gustavus at last, because he had to succumb to such quick-witted dames, and from his modest deference to other people's talents, and perhaps because the Resident Lady was withheld from him by her company, and Beata by her respected father--absolutely took himself away. But out of doors the drooping flower cannot revive itself under the cooling night-dew; in the Still Land he passed along before the four-cornered reflections which the chandeliers threw upon the grass without yearning, and turned round and round to take in at a full glance all the walls of the broad darkly-painted ball-room, where fate propels the sun-ball into great, and the ball of earth into little circles. When he there felt the great profile of day, the night, like that of a departed female friend, cool and comforting, on his bosom, then he thought, but without pride: "O to thee, great Nature, will I always come, when I am saddened in the midst of men; thou art my oldest friend and my truest, and thou shalt console me till I fall from thy arms at thy feet and need no solace more." ...
"Can you not inform me where young Herr von Falkenberg lodges hereabouts," a night-messenger accosted him. He handed him a letter, which he hurriedly ran through in the fixed-star-light of the far off chandeliers. But they seemed to-night to have to illumine only sad scenes. Amandus had therein written to him on the coverlet of his sick bed as follows: