Sunday Morning.--Open Table.--Tempest.--Love.
What a Sunday!--To-day is Monday. I know no means of discharging myself, I who (as we all have by our insulation), have become an electrophorus of joy, except by writing, unless, indeed, I should dance. Gustavus makes himself heard over here: he has for a conductor a harpsichord and plays on it. The harpsichord will lighten this section for me and fling out to me many sparks of thought. I have often wished only to be rich enough to keep (as the Greeks did) a fellow of my own who should make music as long as I was writing. Heavens! what opera omnia would bloom out! The world would at least experience the pleasurable result, that whereas, hitherto, so many pieces of poetical patchwork (e. g. the Medea) have become the occasion of musical masterpieces, the case would be reversed, and that musical blanks would produce poetical prizes.
Yesterday, before day, we rose from our beds, I and my musical souffleur. "We must," I said to him, "stir round out of doors four good hours before we go to church."--Namely, to Ruhestatt, where the excellent Herr Bürger of Grossenhayn[[92]] was to appear as invited preacher. So said, so done. Up to this hour I know not whether to prefer a tepid summer night or a cold summer morning: in the former the melted[[93]] heart dissolves in longing; the latter consolidates the glowing heart to joy and steels its throbbings. In order to reproduce our four hours one would have to bring together the minutes from a hundred summer-houses and hunting-lodges, and even then the description would limp. Morning twilight is to the day what spring is to summer, evening twilight to the night, autumn to winter. We saw and heard and smelt and felt, how one bit of the day gradually woke up after another--how the morning passed over lawn and garden and perfumed them like the morning-chambers of the great with flowers and blossoms--how it opened (so to speak) all windows, that a cooling draught of air might sweep through the whole theatre--how every throat woke every other and invited it into the breezy heights, that they might, with intoxicated bosom, soar to meet the low and rising sun and sing him a welcome--how the changeable sky ground and melted a thousand colors and touched and painted its drapery of clouds.... So far had the morning advanced, when we were still walking in the dewy vale. But when we passed out from its eastern gate into an immense meadow mosaically laid out with growing garlands and stirring foliage, whose soft wave-line sank into deeps and flowed up into heights, so as to keep its charms and flowers moving upward and downward--when we stood before all this--then uprose the storm of bliss and of the living day, and the east wind moved along beside it, and the great sun stood and throbbed like a heart in heaven and set all streams and drops of life whirling around him.
(Gustavus plays at this moment more softly, and his tones arrest my breath which passes over more and more easily into hypochondriacal intensity.)
Now when the mill of Creation roared and stormed with all its wheels and streams, in our sweet intoxication we hardly cared to go on, everywhere we were delighted; we were rays of light, broken on their way by every medium; we journeyed with the bee and the ant and followed every fragrance to its very source, and walked around every tree; every creature was a pole-star that led our needle into deflections and inflections. We stood in a circle of villages, whose roads were all bringing out joyous churchgoers and whose bells were ringing in the holy fair. At last we too followed the devout pilgrimage and entered the cool Ruhestatt church.
If a maître de plaisirs should draw up for a Prince a plan of decoration for an opera-house, to consist of a rising sun, a thousand Leipsic larks, twenty ringing bells, whole meadows and floras of silken flowers, the Prince would say, it cost too much~-but the master of pleasures should reply, costs a walk--or a crown, say I, because such an entertainment requires not the Prince, but the man.
In the church I seated myself on the organ-stool in order to fire off the clumsy organ, to the astonishment of most of the souls present. When Gustavus stepped into a pew of the nobility, there sat in the opposite one--Beata; for she was as fond of a sermon as other maidens are of a dance. Gustavus bent down with drooping eyes and rising blushes before her and was deeply touched by the pale, afflicted form, which once had glowed before him. She was equally affected by his, on which she read all the mournful recollections which had been on either his or her soul. Their four eyes turned back again from the object of love to that of the general attention, Herrn Brüger of Grossenhayn. He began--I had intended, as temporary organist, not to give heed to him at all--a chorister makes as little out of a sermon as a man of ton;--but Herr Brüger with his first words preached the singing-book, in which I was going to read, out of my hands. He took for his theme the forgiveness of human faults--how hard men were on one side and how frail on the other; how surely, too, and how bloodily every fault avenged itself upon man, and like a hairworm ate its way through him whom it inhabited; and how little reason, therefore, another had to exercise the judicial office of inexorableness; how little merit there was in forgiving faults of heedlessness, little or venial errors, and now very much all merit centered in the overlooking of such faults as reasonably exasperated us, etc. When at last he pointed to the blessedness of love to man, then did the burning and streaming eyes of Gustavus unconsciously rest on Beata's countenance; and when, finally, their eyes, directed toward the preacher, filled with the true solvent of joy and sorrow, and when, during the drying of them, she turned to Gustavus, then did they open upon each other mutually their eyes and their innermost being; the two disembodied souls gazed full into each other and a moment of the tenderest enthusiasm flying over chained their eyes together by a spell.... But suddenly they sought the old place again, and Beata's remained fixed upon the pulpit.
I cannot assert whether he, Herr Brüger, has yet inserted this practical discourse in his printed volume; nevertheless, this commendation shall not prevent my confessing that his sermons, however good in themselves, are perhaps wanting in the proper soporific power, a defect which one perceives in reading as well as in hearing. I will here, for the benefit of other clergymen, interpolate some extra pages upon the false style of church architecture.
Extra lines on the false architecture of Churches.
I have already delivered this lecture before the Consistory and the building inspector; but it had no effect. We and they all know that every church, a cathedral as well as a chapel of ease, has to care for the head or brain of the diocese, i. e., for its sleep, because, according to Brinkmann, nothing strengthens the former so much as the latter. It were ridiculous if I should set to work to elaborate the point, that this disorganizing sleep can be induced in a cheaper way and for fewer pence and less opium, than it is done among the Turks; for our opium, like quicksilver, is rubbed in outwardly and applied mainly at the ears. Now, no one knows so well as I what has been already done in the whole matter. As in Constantinople (according to De Tott) there are special baths and seats for opium eaters, but only near the Mosques; so with us they are actually in them and are called church pews. Further, regular night-lamps burn on the altar. The window-panes have in Catholic temples, glass paintings, which answer for shade as well as window-curtains. Sometimes the columns are so arranged or multiplied that they help toward that darkening of the church which is such a promoter of sleep. As the sleeping-chambers in France have only dull and dead colors, so in the great canonical dormitory is at least so much provision made for sleeping, that those parts of the church at least on which the eye chiefly rests: altar, preacher, chorister, and pulpit, are painted black. It will be seen that I omit no good point, and if I censure it is in no censorious spirit.
But still much is wanting to make a temple a true dormitory. I have in Italy and even in Paris, stood (I might say lain) in many theater boxes, which were rationally arranged and furnished; one could in them (for everything was provided for the purpose) sleep, play, eat, and--so forth.... One had his female friends with him also. Now this the great folks have been accustomed to; how shall one expect them to go to church and sleep there when their money can procure them all friends sooner than sleep? With the tiers ètat, with poor and burghers, even with the college of burgomasters, which wears itself out through the week with voting, it is no wonder, of course, that it should be easy enough to induce them to fall asleep in any pew, in any loft; I do not deny it; but the libertine, the sleeper on eider-down, will not (even were a Consistorial Counsellor preaching) sleep on any back seat; he therefore prefers not to go to church at all. For such people of ton regular church-beds must therefore be made up in the boxes, so that the thing may succeed; just as gaming-tables, eating-tables, ottomans, female friends, and the like, are such indispensable things in a court-chapel, that they might better be left out in any other place than there.
One may therefore without offending me and the truth, call it no flattery if I contend that nothing but the stupid church architecture and the want of all house and kitchen utensils, all beds, etc., is to blame, and not the well and philosophically or mystically elaborated sermons of clever court university--barrack--Vesper-preachers, that people of rank are able to sleep in them far less than one hopes to.
End of the Extra Pages.
After church we all met in the vestry. I pass over trivialities and come at once to the point, that we all withdrew in a body and that Gustavus gave his arm to our fair Dauphiness and took hers. It was a quiet walk under the festal sun and beneath the blossoms of the bushes. The finery of the female peasantry, the wainscoted foreheads, the front locks stretched across them like the hairs of the fiddle-bow, the frocks lying one over another in layers, like the skins of an onion, all this, together with their laughing faces prefigured Sunday to us more vividly than whole parüres of city dames could. On Sunday, too, I find much more beautiful faces than on the six work days which disguise everything in smut.
The conversation must have been indifferent, I think, even at the forget-me-not. Beata, namely, found one lying in the grass, and ran up to it and--lo, it was made of silk: "Oh, it's a false one," said she. "Only a dead one," said Gustavus, "but a durable." Among persons of a certain refinement everything easily turns to allusion! Good nature is therefore indispensable to them, that they may infer no allusions but kindly ones. Nothing delighted me so much all through the little pilgrimage as the feeling that I was the back-ground and fair wind that followed them; for if I had gone ahead I should have failed to see the most beautiful gait in which the most beautiful female soul that ever was manifested itself through the body--Beata's. Nothing is more characteristic than a woman's gait, especially when it has to be accelerated.
In the vale we found, beside shade and noontide, something still finer, Doctor Fenk. He had arranged a little dinner-concert-spirituel among the flowers, where we all, like princes and players, kept open table, but only before seated and musical spectators, the birds. We made no complaint, that occasionally a blossom fluttered down into the saucepan, or a leaf into the vinegar cruet, or that a puff of wind blew the powdered sugar sidewise out of the sugar-bowl; per contra, the greatest plat de ménage, Nature, lay around our joyous table, and we were ourselves a part of the show-dish. Fenk said, as he played with a branch which he had drawn down: "Our table had at least one advantage over the tables of the great world, that the guests at ours knew each other, whereas the great ones in Scheerau and Italy, i. e., feasted more people than they became acquainted with; as in the fat of the animal which was so much abhorred and irritated by the Jews mice lived, without the creatures noticing it."
A physician may be ever so delicate in expression, he is so only to the mind of physicians.
During the coffee my dear Pestilentiary asserted that all pots, like coffee-pots, chocolate-pots, tea-pots, pitchers, etc., had a physiognomy which was too little studied; and if Melancthon[[94]] had been the missionary and cabinet preacher of pots, still they stood in need of a Lavater.
He had once known a coffee-pot in Holland, the nose of which was so faint and flat, its profile so shallow and Dutch, that he told the ship's-physician with whom he was drinking, there certainly must be just as miserable a soul in that pot, or all physiognomy was mere wind; on pouring it out, he found the stuff was not fit to drink. He said, in his own house, not a milk pitcher was bought of which he had not at first, as Pythagoras did of his pupils, made a physiognomical inspection.
"To whom have we to ascribe it," he went on in his humorous enthusiasm, "that around our faces and figures not so many lines of beauty are described as around the Greek,--unless it be to the cursed tea-pots and coffee-pots, which often have hardly human conformation, and which nevertheless our women gaze at all through the week and thereby copy in their children? The Greek women, on the other hand, were watched only by beautiful statues, nay, the Spartan women had the likenesses of fair youths hung up even in their sleeping-chambers."--(I must however say in justification of many hundred dames, that they certainly do the same with the originals, and that something is to be done even in that way.)--
As in this family-spectacle I have respect for no Goddess but that of Truth; I cannot sacrifice her even to my sister, although her sex and her youth place her, too, among the Goddesses. It vexes me, that it will not vex her, to read herself here printed and censured, because she makes more account of the gain to her vanity by the printing, than of the loss to her pride by the censure.
Pride is in our strategic century the most faithful patron-saint and guardian of female virtue. No one, to be sure, will require me to name publicly the ladies of my acquaintance who would certainly like Milan (according to Keissler) have been besieged forty times and taken twenty, had they not been bravely proud, nay, had not one of them, in a single evening full of dances, been proud two and a half times; but I could not name her, if I would.
Thou teachest me, dear Philippina, that the noblest feelings do not always exclude vanity, and that, except the business of loving thee, I can have no better than that of scolding thee--and thy medical adviser, Fenk, too, who indulges toward thee in too great a degree his reckless humor; fortunately she is still at an age, when maidens always love the one they have talked with longest, and when their heart, like the magnet, lets the old iron drop, when one applies to it a new one.
Beata and Gustavus touched each other's sore souls like two snow-flakes; even in the voice and in the movement was pictured a tender, forbearing, honorable, self-sacrificing reserve. O if even the denials of coquetry itself give so much, how much more must the present ones of virtue give!
The afternoon had sped away on the wings of the butterflies, which sought by our side their lower flowers; the conversation like the eyes, increased in interest, and we sauntered (or shall I write sawntered?)[[95]] along on the terraced alley which winds round the mountain like a girdle and in which the eye can pass over the hedges of the vale into the pastures. Toward the west a tempest strode across the heavens with its thunder-tread and hung its bier-cloth of black cloud over the sun. The country looked like the life of a great but unhappy man; one mountain glowed under the sun's fiery glance, the other darkled under the descending night of a cloud--over in the western region there pealed forth in the heavens instead of the song of birds the heavenly pedal, the thunder, and in rows of white water-columns the warm rain came down from heaven and filled again its flower-cups and summits out of which it had ascended--it was to the soul as solemn as if a throne were set up for God and all were waiting for him to come down and sit thereon.
Gustavus and Beata, swallowed up in this heaven, went forward on the terrace; the Doctor, my sister, and I at a little distance behind them. At last single rain drops pattered down on the foliage of the alley, which flew and fell over us out of the border of the broad storm-cloud; thus does a thundering, lightning-flashing calamity of a neighborhood only sprinkle the distant lands with a few tears, that steal from the eye of sympathy. We all betook ourselves to the shelter of the nearest trees. Gustavus and Beata stood, for the first time, again in many months, alone beside each other, without ear-witnesses, though with eye-witnesses not far off. They faced the west and were silent. There are situations, in which man feels himself too great to start a conversation, or to be polite or to make allusions. Both remained mute, till Gustavus in the hottest solstice of his emotions turned round from the deluged western country toward the eyes of Beata--hers raised themselves slowly and openly to his and the lips beneath them remained quiet and her soul was with no one but God and virtue.
The cloud had emptied itself and disappeared. The Doctor had to hurry home. No one could break from his blissful silence. In this perfect silence we had all come down the terrace--and everything had already gone from under its leafy umbrella--when, all at once, the low sun blazed through the black cloud canopy and rent it asunder, and flung the funereal veil of the tempest far back and gleamed over us and over the glistening thickets and every fiery bush.... All birds screamed, all human creatures were mute--the earth became a sun--the heavens trembled tearfully over the earth for joy and embraced her with hot, immeasurable rays of light.
The landscape burned around us in the heavenly rain of fire; but our eyes saw it not and hung blindly on the great sun. In the effort to set the heart free from blood and joy, Gustavus's hand sank into Beata's--he knew not what he took--she knew not what she gave--and their present feelings were exalted far above insignificant refusals. At last the thunder-beset sun laid himself down like a philosopher under the cool earth, his evening glow calmly reposed under the flashes of the retiring tempest, he seemed like a soul gone to God and a clap of thunder followed his death.
Twilight came on.... Nature was a mute prayer.... Man stood more sublime therein, like a sun; for his heart apprehended the speech of God.... But when that language comes into the heart and it grows too great for its breast and its world, then does the great genius whom it thinks and loves breathe the tranquillizing love of humanity into the stormy bosom and the infinite lets himself be tenderly loved by us in the person of the finite....
Gustavus felt the hand which pulsed in his and struggled to escape from it--he held it more faintly and looked back into the loveliest eyes--his own begged Beata in an infinitely touching manner for forgiveness of the past days and seemed to say: "O! in this blissful hour take my last sorrow away also!"--And now when, in a tone that was as much as a good deed, he asked softly: "Beata?" and when he could say no more and she turned her blushing face to the earth and ceased to draw her hand out of his, and with deep emotion looked up again and showed him the tear that said to him: "I will forgive thee;" then the two souls which were still greater than the nature around them became two angels and they felt the heaven of the angels; they stood silent, lost in endless gratitude and rapture. At length, agitated with reverent joy, he took her trembling arm and joined us.
The Sabbath closed with silent thoughts, silent raptures, silent recollections and a still rain out of all discharged tempests.