The Second Decade of Life.--Ghost Story.--Night-Scene.--Rules of Life.
Oefel kept his word. Fourteen days after this Professor Hoppedizel wrote to us that he was coming to fetch the new cadet. Now, what had been hitherto our wish became our grief. The bond between Gustavus and myself was to be strained and wrenched asunder; every book that we now read together afflicted us with the thought that each would finish it alone; I could hardly bear to teach anything more to my Gustavus, whose building-up I must hand over to strange architects, and every fair flower-ground was to us the garden-gate of the Eden which an armed cherub guarded against us.
The stormy months of his heart were now, too, drawing nearer. Besides, I had not plucked out feathers enough from the wings of his fancy nor driven him often enough out of his solitude. Therein his fancy sent its roots in through all the fibres of his nature and obstructed with the curtain of blossoms which adorned his head, the entrances of the outer light.
In truth, neither the rattling Mentor nor his books, i. e., neither the garden-shears nor the watering-pot nourish and color the flower, but the sky and the earth between which it stands--i. e., the solitude or society, in which the child spends the first budding moments of his growth. Society is the germinative power in the common-place child, who gives out his sparks only under external blows. But solitude is the best environment of the exalted soul, as a desert place sets off a palace; here it develops itself more harmoniously among congenial dreams and images than among heterogeneous utilitarian applications. So much the more reason have general excise-colleges to see to it that great poetic geniuses--no one of whom in fact can make a judicious chancery or finance officer--shall from the tenth to the thirty-fifth year be kept on the move through nothing but saloons, studies and town-halls, without having a still minute; else not one of them is to be transformed into an archive keeper or registrator. Hence too, the market-din of the great world so happily keeps all growth of fancy to the level of the earth.
I have often thought on this matter, and brought up many objections to my mind. Would not (I represented to myself), a more thorough school colleague, when thy Gustavus was lying on his back on the grass and dreaming to sink upward into the blue crater of the heavens, or with wings on his shoulder-blades to swim through the universe, drive him with his cane to a useful book? And, (said I), if I should say to the more thorough colleague it was all one on what a child's fancy wound its way upward, whether on a lackered staff, or on a living elm or on a black smoker's-tube, would not the colleague wittily reply, for that very reason it was all one?
Meanwhile I, on my part, should also possess wit of my own; I should hit upon the reply: "Do you believe, then, Sir Confrater, that between the greatest knave and the greatest comic poet, whom you produce, there is any difference? Certainly, a good plan of a Cartouche differs from a good plan of the Poet Goldoni's in this, that the first acts, himself, the comedy, which the latter gets acted by players."
Gustavus was now in the midst of the fairest and most momentous decade of man's flight to the grave, namely, the second. This decade of life consists of the longest and hottest days; and--as the torrid zone increases at once the size and the venom of the beasts--so at the glow of youth there ripen, indeed, love, friendship, zeal for truth, the spirit of poesy, but also the passions with their poison-teeth and poison-bags. In this decade the maiden steals away out of the years she has laughed through, and hides her sadder eye under the same weeping-willow beneath which the still youth cools his breast and his sighs, which rise for something nearer than moon and nightingale. Happy youth! at this moment all graces take thy hand, the poetic, the female, and nature herself, and lay aside their invisibleness and draw thee into a charmed circle of angels. I said, nature herself; for about her there glow still higher charms than the picturesque; and man, for whose eye she was a mile-long portrait full of enchantments, can bring with him to her a heart which shall make out of her a Pygmalion's image that has a thousand souls and with them all embraces one.... Oh, it never, never comes back again, the second decade of our poor life, which has more than three high festival days; when it has once gone by, a cold hand has touched our breast and eye; what still finds its way into that, what still forces its way out from both, has lost the first morning-charm and the eye of the old man opens then only to a higher world where he will perhaps again become a youth!
Three days before the arrival of the Professor there was a great ghost-scare in the castle; two days before it still continued; one day before the Captain made arrangements for the detection of the trickery. He had a hydrophobia-like dread of ghost-stories and gave every servant who, like Boccaccio, told one, as payment for his novel, cudgelings, so many for every sheet. The Captain's wife vexed him by her credulity, and she often got that look from him which men give when the hopes or fears of their wives make hares' leaps of half the earth's diameter. She had heard at night a three-footed tramp through the corridor, a flash had shot through the keyhole and another clock than hers had struck twelve, and all had flown away.
He, therefore, loaded his double-barreled pistols, in order to attack the devil with the powder which the latter, according to Milton, invented earlier than the Chinese; his Gustavus must be with him at the time, for the sake of exercising his courage. The castle-clock struck eleven, nothing came--it struck twelve, still nothing--it struck twelve a second time, without help of the clock-work; at this moment a hieroglyphic racket made its way over the castle-floor, three feet tramped down the many steps and shook the corridor. He, who was seldom courageous in suffering, but always in danger, walked slowly out of the chamber and saw nothing in the long passage but the blown-out house-lantern on the top stair; something came up to him in the darkness--and as he was about to fire at the dumb thing, he cried: who's there? Suddenly there flashed five paces from him--and here the tetanus of horror seized the nerves of Gustavus--the light of a dark-lantern upon a face which hung in the air, and which said: "Hoppedizel!" It was he; he threw his boot-tree and other apparatus of this farce away, and no one had anything against it but the Captain, because he could not show his courage, and the Captain's wife, because she had not shown any.
But in Gustavus's brain this face, hanging in the air, scratched with the etching-needle a distorted image which his feverish fancies will one day hold up again before his dying eyes. It is not want of courage, but merely intense fancy that creates fear of ghosts, and whoso has once awakened that in a child so as to terrify him gains nothing, even if afterwards he refutes it again and teaches him that "it was all natural." Hence, in the same family, only certain children are timid, i. e., those of a lively and volatile fancy. Hence Shakespeare in his ghost scenes raises the hair of the incredulous one in the front box mountain high, evidently through his excited fancy. The fear of ghosts is an extraordinary meteor of our nature; first, because of its dominion over all peoples; secondly, because it does not come from education; for in childhood one shudders equally before the great bear at the door and before a ghost; but in the one case the terror fades away. Why does it remain in the other? Thirdly, on account of the object: the person who is afraid of ghosts dreads neither pain nor death, but shrinks from the mere presence of a being of an entirely foreign nature. He would be able to look upon an inhabitant of the moon, a resident of a fixed star, as easily as upon a new animal; but there resides in man a dread as if of evils which the earth knows not, of a wholly different world from what revolves around any sun, of things which trench more nearly upon the limits of our personality....
I could not well avoid recording the foolish trick of the Professor's, because, two days after, it conjured up around Gustavus, on the eve of his departure, the following scene, which might full as well have crushed as cheered his heart.
In the interval before his departure he carried his heavy heart and heavy eye to all places which he loved and was leaving, to the holy sepulchre of his childhood, under every tree which had shut out from him the sun, up every hill which had shown it to him--he went on through nothing but ruins of his tender child life; over his whole youthful Paradise the past lay like a flood; before him, behind him, stretched the marsh land and land of tillage, into which fate so soon drives man.
... This was the moment when, before the sun, which, like him, was going hence, and before the whole of great nature, which, with invisible hands lifts blind man into vast, pure, unknown regions, I pressed the likeness of his Guido,[[52]] which I had hitherto withheld from him, to my beloved scholar's heart; at such moments words are unnecessary, but every word one does speak has an almighty hand: "Here, Gustavus," said I, "here, before Heaven and Earth, and before all that is invisible around man, here I make over to thee from my guardian hands into thine five great things--I deliver to thee thy innocent heart--I deliver to thee thy honor--the thought of the Infinite--thy Destiny--and thy form, which also encloses Guido's soul. Not on the earth do the great hours stand, which will ask thee whether thou hast kept or lost these five great things--but they will one day compare thy future soul with thy present. Ah! let me not think of myself, if thou shalt have lost all!" ...
I went away without embracing him; the best feelings keep a firmer hold when one does not allow them to express themselves. He remained where he was, and his feelings turned toward the picture of Guido; but that had no power to remind him of his own form--for a man may have come to his twentieth year without knowing his own teeth, and to his twenty-fifth remain unacquainted with his own eyelashes, whereas a maiden shall know all about hers before her confirmation--but the picture woke to life again all of memory and love towards his Genius, his first educator, that slumbered within him; nay, he found in the likeness nothing but resemblances to his friend who had fled from him and saw his form in the painted nothing as in a concave mirror.
His brain burned on in dream, as he lay on his pillow, like a glowing anthracite coal-mine. It seemed to him as if he melted away into a dew-drop and a blue flower-cup drank him up--then the swaying flower stretched itself up with him to a great height and landed him in a lofty, lofty chamber, where his friend, the Genius, or Guido, was playing with his sister; and he dreamed that as often as the young man stretched out his arm towards him it dropped off, and his sister handed it to him again. All at once the flower collapsed, and falling downward he saw three white moonbeams bear his friend into heaven, who cast his eyes downward toward the fallen one. He woke--he was out of bed leaning at the open window which looked out over the garden into the sleeping Auenthal. The heavens came down in a dumb rain of light--throughout the gleaming universe nothing stirred save the scintillating points of the fixed stars--the houses stood like sepulchres in which mortals were taking their long sleep; dreams went in and out through the closed senses of men and sometimes death's tread clove asunder a head and the dream within it. Heaven seemed to Gustavus to have sunk down before his window. "Oh, turn back, come again, beloved!" he cried, transported at once by dream and present reality, "O thou wast there, thou wast seeking me! Ah, thou thousand times beloved! send me from thy heaven at least thy voice!" Unexpectedly something cut the air before the window and cried, "Gustavus," and in its distant flight called down twice from a higher and higher altitude, "Gustavus! Gustavus!" An iceberg fell upon his stiffening skin in the first second; but in the next he recovered his glow, gave his arms to death and to his friend, and concentrated his vision upon a spot in the air under the dazzling moonlight, in order to see something. The two worlds had now for him collapsed into one; calmly he awaited his friend from the world behind the suns and was ready to fall with earthly breast upon his ethereal one. He cooled off at last, and with a shudder of soul and a shiver of the skin went back to bed. But long will the emotions of his soul be wafted to him from this hour, as the winds blow from a region of a storm.
It was probably the work of the old starling, who, so far as I know, had escaped from his cage. Gustavus never knew it. Whether a soul like a standing-pool heaves its waves as high as the shirt-frills, or like the ocean mountain high, those are two things; whether these lofty emotions are excited by a starling or a saint in bliss, that is all one.
The Professor taught him, in my hearing, golden brocards[[53]] of practical wisdom, which he himself transgressed in his teaching,--e. g., Not merely the love but also the hatred of men is changeable, and both die unless they grow.--Most people speak against those vices only which they themselves have.--The greater the genius, the fairer the person, so much the more does the world pardon them; the greater the virtue so much the less does the world pardon it.--Every youth thinks none is like him in feelings, etc., but all youths are alike.--One must never excuse himself; for not the reason but the passion of another is provoked with us, and against that there is no argument but time.--Men love their pleasures more than their prosperity; a good companion more than a benefactor; parrots, lap-dogs, and monkeys more than useful beasts of burden.--One guesses what men are when one gives them credit for having no principles, and the suspicious man is always right; he guesses, if not the actions, yet the thoughts of another; the defeats of the bad and the temptations of the good.--The sin against the Holy Ghost, which no one forgives thee, is the sin against his spirit, i. e., against his vanity, and the flatterer pleases, if not by his conviction, yet by his humiliation. Etc.
There are certain rules and means of knowing human nature which the higher and better man despises and condemns, which he is just the one not to be helped by in guessing character, and which neither instruct nor reveal him. The Professor further advised my Gustavus to form his face, to silhouette virtue upon it, to smooth it out before the looking-glass, and not to rumple or ruffle it by intense emotions. I know full well that with the world's people the mirror is still the only conscience which holds up their faults before them, and which, like the brain, must be divided into the larger and the lesser; the great conscience consists of wall and pier-mirrors, the little one consists of etuis, and is drawn out as a pocket-looking-glass; this for the world's people; but for thee, Gustavus----? Thou, who can'st neither accept, nor even understand, least of all use, the above Decalogue for knaves--for one understands and finds useful only such rules of life as rest upon experiences which he has himself so passed through, that he himself could have given the rules--thou, whom I have taught that virtue is nothing but reverence for our own personality and that of others; that it were better to believe in no vices than in no virtue; that the worst know only their own caste, and the best, one beside----? ... If Gustavus had not risen in rebellion against those teachings, which are mostly truths, and against the teacher of them; if he had not sworn that this disgusting cancer-philosophy should never spin and fasten itself upon a corner of his heart; then should I not have thought even as well of him as of the Resident Lady von Bouse, to whom the system of Helvetius seems as beautiful as her own face; for in her station the best heart has often the worst philosophy.
It will hardly reward the trouble, that I should add here that the rascal Robisch was chased to the devil, because he gave out and reckoned in a runaway recruit for a new one. If I said "chased to the devil," I was satirizing, for it was only to Herr von Röper, who accepts no servants except such as are Polyhistors[[54]] in livery, like Robisch, i. e., who are at once hunters, gardeners, scribes, peasants, and servants.