The Springs.--The Wail of Love.
I went to sleep in the first heaven and woke up in the third. One should never wake up in any but strange places--nor in any chambers except those into which the morning-sun flings its first flames--and before only those windows where the green shadows burn like a traced name in the heavenly firework, and where the bird screams among the leaves through which he is skipping....
I could wish my future reviewer were living with me in my chamber at Lilienbad; he would not (as he does) break over my joy-sections the æsthetic staff, but an oak-twig to crown their father....
That father is just now a ladies' tailor, but merely in the following sense: in the centre of Lilienbad is the medicinal spring, from which is drawn the dispensary gushing out or the earth; from this spring radiate in regular symmetry the artificial peasants'-cottages, which the bathing guests occupy; each of these little cottages is decorated in jest with the hung-out emblem or signature of one or another trade. My little house holds out a pair of shears as a technical insigne, to announce that its occupant (myself) drives the trade of a ladies' tailor. My sister (to judge by the exponent of a wooden stocking) is a stocking-weaver; next door to her swings a wooden boot or a wooden leg (who can tell which?) which tells us as plainly as a journeyman's greeting, that the occupant is a shoemaker, who is no other than my Gustavus.
Against Beata's cottage, which like ladies of the present day has on a hat or roof of straw, rests a long ladder, which indicates the fair peasant-woman dwelling within, and is the Jacob's ladder, at the foot of which is seen at least one angel.
It is well known even in foreign parts, that our principality has and must have its healing springs as well as any one on the princely bench, for everyone of them must carry round with it such a pharmaceutic well as a flask, to smell of, against financial fainting; further, it may be well known that once many guests came hither, and now not a cat--and for this, not the springs, but the Chamber of Finance is to blame, which has built too much into the place and wants to get too much out of it, and which began at as dear a rate as the Selter's springs ended--that consequently our springs will end as cheaply as those began--and that our Lilienbad, with all its medicinal virtues, has not after all the more important one of making people as sick as a chamber-maid--I said, that is all sufficiently well known, and therefore I need not in fact have said it at all.
To be sure, it is not a merit in other healing springs, if they are popular resorts of the sick, around which the whole great and rich world stands in priestly attitude; had we only here in Lilienbad also such female angels as in other watering-places, to agitate the pool of Bethesda and impart to it a medicinal virtue, which is the reverse of that of the Biblical one; had we players who should compel the guests to sit, attendant physicians who should force them to swig, not sip, the eau-de-vie, then would our springs be as capable as any others in Germany of putting the tippling guests into such a state that they would come again every year. But as it is, our Board of Inspection will have to see again and again the sick phalanx of the great world roll by us and throng to other springs; as the wild beasts do round one in Africa; and if Pliny[[91]] explains by these animal-conventions the proverb in the note, I too would find a key to similar novelties in the mineral-spring-congresses.
The Exchequer is after all the most to be pitied, that in our Valley of Jehosaphat, nothing is to be found but Nature, Blessedness, Temperance and Resurrection.
To-day we all drank, at the Baquet (or water-trough) the water drawn off over iron, amidst the noise of birds and leaves, and swallowed down the image of the sun that gleamed up out of it and its fire too. The winter of sorrow has drawn around the eyelids of Beata and around her mouth the inexpressibly tender lines and letters of her faded grief; her large eye is a sunny heaven, from which escape glistening drops. As a maiden can unfold the peacock's-mirror of her charms with another maiden more easily than with a male person, so she gained greatly by her play with my sister. Gustavus--was invisible, he drank his water after the rest and lost himself amidst the charms of the country, in order, strictly speaking, to escape the greater charms of its fair inhabitant. Except the happiness of seeing her he knew no greater than that of not seeing her. She never speaks of him, nor he of her; his thoughts of her which yearn outward do not grow into words, but only into blushes. Would to Heaven I were composing a romance instead of a biography! then would I bring you, fair souls, nearer together and reconstruct a friendly circle out of its segments; then should we both secure even here such a heaven, that if death should come along looking for us, that worthy man would not know whether we were already settled there or whether we were still waiting for him to get us in....
I acted at once judiciously and delicately, in bringing before Gustavus at this time, as I now do before my readers, a certain sketch which Beata made in the winter and which I came by in an equally honorable and ingenious manner. It is addressed to the picture of her brother and consists of questions. Grief lies upon woman's heart, which yields patiently to its burden, far more heavily than on man's, which by throbbing and thumping labors to shake it off; as on the motionless fir-peaks all the snow piles itself up, whereas on the lower twigs, which are always in motion, none remains.
"To the Picture of my Brother.
"Why dost thou look on me so smilingly, thou precious image? Why dost thy pictured eye remain forever dry, when mine is so full of tears before thee? Oh, how I would love thee, wert thou painted mourning!
"Ah, Brother! dost thou not still long for a sister, does thy heart never tell thee that there is in the desolate world yet another which loves thee so unspeakably?-~Ah had I but once set my eyes upon thee, clasped thee in my arms ... we could never forget each other! But now, if thou too art forsaken like thy sister, if thou too, like her, ploddest on under a rainy heaven and over a dreary earth, and findest no friend in the hours of sorrow--ah, in that case, thou hast not even a sister's likeness, before which thy heart may bleed to death! Oh, Brother! if thou art good and unhappy, then come to thy sister and take her whole heart--it is torn, but not asunder, and only bleeds! Oh, it would love thee so! Why dost thou not long for a sister? O thou unseen one, if thou too art abandoned, art deceived, art forgotten by strangers, why dost thou not long for a faithful sister? When can I tell thee, how often I have passed thy mute image to my heart, how often I have gazed upon it for hours together, and imagined my tears into its painted eyes, till I myself have burst into a flood of real tears at the thought?--Tarry not so long that thy sister with her worn-out heart shall repose under the coffin-lid, and with all her vain yearnings, her vain tears, her vain love, shall have crumbled into cold, forgotten earth! Nor tarry so long that our youthful meadows shall meanwhile have been mowed down and snowed over, and the heart has stiffened, and years and sorrows have become too many. There comes all at once over my soul so sad, so bitter a feeling.... Art thou perhaps already dead, dear one?--Ah, the thought benumbs my heart--turn thine eyes away, if thou art in bliss, from thy orphaned sister, and behold not her sorrows--ah, I put to myself the heavy question in my bleeding heart: What have I left to love me? and I give myself no answer...."
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The reader has the courage to divine from this more to Gustavus's advantage than he himself can. To him, as the hero of this book, this leaf must be a welcome one; but I, as his mere biographer, have nothing from it but two or three more heavy scenes, which however I gladly despatch out of true love for the reader--billions of them would I work out for his pleasure. Only it does my whole biography harm, that the persons whom I have set to work at the same time set me to work, and that the writer of this history or protocol is himself one of the heroes and parties. I should perhaps be more impartial, too, if I composed this history two or three decades or centuries after its birth, as they will have to do who shall in future draw from me. The artists direct the portrait-painter to sit three times as far off from the original as it is tall--and as Princes are so great and consequently can only be drawn by authors who sit at a distance from them, of place or time, equal to such greatness--accordingly it were to be desired that I did not stand so near to the Prince, so that I might portray less partially than I do....