The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

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!" ...