The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

Gustavus saw no more in the garden anything but what he sought not, the Prince and his like; he cherished unnecessary, i. e. a lover's reluctance to inquire of any one about Beata's invisibleness--except of the gardener's two children, who knew nothing, except that Beata, as well as he, always toyed with them and gave them presents. Perhaps she gave them, because he did; for he did, because she did. The only relics of her, her walks, attracted him to them so much the oftener. O, if only the pebbles under her feet had been softer, or the grass longer, so that both might have retained an outline of a trace that she had been there: then would this thorn-garden of his invisible one have given his wishes still greater wings, and his melancholy deeper sighs. For I must just confess, once for all, to myself and my readers, that he is now in that enthusiastic, yearning, dreamy state, which precedes a declaration of love. This dreamy veil must have hung over him, when he once, instead of the serpentine brook in the evening-dell which he was going to draw, sketched the lovely statue of Venus, who seemed to have risen from those waves; and secondly, when he did not see who saw him--the Resident Lady. He appeared to her like a fair child, who had grown five feet tall; with all his inner excellences he could not yet produce an imposing effect, because on his face there was still written too much good nature and too little knowledge of the world. With that playful frankness of the coquette, which is the first-born daughter of the coquette's disparagement of the male sex, she said: "I'll give you the original for the drawing," and took the latter and contemplated it with an interesting and thoughtful admiration (only her thoughts were on another subject.) Oefel, to whom he related the adventure, scolded at him for not having said neatly: "Which original?" For to the living Venus Gustavus had said nothing.

Nor, in fact, could he have done it, for she stood before him with all the charms which are left to a Juno, when one takes from her the gracious hue of the first innocence, with her forest of plumage, which hundreds in Lower Scheerau wear after her, because they, as well as a few of my lady readers, who also put on more feathers than they will slit (pens) in their whole life, have made out so much as this, that every Juno must be a Goddess, and every Goddess a Juno, and that ladies'-heads and harpsichords must always be stuck or struck with quills.

She asked him after the name of his drawing-master (the Genius); his own she herself told him. She could not fail, with all her missteps, to command a certain respect, and her sins and the Devil seemed to walk behind her only as Chamber-Moors; her face, like her behavior, bore the inner consciousness of her remaining virtues and her talents. Nevertheless she remarked in the shy reverence which Gustavus manifested less for her rank and worth than for her sex, that he had little knowledge of the world. She avoided all circumlocution and made a direct application to him for a drawing of the whole park to send to her brother in Saxony. I call that a request, which she properly always framed in addressing men in the jocose tone of a cabinet-order--and one could oppose her female ukases in no other way than by masculine ones.

Let woman once lay a commission upon thee, then thou art hers, body and soul; all thy disagreeable steps, all thy irksome services in her behalf resolve themselves into charms around that image of her which thou hast spread out on the bony walls of thy brain. To rescue--avenge--teach--protect a woman is hardly much better (only a little) than to love her at once. Gustavus never heard a more welcome request; he sketched the park in a very short time, and could hardly wait for the forenoon in which he was at liberty to hand it to her. We all know what he hoped to behold in the Resident Lady's apartment beside herself--but all he found there beside her was the little pupil (Laura) of the absent Beata, at the Silvermann's-harpsichord.

The Resident Lady fixed a long look upon the drawing. "Have you," said she, "seen any pieces by our Court Painter? You should be his scholar and he yours--he has never yet painted a fine portrait nor a poor landscape--in your drawing the statues are finer than the garden--retain your fault, and continue to beautify persons," she said and looked upon him. In my slender artistic judgment--for they have never yet admitted one of all my pieces, as aspirant, into a picture-gallery, and I seek, with more honor, rather to review publicly such exhibitions than to enrich them--the precise opposite is true, and my hero (like his biographer) makes far better landscapes than portraits. "Try it," she continued, "with a living original"--he seemed perplexed as to the intention of her advice--"take one that will sit to you as long as the artist himself sits." Oefers vanity with Gustavus's impetuosity might, at this point, have got together a stupid piece of politeness--"Here! this one I mean in here "--and she pointed to a looking-glass; at this moment he was, after all, on the point of coming out with the resuscitated flattery, that her figure was beyond his pencil: when she luckily added: "Paint yourself and show me the picture." Over an accidentally swallowed sottise one grows quite as red as over a rejected one--thou beautiful, burning red Gustavus!

I therefore write out here, for children who have never yet danced at winter balls, this motto from the laws of fashion: When people are about to make a declaration to you, to put one into their mouths is as impolite as it is dangerous.

"I will just show you why," said she, and reached her hand half way to his and drew it back again, and took him with her through her reading-cabinet, through her library into her picture-gallery. When she walked, one could hardly walk himself; because one wanted to stand and look after her. Still harder was it by her side to look at pictures. She pointed out to him in the gallery a motley row of likenesses which the most famous painters had taken of themselves, and which the Resident Lady had had copied from the gallery in Florence. "You see, if you were a famous painter--and that you must become--I should not have your portrait yet in my collection." On the window-seat stood upright the female parasol, a green walking-fan, which he could have taken his oath before a bench of justice was Beata's--several hay-carts of Wouwerman's grass, several hundredweight of Salvator Rosa's rocks, and a square mile of Everdingen's grounds, would he have given for that mere fan.

But the promise which had been extorted from him, to paint himself, was, for such a child of nature as he, to whom art had not yet given vanity, hard to fulfil. Hundreds of youths now-a-days show more ability to survey themselves before a looking-glass in company, than he had to do it in solitude. He really feared that he was committing all the time the sin of vanity.

In this way my hero, who is trying to fetch himself out of the looking-glass, is beheld and painted by three drawing masters at once: by the biographer, or myself, by the romancer, or Herr von Oefel, who inserts in his romance a chapter wherein he treats anonymously Gustavus's love for the Bouse, and by the painter and hero himself. He may well, then, be well hit.

Of Oefel's romance of the Grand Sultan nothing more will appear in the court bookstore at the next fair than the first volume; and it will gratify the minor public which reads and makes the most of our romances, to hear that I have looked a little into the Grand Sultan and that most of the characters therein are taken not out of the wretched actual world, which, moreover, one has around him every week and knows as well as he does himself, but mostly out of the air,[^[68]] that arsenal and nursery of the thinking romancer; for if, (according to the system of dissemination) the germs of the actual man, side by side with the pollen of flowers, flutter round in the air, and must, out of it, as the repository of posterity, be precipitated and absorbed by the fathers: then much more must authors get their drawings of men out of the air, (where all Epicurus's exfoliations of actual things fly round,) and shape them on paper, that the reader may not crumble.