The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

This sketch was so striking, that to the Resident Lady one or two unlikenesses would perhaps have been more agreeable--they would have announced a greater resemblance to her second image in him. She now passed on by gentle, not, as usual, sudden and sportive, transitions from his professional compensation and from the disadvantages of his training to his rôle in the legation--she disclosed to him, but with slow and confidential hand, his want of knowledge of the world--she offered him admission to her society and invited him to souper for to-morrow. But in the forenoon, she added smiling, you must not come; Beata absolutely refuses to be painted.

----The reader has not yet, in the whole book, been allowed to speak or write three words: I will now let him come up to the grating or into the parloir and will write down his questions. "What, then,"--he asks--"is in the Resident Lady's mind? Will she cut out of Gustavus a toothed cog-wheel, which she may put into some unknown machine or other?--Or is she constructing the hunter's screen and twisting the elastic net, to pounce upon and catch him? Is she, as does every coquette, becoming like him, who will not be like her, as, according to Plattner man becomes to such a degree that which he feels, that he bends down with the flower and lifts himself with the rocks?"

Let the reader observe, that the reader himself has wit, and proceed!

"Or," he therefore continues, "does the Resident Lady not go so far, but will she, from magnanimity, for the sake of which one often pardons the optical tricks of her coquetry, seek out and train up the most beautiful and disinterested youth on the most beautiful and disinterested grounds?--Or may not all be mere accidents--(and nothing is so obvious to me)--to which she, as racer through pleasure-groves, fastens, as she flies, the fluttering lasso of a half-formed plan, without taking the least look, the next day after the strangled prey of her snare?--Or am I wholly wrong, dear Author, and is perhaps not one of all these possibilities true?"--Or come, dear Reader, come, are they all true at once, and was this the cause of thy not guessing a capricious woman, that thou givest her credit for fewer contradictions than charms?--The reader confirms me in my observation, that persons who could never have the opportunity to give the great world lessons on the piano-forte (for example, unfortunately, the otherwise excellent reader) are capable, indeed, of pre-calculating all possible cases of any given character, but not of singling out the real one. For the rest, let the reader rely on me (one who would hardly without reason extenuate distinctions which attach to himself)--for the rest, he has far less cause to mourn his poverty in certain conventional graces, in certain light, fashionable and poisonous charms, which a court never denies, than other courtiers--the author could wish he were not reckoned among them--have really to bewail their wealth of the like species of poison; for in this way he remains an honest and healthy man, the respected reader; but whoever knows him would have stood security for it, that, in case all bands and bridles of the great world had tugged and pulled at him, he would, besides his honesty, have retained also his unlikeness to the fashionable gentry, who atone for the maltreatment of the fairest sex with loss of voice and loss of calves, as (according to the oldest theologians) that woman-tempter, the serpent, who could previously speak and walk, by his seductive industry played away speech and legs....

THIRTIETH, OR XXIV TRINITATIS, SECTION.

Souper and Cow-Bells.

To-day I am working in my shirt-sleeves like a blacksmith, so abominably long and heavy is this thirtieth section. When Gustavus learned from Oefel that a little souper at the Resident Lady's meant as much as the greatest does with us, he had already distributed in his head, before he began to dress it, persons and parts, and to himself the longest of all;--this single fault he always committed, that when, at last, he came upon the stage and had to play, he did not play. Before going into a large company he knew word for word what he meant to say; when he came out again he knew also (in the green-room) what he should have said--but in the salon itself he had really said nothing. It arose not from fear of man, for it was almost easier to him to say anything bold than anything witty; but it came from this, that he was the opposite of a woman. A woman lives more out of than in herself; her feeling snail of a soul, attaches itself almost externally to her variegated bodily conchylia, never draws back its threads and horns of feelers into itself, but touches with them every breath of air and curls up around every smallest leaflet--in three words, the sense which Dr. Stahl ascribes to the soul, of the whole constitution and condition of its body, is with her so lively, that she feels continuously how she sits or stands, how the lightest ribbon lies or sits upon her, what are the curves her hat-feather describes; in two words, her soul feels not only the tonus of all perceptible parts of the body, but also of the imperceptible, the hair and the dress; in one word, her inner world is only a hemisphere, an impression, of the outer.

But not so with Gustavus; his inner world stands far apart and abruptly separated from the outer; he cannot pass from either to the other; the outer is only the satellite and companion-planet of the inner. From his soul--imprisoned in the earthly globe which the hat covers--the diversified individual growths on which it cradles and forgets itself, shut out the view of objects external to its body, which cast only their shadows upon its fields of thought; it therefore sees the outer world then only when it remembers it; then the latter is transposed and transformed into the inner world. In short, Gustavus observes only what he thinks, not what he feels. Hence he never knows how to amalgamate his words and ideas with the words and ideas of other people that fly by him. The courtier winds up and turns his screws, and the cascades of his wit leap and sparkle--Gustavus, on the other hand, first throws the bucket into the well and proposes to draw up the draught at a proper time. A finer reason I assign below.

On the morning of this momentous souper Oefel boasted to him so much about Beata, how he would today see her cœur so perfectly balanced against the esprit of the Resident Lady--that he cursed all seeing, and got a second reason for carrying his heavy heart into the Still Land. His first was, that he always prepared himself for a great company by going first into the greatest--under the broad, blue heavens. Here, beneath the colossal stars, on the bosom of Infinity, one learns to exalt himself above metallic stars, sewed on beside the button-hole; from the contemplation of the earth one brings back with him thoughts through which one hardly sees the particles of dust, called men, whirling about; and the colored gold-bugs wherewith the realm of vegetable nature is mosaically spangled, are not surpassed by the gold-and-gem-embroidery of court splendor, but only imitated. The present author always paid a visit to the great terrestial and celestial circle before and after paying one to a smaller circle, that the great one might prevent and extinguish the impressions of the little.

I grow red, when I think how helplessly my Gustavus may have suffered himself to be ushered through two ante-chambers into a salon, where already sat opponents around at least seven card tables. Refinement of thought is a soil, refinement of expression is a fruit, to which not exactly court-gardeners are necessary; but finish of external behavior is nowhere to be gained but there, where it tells for everything--in the great world, full of microcosms. Should I have more to show up of the latter refinement than one commonly looks for in my legal class, I am never so vain as to trace it to any other source than my life at the Court of Scheerau. The Resident Lady (Beata never) played seldom, and very properly: a lady who can with her face take other hearts than those painted on cards, and who can take from men other heads than those stamped on metal, does ill if she contents herself with the lesser, unless she can shuffle and cut with the fairest fingers that I have yet seen in female gloves and rings. No lady should play before fifty, and after that only she whom her husband and daughter had cause to lose in the game. On the contrary, the poetical gladiator, Herr von Oefel, served in the army which (according to the Journal des Modes) every winter night is 12,000 strong in the front German Imperial Circles--namely with and against L'Hombre players. The Resident Lady was a brilliant Sun, whom Beata ever followed as Evening Star. Soft and gracious Hesper in Heaven! thou throwest the silver spangles of thy rays upon our earthly foliage and gently openest our hearts to charms which are as tender as thine! All the summer evenings which my eye has in dreams and remembrances lived through on thy lawns of innocence stretching high over my head, I repay thee for, fairest silvered dew-drop in the blue ethereal bell-flower of Heaven, when I make thee a type of the beautiful Beata! Oh! could I only project her saintly form out of my heart and present it here on these pages, that the reader might see, and not merely conceive, how from the Junonian Bouse, from whom all womanly charms stream forth, even rare disinterestedness, but not, however, innocence nor modest womanly reserve,--how all these wooden rays fall off from her, when by her side Beata not so much shows as veils herself,--Beata, who has gained the inner victory over the most passionate female wishes and yet betrays neither victory nor conflict,--who, without the Bouse's mourning array, and play of grief, gives thee a softened heart and irresistibly enchains thy sight, and with whom thou canst walk by moonlight, without enjoying her or the night-heavens upon the earth one whit the less! Gustavus felt even more than I; and I feel all again in my biographical hours more than I did once in my musical ones.