Poetizing geniuses are in youth renegades and persecutors of taste, but afterward its proselytes and apostles, and age grinds down the distorting microscopic and macroscopic concave mirror to a flat one which merely duplicates nature, while painting it. Thus will the practical and passive geniuses from being enemies of principles and stormers of virtue, become greater friends of both than faultless people can ever be. Ottomar will one day surpass those who now may censure him. For the rest, I shall not in the sequel of this multo-biography treat him knavishly, but honorably, although he does not expect it; for before his journey, when I sometimes found myself in the hot focus of his faults, we fell out a little with each other. Since then he thinks I heartily hate him; but I think I heartily love him, only, like a hundred others, I take a peculiar pleasure in cherishing a secret and suffering love.
THIRTY-FIFTH, OR ST. ANDREW'S, SECTION.
Days of Love.--Oefel's Love.--Ottomar's Palace and the Wax-figures.
I hasten to dip my pen again to-day into my biographic inkstand, because I shall now soon come up against the present moment with my building operations--by Christmas I hope to reach it;--furthermore because to-day is St. Andrew's and because my landlord has, amidst the screams and shouts of his children, installed a birch-tree in the sitting-room and in an old pot, that it may bear on Christmas eve the silver fruit which will be tied to it. In the presence of such things I forget court-days and law-terms.
Gustavus awoke, on the morning after the declaration of love, not from his sleep--for into that, after such a royal-shot in human life, only a human badger or badgeress could fall--but from the ring and roar of joy in his ears. Raptures danced a reel around his inner eye, and his consciousness was hardly equal to his enjoyment. What a morning! Never did the earth come before him in such bridal finery. Everything pleased him, even Oefel, even Oefel's bragging about Beata's love. Fate had to-day--except the loss of his love--no poisonous dart, no festering splinter, which he would not indifferently have received into his utterly blissful and tightly strung breast. Thus, oftentimes, is the extreme of warmth replaced by the extreme of coldness or apathy; and under the diving-bell of an intense idea--be it a fixed idea or a passionate or a scientific one--we stand panoplied against the whole outer ocean.
With Beata it fared just so. This soft still-vibrating joy was a second heart, which filled her veins, animated her nerves and colored her cheeks. For love--unlike other passions which assail us like earthquakes, like lightnings--stands in the soul like a still, transparent after-summer day with its whole heaven undisturbed. It gives us a foretaste of the blessedness of the poet, whose bosom a perennial, ever-blooming, singing, sparkling Paradise encircles, into which he can ascend at any moment, while his external body bears itself and the Eden over Polish filth, Dutch morasses and Siberian steppes.
Oh, ye voluptuaries in capital cities! When does the Present offer you so much as one minute of what the Past here presents my couple, whole days; you, whose hard hearts the highest fire of love, as the concave mirror does the diamond, only volatilizes, but cannot melt?
But as the red of evening twilight so floats round in the sky that it tinges the clouds of morning-redness, so on Beata's cheeks by the side of the red flush of joy stood that of shame--although no longer than until the form of the beloved, like an angel, flew through her heaven. Both longed to see each other; both dreaded to be seen by the Resident Lady; the discovery and still more the criticism of their emotions, they would gladly have avoided. There is a certain stinging glance, which dissolves and destroys soft sensibilities (as that of the sun does the little Alpine creature, the Sure;) the fairest love shuts the leaves of its flowers together before its very object, how should it stand the singeing look of a court?
The biographer, with insight, seizes this opportunity to praise in two words the marriages of great folk; for he can liken them to the innocent flowers. Like Flora's variegated children, great folk have no covering to their love--like them they marry without knowing or loving each other--like flowers they care not for their offspring--but hatch their posterity with the same sympathy with which a hatching-oven does it in Egypt. Their love is even as a flower frozen to the window which melts away in the heat. Among all chemical and physiological combinations therefore only the union of two persons in the upper classes has the advantage, that the parties who fly into a passionate fondness for each other and exchange rings diffuse a terrible chilliness; with this exception one finds the same singularity and coldness only in the union of mineral alkalies with nitric acid and M. de Morveau says with simplicity: "It is remarkable."
As Beata longed so much to see her hero and mine, accordingly, by way of disappointing her wish, she went for some days to her mother at Maussenbach. I will be her vindicator and speak for her. She did it because she wanted never to come upon him except accidentally; but at the Resident Lady's it would in any case have been designedly. She did it, because she loved to afflict herself, and like Socrates emptied the cup of joy before she put it to her lips. She did it, for a reason that would seldom have actuated another of her sex--in order to fall upon her mother's neck and tell her all. Finally she also did it, in order to hunt up at home the portrait of Gustavus, which the old man had sold at auction.