Part 18
The latter carried on his game still further and cunningly planned that this Grand Sultan, this hero of two well-written books, should, on a certain evening, when the Cadet-General gave a great _souper_, stand before his house as--sentry. Deuce take it! when the loveliest of ladies pass by him:--the well-known Resident--who, with a casual glance set up our good sentry all skinned and stuffed as an image in her brain--and her maid-of-honor Beata--and when one has to present arms before such faces: one would much rather lay them down, and, in fact, instead of standing, kneel down to wound not so much the foe as the (female) friend.... Heavens! I shall have had more wit here than one may well give me credit for; but let a live man once try it, and write upon love and refrain from wit! It is almost impracticable. I neither affirm nor deny that Oefel may perhaps, from the dreams of Gustavus, which were always talkative, and often prolonged their effect after waking, have caught the names of the aforesaid double-lottery-number of beauty. The Romancier has therefore an advantage over the Biographer (which is I): he keeps close by his hero.
He disgusted his and our hero, who, however, was such only in the aesthetic, not in the military sense, with the great Autumn-review: for every little prince imitates the still smaller children in playing soldier after the great soldiers in the streets; hence we Scheerauers have a neat pocket-land-force, a portable artillery and a juvenile cavalry. Besides, a sovereign makes a joke, when he makes a man a recruit; it does no harm to the fellow, all he needs is to be in motion, because now-a-days [namely in 1791] our more important wars, as the Italian once did, consist of nothing but marchings out of countries into countries. So also in the theatre campaigns consist merely in repeated marches round the stage, only shorter ones. I walked along, a year ago, for a joke, half a league beside a regiment, and made believe to myself: "Now thou art in fact joining in a campaign of half a league against the enemy: but the newspapers hardly mention thee, although thou and the regiment by this warlike sham-procession ward off as many plagues from the country as the clerisy do by their spiritual singing processions."
He disgusted him, I said: he pictured the review namely in this style: "Frederick the Great did smaller wonders than will be expected of the cadet-corps! There will be more wounded than wounding! In all tents and barracks they will talk of the last Scheerau grand-review!" Gustavus had long since got so far along in the minor service that he was in a condition, through the fortification of his body, to wound at least one, namely that body itself. I shall surely not lessen the apprehensions of the world, when I go on to relate that Gustavus regularly every seven weeks has leave of absence for five days, wherefrom his friends and the Biographer himself will derive just as much light as the oldest readers--that Oefel by secret intriguing made his furlough so disagreeable, that he could not at such price desire a repetition of it--that Gustavus from his last journey brought home to Dr. Fenk a letter from Ottomar, which we shall not indeed withhold from the reader, but of the reception whereof we can disclose nothing to him, because we ourselves know nothing.
From all these thorns and from the wounds of the Review our Gustavus was rescued by another's degradation. After the aforementioned march homeward an officer in Upper Scheerau, whose name and regiment one will here suppress out of regard for his distinguished family, was declared under disgrace, because he had associated with low company. When the Provost in the middle of the regiment which he had dishonored, broke his sword and weapons and tore off his uniform, and stripped him of everything which helps a man to stand upright when bowed by calamity, Gustavus, whose sense of honor bled even out of the wounds of a stranger, and who had never yet witnessed the black spectacle of a public punishment, sank into a swoon; his first exclamation on coming-to was: "Done with soldiering forever!--If the poor officer was innocent or if he is reformed, who shall give back to him his murdered honor?--Only the Omniscient God can take it away; the court-martial should take nothing but life!--No; the bullet, but not disgrace!" he cried as in a spasm. I think he is right. For two days he was sick and his fancies transported him into the robbers'-caves and catacombs of the degraded----a new proof that the fever images of poor mortals persecuted by their torments from the sick bed into the grave are not always the warrants and transcripts of their inner selves!--Martyred brothers! how I love you and the tender-hearted Gustavus at this moment, when my fancy peers in among you all and sees how, driven about in the zig-zag of destiny, you stand with your wounds and tears, wearily beside each other, embracing, bewailing--burying one another!
So long as he was sick and wandering, Amandus hung upon his glowing eyes and suffered as much as he and forgave him all. When Dr. Fenk assured them that on the morrow he would be well, the next morning Amandus came not, but meant to be hard-hearted again.
Oefel enjoyed the victory of his place. He took upon himself the setting matters right with old Falkenberg, and wrote to the man with his own hand. As he placed with his inky wand the good father on the Mosaic mountain, beyond the mountain the promised land of the embassy, and in the midst of the Canaan the young Secretary of Legation: then did the old man share the joy of many parents, who are glad to see their children become what they themselves hated to be or could not. He came to me with the letter and rode under my window.--All that Gustavus had inwardly to say still further against his removal to the old palace was that the fair Beata lived in the new one, which was separated from the old merely by a bisected wall, and that he should be confirming Amandus's suspicion. But fortunately, after the conclusion he fell upon the original motive which had suggested it and which gave dignity and expansion to its sphere of action: "He might," (he said) "after his release from the post of the embassy, be appointed to a board, and there help up the prostrate country, etc." In short, the highest beauty of Beata could not now have brought him to the point of--avoiding her.
In fact, the romance writer shelled him so effectually out of his military skin, that, inasmuch as he, like married men and princes, oftener had the bridle in the passive _mouth_ than in the active _hand_--one would have thought he was led in order to lead; but that is not my idea.
Gustavus paid his farewell visit to Amandus. A good way of forgiving one whom an imaginary offence has exasperated against us is to commit a real one. Gustavus, in the circuit of streets which he voluntarily made on the way to his aggrieved Amandus, thought of Beata, who was now to be his next-door neighbor, of the love and suspicion of his friend, of the impossibility of removing that suspicion, and when, exactly at 6 o'clock, the evening music-of-the-spheres floated down into the streets from the iron orchestra and the St. Stephen's tower, his heart melted into the tones, and he imparted to his friend the tenderest feeling that existed outside of the breast of Beata. I and the reader have our thoughts on the subject; this very placable tenderness was ascribable merely to the covert consciousness that he half deserved the suspicion of rivalry, for otherwise he would, elevated by pride, have, to be sure, forgiven the other; but not on that account loved him the more intensely. He found him in the worst mood for his purpose, namely, in a friendly one; for in sensitive invalids every feeling is a sure forerunner of its opposite, and all have alternating voices. Amandus was in his father's anatomical chamber; the last ray of the setting sun darted into the empty eye-socket of a skull; there hung in vials human fluids, little ground strokes, according to which fate would absolutely draw out man; manikins with great protruding head and heart, but without an error in the great head or a pang in the great heart. On a table lay the black hand of a dyer, upon whose color the Doctor was about to make experiments.... What a scene for a _reconciliation_ and a _leave taking_; three looks made and sealed the _former_,--even looks, in this naked disembodiment of souls, speak too loud a language--but when Gustavus, transported by the finest enthusiasm above fear and suspicion, announced to his friend the _latter_; when he made known to him, who had till now no idea of it, his new neighborhood and the loss of the old one, the friend had flown away and a black foe sprang up out of the ashes. Of this moment death availed himself and absolutely tore asunder the last root-fibres of his trembling life.... Gustavus stood too high to be angry; but he must needs place himself still higher; he fell on his neck and said with clear, resolute voice, "be angry and hate me, but I must forgive thee and love thee. My whole heart with every vein remains true to thine and seeks it out in thy breast, and even if thou henceforward misunderstandest me, still I will come every week. I will look on thee; I will listen to thee when thou speakest with a stranger, and if thou then lookest on me with hatred, I will go with a sigh, but still love thee. Ah, I shall think of this then, that thy eyes when they were still lacerated looked upon me more sweetly, and recognized me more truly.... O do not thus thrust me from thee, only give me thy hand and look away!"
"There!" said the shattered Amandus, and gave him the cold, black--dyer's fist.... Hatred ran down like a shower over the most affectionate heart that ever bled to death in a human breast. Gustavus stamped his love and his hatred under his feet, and with choked emotions went silently out of the house, and the next day out of Upper Scheerau.
Hardly had Amandus seen his maltreated youthful friend stagger along the street, than he went into his chamber, buried himself in the pillows and, without accusing or excusing himself, let his eyes weep as much as they could. We shall hear whether he raised his sick head from the pillow again, and when he was again _accompanied_ by Gustavus into the Silent Land, from which he once sought to thrust him back. O man!--why will thy heart, so soon to crumble into salt, water and earth, crush another crumbling heart?--Ah, before thou strikest a blow with thy uplifted dead-man's-hand, it falls off into the grave--Ah, before thou hast inflicted the wound upon thy foeman's bosom he sinks and feels it not, and thy hatred is dead or thou art dead thyself.
TWENTY-FIFTH, OR XX TRINITY, SECTION.
Ottomar's Letter.
When we have read Ottomar's letter, we will take our places at Gustavus's new theatre and look at him. In the following letter a spirit reigns and riots, which, like an Alp, oppresses and often possesses all men of the higher and nobler quality, and which--much as it outweighs even Holland spirits--a _higher_ spirit only can overpower and crowd out. Many men live in the _Perigee_, some in the _Apogee_, few in the _Perihelion_.--Fenk so often yearned for his Ottomar, especially since his complete silence of some years' standing, and spoke of him so often to Gustavus, that it was well the address of the letter was from a strange hand and to Doctor Zoppo in Pavia: else the Doctor had sinned at once against the first line of the letter.
* * * * *
"Name not my name, oh eternal friend, to the bearer: I must do it. On the last year of my life there lies a great black seal; break it not, count the past as the future--I make it for thee the present, only not just yet--and if I should die I would appear before and tell thee my last mystery of earth.
"I write to thee, simply that thou mayst know that I am living and am coming in autumn. My thirst for traveling is quenched with Alpine ice and sea-water; I repair home now to my resting-place, and if there, at my street-door, a tempting voice of secret desire should call me again to cross the mountains, I should say to myself: the same panting and pining human heart gazes down into the waters of the Gaudiana and the Volga, which sighs in thee beside the Rhine stream, and that which climbs the Alps and Caucasus, is what thou art, and turns a longing eye over toward thy street-door.[62] But if I sit here, and every morning go to the close-stool, and am glad to be hungry, and afterward that my appetite is satisfied, and if I daily put on and pull out breeches and hair pins, ah! what in the end does all amount to? What was it then I wanted, when in my childhood I sat upon the stone in my gateway, and gazed yearningly in the direction of the long road and thought how it ran on and on, shot over the mountains, still onward and onward ... and at last?... Ah, all roads lead to nothing, and where they break off, there stands another looking longingly back over the hills to where we sit. What was it then I would have, when my little eye swam along with the waves of the Rhine, that it might waft me to a promised land, whither all streams, I thought, were flowing, not knowing, meanwhile, that the same river, which bore in its bosom many a heavy heart, murmured along by many a crushed form, which it alone could release from its anguish, that then, like man, it frittered and crumbled itself away, and filtered itself at last into Holland sands?--Orient land! morning land! toward thy fields also did my soul once lean as trees do toward the East:--'Ah! how must it be there, where the sun rises!' I thought; and when I traveled with my mother to Poland, and at last into the land lying toward morning, and came among its nobles, Jews and slaves--.... But there is no other sunny land of the morning to be found on this optical ball, than that one which all our steps can neither _remove_ nor _reach_. Ah, ye joys of earth, none of you can do more than satisfy the breast with sighs and the eye with water, and into the poor heart, which opens under your heaven, ye only pour one more wave of blood! And yet these two or three wretched pleasures lame us as poisonous flowers do children who play with them, in arm and limb. Only let there be no music, that mocker of our wishes; do not, at her call, all the fibres of my heart fly asunder and stretch themselves out like so many sucking polypus's-arms and tremble with longing and seek to embrace--whom? what?... An unseen something waiting in other worlds. I often think, perhaps it is, after all, nothing; perhaps, after death, all goes on just as now, and thy longings will reach forward out of one heaven toward another[63]--and then I crush under this fantastic nonsense the strings of my harpsichord, as if I would bring a fountain out of them, as if it were not enough that the pressure of this yearning untunes and snaps the thin strings of my inner musical system.
"In Rome there lived opposite the Church of St. Adrian a painter, who during a rain always placed himself under the spouts, and laughed till he was crazy, and who often said to me: 'There is no dog's death, but only a dog's life.' Fenk! take at least what man is or does: so very, very little! What power, then, is wholly developed in us, or in harmony with the other powers? Is it not a piece of good fortune, if so much as one faculty gets drawn in like a branch into the hot-house of a lecture-room or library and is forced by partial warmth to bloom, while the whole tree stands outside in the snow with hard black twigs? Heaven snows two or three flakes together to make one inner snow-man, which we call our education; the earth melts or muddies a quarter of it, the tepid wind loosens the snow man's head off--that is our cultured inner man, such an abominable patch-work in all our knowings and willings! From individuals to universal humanity I have no desire to pass; I care not to think, how a century is ploughed and harrowed under to manure the next--how nothing will round itself to anything--how the eternal writing in books and stratifying of the _Scibile_ has no aim, no end, and all dig and drive in opposite directions! What does man do? Even less than he knows and becomes. Tell me, what then does thy penetration, thy heart, thy swiftness effect before the princely portrait over the President's chair, or in fact before an emasculated reigning face? The crooked twigs pressed back into each other are squeezed against the window of the winter-house, the Regent causes their fruit to pass by his dish in the _compotiere_, the blue sky is denied them, the cleverest thing at last is, that they rot! What, then, do the noblest faculties avail in thee, when weeks and months glide away, which do not use, do not call out, do not exercise them? When I have thus contemplated, as I often do, the impossibility, in all our monarchical offices, of being a whole, a really active, a universally useful man--even the monarch cannot, with those innumerable black subaltern claws and hands which he must first fasten to his own hands as fingers or pincers, do anything completely good--as often as I have contemplated this, I have wished I were hanged with my robbers, but were first their captain, and with them ran down the old constitution!... Beloved Fenk! _Thy_ heart no one can tear out of _my_ breast, it propels my best blood and never canst _thou_ misunderstand me, let me be as unknowable as I will! But, oh friend, the times are coming on, when for thee this misunderstanding may after all grow easier!
"Veiled Genius of our overshadowed globe! ah, had I only been something, had the globe of my brain and had my heart, like Luther's, only earned by some lasting and far-rooting deed the blood which reddens and feeds them; then would my _hungry pride_ become _satisfied lowliness_, four humble walls would be large enough for me, I should no longer sigh for anything great except death, and first for the autumn of life and age, in which man, when the birds of youth are dumb, when over the _earth_ lies haze and flying gossamer-summer, when the heavens hang bright, but not blazing, over all, lays himself down to sleep upon the withered leaves.----Farewell, my friend, upon an earth where one can no further do any good except to lie down in it; _next_ autumn we shall be with one another!"
* * * * *
To this letter, which takes possession of my whole soul and renews my errors as well as my wishes, I can add nothing more, than that to-day the first man in this history has been buried on a mountain. When, after four or five sections, I come to speak of his evening-euthanasy, then will the outlines of his form already have grown paler and fainter, as well in the coffin as in the hearts of his friends!
EXTRA-LEAF.
Concerning Lofty Men, and Evidence that the Passions belong to the Next Life, and Stoicism to this.
I call certain men _lofty_ or festal-day-men, and to this class belong, in my history, Ottomar, Gustavus, the Genius and the Doctor, and none beside.
By a lofty man I do not mean the man of strict honesty and rectitude, who, like a body of a solar system, pursues his path without other than apparent aberrations; nor do I mean the fine soul which, with prophetic feeling, smooths all down, spares every one, satisfies every one, and sacrifices itself, but does not throw itself away; nor the man of honor, whose word is a rock, and in whose breast, heated and moved by the central Sun of Honor, there are no thoughts and purposes other than the deeds outside of it; nor, finally, either the cold, virtuous man of principle, or the man of feeling, whose feelers wind about all beings, and quiver in another's wound, and who embraces Virtue and a Beauty with equal ardor; nor do I mean by the lofty man the mere great man of genius, and indeed the very metaphor indicates in the one case horizontal, and in the other vertical extension.
But I mean him who, to a greater or lesser degree of all these distinctions, adds something more, which earth so seldom possesses--elevation above the earth, the feeling of the pettiness of all earthly doings, and the disproportion between our heart and our place; a countenance lifted[64] above the confusing jungle and the disgusting filth of our floor--the wish for death and the glance beyond the clouds. If an angel should place himself above our atmosphere and look down through this darkened sea, turbid with cloud-scum and floating verdure, to the bottom on which we lie and to which we cleave; were he to see the thousand eyes and hands which stare and clutch _horizontally_ at the contents of the air, at mere tinsel; should he see the worse ones which are bent _sheer downward_ toward the prey and yellow mica on the muddy bottom, and finally the worst, which _supinely_ drag the noble human face[65] through the mire;--if this angel however, should behold among the sea-animals some lofty men walking upright and looking upward to himself, and should perceive how they, weighed down by the watery column above their heads, entangled in the snarl and slime of the ground beneath them, pressed through the waves and panted for a breath of the vast ether above them, how they loved more than they were loved, endured life rather than enjoyed it, equally far from the stationary upward gaze of astonishment and the race of business-life, left their hands and feet to the mercy of the bottom, and gave only the upward yearning heart and head to the ether beyond the sea, and looked at nothing but the hand which separates the weight of the body from the bottom to which the diver is held down by it, and lets him soar into his proper element-- ... Oh, well might this angel count such men as submerged angels, and pity their low condition and their tears in the sea.... Could one gather together the graves of a Pythagoras (that noblest soul among the ancients), of Plato, Socrates, Antoninus (not so much, of Cato the great or Epictetus), Shakespeare's (if his life was like his writing), J. J. Rousseau's, and the like, into one churchyard, then would one have the true princely bench of the _high nobility_ of mankind, the consecrated earth of our globe, God's flower-garden in the low North. But why do I take my white paper and picture it and strew it with coal-dust or ink-powder, in order to dust-in the image of a lofty man, while from heaven hangs down the great, never-fading picture of the virtuous man which Plato in his Republic has transferred out of his own heart to the canvas?
The greatest villains are the least acquainted with each other; lofty men know each other after the first hour. Authors who belong to this class are the most censured and the least read; for example, the departed Hamann. Englishmen and Orientals have this fixed star on the breast oftener than any other people.
Ottomar led me to the subject of the passions: I know that he, once at least, hated nothing so much as heads and hearts which were covered with the stony rind of Stoicism--that he longed for cataracts in his veins and in his lungs tempests--that he said, a man without passion was a still greater egotist than one of the intensest; that one whom the near fire of the sensuous world did not kindle would be still inflamed by the distant fixed-starlight of the intellectual; that the Stoic differed from the worn-out courtier only in this, that the cooling off of the former proceeded from within outward, that of the other from without inward.... I know not whether with the inwardly burning, outwardly freezing, slippery court-man it is so; but so it is with glass: when it receives from without too much chilling around the glowing nucleus, it becomes porous and frangible;[66] the process must be reversed.