Part 21

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.

For some days the von Bouse was not accessible, when the original wanted to carry her his copy. At last she sent for both. His face was very unlike the painted one, when his glance, on entering, fell upon his physiognomical sister, who was singing with her little Bouse at the harpsichord, upon Beata. We poor devils, we who have grown up not on family trees, but on a family bush, are brought by four walls so near to each other, that we make each other _warm_; on the contrary, the velveted walls of the great keep their inmates as far apart as city walls, and it is with us there as in taverns, where our interest detaches only one or more from the great mass. So Beata kept on; and he began; to him it was no more than if he saw her through his window in the garden. His portrait found the most favorable reviewer. She flew on with it through several rooms. Gustavus could now set his eyes where his ears had long since been. His only wish was, that the pupil were extraordinarily stupid and sang everything falsely, merely that the charming leader might the oftener recite her part. It was that divine _Idolo del mio_ of Rust's, at hearing which I and my acquaintance always feel as if we were absorbed by the bland heaven of Italy, and dissolved by the waves of the tones, and inhaled as a breath by the Donna who glides along in the same gondola with us under the starry sky.... By such dangerous fancies I really upset all my stoicism and become, even before I am yet thirty, eighteen years old.

So much the more easily can I conceive how it was with young Gustavus, who had his eyes and ears so near to the magnetic sun. Verily, I would a thousand times rather (I know right well what I undertake) drive all through Scheerau with the loveliest woman in the whole principality and lift her not only _into_, but even (what is far more dangerous) out of the carriage. Nay, more: sooner would I read to her with an impassioned voice the best we have in the poetic and romantic departments--yea, I would sooner dance with her at a masquerade ball out of one hall into another, and as we sit down ask her if she is happy--and finally (I cannot express it more strongly), I would sooner put on a doctor's hat and fasten her faint hand with mine to the bleeding-stand, while she, in order not to see the stream of blood leap over the snowy arm, gazes with her pale face steadily into my eye--sooner, I promise, will I (to be sure I shall get more and deeper wounds than the little bled-manikin in the calendar) do all this than hear the loveliest girl sing; then I should be melted and gone; who would help me, who would hear my signals of distress, when in the most tranquil attitude she let the snow of her right arm fall softly over some black surface or other, half opened the bud of her rose-lips, let her dew-distilling eyes fall upon--her thoughts and sink therein, when the soft downy bosom[69] lay heaving like a white rose-leaf on the waves of the breath, and rose and fell with them; when her soul, otherwise wrapt in the threefold clothing of words, of body and of dress, unwound itself out of all wrappages and plunged into the waves of melody and sank in the sea of longing...? I should leap after her.----

Gustavus was caught in the very act of leaping after her, when the Resident Lady came back with _two_ portraits. "Which is the more like?" she said to Beata, and held up both before her and fixed her eyes not upon the three faces which were to be compared, but upon the comparing one. The companion-piece was, namely, the lost one of the real brother, about which Beata had written to my Philippina. "O my brother!" said she with too much emotion and accent (which is pardonable, as she had just come from the harpsichord): and as she hastily snatched it, she screamed out, until her eye had accidentally glided down over the back of the picture and found no name there. Upon such particles of earthly dust often hangs the beating of the human heart: it hears and lifts the hundred-weight pressure of the whole atmosphere of life, but under the sultry breath of a social embarrassment it collapses in impotence. He who has not where to lay his _head_, suffers often less pain than he who has not where to lay his--_hand_.

"I thought your brother was a distant relative of yours," said the Resident Lady with perhaps a malicious double meaning, in order to entangle her in the choice of one or another sense. Certainly the Resident Lady had so readily at her command all words, ideas and limbs, that in Gustavus's and Beata's understanding and virtue, _force_ hardly availed, as in mechanics, to supply the place of _velocity_. But Beata steadily related, without extenuation and without extravagance, all about these pictures which the reader has learned from my mouth. Gustavus could not have delivered such a narrative. The information, how it had come into the hands of the Resident Lady, the Resident Lady forgot to give, because she knew a hundred answers to it; Beata forgot to demand it, because she remarked the same thing.

"For your face,"--she said in the gayest tone, in which, without hesitation, she said the good about her charms, which others said in serious tones--"I could give you no other than my own; but that I must send with the garden to my brother in Saxony--you can paint it in with the park, so that both pieces may have one master." It is much harder to refuse anything to the jocose tone than to the serious--or at most it can be done only in a tone of pleasantry; but for this all the proper chords in Gustavus had been broken. Beata had not understood the allusion to the park; Bouse brought the whole landscape-drawing and asked her what pleased her most. She was for the shadow-realm and the evening-dell. (Why did she leave out the hermitage-mountain?) "But of the persons in the garden?"--she continued (the poor subject of inquisition fixed her still gaze more steadily on the evening dell)--"particularly the fair Venus here in the evening-dell?" At last she was obliged to speak, and said, without embarrassment: "The sculptor will not have to complain of the painter, but perhaps the painter will of the sculptor; perhaps, too, it is merely the _frost_ that has injured this _Venus_ a little." The Resident Lady, by her laughter and her _witty_ glances at Gustavus, made a bonmot out of this, made her a little red, _him_ fiery-red, her by this last again redder, and completely so by the answer: "So would my brother also think if he should get the Venus in this way; but you will do me the favor, my love, also to sit to the gentleman, our painter here, then there will come into our park a fairer Venus. I am in earnest. The two coming mornings you will give to our faces, Mr. von Falkenberg!" The good girl was silent. Gustavus, who had already consented to duplicate with his pencil Bouse's countenance, came within a hair of breaking out with the remark that he could not copy Beata's in connection with his. Fortunately it occurred to him that she would be dressed for the table.

(On Sunday, a week hence, I must begin my section with "For"----.)

TWENTY-NINTH, OR XXIII TRINITATIS, SECTION.

The Minister's Lady and her Fainting-fits--and so forth.

For it was only in the forenoon that he was in that green vault which contained Scheerau's greatest beauties--in the Bouse's apartment; in the afternoon and later the rivers of pleasure roared through it, poured out by the Naiads of pleasure from their chalices of joy. Half the court drove out thither from Scheerau. The court, as is well known, while the people have only Sabbath days, has whole Sabbatical years, and the nearer ministers of the court are distinguished from the ministers of the State in this, that they do no work whatever; so, too, in ancient times, only those beasts were laid upon the altars as offerings to the gods, which had never yet labored. I know full well, that more than one requires of the paralytic great world a certain labor, namely that of amusing itself and others in one continued stretch; but this is so herculean a task and so severely strains all the faculties, that it is enough if they collectively after a fete, on driving off in the morning dissemble and say, as they part from one another, or the next day on meeting each other: "After all we spent a delicious evening, and altogether things were so brilliant!" Great Quarto-Theologians have long since proved that Adam _before the fall_ took no pleasure in eating or other enjoyments--our grandees before their fall are just as badly off and go through all these things in their state of innocence without having the least fun out of them. I wish I could help the Court.

A man who has a stated working-hour (and though it were only thirty minutes long) regards himself as more industrious than one who has just this day interrupted his twelve hours'-stint for thirty minutes. Oefel reproached himself for his overstrained exertion, and said he knew not how to excuse himself for writing one full hour every morning at the "Grand Sultan." Not till after that were the serious occupations of the day at an end; then _for the first time_ he had himself frizzled and powdered, in order to flutter round as a day-butterfly before all toilet-mirrors; on the flowery head of the _Defaillante_ (so the Minister's Lady was called) he alighted. There he let himself a _second_ time be frizzled and be plumed, in order as a _well-powdered_ twilight-and-night-butterfly to sweep round among the counters and show-dishes and their counterparts. I should not have happened upon this simile, had not his hair dressed for the evening in the shape of a horn and drawn up together into a capsule led me to think of the caterpillars of the night-butterflies, which have a horn or queue attached to them on behind--the day-caterpillars have nothing on them, just as his abbreviated stuck-up morning-hair required, in order to bear out their mutual resemblance.

As I have named the Minister's Lady the _Defaillante_, and as one might on the whole give her credit for the simplicity of being more faithful to the Counsellor of Legation than he was to her, I will tell the whole story and speak in her behalf. Vanity, which ruled over him as a limited monarch, held over her an unlimited monarchy--she had and made Italian verses, epigrams and all things belonging to the fine arts, and it is town-talk that, inasmuch as she had ceased to belong to fine _Nature_, she threw herself into the works of the fine _arts_, and from a model exalted herself by paint into a picture, by pantomime, into an actress by swooning into a _statue_.

This last is the cardinal-point--she died weekly and oftener, like every true Christian woman, not for the sake of her chastity, but even _before_ her chastity; I mean a minute or two--she and her virtue swooned one after the other. If I am not copious on such a subject, I am not worth cutting a pen, and the deuce may take my productions. Virtue then, fared as badly with the Minister's Lady as a favorite young cat with a child. I will not speak of seasons of the day--but only of days of the week: I will suppose that on each day a different antichrist and arch-enemy of her virtue had, for visiting-card, sent his person: in that case it might have run somewhat thus: On Monday her virtue was in the beaming new moon for Herrn von A.,--on Tuesday, in full-moon for Herrn von B., who said: Between her and a _Devote_ the only difference was age,--on Wednesday, in the last quarter for Herrn von C., who says: "_je la touche de'ja_," namely her arm,--on Thursday in the first quarter for Herrn von D., who says: "_peutetre que_"--and so on with the remaining enemies throughout the week; for each adversary saw on her, as his own rainbow, his own virtue. Honor and virtue were with her no empty words, but signified (quite in opposition to the school of Kant) _the interval of time between her No and her Yes_,--often merely _the interval of space_. I said above, she always had a swoon, when it was the _Monday_ of her virtue. But this admits an explanation: her body and her virtue were born on the same day and of the same mother, and are true twins, like the brothers Castor and Pollux. Now the first, like Castor, is human and mortal, and the other, like Pollux, divine and immortal, and as that mythological brotherhood by a cunning device _went halves_ in mortality and immortality, so as to share each other's society for a while, dead, and again for a while, living this cunning trick is repeated by her body and her virtue: both always die simultaneously, in order afterward to come to life again together. The artistic dying of such ladies may be regarded, on still another side: Such a woman can experience a _joy_ over the strength and the proofs of her virtue, which may reach even the point of a swoon; moreover, a _grief_ at the sufferings and defeats of the same, which may also amount to a swoon. Now one can imagine, whether under the combined attacks of two emotions, each of which alone may be mortal, a woman can still remain erect. Notoriously the honor of women of the world dies as little as the King of France, and that is a well-known fiction; at least the death of that honor is, like that of the Saints, a sleep which does not last over 12 hours. I know at one Court a kind of honor or virtue, which, like a polypus, nothing can kill: like the ancient Gods, it may be wounded, but not annihilated--like the horn-beetle it continues to writhe and wriggle on the needle and without any nourishment. Naturalists of rank often inflict upon such a virtue, as Fontana did to the infusoria, a thousand torments, under which citizenly female virtue would instantly give up the ghost,--not a bit! no thought of dying. It is a beneficent arrangement of Nature that precisely in the higher class of ladies virtue has such an Achillean power of life or of regeneration, that it may, in the first place, the more easily endure the simple and compound fractures, bone-shatterings and amputations, and generally the battlefield of that rank. Secondly, that those ladies (in reliance upon the immortality and long line of life belonging to their virtue) may need to set to their pleasures, whose physical limits are, besides, so narrow, at least no moral ones.

I come back to the virtuous swoons or erotic dying of the Minister's Lady; I will not, however, confine myself to remarking that as the ancient philosophy was the art of learning how to die, so also is the French Court philosophy, only of a more agreeable sort--nor will I merely say in a witty way: _qui_ (_quae_) _scit mori, cogi nequit_--nor will I merely apply Seneca's expression about Cato to the Minister's Lady: _majori animo repetitur mora quam initur_; but I simply state the reason why she is universally called in Scheerau the _Defaillante_ [or Fainting Lady]--and it is this: that a certain gentleman, on being asked how she had gained a certain weighty case despite the postponement of the term of closure, replied: _en defaillante_.

I return.... But I were a lucky man, if Time would sit down and let me come up with him; but as it is, I still follow him at a distance of several months, my freight of venture grows daily heavier; I must have paper enough for a double history--that which is already written and that which is all the time occurring. I worry myself to death and at last people have hard work to read me! But is there any help for it?----

Amandus, meanwhile, lay on the hardest bed in the world--the thorny and stony mattresses of the old monks feel like eider-down in the comparison--namely, on the sick bed: his desolate eve rested often on the door of his chamber, to see whether no Gustavus would open it, whether death might not enter in the form of a joy, a reconciliation, and with a love-pressure softly crush the flower of his life; but Gustavus, on his part, lay upon a magic bed to which a better God than Vulcan fastened him down with invisible fetters; he could hardly stir under his wiry coverlet.

On the morning when he was making ready to take the portrait and pay the visit to the Resident Lady, Oefel let off all around him a multitude of rockets of wit, and confessed to him, with the contentment with which a Belletrist always bears poverty in bodily goods and the sorer poverty in spiritual ones, in intellect and the like, so much as this,--that he had himself detected in Gustavus his penchant for the--Resident Lady, sooner perhaps than either of the two interested parties themselves. Every denial on the part of Gustavus was a new leaf in his laurel crown. "I will be more honest," he said; "I will be my own traitor, since I have no one outside of me. In the apartment where _you_ have an altar, stands one for me; it is a Pantheon;[70] you kneel more before a God than a Goddess--but I find there my Venus (Beata). She wants nothing to make her a Venus de Medici than--position; but I know not _which_ hand, in that position, I should kiss to her." ... Before Gustavus's pure soul, this lump of _boue de Paris_, happily flew by, into which at courts even good men step without reflection; even authors of this zone have something of this mud still sticking to them.

What pleased him about Beata (and in every maiden) was simply this, that he, as he thought, pleased her; of all the five hundred million women on the earth he would have loved every one if he had pleased them all; on the contrary not one of them, if not one of them liked him. He now related to Gustavus, through what window in the greenhouse of Beata's heart he had seen her love to him bloom out. Except a certain blockhead whom I knew in Leipsic, and a cat, who has nine lives, no man had more lives than this man; did he forfeit one--forthwith he had a fresh one; I mean he had more swoons than another had fancies. Such a mock suicide he could perpetrate at will, and whenever he needed it in his dramas, as an affecting theatre poet; oftenest, however, he and the Leipsic blockhead inflicted this death upon themselves in effigy, when among a lot of ladies they had singled out to visit that one who was most in love with them. For the whole body were distinguished from each other, the two blockheads said, not in the existence but simply in the degree of their love for both of the two fainting subjects. The highest degree of terror at the pantomimic apoplexy, said the swooning couple, is the notary's seal of the highest love. When, therefore, Oefel three weeks ago acted his masquerade death before Beata, under all the neckerchiefs present there beat no heart so tender and sympathetic as hers, which knew neither hardness of its own nor deception on the part of another. Indifferently Oefel put himself to the optical death; in love he rose again and with his pretended swoon had almost effected a real one. "Since then I have not been able so much as to speak to her on the subject," he said. Gustavus struggled with a great sigh, not at Oefel's unfeeling vanity, but over himself and Oefel's good fortune. "O Beata, in this bosom"--(his inner being addressed her)--"wouldst thou have found a more reserved and sincere heart, than is this which thou preferrest to it--it would have concealed its happiness, and now it does its sighs--it would have remained forever true to thee--ah, it will remain true to thee still!" Nevertheless he did not quite feel the disgusting element in Oefel's vanity, because a friend inoculates himself into our personality and grows into it to such an extent that we overlook his vanity as easily as our own and on like grounds.