Part 29
"Yes, I have only this; but if the divine spark of the highest love can glow in the human heart it dwells in mine, and burns for one whom I can only love but not repay. Thou, higher spark, wilt gleam on for her in my heart when tears flood or misfortune crushes it, or death turns it to ashes.... Beata! no human being can, here on earth, tell another how he loves him. Friendship and love go with closed lips over this ball, and the inner man has no tongue. Ah, if man, out in the eternal temple, which arches upward even to infinity, amidst the circle of singing choirs, holy places, altars of sacrifice, will fain fall down dazed before an altar and pray, ah then does he, as well as his tear, sink to the ground and remain speechless! But the good soul knows who loves her and is silent; she overlooks not the still eye which follows her, she forgets not the heart which the more strongly it beats has the less power to speak, nor the sigh which seeks to hide itself. But, Beata, believe me!--when once this eye and this heart have ended their silence, when in the most blissful hour they have dared with all the energies of the loving nature to say to the beloved soul, 'I love thee,' then is it hard and painful to be mute again; so painful to press back again the upheaved, flaming, impetuous heart into a close, cold breast--then in the innermost soul will the silent joy dissolve into silent sorrow and gleam sadly into it, as does the moon into a rainbow which the night uprears.... Beata! I can proffer no petitions, I dare not have any; I can picture to myself the Eden which Beata's looks and words might give me, but I dare not crave it; I must with all my wishes fasten myself to the shore of the silver shadow, which even in dreams, and at this moment in life, like a broad stream divides us; but, darling, if I do not sometimes hear to whom the most precious heart has given itself, how shall I retain the courage to believe it? When I behold this gracious heart among so many good and exalted beings, and then am compelled to say to myself, ah, you all, nevertheless, have failed to deserve it; then does a joyful amazement come over me, that it has given itself to my soul, and I can hardly believe it. Beloved! thousands were more worthy of thee; but none could have been made happier by thee than I am!"
* * * * *
The hardest thing now was, to get the letter, on any other wings than those of a carrier-dove--Venus probably harnessed a span of carrier-doves to her gondola--to its destined place. Of such a thing he saw no possibility, because, among all possibilities, such a one is for him the hardest to see,--for my sister such a one is the easiest.
All came about in the rehearsal of the play.
Regular plays, we know, are not, like their sisters, the political ones, produced without rehearsal. I will willingly let as small a paper-interval as possible come between the rehearsal and the performance; but the reader must also, on his part, turn the leaves over nimbly, and not lay his hands in his lap so much as the book. The rehearsal took place in the old palace. Oefel did his part well enough--Beata still better--and Gustavus the very worst of all. For the faces of the Prince and the Fainting Lady, like salt and nitric acid, almost transformed his heart into an icicle; there are many people before whom one is nerveless and incapable of having inspired feelings. Singular! only his, but not Beata's, were chilled by this north-wind sweeping over the stage. And yet after all it is not singular; for love throws the young man out of his own self into other personalities around him, but repels the maiden from others back into her own. Slightly, if at all, did Beata notice the approaches of the reigning actor or acting Regent. Oefel, however, saw it, and anticipated his victory over the exalted rival--who made his approaches to him in no very large snail-line, as was his custom with the Court ladies, who only in youth give away their virtue _a la minutia_; in old age, on the contrary, drive a larger business with it _in grosso_. I said just now something about a snail-line, because I had in my head a conceit of this kind, that women of the world and the sun, under the appearance of leading the planets in a circle round their rays, in fact hurry them onward in a fine _spiral_ (or snail-line) to their burning surface.
In the midst of the rehearsal, just as Gustavus (or Henry) handed Marie the blank paper as a certificate declaring their relationship null and void, something occurred to him as Henry which would have occurred to another long before as Gustavus, namely, that something might be written on the blank paper, and in fact the best something--his love-letter, which we have already long since read. In short, he proposed to himself to slip his letter into her hands in the play in the form of that certificate, if it could not be done otherwise. Even the romantic element in the resolve, to insinuate his real part into his theatrical one, and to put upon so many spectators another deception than the poetic one, did not repel, but rather impelled him. I will just confess, dear Gustavus--and though my confession should fall into thine own hands--on thy heavenly modesty the honey-dew of approbation, which in such a place thou wast justified in regarding not even as flattery, but merely as a _facon_ of speech, had fallen with a disturbing influence! Of all things human, modesty is the most fumigated or brimstoned to death, and many a commendation is as harmful as a calumny. In the madhouse we see that man takes other people's word for it that he is crazy,[85] and in palaces we see that he takes their word for it when they call him wise. On the whole Gustavus--(for a man is often destined on an evening not merely to play one wretched part after another, but often also mere thoughtless pranks)--on the dramatic evening, was almost selected for the latter role.
... At length the Bouse's birthday fete has arrived.... O my Gustavus! To this very day thy eyes are wet with the remembrance!
The fete breaks into three courses--_Comedie_, _Souper_, and _Bal pare_. In reality, there is still a fourth course--a fall.
On the day of the performance, the new palace emptied itself into that of the Prince at Ober-Scheerau. Gustavus thought, while on the way (in Oefel's carriage), of his letter which he was going to deliver, and of good Doctor Fenk a little; but the shortened days gave him no time for visiting. His fault was, that for him the present, like a cataract, always drowned all distant sounds; and he would not perhaps even have come to me if my crowded legal work-table had allowed me to go to town.
He saw his Marie--ten hundred thousand new charms ... but I will restrain himself. So much is physiologically true, that a maiden of our familiar acquaintance in a strange place will appear to us somewhat as a stranger, but only the more interesting. Beata had this in common with the brilliant Lady Resident, but a certain breath of modest shyness adorned her alone with its veil. In what was Gustavus at this time distinguished from her? In this: man's bashfulness lies merely in his training and his circumstances; woman's lies deep in her nature--man has internal courage and often merely external helplessness; woman has not this, and is nevertheless shy--the former expresses his respect by pressing forward; the latter hers by drawing backward.
The Fainting Lady, the so-called _Defaillante_, the Ministress, to-day excepted! Her winking and blinking, her lisping and whispering, her wriggling and giggling, her fearing and daring, her coquetry and mockery--how shall the one-legged Jean Paul biographically copy all this in poor, common prose? Nevertheless, it is absolutely not otherwise to be done, and he must. If the variegated heads of _women_ had to represent, in the great garden of nature, the blue, red, _glass-globes_ on lacquered pedestals (which not one man in a hundred believes), I would go on in my portrayal thus: that of the Minister's Lady was hot bad, not gay; this head was a short, practical extract of ten other heads, that is to say, which had contributed hair, teeth, features, to the making-up of it. She was an antique of great beauty, but one which after the devastations of years and men was no more to be had in a sound state; she had, therefore, to be restored by skilful sculptors with new members--such as bosom, teeth, etc.
On the cheeks the _alloying_ was done in _red_, the neighboring parts below were alloyed with _white_.[86]
Those teeth which place man in the class of ruminant animals, the incisors, were as white as ivory, and all the more so, because they were really such and came from the mouth of a graminivorous beast;--whether I mean by that an elephant or a common man, who seldom applies the teeth which, as scions, he grafts upon a nobler stem, to anything but vegetables; at all events so much is certain, that no other concluding clause will fit this period but the following: she had once more as many teeth as other Christian women, and two gold threads beside, because the dentist always had one part in the house and under the brush, while the others pronounced the dental letters.
As, according to the latest text-books trigonometry--and bosoms--can be divided only into _plane_ and _spherical_, and as she had manifestly the entire alternative before her, her geometrical genius preferred for her those magnitudes which afford geometers the greatest power and the greatest pleasure--the spherical.
Her attire, from shoe-rosettes to hat-rosettes, sought its effect far less in form than in material, and consequently could be less appraised by the eyes than on jeweler's scales, less by lines of beauty than according to carats--there always remained a distinction therefore between her and her legislative doll; for the rest she, like every other woman, had to carry herself according to that standard. I will say just one timely word here on dolls.
* * * * *
The Word upon Dolls.
These bits of wood hold in their hands, as is well known, the law-giving power over the fairer portion of the female world; for they are the Legates and Vice-Queens, sent from Paris by the reigning line in the finery department, to rule over the female German Circles--and these wooden plenipotentiaries again send down their _heads_ (of caps) as _missi regii_, to reign over the more common ladies of rank. If these reigning wooden heads [or blockheads] cannot come themselves, they then (as living Princes in the privy council supply their places by their _portraits_) send their _laws_ and _likenesses_ in Schmauss _corpus_ of all imperial-decrees of fashion, which _corpus_ we all have in our hands under the name of the _Journal des Modes_. In such circumstances--as one piece of wood plays into the hands of another--but more unselfishly than whole colleges; since, furthermore, new ones are elected annually as Proconsuls--I do not wonder that the system of government at the toilettes is well arranged and administered and that the whole female commonwealth which men cannot govern, is, by the electric female Regents sent in bass-viol cases, who stand and direct in this aristocracy from Lisbon to St. Petersburg, kept in excellent order and subjection.
I am not the man that needs to have it told him as a piece of news, that these dolls are the dressed wooden statues which are set up to (in the matter of dress) meritorious women;--nay, I am convinced that these public monuments, which are erected to attiring merit, have already quickened very many and it is to be hoped will yet stir up many more to a noble emulation, as a great man seldom does so much good as the respect paid to his statue; but a main point, without which all else limps, is manifestly this, that the statues must be--visible. Without _that_ I would not give a button for the whole of them. What Socrates did for philosophy, I would do with the best dolls, namely, draw them down from the heaven of the great to the earth of the common people. I have a notion that, if one should take the images of the Virgin, or even the Saints and Apostles, which have hitherto, in Catholic churches, been dressed and undressed without the least profit or taste and should dress them up more rationally and advantageously, that is, just like the French dolls--if the church would regularly every month receive the _Journal of Fashion_, and according to its colored patterns re-dress the Marys (as ladies) and the Apostles (as gentlemen) and so set them around the altar, then would these people be _imitated_ and venerated with more zest, and one would know, surely, for what one went to church, and what they wore in Paris and Versailles;--one would learn the fashions in good season, and even the common people would put on something more sensible, the Apostles would become the file-leaders of dress and Mary the true Queen of Heaven to the women. Thus must ecclesiastical benefits be utilized as state benefits; even so did the Dominican Monk Rocco in Naples (according to Muenter) apply the extravagance of burning lamps in the streets at the altar of Mary to the multiplication of these altars and--the lighting of the streets.
_End of the Word upon Dolls_.
I still owe the reader the reason why the Minister's Lady insisted on taking the part of Jeanne--it was because that part allowed her a shorter skirt--or, in other words, because she could then display more easily her graceful Lilliputian feet. They were the only thing immortal about her beauty, as in Achilles the feet were the only thing mortal; in fact, they might, like the fallow-deer's, have served for tobacco-pipe stoppers.
How much better did Oefel appear by contrast. He is a downright fool, but in a proper measure. The Resident Lady surpassed the other in every bending of the arm, which a painter--and in every lifting of the foot, which a goddess--seemed to move; even in the laying on of the rouge, whereto the Bouse had to accustom her cheeks under a princess who used to require this fleeting flesh-tint of all her court-ladies--her rouge, like the reflection of a red parasol, only tinged her with a slight mezzotint.... In respect to beauty, hers was distinguished from the ministerial as virtue is from hypocrisy....
The drama was born into the world, through the five players, not in the opera house, but in a hall of the palace, which favored the Resident Lady's coronation. I was not there; but all was reported to me. The good Marie, Beata, had too much sensibility to show it; she felt that she was dramatizing the duplicate of her destiny, and she possessed too many of the good principles of the feminine character, to expose it before so many eyes. Her best part she therefore played inwardly. Henri (Gustavus), beside his inner one, played the outward one also very well, for the same reason. The letter which he was going to deliver confounded his part with his history which I am writing, and the false praise which the Minister's Lady had bestowed on his recent rehearsed part, from the very same unconvinced affectation in which she exaggerated her own, helped him reap true praise. The man who is the most bashful when much fancy glimmers under his actions, is the most courageous when it blazes forth.
It would be ridiculous, if my praise of the warmth of his playing should include the refinement of his performance; but the spectators gladly forgave him because poverty in refinement[87] was coupled with wealth and heartiness, by way of drawing them into the illusion that he was from the country and merely Henri.
He needed this fervor, when, at the place where he reveals to her the brotherly relation, he would hand his beloved Beata the real love-letter--she unfolded it as her part required--with infinite grace he had spoken those words in which his whole life was infolded: "O believe me, indeed I am not thy brother"--she glanced at his name there--she had already half guessed the truth from the manner of his delivering the paper (for no maiden, be sure, ever yet was found wanting when she had to complete a man's stratagem)--but it was impossible for her to fall into a feigned fainting fit--for a true one seized her--the swoon overdid the part a little. Gustavus took it all for acting, so did the Minister's Lady, who envied her the gift of illusion. Henri brought her to merely by the means which his written part prescribed, and in a state of confusion, produced by the conflict of all emotions, love, consternation and nervous tension, and in a quite other than theatrical glorification, she played to the end Henri's beloved, in order not to play Gustavus's. After the performance she was obliged to renounce all the remaining festivities of the evening, and in a chamber which the Prince, as well as the Doctor, with much _empressement_, urged upon her, to seek rest for her still agitated nerves and in the letter _unrest_ for her throbbing bosom. I lift the curtain still higher, dear soul, which then still veiled that which now robs thy nerves and thy bosom of peace!
Gustavus saw nothing; at the table, where he missed her, he had not the courage to inquire after her of the ladies sitting near him. Of other things he asked to-day more boldly; not merely had the applause he had gained been an iron-and-steel-cure to his courage, but the wine also, which he did not drink, but ate at the absurd Olla Podridas of the great folk. This eaten beverage fired him actually to publish the _bon mots_ which he used once to say only to himself. And here I publicly testify, how it afflicts me to this very moment that I once on my entrance into the great world was a similar simpleton, and thought things which I should have spoken. Particularly do I repent this, that I did not say to the wife of a trench-major, who had by the hand her little girl and in her bosom a rose with a little one out of the midst of it: _Vous voila!_ and point to the rose, though I had the whole _bon mot_ lying all ready cast in my head. I afterward carried round the _saillie_ for a long time in the chambers of my brain, watching my chance, but finally let it off in the stupidest way, and dare not here so much as name the person.
As there stood among the show-dishes, the optical parade-dishes of the great folks, a winter-landscape with an artificial frost, which melted in the warmth of the room and disclosed a leafy spring, Gustavus had a fine conceit about that, which no one has been able to remember and report to me. Nevertheless, although he ate under the finest ceiling-piece and in the neatest chair, he still, as a mere court-novice, took an interest in all he said and in every one he talked with; to thee, thou blessed one, no truth and no person were as yet indifferent. But there yet awaits thee that bitter transition from hate and love to indifference, which all have to undergo who concern themselves with many persons or many things to which they must needs remain cold!
The Resident Lady drew out to-day more than usual his shy talents to light, and easily graced the interest she took in him with the acknowledgment of his theatrical claims upon her gratitude. At length the third spectacle began, wherein more could shine than in either of the others--the ball came on. Dancing is to the female world what the play is to the great world--a fine vacation-time of tongues, which often become awkward, often dangerous. For a brain like Gustavus's, which to-day for the first time had experienced so many assaults upon his senses, a ball-room was a New Jerusalem. In fact any ball-room is something; look into this one, where Gustavus skips round! Every stringed and wind instrument becomes a lever which lifts the heart out of this niggardly, mistrustful, every-day life; dances shuffle men and women like cards in and out among each other, and the ringing atmosphere around them binds the intoxicated mass into one--so many human beings, and they linked together for such a joyous purpose, dazed by the surrounding chiaro-oscuro, inspired by their beating hearts, must at least commend the cup of joy which Gustavus drained, for he, to whom every lady is a Dogessa, was inspired by every touch of a hand, and the outer tumult so awoke one in his whole inner being that the music, as by reverberation, left its outward birthplace and seemed to spring up only in his own soul amidst and beside his thoughts, and from there to sound outward....
Verily, when one bears about his ideas around a blazing chandelier, they cast back a quite other light than when one crouches with them before an economical lamp! In men of lively fancy, as in hot lands or on high mountains, all extremes lie nearer together: with Gustavus rapture tended every moment to become melancholy; and joy, love, and all the emotions with which the fair dancers inspired him, he would fain bear to his one darling, who staid apart in solitude. It seemed to him, however, as if not all of these made her place good so much as the Resident Lady. Even the play, which was associated with her and in which he had acted for her coronation, made her more dear to him; nay, this her birthday was in his eyes one of her charms. Not otherwise, nor more reasonably than thus, do man's _feelings_ ever act. In short, the Resident Lady gained in all respects in which the absence of Beata to-day bereaved him. To-day was the first time that he had touched anything more of the Resident Lady, for whom he had an extraordinary respect, than a glove--to-day he touched her arm and back, in other words the dress which covered them: on arm and back, but not on the hands, clothing is as good as none. Gustavus! philosophize and sleep rather....
The Bal Pare is over--but the devil's play now begins. Oefel's carriage followed the Bouse's; a neglected axle of the latter took fire from its unnecessary speed. Of course it was an accident, but certain men know no such thing as a mischance, and their plans use every one as a nucleus. Oefel had to offer her his carriage. The good Beata had been left in her sick chamber with a little circle of female attendants. He took a horse from the carriage of the Resident Lady; he left with her (I know not whether from gallantry toward her sex or from sharp-sightedness and friendship for his own and for his romance) my hero and hers. I would offer to prove before an academical senate that nothing is more critical, for one who is meaning yet to become an angel, than to drive home by night from a ball-room with a woman whom he regards as one already--nevertheless not a hair of my hero's head was hurt, nor did he hurt another's.
But he grew more in love, without knowing with whom.