part to keep up the acquaintance with Goethe, by correspondence, or any
other means. She never mentions his person, only his genius. Twenty
years pass, during which she sees nothing of him. Once, in 1811,
Varnhagen sends Goethe some appreciations of his poetry written by
Rahel. Goethe is much struck by them, pronounces the author to have a
remarkable gift of instantaneously grasping, comprehending, connecting,
helping, completing; but he never learns--Rahel having forbidden
Varnhagen to tell--who the author of the manuscript is. In 1815, in the
neighbourhood of Frankfort, Rahel sees Goethe again. There is something
touching about this meeting. Goethe is now sixty-six. He is visiting
his friend, Marianne von Willemer (the Suleika of the _Diwan_) at
Willemer's country house "die Gerbermühle." Rahel, who is in Frankfort,
accidentally sees him driving with his hosts, and in her sudden joyful
surprise calls loudly: "There is Goethe."
Twenty years, as already mentioned, have passed. It is a quarter past
nine on the morning of the 8th of September. Rahel, who had been
suffering from an affection of the eyes, has got up later than usual,
and is standing half-dressed, brushing her teeth, when the landlord
comes to say that a gentleman wishes to see her. Her maid hands her
his card. It is Goethe. And out of pure respect, that he may not have
to wait, she does not take time to dress herself properly, to make
herself look presentable: "I told them to ask him to walk into the
sitting-room, and only kept him waiting the time that it took me to put
on a dressing-gown (_Unterrock_). It was a black quilted dressing-gown.
I sacrificed myself so as not to keep him waiting one minute. It was
my one thought. I did not even excuse my dress; I did nothing but
thank him. I did not excuse myself, for it seemed to me that he must
know that _I_ obliterated myself, that _he_ was my one consideration.
Such was--alas!--the first impulse of my heart. Now, with the most
passionate, most comical, most torturing remorse, I think otherwise."
The feeling of being unsuitably, unbecomingly dressed, depressed her;
she said nothing that was worthy of her. After all these years of
love for him, of living in him, and longing for him, she saw him once
and once only in private for a few minutes, and this was the turn
things took. "But you must hear to the end how ridiculous I was," she
writes to Varnhagen. "When he had gone I dressed most carefully and
beautifully. I wanted to make up for everything. I put on a lovely
white dress with a high collar, a lace veil, my Moscow shawl.... Now I
can say as Prince Louis wrote: 'My market value has risen ten thousand
thalers. Goethe has visited me.'"
Rahel, after twenty years of waiting, after the worship of a lifetime,
receiving Goethe in a quilted dressing-gown rather than keep him
waiting ten minutes--this every one will confess to be a supreme
expression of feminine heroism. After the perusal of many volumes
of Rahel literature, this scene is what remains in one's mind as
definitely characterising her. It gives the measure of her reverence,
her understanding, and her capability of overcoming even the most
justifiable vanity of her sex.
It is to be regretted that a being with such rare attributes should
have been entirely destitute of talent, of all creative, plastic
power. Her ingenious and profound thoughts are scattered, as mere
observations, throughout private letters and records which otherwise
are of little interest to us nowadays. Probably none but enthusiastic
devotees of the women's rights theories are capable of reading much of
her at a time.
Her nature was not the artistic nature. Its essence was truthfulness.
She herself says: "In the great universal misery of this world, I
have consecrated myself to one God, truth; and every time I have been
saved, it has been by him." She was a staunch, reliable friend, yet,
even at the risk of sinking in the estimation of others, she frankly
and without shame confessed when the feeling of friendship had ceased
to exist. Closely connected with her truthfulness was her simplicity;
she made no pretence of being above common weaknesses, no secret of
her love of sweets and her keen interest in the latest Paris fashions.
And she was fortunate enough to feel what she deserved to feel, an
undisturbed inward harmony, partly innate, partly acquired, a perfect
consistency of her spiritual life with her convictions. This was what
gave her her great and justifiable self-confidence. "Pedantry cannot
exist within thirty miles of where I am," she used to say.
We have seen how great her moral tolerance was; in intellectual
matters she was equally forbearing. She neither demanded moral purity
nor marked ability in those she esteemed; what she did demand was
unaffectedness. She was unique in her keen recognition and appreciation
of whatever was natural and original, however unassuming; and she
herself, in spite of her searching intellect, was as naïve and fresh in
perception and expression as a gifted child.
When she was at the zenith of her reputation she was obliged to make
herself unapproachable, to surround herself with all sorts of social
barricades, that she might be free to choose her associates. She
invariably chose individuals of markedly original character.
One of her intimates, Count Tilly, writes to her: "I have a thousand
polite messages to give you before I close. One person admires you;
a second is devoted to you; a third is astonished by your words of
wisdom; a fourth is grieved to say farewell to you, even when it is
only a letter that must be brought to a close. It is I, myself, who am
all these different persons." This little pleasantry serves to give us
an idea of the varied impressions she produced.
Rahel often reflected on the subject of originality. She writes: "If
a person were to say, 'You imagine it is easy to be original--on the
contrary, it costs no end of trouble and exertion,' he would be thought
crazy. And yet the assertion would be a true one. Every one could be
original, if only people did not carelessly cram their heads with
half-digested maxims, which they pour forth again as carelessly."
There had been eminent and interesting women in German intellectual
society before Rahel. The latest were Caroline, Dorothea, and those
others known to fame through the Romanticists. Rahel is the first
great modern German woman, and the first to be completely conscious
of her originality.[4]
The pursuit of originality in her day was not without its accompanying
danger. It is not the danger of affectation that I allude to. In all
days and times there have been affected creatures who imagine that
they are original when they help themselves to soup with their shoes.
But the perpetual self-inspection and self-examination prevalent in
Rahel's day produced a dangerous tendency to impute singularity to very
ordinary feelings and impressions, a liability to become unaffectedly
unnatural, like the beautiful Henriette Herz and many of her friends,
whose outpourings have a haunting flavour of lamp-oil and ink. The
fire-writing of originality is something very different.
This is to be found in Bettina's _Goethe's Correspondence with a
Child_. Bettina's letters are written in the fiery characters, the
"singing flames" of passion.
Bettina von Arnim, a sister of Clemens Brentano, wife of Achim von
Arnim, by family and marriage connected with the Romanticists,
nevertheless belongs as an authoress to the Young German school.
Rahel admired and worshipped Goethe timidly, with a beating heart, a
quiet, dignified seriousness. Bettina's admiration showed itself in an
insinuating, half-sensuous, half-intellectual devotion, a determined
bur-like adhesiveness, and flights of the wildest enthusiasm.
In 1807, when she, as a native of the same town, made Goethe's
acquaintance through his mother, she must have been twenty-three,
but in her ways she was still a child, or rather a being midway
between child and woman. She comes to Weimar, provides herself with
a superfluous letter of introduction from Wieland, holds out both
her hands to Goethe as soon as she sees him, and forgets herself
altogether. He leads her to the sofa, seats himself beside her, talks
about the Duchess Amalie's death, asks if she has read about it in the
newspaper. "I never read newspapers," said I. "Indeed! I understood
that you were interested in all that goes on at Weimar." "No, I am only
interested in you, and I'm far too impatient to be a newspaper reader."
"You are a kind, friendly girl." A long pause. She jumps up from the
sofa and throws her arms round his neck.
This little anecdote suffices to show the difference between her
position to Goethe and Rahel's. From her childhood she had been
distinguished by a youthful daring more often met with in boys than
girls. At Marburg they still show a tower to the top of which she
climbed, drawing the ladder up after her, so that she might be alone.
Along with the agility of a young acrobat, she had something of
Mignon's childlike, innocent devotion. She is Mignon in real life, as
charming as ever, and far less serious.
In 1835, when her _Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde_ came out,
Bettina was fifty. Arnim had died in 1831, Goethe in 1832. She had got
back the letters written by herself to Goethe between 1808 and 1811,
when an end was put to their intercourse by an act of discourtesy on
her part towards Frau Goethe, and had taken even greater liberties with
these letters than Goethe took in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ with the
experience of his past life. She expressed in them not only all that
she had felt, but much that she now thought she ought to have felt;
she gave to their intercourse a more passionate colouring than really
belonged to it, and yet in the profoundest sense she was truthful. The
letters were at first accepted as genuine. But strong suspicions were
presently awakened by the fact of Bettina's having published poems,
which were undoubtedly addressed to other women, as if they had been
written to her; and there came a time when her letters lost all credit
as historic documents, and everything in them was considered to be
fictitious. In 1879, however, Loeper published the genuine letters
written by Goethe to Bettina, and it was then seen that in them she
had made almost no alteration; a few greetings were omitted and _thou_
was substituted for _you_--nothing more. In only one of the original
letters is she addressed as _thou_, but that letter is the only one
which Goethe did not dictate, but wrote with his own hand, so Bettina's
alteration was not altogether unjustifiable. Goethe was in the habit of
enclosing in his letters any poem which he had just written. Bettina
was conceited enough to imagine that poems addressed to Minna Herzlieb
(even those which played upon the name Herzlieb, and were consequently
incomprehensible to her) and to Marianne von Willemer, were meant for
her. This was an absurd but excusable mistake. It was inexcusable of
her to transpose these poems into prose and incorporate them in her
earlier letters, thereby producing the impression that Goethe had
simply put her thoughts and feelings into verse.
What she tells us of her intercourse with Goethe's mother, of her
eagerness to gather from that mothers lips information about Goethe's
childhood which might serve as an introduction to _Dichtung und
Wahrheit_, and also what she tells about Beethoven and the relation
in which she stood to him, is in all essentials absolutely true.[5]
No one with any feeling for poetic enthusiasm who has read Bettina's
book in his youth will ever forget the first impression produced by her
style. There is a vitality about it, an animation, a refined wildness,
a rhythmic ring and flow, which astound and fascinate. Turning from
Rand's dark hieroglyphs, which suggest a thousand secrets to us, but
which we seldom really understand, because the living life which was
the commentary is no more, it is refreshing to bathe in this clear
spring of naïve and charming devotion. Rahel is more profound and more
realistic. But talent is such a marvellous thing. The pleasure it gives
is great. We can and must excuse much for its sake.
In these letters Bettina is twenty-three to twenty-five years old,
Goethe fifty-eight to sixty. Hence her passion is not the ordinary
human passion of a young woman for a young man. She has grown up with
it; it is an inheritance from her mother, Maxe Brentano, who partly
suggested Werther's Charlotte. She loves Goethe's mother, as a young
woman always does love the mother of her beloved; she is grateful to
her for having borne him--"how else should I have known him!" Her
devotion to the son finds expression in letters to the mother, till she
meets him; then she writes to himself.
After that first embrace she looks upon him as her own. She writes to
his mother: "It is possible to acquire a kind of possession of a man
which no one can dispute. This I have done with Wolfgang. And it is
what no one ever did before, in spite of all these love affairs you
have told me about. Love is the key of the universe; through it the
spirit learns to comprehend and to feel everything. How else could it
learn!"
These letters have been compared to ships laden with rich cargoes.
Goethe is the guiding star on all their voyages.
All her thoughts of him are thoughts of enthusiastic devotion: "I would
I were sitting at his door like some poor beggar child, so that he
might come out to give me a piece of bread. He would read in my eyes
what I am, would take me into his arms and wrap his cloak round me to
warm me. I know he would not tell me to go again; I should have my
place in his house; years would pass, and no one would know where I
was; years would pass and life would pass; I should see the whole world
mirrored in his face, and more I should not need to learn."
"Last May, when I saw him for the first time, he picked a young leaf
from the vine at his window and held it against my cheek and said:
'Which is softer, the leaf or your cheek?' I was sitting on a stool at
his feet. How often I have thought of that leaf, and of how he stroked
my forehead and my face with it, and played with my hair, and said: 'I
am a simple-minded man; it is easy to deceive me; there would be no
glory in doing it.' There was nothing brilliant in these words, but
I have lived that scene over again a thousand times in my thoughts;
I shall drink it in all my life, as the eye drinks light--it was not
intellectual converse, no! but to me it surpasses all the wisdom of the
world."
There is poetry in this exaltation and in the way in which she tells
of his constant presence with her, of her longing for him, of her dumb
jealousy of the famous women who came, as Madame de Staël did, to make
his acquaintance; there is poetry in her distress at her inability to
be of any use to him, and in her vivid appreciation of her own capacity.
"I must tell you what I dreamt about you last night. I often have the
same dream. I am going to dance for you. I have the feeling that my
dance will be a success. A crowd has gathered round me. I look for
you, and see you sitting alone, straight opposite to me; but you don't
seem to see me. With golden shoes on my feet, my shining silver arms
hanging listlessly by my side, I step forward in front of you, and
wait. You lift your head, your eyes involuntarily rest upon me; with
light steps I begin to trace magic circles, and you keep your eyes upon
me. You follow me through all my bends and turns; I feel the triumph
of success. All that you dimly feel I show you in my dance; you marvel
at the wisdom it reveals. Presently I fling aside my airy mantle, and
let you see my wings, and away I fly, up to the heights. It rejoices
me that your eyes follow me, and I float down again and sink into your
open arms."
This symbolic description is both graceful and felicitous. In Bettina's
Goethe-worship there is something of the same love of mounting and
climbing that she displayed in her childhood. She climbed up on to the
shoulder of the great Olympian's statue--a statue she was perpetually
modelling--drew the ladder up after her, and sat there alone, revelling
in the pleasure of being so near him. But it was not her Goethe-worship
merely as such which made Bettina an ideal character, a Valkyrie, in
the eyes of Young Germany. What won their hearts was the political
liberalism to which she gave expression in her letters, and with which
she in vain tried to imbue the sage who sat aloof in Weimar, her ardent
admiration for the brave resistance of the Tyrolese to the domination
of France, her eager desire for the well-being of humanity, for the
extermination of poverty and all the other ills of society. It made
a powerful impression when she, a worshipper of Goethe, but a more
independent-minded one than Rahel, extolled Beethoven's republicanism
as greater, worthier than Goethe's submissive loyalty. She tries to
bring Goethe and Beethoven together; she wishes she could send Wilhelm
Meister to the Tyrol, to Andreas Hofer, that he might learn to feel
greater enthusiasm and to do manly deeds.
In the commencement of Frederick William's reign she was in favour at
court. There was a frank, friendly intimacy between her and the king;
she had almost as much influence upon him as Humboldt, when there was
any question of assisting talent or alleviating misery. But before long
her feelings led her openly to declare socialistic principles. In 1843
she published _Dies Buch gehört dem König_ ("This Book belongs to the
King"), a work in which she calls upon Frederick William to relieve the
distress of his subjects. From her youth she had looked upon herself as
the natural champion and advocate of the distressed. "The forsaken and
unhappy possessed a magnetic attraction for her," says Hermann Grimm,
who, as her son-in-law, knew her intimately. Her natural inclination
to help others, arid the early impressions made on her mind by the
French Revolution, produced those political sympathies to which she
unhesitatingly gave utterance, in the naïve expectation of receiving
support from royalty.
In 1831, when the cholera raged in Berlin, she went fearlessly among
the sick and suffering. Judging from the hard lot of the Berlin working
classes, she came to the conclusion that the whole nation was in a bad
way and in need of help. To her, liberty had always been a magic word.
She believed that whenever the words "Let there be light!" resounded
from the right quarter, liberty would manifest itself, and all the
feelings and dreams of humanity would take shape in harmonious music,
to the strains of which the peoples would march joyfully onwards.
Her book, which in a little introductory parable she dedicates to
the king, is written in the form of conversations. Goethe's mother
is the chief speaker. There is much warm feeling in the book, and a
considerable amount of information on the subject of the distress among
the lower classes, but too little political insight to make it readable
nowadays.
The authoress reaches a climax with the words: "Our sign is the banner
of liberty; its brightness lights up the black darkness of the times;
its brilliancy dazzles and terrifies those who are on the shore, but
we are glad and rejoice.... Dangers? Liberty knows no dangers! To it
everything is possible. The storm itself, the wildest of all storms,
is the captain of our ship."[6]
Such sentiments were not likely to meet with a favourable reception
at the Prussian court of that day. The book created a sensation, but
put an end to the good understanding between Bettina and the king. It
naturally only increased the political discontent of the masses, and
a pretext was found for seizing her next book (on Clemens Brentano),
because a repetition of the same sort of thing was feared.
Long before this, however, Bettina had received the unanimous homage
of the younger generation. Those interested should read Gutzkow's
account of his first visit to her, Mundt's description of her, Kühne's
poetical appreciation. Even Robert Prutz, severe as he is on all the
representatives and models of Young Germany, numbers himself among her
admirers. "Bettina's letters are," he says, "the last bright blaze of
Romanticism, the sparkling, crackling fireworks with which it closes
its great festival; but they are at the same time the funeral pile
upon which it consumes itself, the pillar of fire which rises from its
ashes--and shows us the way."
The third woman whose life and character made a deep impression on
the generation of 1830 was Charlotte Stieglitz, the daughter of a
Leipzig merchant named Willhöft. As a child Charlotte was quiet and
thoughtful, as a young girl there was something nun-like about her. In
1822 Heinrich Stieglitz, then in his twenty-first year, came to Leipzig
to study philology. From no fault of his own he had been mixed up in
the prosecution of the demagogues in Göttingen. He was a handsome young
fellow, audacious, and, to judge by his looks, passionate; and he was a
poet. Charlotte was then a beautiful girl of sixteen, whose appearance
suggested the possession of that supernatural quality which the Germans
in olden days ascribed to those women whom they believed to possess the
gift of prophecy. She had a high, open, intellectual forehead, curly
brown hair piled up in a tower-like coiffure, a thin, aquiline nose, a
beautiful mouth, large, star-like brown eyes that looked brightly and
bravely out into the world. She spoke low, but sang with a full, clear
voice.
Whatever else modern poets may have neglected, they have not neglected
to impress upon all, but more especially upon women, that a poet is a
superior being. When Charlotte fell in love with the handsome young
Stieglitz, who was fascinated by her, she felt that she had learned
what happiness is. The very idea of being the beloved of a poet, a
real, living poet, was bliss. And to this poet of hers she consecrated
her every feeling, her every thought, from the first time she saw
him until, twelve years later, she stabbed herself to the heart for
his sake. Even before they were engaged, the desire was ever present
with her to be able, all unknown to him, to do something really
difficult, really great for him. She had the feminine helpfulness, the
motherliness, the housewifely understanding, and the brave cheerfulness
which are among a woman's best qualities. The impression she produced
was that of gentle high-mindedness.
And this noble woman was unfortunate enough to mistake an effeminate
Leipzig student for the ideal man of her day-dreams--a poet of
inferior, perfectly mediocre talent, for a great artist. In order to
be able to marry, Stieglitz was obliged to find employment. In 1827
he became a teacher in the Berlin Gymnasium and at the same time
assistant librarian in the Royal Library, groaning immoderately over
the restraint imposed on him by these occupations. He was gloomy,
passionate, eager to distinguish himself as a poet, but any artistic
gift he had was purely bookish and unrealistic; he had no perseverance
or power of resistance in the struggle of life, but was one of those
whom adversity prostrates. He had the outward appearance of a genius;
in reality he was but a dull fellow.