“Like all great spirits, Herr von Goethe, you have clearly recognised
and felt the riddle and the hopelessness of human life, with its
moments of transcendence that sink again to wretchedness, and the
impossibility of rising to one fair peak of feeling except at the cost
of many days’ enslavement to the daily round; and, then, the ardent
longing for the realm of the spirit in eternal and deadly war with the
equally ardent and holy love of the lost innocence of nature, the whole
frightful suspense in vacancy and uncertainty, this condemnation to
the transient that can never be valid, that is ever experimental and
dilettantish; in short, the utter lack of purpose to which the human
state is condemned--to its consuming despair. You have known all this,
yes, and said as much over and over again; yet you gave up your whole
life to preaching its opposite, giving utterance to faith and optimism
and spreading before yourself and others the illusion that our
spiritual strivings mean something and endure. You have lent a deaf
ear to those that plumbed the depths and suppressed the voices that
told the truth of despair, and not in yourself only, but also in Kleist
and Beethoven. Year after year you lived on at Weimar accumulating
knowledge and collecting objects, writing letters and gathering them
in, as though in your old age you had found the real way to discover
the eternal in the momentary, though you could only mummify it, and to
spiritualise nature though you could only hide it with a pretty mask.
This is why we reproach you with insincerity.”
The old big-wig kept his eyes musingly on mine, smiling as before.
Then to my surprise, he asked, “You must have a strong objection, then,
to the _Magic Flute_ of Mozart?”
And before I could protest, he went on:
“The _Magic Flute_ presents life to us as a wondrous song. It
honours our feelings, transient, as they are, as something eternal and
divine. It agrees neither with Herr von Kleist nor with Herr Beethoven.
It preaches optimism and faith.”
“I know, I know,” I cried in a rage. “God knows why you hit of all
things on the _Magic Flute_ that is dearer to me than anything
else in the world. But Mozart did not live to be eighty-two. He did
not make pretensions in his own life to the enduring and the orderly
and to exalted dignity as you did. He did not think himself so
important! He sang his divine melodies and died. He died young--poor
and misunderstood--”
I lost my breath. A thousand things ought to have been said in ten
words. My forehead began to sweat.
Goethe, however, said very amiably: “It may be unforgivable that I
lived to be eighty-two. My satisfaction on that account was, however,
less than you may think. You are right that a great longing for
survival possessed me continually. I was in continual fear of death and
continually struggling with it. I believe that the struggle against
death, the unconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the
motive power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men.
My eighty-two years showed just as conclusively that we must all die
in the end as if I had died as a schoolboy. If it helps to justify
me I should like to say this too: there was much of the child in my
nature--curiosity and love of wasting time in play. Well, and so it
went on and on, till I saw that sooner or later there must be enough of
play.”
As he said this, his smile was quite cunning--a downright roguish
leer. He had grown taller and his erect bearing and the constrained
dignity of his face had disappeared. The air, too, around us was now
ringing with melodies, all of them songs of Goethe’s. I heard Mozart’s
_Violets_ and Schubert’s _Again thou fillest brake and vale_
quite distinctly. And Goethe’s face was rosy and youthful, and he
laughed; and now he resembled Mozart like a brother, now Schubert, and
the star on his breast was composed entirely of wild flowers. A yellow
primrose blossomed luxuriantly in the middle of it.
It did not altogether suit me to have the old gentleman avoid my
questions and accusations in this sportive manner, and I looked at him
reproachfully. At that he bent forward and brought his mouth, which had
now become quite like a child’s, close to my ear and whispered softly
into it: “You take the old Goethe much too seriously, my young friend.
You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does
them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously.
We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It
consists, I don’t mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high
a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that
reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there
is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a
joke.”
And indeed there was no saying another serious word to the man. He
capered joyfully and nimbly up and down and made the primrose shoot out
from his star like a rocket and then he made it shrink and disappear.
While he flickered to and fro with his dance-steps and figures, it was
borne in upon me that he at least had not neglected learning to dance.
He could do it wonderfully. Then I remembered the scorpion, or Molly,
rather, and I called out to Goethe: “Tell me, is Molly there?”
Goethe laughed aloud. He went to his table and opened a drawer; took
out a handsome leather or velvet box, and held it open under my eyes.
There, small, faultless, and gleaming, lay a diminutive effigy of a
woman’s leg on the dark velvet, an enchanting leg, with the knee a
little bent and the foot pointing downwards to end in the daintiest of
toes.
I stretched out my hand, for I had quite fallen in love with the little
leg and I wanted to have it, but just as I was going to take hold of
it with my finger and thumb, the little toy seemed to move with a tiny
start and it occurred to me suddenly that this might be the scorpion.
Goethe seemed to read my thought, and even to have wanted to cause
this deep timidity, this hectic struggle between desire and dread.
He held the provoking little scorpion close to my face and watched
me start forward with desire, then start back with dread; and this
seemed to divert him exceedingly. While he was teasing me with the
charming, dangerous thing, he became quite old once more, very, very
old, a thousand years old, with hair as white as snow, and his withered
greybeard’s face laughed a still and soundless laughter that shook him
to the depths with abysmal old man’s humour.
When I woke I had forgotten the dream; it did not come back to me till
later. I had slept for nearly an hour, as I never thought I could
possibly have done at a café-table with the music and the bustle all
round me. The dear girl stood in front of me with one hand on my
shoulder.
“Give me two or three marks,” she said. “I’ve spent something in there.”