Part 26
Rahel owes her literary distinction to the fact that she was the first in the literary circles of Berlin to comprehend and to proclaim Goethe's real greatness. Long before any decisive opinion on this vital question in German culture had been arrived at, Rahel, fully persuaded of Goethe's genius, completely under the spell of its power, proclaimed to all with whom she came into contact that this man was not to be compared with other men; that he stood alone--the loftiest intellect, the wisest counsellor and judge in all the affairs of life. This was at a time when Goethe as an author was only one among the crowd, and when others were ranked high above him. Long before the criticism of the brothers Schlegel established his position beyond dispute, Rahel had introduced the cult of the great, uncomprehended, misjudged genius in her circle in Berlin, had everywhere proclaimed the praises of his illuminating word, and declared his name to be a holy, a consecrated name.
In 1795, when she is only twenty-four, she is so fortunate as to meet him at Teplitz. We learn from a letter from David Veit to Rahel, what Goethe said about her: "Yes, that now is a girl of remarkable intellect, a girl who is always thinking--and as to feeling--where is the like of her to be found? We were constantly together, and were on the most friendly, intimate terms." To Franz Horn, Goethe said: "She is a girl with a loving heart; she feels everything very strongly, and yet expresses herself very gently--we admire the originality and are charmed by the amiability."
When Rahel is told this, she writes: "How can he know that I have feeling? Never in my life was it so difficult for me to show myself as I am. But why write thus? He is Goethe. And what he feels and says is true. I believe what he says of me.... When you see him, Horn, greet him from one who has always worshipped him, idolised him, even when no one else praised, understood, admired him. And if he wonders at a staid young woman sending him such a greeting, make him understand that her excessive reverence for him prevented her telling him how she reveres him. Tell him that this is not affectation, but true, tender feeling (_Pflaumenweichheit_). It is not my fault that others affect what in my case is serious earnest. Am I not right? Yes, yes! I worship him."
Nothing further happens; there is not the slightest attempt on Rahel's 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."