CHAPTER II.

THE NOTABILITIES OF WEIMAR.

The Dowager Duchess Amalia. Mile. Göchhausen. Wieland. Einsiedel. Corona Schroter. Bertuch. Musæus. Seckendorf. The Duchess Luise. Karl August. Gräfin Werther. Frau von Stein. Knebel. Herder.

Having endeavoured to reconstruct some image of Weimar and its people, we may now descend from generals to particulars, and sketch rapidly the principal figures which will move across that scene, during the first years of Goethe's residence.

The Dowager Duchess Amalia is a very interesting figure. She had the Brunswick blood, with its capriciousness, love of pleasure, and frivolity; but she had also a mind well cultivated, not poorly gifted, and ready in appreciating men of talent. Although a niece of Frederick the Great, she did not follow the princely fashion of the day, and turn her eyes away from German Literature, to fix them only upon France. She chose Wieland as the tutor of her son, and made him her own dear friend. Schiller, a rash judge of persons, and not very keen in his perception of woman's character, wrote to Korner, after his first interview with the duchess: "She has made no conquest of me. I cannot like her physiognomy. Her intellect is extremely limited, nothing interests her but what is based on the sensuous: hence the taste she has, or affects to have, for music, painting, and the rest. She is a composer herself, and has set Goethe's Enwin und Elmire to music. She speaks little; but has, at any rate, merit of throwing aside all the stiffness of ceremony." Schiller's verdict cannot be accepted by any one who reflects, that, besides her appreciation of men of talent, who found delight in her society, she learned Greek from Wieland, read Aristophanes, and translated Propertius, was a musical composer, a tolerable judge of art, discussed politics with the Abbé Raynal and Greek and Italian Literature with Villoison; that, moreover, with all her multifarious reading and enjoyments, she contrived to superintend the education of her sons, and manage her kingdom with unusual success. This is not to be done by an "extremely limited intellect."

the

The " sensuous basis" alluded to by Schiller was certainly there. One sees it in her portraits. One sees it also in the glimpses of her joyous, pleasure-loving existence. Biographers and eulogists omit such details; for in general the biographical mind moves only through periods of rhetoric, which may be applied with equal felicity to every prince or princess of whom it is the cue to speak. But it is by such details that the image of the Duchess can alone be made a living one. Here, for example, is a sketch of her, given by an anonymous traveller.*"She is small in stature, good-looking, with a very spirituelle physiognomy; she has the Brunswick nose, lovely hands and feet, a light yet princely gait, speaks well but rapidly, and has something amiable and fascinating in her nature. . . . This evening there was a Redoute, tickets one gulden (two francs) each. The Court arrived at eight. The Duchess was magnificent, en domino, and brilliant with jewels. She dances well, lightly and gracefully. The young princes, who were attired as Zephyr and Amour, also danced. well. The masquerade was very full, lively, and varied. A faro table was laid out: the smallest stake being half a gulden. The Duchess staked dollars and half-louis, played generously and lost. But as she was glad to dance, she did not play long. She danced with every mask who invited her, and stayed till nearly three o'clock, when almost everyone had gone home." The same writer also speaks of another Redoute. "The Duchess appeared en reine grecque, a very beautiful costume, which suited her well. The ball was very brilliant; some students from Jena were there. At the last ball of the season, the Duchess sent me one of her own Savoyard dresses, and I was frisé and dressed like a woman by the Countess von Görtz's maid. The young Count was likewise dressed as a woman, and we went to Court so, dined there, and drove thence to the ball, which lasted till six o'clock."

This pleasure-loving Duchess, who knew so well how to manage her kingdom, cared little for the dignities of her state. According to Wieland, she lived sometimes in student fashion, especially at Belvedere, where student-songs, not always the most decorous, rang joyously through the moonlit gardens. Driving once with seven friends in a haycart from Tiefurt, and overtaken by a storm, she made no more ado but drew over her light clothing Wieland's great coat, and in that costume drove on.

Her letters, especially those to Goethe's mother, several of which I have seen, have great heartiness, and the most complete absence

* Quoted from BERNOUILLI by VEHSE: Geschichte der Deutschen Höfe, vol. xxvIII,

p. 60.

of anything like formality. In one of them, I remember, she apologises for not having written for some time, not from want of friendship, but lack of news: to show that she has been thinking of Frau Aja, she sends her a pair of garters worked by herself. "Liebe Frau Aja!" she writes on another occasion," my joy at the receipt of your letter is not easily described, nor will I attempt it, for true feelings are too sacred to be set down in black and white. You know, dear mother, what you are to me, and can believe how infinitely your remembrance of me has rejoiced me."*

Beside the figure of the Duchess Amalia, we see that of the merry little humpbacked Göchhausen, her maid of honour, by intimates named Thusnelda. One sees not why this sprightly little démon de bonne compagnie should have been named after the wife of Arminius. She was a great favourite with Amalia, with Karl August also, who was constantly engaged in "wit combats" with her, not always of the mildest. She animated society with her devices, and kept up a voluminous correspondence with wits and notabilities in other cities. She was very fond of Goethe, and wrote constantly to his mother. But Karl August was her darling; perhaps because he plagued her so incessantly. As a sample of the lengths to which tricks were carried, consider the following anecdote, which I have from Frau von Goethe, who had it from her father-in-law, an accomplice in the deed. One night as Thusnelda came up the stairs leading to her bedroom, her candle was blown out. Not much heeding this, she went on, reached the gallery into which her bedroom opened, and walked on, feeling for the door. There is no great difficulty in finding the door of your own room in the dark, yet Thusnelda groped, and groped, and groped in vain : no lock met her hand, a smooth blank wall allowed her hand to pass and repass over it with increasing confusion. Where was the door? Where was she? After groping some time, her perplexity growing into undefined alarm, she descended to the duchess's room; but she found that closed; the duchess was asleep; and her gentle knockings were not answered. Upstairs she went again, again to pass her hands along the wall, but still to find no door. The night was cold, and she was half-frozen with cold and fear before the mystery was explained the Duke and Goethe had removed her door, and built up the wall in its place.

Wieland had established his paper, the Teutsche Merkur, which

*Here is another extract, which I leave in the original: "Ach Mutter, Mutter! -sie errathen wohl meine Gedanken! was macht der alte Vater? er sollte ja nicht wohl seyn. Grüssen sie ihn von mir, und das tausendmal. Leben Sie wohl, beste Mutter; behalten Sie mir lieb und denken fleissig an ihre Freundin. Amalia.”

was not without its influence. When he ceased to be the prince's tutor, he remained the valued friend of the duchess. He was in all the pleasure parties. So also was Einsiedel, who, at first court page, became chamberlain to the Duchess Amalia in 1776. A jovial, careless epicurean; everywhere known as l'ami, from his goodnature and eccentricity; filling the mouth of gossip with his extravagances; poet and musician in a small way; actor and inventor of amusements, his name meets us on every page of the Weimar chronicles. Einsiedel makes us think of Corona Schröter, the Hofsängerin (singer to the court—we have no such word, because we have no such thing). Goethe had known this beautiful and accomplished creature while he was a student at Leipzig, and when, shortly after his arrival at Weimar, he made an expedition to Leipzig with the Duke, he saw her there again, and induced her to come to Weimar. She was the grace of their private theatricals, and the original personator of Iphigenia.

"Ala eine Blume zeigt sie sich der Welt,"

says Goethe of her, in that passage wherein he has immortalised her and Mieding. What a description!

She, like a flower, opens to the world.

Corona painted, sang, played, was learned in music, and declaimed with peculiar elegance,—

"The Muses lavished on her every art."

According to Karl August, she was "marble-beautiful, but marblecold"; Goethe says of her:

'Und hoch erstaunt, seht Ihr in ihr vereint
Ein Ideal, das Künstlern nur erscheint."†

There is a notion current, originating with Riemer, but shown by Schöll to be very improbable, that Goethe had a liaison with Corona. I not only agree with Schöll's reasoning, but can corroborate it by the testimony of the Frau von Goethe, who assured me her fatherin-law expressly and emphatically told her that he never had a passion for any actress. Varnhagen von Ense suspects that Corona was privately married to Einsiedel; if not, her letters, still extant although inedited, prove that they were on the footing of lovers.

Another chamberlain, poet, and musician was Seckendorf, who translated Werther into French, a year after Goethe's arrival (Les

* See the poem Mieding's Tod.

And gently awed, you feel in her combined
What is Ideal in the artist's mind.

Souffrances du Jeune Werther. Par le B. S. d. S. Erlangen, 1776); and to these gay companions must be added Bode, the translator of Smollett; Bertuch, the treasurer and the translator of Cervantes; and Musæus, a passionate lover of gardening, who gave Weimar its pleasant Erholung, and who might be seen daily crossing the quiet streets with a cup of coffee in one hand, his garden tools in the other, trudging along to that loved retreat. At other times he might be seen plying the ex-drummer, Rüppler, with inspiring schnapps to unlock the casket of his memory, wherein were stored the legends and superstitions of the peasantry which Musæus afterwards dressed up in his own style in his celebrated Volksmärchen. There was much humour in Musæus; he furnished his Weimar friends with many a pleasant quip and crank. Heinrich Schmidt tells the following. One day Musæus, after a long illness, came to dine with the Schmidts. Every one was amazed at his healthy aspect. He received their reiterated compliments with perfect gravity, till his wife, unable longer to contain herself, confessed that before setting out he had rouged his cheeks!*

These are the principal figures of Amalia's Court. We may now glance at the Court of the reigning Duke and Duchess—Karl August and Luise.

Of the Duchess Luise no one ever speaks but in terms of veneration. She was one of those rare beings who, through circumstances the most trying, as well as through the ordinary details of life, manifest a noble character. The Queen of Prussia and the Duchess of Saxe-Weimar are two of the great figures in modern German history; they both opposed the chief man of the age, Napoleon, and were both admired by him for that very opposition. Luise was of a cold temperament, somewhat rigid in her enforcement of etiquette (unlike the dowager), and wore to the last the old costume which had been the fashion in her youth; apt in the early years of her marriage to be a little querulous with her husband, but showing throughout their lives a real and noble friendship for him.

And he was worthy of that friendship, much as his strange, and in many respects opposite nature, may have tried her. Karl August, whom Frederick the Great pronounced, at fourteen, to be the prince, of all he had seen, who gave the greatest promise, was in truth a very mixed, but very admirable, character. He can afford to be looked at more closely and familiarly than most princes. He was a man whose keen appreciation of genius not only drew the most notable men of the day to Weimar, but whose own intrinsically fine *SCHMIDT: Errinerungen eines weimarischen Veteranen, p. 21.