so I shall write entirely without passion. Imagine to yourself a woman well-grown, though not very tall; a round, agreeable, though not extraordinarily beautiful face; open, gentle, engaging manners; a very pretty understanding, without having had any great education. He loves her very tenderly, with the perfect, honest intentions of a virtuous man, though he knows that she can never be his. Whether she loves him in return I know not. You know, dear Moors, that is a point about which one cannot well ask; but this much I can say to you, that they seem to be born for each other. Now observe his cunning! That no one may suspect him of such an attachment, he undertakes to persuade the world of precisely the opposite, and hitherto he has been extraordinarily successful. He makes a great parade, and seems to be paying court to a certain young lady of whom I have told you before. He can see his beloved and converse with her at certain times without giving occasion for the slightest suspicion, and I often accompany him to her. If Goethe were not my friend I should fall in love with her myself. Meanwhile he is supposed to be in love with the Fräulein (but what do you care about her name?) and people are fond of teasing him about her. Perhaps she herself believes that he loves her, but the good lady deceives herself. Since that time he has admitted me to closer confidence, has made me acquainted with his affairs, and shown me that his expenditure is not so great as might be supposed. He is more of a philosopher and moralist than ever; and innocent as his love is, he nevertheless disapproves it. We often dispute about this, but let him take what side he will, he is sure to win; for you know what weight he can give to only apparent reasons. I pity him and his good heart, which really must be in a very melancholy condition, since he loves the most virtuous and perfect of girls without hope. But if we suppose that she loves him in return, how miserable must he be on that very account! I need not explain that to you, who so well know the human heart. He has told me that he will write you one or two things about it himself. There is no necessity for me to recommend silence to you on this subject; for you yourself see how necessary it is. . . Imagine this somewhat fantastic youth assured that his passion is returned, and then imagine him indulging in the boyish caprice of tormenting his beloved. There is nothing more cruel than youth; and youthful lovers, once assured of victory, are singularly prone to indulge in the most frivolous pretexts for ' ingeniously tormenting.' Man loves to conquer, likes not to feel secure, Goethe says, in the piece where he dramatized this early experience: 'Erringen will der Mensch; er will nicht sicher seyn.' Had Käthchen coquetted with him, keeping him in the exquisite pain of suspense, she would have been happier; but as he said in his little poem Der Wahre Genuss, 'she is perfect and her only fault is that she loves me': Sie ist volkommen, und sie fehlet Darin allein dass sie mich liebt. No He teased her with trifles and idle suspicions; was jealous without cause, convinced without reason; plagued her with fantastic quarrels, till at last her endurance was exhausted, and her love was washed away in tears. sooner was he aware of this than he repented, and tried to recover the jewel which like a prodigal he had cast away. In vain. He was in despair, and tried in dissipation to forget his grief. A better issue was poetry. Several of his lyrics bore the burden of this experience : and one entire play, or pastoral, is devoted to a poetical representation of these lovers' quarrels: this is Die Laune des Verliebten, which is very curious as the earliest extant work of the great poet, and as the earliest specimen of his tendency to turn experience into song. In the opera of Erwin und Elmire he subsequently treated a similar subject in a very different manner. The first effort is the more curious of the two. The style of composition is an imitation of those pastoral dramas, which, originated by Tasso and Guarini in the soft and almost luscious Aminta and Pastor Fido, had by the French been made popular all over Europe. Two happy and two unhappy lovers are somewhat artificially contrasted; the two latter representing Käthchen and the poet. Action there is none; the piece is made up of talk about love, some felicitous verses of the true stamp and ring, and an occasional glimpse of insight into the complexities of passion. Eridon, the jealous lover, torments his mistress in a style at once capricious and natural; with admirable truth she deplores his jealousy and excuses it: Zwar oft betrübt er mich, doch rührt ihn auch mein Schmerz. It is admirably said that the very absence of any cause for grief prompts him to create a grief: Da er kein Elend hat, will er sich Elend machen. Amine is also touched with a delicate pencil. Her lov * 'Tis true he vexes me, and yet my sorrow pains him. And he will weep with me, because he sees me weep. ingness, forgivingness, and endurance are from the life. Here is a couplet breathing the very tenderness of love : Der Liebe leichtes Band machst du zum schweren Joch. Du quälst mich als Tyrann ; und ich? ich lieb dich noch ! * One more line and I have done : Eglé is persuading Eridon that Amine's love of dancing is no trespass on her love for him; since, after having enjoyed her dance, her first thought is to seek him: Und durch das Suchen selbst wirst du ihr immer lieber. † In such touches as these lurks the future poet; still more so in the very choice of the subject. Here, as ever, he does not cheat himself with pouring feigned sorrows into feigning verse: he embalms his own experience. He does not trouble himself with drawing characters and events from the shelves of the library: his soul is the fountain of his inspiration. His own life was uniformly the text from which he preached. He sang what he had felt, and because he had felt it; not because others had sung before him. He was the echo of no man's joys and sorrows, he was the lyrist of his own. This is the reason why his poems have an endless charm: they are as indestructible as passion itself. because they issue from his. according to the huntsman's been dipped in the marksman's blood. They reach our hearts Every bullet hits the mark, superstition, if it have first He has told us, emphatically, that all his works are but fragments of the grand confession of his life. Of him we may say what Horace so well says of Lucilius, that he trusted his secrets to books as to faithful friends: * The fairy link of Love thou mak'st a galling yoke. 'Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim Credebat libris; neque, si male cesserat, unquam Vita senis.'* How clearly he saw the nullity of every other precedure is shown in various passages of his letters and conversations. Riemer has preserved one worth selecting: There will soon be a poetry without poetry, a real лoinois, where the subject matter is voo, in the making: a manufactured poetry.' He dates from Leipsic the origin of his own practice, which he says was a tendency he never could deviate from all his life: namely, the tendency to transform into an image, a poem, everything which delighted or troubled me, or otherwise occupied me, and to come to some distinct understanding with myself upon it, to set my inward being at rest.' The reason he gives for this tendency is very questionable. He attributes it to the isolation in which he lived with respect to matters of taste forcing him to look within for poetical subjects. But had not the tendency of his genius lain in that direction, no such circumstances could have directed it. Young, curious, and excitable as he was, nothing is more natural than that he should somewhat shock the 'fair respectabilities' by his pranks and extravagances. His constant companion was Behrisch, a wayward, sarcastic devil-may-care, who, however, had some shrewd good sense, as a buttress for all his follies. Behrisch in *Sermon., lib. ii. 1. + Briefe von und an Goethe. Herausgeg. von Riemer. 1846. What follows is untranslateable, from the play on words: Die Dichter heissen dann so, wie schon Moritz spasste, a spissando, densando, vom Dichtmachen, weil sie Alles zusammendrängen, und kommen mir vor wie eine Art Wurstmacher, die in den Darm des Hexameters oder Trimeters ihre Wort- und Sylbenfülle stopfen.' |