CHAPTER NINE
331
Comparing these lines with the note addressed to
Goethe, quoted early in our tale, we are driven to remark
the much greater care and consideration expended on
the latter.
But in actual fact the friend of her youth had written
to her too, once in these weeks. Early on the morning
of October 9th, to her surprise, she received at the
Elephant a little note, brought up by Mager as she was
dressing. She had a hard time getting him out of the
room. Then she read:
Should you care, my dear friend, to use my box this
evening, my carriage can fetch you. No ticket is
needed, my servant will escort you through . the
parterre. Forgive me for not coming myself, and not
showing myself in all this time — I have been often
with you in my thoughts.
With heartiest good wishes,
^ Goethe.
She tacitly granted the writer the absolution he sought
for not coming himself and not seeking her out ere now
— tacitly, in that she made use of his invitation. She went
alone. Young Lotte had a Puritan distaste for the gifts
of Thalia, and Sister Amalie and her husband were
bespoken elsewhere. So she was driven alone, in the
Goethe equipage, a comfortable landau upholstered in
blue broadcloth, drawn by two glossy chestnut horses;
and in the theatre the Hannover housewife spent the
evening, the cynosure of many lorgnons and much envy,
unperturbed by stares, in the place of honour lately
occupied by a woman of very different appearance,
Christiane, the Mamsell. Even during the long entr'acte
she did not leave her proscenium box.
The play was Theodor Kbrner's historical tragedy
Rosamunde. The performance was polished and well-
rounded; Charlotte, in her usual white frock, this time
trimmed with heliotrope bows, followed it with the
greatest enjoyment from beginning to end. Refined
diction, lofty delivery, shrieks of passion entrusted to
practised and adequate organs, flattering to human ears,
33S LOTTE IN WEIMAR
it all struck on hers, accompanied and enhanced by
noble, measured gesture. Conscious command of tech-
nique sustained the crises of the plot, the glorified death
scenes where the dying delivered their lines in verse, with
the ideal strength of their voices up to their very end;
the passages of violence and cruelty beloved of the tragic
muse; and the consolatory finale, where even the evil
principle itself was driven to confess that ‘Lell is no
more/’ There was much weeping in the parterre, and
Charlotte’s eyes were wet once or twice, though she per-
mitted herself some private criticism on the score of the
author’s well-known youth. She did not like to hear the
heroine, Rosamunde, in a solo recitative, address herself
repeatedly as Rosa. And she knew too much about
children to be convinced by the behaviour of these infant
Thespians. They had daggers put to their breasts, to
constrain their mother to drink the poison; and they
said to her: “Mother, thou art so pale. Be blithe, as wc
also would be!” And they pointed to the cofiin, in full
view on the stage throughout the scene, and cried: “Lo,
see how joyously the candles gleam!” Sobs from the
parterre at this point, but Charlotte's eyes were dry. So
silly as that, she thought in annoyance, children never
were; a man had to be a very young “fighter for
freedom” indeed to conceive them thus.
And the sentiments to which these actors lent the
authority of their trained organs and popular personali-
ties — they did not sound so inevitable or irreproachable
either, to her. With all that skill and warmth in presen-
tation, she found they lacked profounder experience of
life — it was probably not easy to come by, in a cavalry-
man's career in the open. There was a tirade in the play
that she could not get over, continuing to ponder and
dwell on it in her critical mind until she was in danger
of losing the thread of what follo%ved. Even after she
left the theatre she was still unsatisfied, still mentally
turning it over. One speaker had praised recklessness as
a noble trait. Another, of riper Judgment, deplored the
all too great human temptation to consider sheer
audacity a virtue in itself. Let a tnan dare lay reckless
hands on all values, even sacred ones, and people make
CHAPTER NINE 333
a hero of him straightway, name him great, and enroll
him among the stars of the historical heavens. But it was
not heroic, so the author made the actor say, for a man
simpi) to be utterly abandoned. That confine of
humanity w'hich lies next to hell was easily overleaped,
it was the kind of risk just ordinary wickedness could
take, d he other confine, bordering on heaven, could be
crossed alone by the soul’s highest, purest flight. All very
fine, of course. But the solitary guest m the loge felt
that the poet and volunteer rifle, with his two confines,
had a feeble and immature idea of the topography of the
moral sphere. The boundaries of humanity, she 'mused,
might be not two lines but a single one; beyond that
might lie neither heaven nor hell, or rather just as much
hell as heaven; and the greatness that overstepped the
border was quite possibly single too, good and evil
mingling in it in a way this soldmrly and immature poet
understood as little as he did the enormous shrewdness
and fine perceptions possessed by the childish mind.
Possibly, of course, he did know these things and merely
thought it was the province of poetry to make children
out touching little idiots and assert that two confines
existed to humanity. It w^as an accomplished perform-
ance; but its talent aimed at producing a theatre piece
according to accepted standards, and the poet did not
once overstep the confines of humanity on either side.
Well, the young generation of writers, with ail their skill,
were certainly at rather a low ebb, all in all, and the great
of an earlier time had little to fear from them.
Thus she mused and marshalled her objections, and
the curtain went down for the last time to loud applause,
the audience rose up, and the servant from the Frauen-
plan reappeared respectfully at her side to lay her mantle
about her shoulders.
**WelI, Carl,*' said she, for he had told her his name,
“it was very fine. I enjoyed it very much.”
“His Excellence will be pleased to hear it,” replied he
And the commonplace prose of his voice, the voice of
reality and everyday after her sojourn in loftier spheres,
made her realise that her carping had been in a measure
wilful It WMS meant to counteract the sense we often
LOTTE IN WEIMAR
534
have, after contact with the beautiful, of rather fretful
and condescending estrangement from ordinary life. We
turn our backs with regret upon that sphere; the persis-
tent applause down below was evidence of the fact. It
was not so much enthusiasm for the actors as a means of
clinging yet a little longer to the beautiful before one
dropped one's hands and resigned oneself once more to
the commonplace. Charlotte too, in hat and wrap, the
servant waiting, stood some minutes at the front of the
loge, applauding with her bemitted hands. Then she
followed Carl and he put his rosetted hat back on his
head and led her down the stairs. Her eyes blinked wuth
staring from the dark into the light; yet they sparkled
intensely, and their gaze w^as not directed outwards, but
rather slantingly upwards, in sign how well she had
enjoyed the play, despite her objections to the theory of
the two boundaries.
The landau stood before the door with its top up, and
a lantern either side the high box where the coachman
sat bracing his Hessians against the dash-board and
saluting her as she came out. The servant helped Char-
lotte to mount and solicitously spread the rug over her
knees, then closed the door and sprang lightly up to the
coachman's side. The coachman chirrupped to his
horses, they pulled at their traces, the carriage moved off.
Its interior was snug and convenient, and no wonder,
for it had served on long journeys, likewise in the
Bohemian forests and on the Main and the Rhine. The
upholstery of tufted blue cloth was most comfortable,
there was a candle in a wind-glass in the corner, and also
writing-materials: on Charlotte's side a leather pocket
with paper and pencil.
Quietly she sat in her corner, her hands crossed on her
n^cessaire. Through the little screen dividing the interior
from the box, flickering, uncertain light fell from the
lanterns; by it she perceived that she had done well to
sit down where she sat, for she was not so much alone
as she had been in the loge. Goethe sat beside her.
She did not start. One does not start at such things.
She only drew a little farther into her corner, a little
CHAPTER NINE 335
more to one side, looked at the shape of her neighbour
there in the fitful, flickering light, and hearkened.
He wore an ample cloak with a stand-up collar faced
and bordered with red. His hat he held in his lap. There
was the massive brow with its Olympian growth of hair,
this time unpowdered and almost youthfully brown, if
less youthfully abundant; beneath it his eyes, large, black,
and bright, looked at her dancing.
“Good evening, my dear,” said the voice that once had
read Ossian and Klopstock to her, a girl and Kestner's
bride. “I had to forgo my place at your side this evening,
and I have been invisible all these days. I would not
relinquish the pleasure of fetching you home from the
play.”
“That was most courteous of you. Excellence Goethe,”
she replied, “and chiefly pleases me because the thought,
and the surprise you have given me, bespeak a certain
harmony between our two minds — if one can talk of
such a thing between a great man and a little woman
They show that you too would have found it unsatis-
factory, or even almost sad, if our adieux after the last
edifying meeting had been in truth the last; if there had
not come another, one I am quite prepared to regard as
in very truth the last for ever, if it can only give this
story a tolerably redeeming close.”
“A division,” she heard him say from his corner,
“parting is a division. Meeting again is a little chapter,
a fragment.”
“I do not know what you mean, Goethe,” she re-
sponded — and the poor soul slipped unawares into the
familiar “thou” of bygone days — “or scarcely even
whether I heard aright; but I do not wonder, nor should
you — once for all, I yield nothing to the litde woman
with whom you lately made poetry by the shining waters
of the Rhine. Your poor son told me of her: it seems she
simply entered into you and your song, and wrote as
good poetry as you did yourself. Well, of course, she is
a child of the stage, and probably has volatile blood in
her veins. But women are women, and all of us, when
needs must, enter into the man and his song. ... So
meeting again is a short chapter, a fragment? But you
336 LOTTE IN WEIMAR
) ourself felt it should not be so fragmentary that I mubt
needs go back with a sense of utter failure to my lonely
widowed state.”
”Thy dearest sister,” said he, “hast thou not embraced
her. After long parting? Then canst thou lament Thy
journey’s failure?”
‘*Ah, do not mock me,” she counteied. ”That is just
it: I used my sister as a pretext to gratify a desire that
had long robbed me of my peace, to journey to your
home, to seek )ou out in your greatness, with whom fate
involved my life, to lind an end to the fragment and
tranquillise the evening of my days. Tell me, did you
find I did so ill? Was it a pathetic schoolgirl trick?”
”We wall not call it that,” he answered, “by no means
that, though it is not good to feed the sentimental
curiosity and malice of the crowd. But from your point
of view, dear friend, I can well understand the impulse
to this journey. I too, at least in a deeper sense, found
your coming not ill done. Indeed, I would call it good, or
even inspired, if it be true that spirit is the guiding force
that lends significance in art and life and make^ us see in
things of the senses a mask for higher concerns. Any life
that has significance has also unity; in it there is no such
thing as chance. It was no chance put our book, the
Werther, into my hands again in the spring of this year
and plunged your friend back into old and early times.
For he realised then that he was entering on a phase of
renewal and recurrence. And he foresaw that the presid-
ing powers might elect to dissolve the passions into spirit.
But where the present so stimulatingly makes itself felt
as a rejuvenescence of the past, it is not surprising that
the unrejuvenated past comes too, borne back upon the
welling tide, to visit us. Nor even that it brings with it
faded allusions, and betrays its bondage to time by
touchingly nodding its head.”
”It is not handsome of you, Goethe, to point out this
little habit so expressly. You call it touching, but that
does not mend matters, because you do not care about
the touching, and where ordinary mortals might find it
so, you simply find it ‘interesting/ I saw you notice my
little weakness. It has nothing to do with the state of my
CHAPTER NINE 337
healtii; my constitution, thank God, is strong and unim-
paired. The trouble is not bondage to time so much as
the bondage of being involved in your overwhelming
life; that, 1 can only say, makes me nervous. What I did
not know w^as that you saw the faded allusion, as you
called it, in niy dress. But of course that roving eye of
yours sees more than one would think. After all, you
were meant to see it, that was why I did it, and I counted
on your sense of humour to see the joke — though I see
now myself it was not particularly funny. But to return
10 my bondage to time: let me tell you, Your Excellence,
you have small reason to boast, for all your poetic re-
newal and rejuvenescence; for you are so stiff, standing
and walking, that it is pathetic, and your rigid politeness
seems to me just as much in need of opodeldoc.”
“I have made you angry, my dear,” he said, in his
gentle bass, ''with my passing allusion. But bear in mind
1 made it in justifying your reappearance and explaining
w^hy 1 found it well done and wise for you too to float
along in the spirit train.”
“How^ strange!” she broke in. "August told me you
always said ‘thou’ to his mother, the Mamseli, but she
always said ‘you’ to you. I notice it is just the other way
about, with us.”
"The two forms,” he replied, ‘‘were always in your
time unsettled betw^een us; what we say for the moment,
moreover, probably depends on our two dispositions.”
"Well and good. But you just said ‘your time’ instead
of ‘our time/ and, after all, it was your time too. But
now it is your time again, renewed and rejuvenated as
the stimulating present, and as that it was mine only
once upon a time. Truly it should not wound me deeply
to have you refer straight out to my insignificant little
weakness; after all, it just means, alas, that it only was
my time!”
"My friend,” returned he, "how can your present time-
form trouble you, or any reference to it wound you, when
destiny has favoured you above millions and given you
eternal youth in a work of art? What was of time, my
%vork has preserved.”
"A good hearing,” said she; "I realize it gratefully.
338 LOTTE IN WEIMAR
despite all the burden and distress bound up with it for
me, poor soul! But I should like to add what your stately
sense of politeness would probably not mention, that it
was silly of me to drape my present form with emblems
of the past that belong only to the timeless figure in your
work. After all, you have not the poor taste to go about
in the blue coat with the yellow waistcoat and trousers
eccentric youngsters wore in our dayl Your coat is of
the finest black cloth, like silk, and I must say the silver
star becomes you as well as the Golden Fleece did
Egmont. Ah, EgmontP' she sighed. *'You did well,
Goethe, to perpetuate your own youthful form in a poem
too. You can resign yourself with dignity now to being
a stiff-legged Excellence, and saying grace for your
sycophants!”
His voice, coming after a pause, was deep and emo-
tional. “My friend,” it said, “cherishes ill feeling. But
not alone because I spoke of that mark of age. My words
only seemed untender, they were meant in afection.
Nay, the anger, or the pain that expresses itself as anger,
has a better, has only too just a ground. And did I not
wait upon thee with the carriage because I felt the need
to face this angry pain, admit its justice and propriety —
and perhaps soften it by a heart-felt plea for forgiveness?”
“Oh, my God!” exclaimed she, quite aghast. “How
can Your Excellence condescend — ? That was not what
I wished to hear, I am as red as I was at the story you told
over the raspberry fool! Forgiveness! My pride, my
great happiness — they are to forgive? Where is the man
who may — even compare with my friend? As the world
does now, so will posterity speak of him with reverence.”
“Neither humility on the one hand nor innocence on
the other,” he responded, “can take away the sting of the
refusal. To say: 1 have nothing to forgive' means you
are still unforgiving; it seems it has always been my fate
to involve myself innocently in guilt. And when the
craving for forgiveness speaks, humility herself should
not deny it. That only means it does not know the secret
torment, the searing pain, that pierces a man's breast at
a justified reproach. There he sits, in the darkness of his
own confident self-esteem; suddenly his breast glows like
CHAPTER NINE 339
those heaps of red-hot mussel-sheiis they use in some
places to build with instead of lime.”
"My friend,” she said, “I should be horrified if the
thought of me could even for one moment trouble your
confident self-esteem — it means far too much for all the
world. But I rather think this sudden burning glow had
to do in the beginning with the first object you renounced
and in so doing set up the pattern — I mean the daughter
of the people, and your bidding her farewell leaning
down from your horse. At least it comforts me when I
read that you took leave of me with a less burning sense
of guilt than of her, poor soul, lying there under her
mound in Baden! But I confess I have no overwhelming
sympathy with her: she did not behave very well, she let
herself languish and pine — and surely it is our duty to be
resolute, to make ourselves our own end, even though we
be a means as well. There she lies, while others have lived
a full life and now rejoice in honourable widowhood,
despite a little trifle of nervous head-shaking that does
not count in the least. And I am the successful one, the
clear, unmistakable heroine of your little book, un-
doubted and unquestioned down to the smallest details,
no matter for the little mix-up about the black eyes.
Even that Chinaman, whatever outlandish views he may
have, paints me with trembling hand, on glass, at
Werther’s side. Me, and no other. I may boast of that—
what if the other there under her mound did come in
too, in the very first place, and perhaps laid open your
heart for Wertner’s love? For no one knows it; it is my
face and my circumstances that are in the public eye.
My only worry is lest some day it might come out and be
discovered that she is the real one, and belongs to you in
the Elysian Fields, like Laura and Petrarch. That would
depose me, and cast out my image from its niche in the
temple of humanity. That is the thought that sometimes
disturbs me until I am near to tears.”
‘'Jealous ?” he asked* with a smile. “Is Laura’s then the
only name that shall be sung? Jealous — of whom? Of
your sister, nay, your reflection and other you? When
the cloud forms and re-forms, is it not still the same
cloud? The hundred names of God, do they not all name
LOTTE IN WEIMAR
340
only the One? And you, beloved children? Life is but
change of form, oneness in many, permanence in change.
And you and she, you are ail one in my love — and in my
guilt. Did you make your journey to be consoled for
this?'"
‘‘Nay, Goethe/* said she. “I came to see the might-
have-been, the possible. Its deliciencies compared to the
actual and existing are plain to see. Yet there it is, beside
the actual, in the world, whenever we say ‘If only* or
‘As once it was.’ And it is worth our questioning. Do
you not find it so, old friend, do not you too sometimes,
in all the glory of your actual, question the might-have-
been? For your actual, well I knotv, is the effect of
renunciation, and in consequence of impairment and
loss; for renunciation and loss lie close together, and all
reality and achievement are nothing but the impaired
possible. There is something frightful, let me tell you,
about that impairment. We numbler folk must avoid it,
we must brace ourselves against it with all our strength,
till our heads quiver with the strain; for else there is
nothing left for us, so to speak, but a mound in Baden.
With you it was different. You had something to put to
it. Your reality looks different; not like renunciation, or
unfaithfulness; but like purer fulfilment and a higher
faith. It is so imposing, no one dares even inquire after
the might-have-been. I congratulate you!*'
“Your feelings, dear child, are so involved, they
embolden you to an ironic kind of congratulation/’
“This much at least I insist upon: to have my say, and
sing my praises with a difference, not in the same key as
all the unfamiliar throng! Let me tell you, Goethe: so
perfectly at ease I did not feel in your presence, in your
circle and your museum of a house. I was oppressed and
fearful, I admit. It smells too much of sacrifice where
you are. I do not mean incense, that I like, and Iphigenia
too consented to burn it before Diana of the Scythians.
But human sacrifice she could not bear, she sought to
soften the harsh deaee. Alas, in your circle it looks too
much the same; it is almost like a battlefield and the
kingdom of a wicked emperor. These Riemers with their
mutterings and grumblings and their manly honour
CHAPTER NINE 34^
floundering about in the bird-lime, and )our poor son
with his seventeen glasses of champagne, and this little
person who will marry him at the New Year and fly into
your upper looms like a moth to the candle — to say
nothing about Marie Beaumarchais, who did not know
how" to stand up as I did and so consumption took her off
to lie under her mound — w^hat are they all but sacrifices
to your greatness? Ah, it is wonderful to make a
sacrifice — but a bitter, bitter lot to be oneT'
The unquiet lights flickered and whisked acioss the
cloaked form at her side. He said:
'Dear soul, let me answer you from my heart, in expia-
tion and farewell. You speak of sacrifice. But it is a
mystery, indivisible, like all else in the world and one's
person, one's life, and one’s work. Conversion, trans-
formation, is all. They sacrificed to the god, and in the
end the sacrifice w^as God. Y'ou used a figure dear and^
familiar to me; long since, it took possession of my soul.
I mean the parable of the moth and the fatal, luring
flame. Say, if you will, that I am the flame, and into me
the poor moth flings itself. Yet in the chance and change
of things I am the candle too, giving my body that the
light may burn. And finally, I am the drunken butterfly
that falls to the flame— figuie of the eternal sacrifice,
body transmuted into soul, and life to spirit. Dear soul,
dear child, dear childlike old soul, I, first and last, am
the sacrifice, and he that offers it. Once I burned you,
ever I burn you, into spirit and light. Know that meta-
morphosis is all that is dearest and innermost of thy
friend, his great hope, his deepest craving: the play of
transformation, changing face, greybeard to youth, to
youth the boy, yet ever the human countenance with
traits of its proper stage, youth like a miracle shining out
in age, age out of youth. Thus mayst thou rest content,
beloved, as I am, with having thought it out and come to
me, decking thine ancient form with signs of youth.
Unity in change and flux, conversion constant out of and
into oneself, transmutation of all things, life showing
now its natural now its cultural face, past turning^ to
present, present pointing back to past, both preluding
future and with her dim foreshadowings already full.
342 LOTTE IN WEIMAR
Fast feeling, tuture feeling — feeling is all. Let us open
wide eyes upon the unity oi the world — eyes wide, serene,
and Wise. Wouldst thou ask of me repentance? Only
wait. I see her nde towards me, in a' mantle grey. Then
once more the hour of Werther and Tasso will strike, as
at midnight already midday strikes, and God give me to
say what I suffer— only this first and last will then
remain to me. Then forsaking will be only leave-taking,
leave-taking for ever, death-struggle of feeling and the
hour full ot frightful pangs, pangs such as probably for
some time precede tiie hour ot deatii, pangs which are
dying if not yet death. Death, final flight into the flame
— the All-in-One — ^why should it too be aught but trans-
formation? In my quiet heart, dear visions, may you
rest — and what a pleasant moment that will be, when
we anon awake together!’'
The long-familiar accents died away. **Peace to your
old age!” was ail she whispered. The carriage stopped.
Its lights fell together with that from the lanterns on
either side the entrance to the Elephant* Mager stood
there between them, hands on back, nose in air to sniff
the misty, starry autumn night. Now in his soft-soled
waiter's shoes he ran across the pavement, to be before-
hand with the servant at the carriage door. He did not
actually run, of course; but moved as one to whom run-
ning is somewhat foreign, with a mincing dignity, his
hands raised to his shoulders, the fingers elegantly curled.
”Frau Councillor,” he said, “welcome, as always! I
hope Frau Councillor spent an elevating evening in our
temple of the Muses? May I offer this arm for your sup-
port? Good heavens, Frau Councillor, I cannot refrain
—I really must say: to help Werther's Lotte out of
Goethe's carnage, that is an experience that — ^what shall
I call it? It ought to be put down,”
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