THE LIFE OF BETTINA VON ARNIM
BY HENRY WOOD, PH.D. Professor of German, Johns Hopkins University
The ten years succeeding the publication of Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (1835) coincided in point of time with the awakening in England, through Thomas Carlyle, and in America as well, of an intense if not yet profound interest in German Literature. It must remain a tribute to the ideal enthusiasm of the movement that, among the first German works to receive a permanent welcome and become domiciled in American literary circles, was that strange and glittering mass, flotsam of a great poet's life dislodged and jettisoned from his personality by the subtle arts of the "Child" who had now gathered it up again and was presenting it to the astonished world. At a time when the Foreign Quarterly Review in England (1838) was vainly endeavoring to persuade "Madame von Arnim" not to undertake the translation of her work, "whose unrestrained effusions far exceed the-bounds authorized by English decorum," Margaret Fuller was preparing in Boston to translate Bettina's Günderode, and soon felt herself in a position to state[3] that "Goethe's Correspondence with a Child is as popular here as in Germany." In one respect, indeed, Bettina's vogue in America remained for the rest of her lifetime more secure than in her own country, where the publication of her later politico-sociological works, Dies Buch gehört dem König (1843) and Gespräche mit Dämonen (1852), was followed by a temporary eclipse of her popularity, and where also her fate, in persistently associating her with Rahel, the wife of Varnhagen, as a foil for Rahel's brilliant but transitory glitter, had tarnished her own fame.[4]
[Illustration: BETTINA VON ARNIM]
For these things American readers of the Correspondence seem to have cared but little. While German critics were deliberating as to what grouping of characteristics could best express Bettina as a type, the American public had already discovered in her a rare personality—the recipient and custodian of Frau Rat's fondest memories of Goethe's childhood; the "mythological nurse-maid,"[5] to whom, though in her proper name as well as to her first-born son, successive editions of Grimm's Fairy Tales had been dedicated; the youthful friend of Beethoven, from whom she had received treasured confidences as to the influence exerted by Goethe's verse upon his mind and art; at times the haunting Muse of Germany's greatest poet and, since 1811, the wife of the most chivalrous of German poets, Achim von Arnim. If we add to these characteristics the circumstance that, as Arnim's wife and as the mother of their rarely endowed children, she had become the centre of a distinguished and devoted circle in the Mark Brandenburg and in the Prussian capital, the distance separating us from Ben Jonson's attitude in his Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke is no longer very great: "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother."[6]
It is, nevertheless, not through the aid of Ben Jonson's line, "fair and wise and good as she," that Bettina may be described. She suggests far rather an electrical, inspired, lyrical nature. The spokesman of this literary estimate of Bettina was Margaret Fuller, and it is interesting to note that this best of American critics at once instituted a comparison between Bettina and Karoline von Günderode, in which the former was made to stand for Nature and the latter for Art. But it appears to have escaped notice that Margaret Fuller, in presenting her example of the artistic type, has, with no express intention, given us a picture of herself.[7] The subtle harmonies, the soft aerial grace, the multiplied traits, the soul delicately appareled, the soft dignity of each look and gesture, the silvery spiritual clearness of an angel's lyre, drawing from every form of life its eternal meaning—these are all lineaments of the Countess of Pembroke type, and these characteristics Margaret Fuller herself shared. How different is her description of Bettina!
"Bettina, hovering from object to object, drawing new tides of vital energy from all, living freshly alike in man and tree, loving the breath of the damp earth as well as the flower which springs from it, bounding over the fences of society as well as over the fences of the field, intoxicated with the apprehension of each new mystery, never hushed into silence by the highest, flying and singing like a bird, sobbing with the hopelessness of an infant, prophetic, yet astonished at the fulfilment of each prophecy, restless, fearless, clinging to love, yet unwearied in experiment—is not this the pervasive vital force, cause of the effect which we call Nature?"
On the part of both Goethe and Bettina, there was always a recognition of such a natural force operating in her. As Günderode once put it, "Bettina seems like clay, which a divine artificer, preparing to fashion it into something rare, is treading with his feet." On the 13th of August, 1807, Bettina wrote: "Farewell, glorious one, thou who dost both dazzle and intimidate me. From this steep cliff [Goethe] upon which my love has risked the climb, there is no possible path down again. That is not to be thought of; I should simply break my neck." Goethe's reply, in this as in other cases, was characteristic: "What can one say or give to thee, which thou hast not after thy own fashion already appropriated? There is nothing left for me but to keep still, and let thee have thy way." In this passage-at-arms, the whole of the Correspondence, though not its charm, is concentrated. Goethe was intent on keeping the relationship within its first limitations, that is to say, as a friendship in which his mother, Frau Rat, was included as a necessary third party. The impetuous young confidante was already transmitting to Goethe chapters from the history of his childhood, as seen through the communications of his mother to her. These had given the poet the purest pleasure, and he intended making use of them for his Autobiography.[8] But, on the other hand, as soon as Bettina risked independent judgments on his creations, as in the case of the Elective Affinities (1809), her inadequacy and her presumption in claiming for herself the rôle of a better Ottilie were both painfully apparent. Her attitude toward the adored object was a combination of meekness and pretension, the latter predominating as time went on. "It was sung at my cradle, that I must love a star that should always remain apart. But thou [Goethe] hast sung me a cradle song, and to that song, which lulls me into a dream on the fate of my days, I must listen to the end of my days." To this humility succeeded the self-deception of the so-called later Diary. Under date of March 22, 1832, Bettina relates that Goethe, at their last interview in the early days, had called her his Muse. Hence, on learning of his death, she reproached herself for ever having left him—"the tree of whose fame, with its eternally budding shoots, had been committed to my care. Alas for the false world, which separated us, and led me, poor blind child, away from my master!" Margaret Fuller[9] called Goethe "my parent." But how sharp is the contrast between her tone of reverent affection and the umbrageous jealousy of Bettina!
And Goethe? While the poet safeguarded his fatherly relation to Bettina, up to the break in 1811, in a hundred ways, we find him already, in 1807, inclosing in a letter to his mother the text of Sonnet I., which had been inspired, in the first instance, by his friendship with Minna Herzlieb. Bettina, left to draw her own conclusions, at once identified herself with "Oreas" in the sonnet, and reproached herself for having plunged, like a mountain avalanche, into the broad, full current of the poet's life. From the letter of September 17th it is plain that Bettina indulged, in all seriousness, the fanciful notion that her inspiration was, in a sense, necessary to Goethe's fame. In her fond, mystical interpretation of the sonnets, her heart seems to her the fruitful furrow, the earth-womb, in which Goethe's songs are sown, and out of which, accompanied by birth-pangs for her, they are destined to soar aloft as heavenly poems. She closes with a partial application to herself of the Biblical text (Luke 1. 40): "Blessed art thou among women."
Goethe's detractors, particularly among the literary school called Young Germany, were fond of repeating the insinuation of Fanny Tarnow (1835), that the poet prized in Bettina only her capacity for idolizing him. But Goethe's attitude toward the "Child" was far removed from that of poet-pasha, and Bettina had nothing of the vacuous odalisque in her composition. G. von Löper has well said of her composite traits: "The tender radiance of first youth hovers over her descriptions; but, while one is beholding, Bettina suddenly changes into a mischievous elf, and, if we reach out to grasp the kobold, lo! a sibyl stands before us!" Behind all Bettina's mobility there is a force of individuality, as irresistible and as recurrent as the tides. Her brother Clemens and her brother-in-law Savigny tried in vain to temper the violence of her enthusiasm for the insurgent Tyrolese, of her flaming patriotism, of her hatred of philistinism in every form, of her scorn for the then fashionable neutrality and moderation in the expression of political opinion.
[Illustration: THE GOETHE MONUMENT (BY BETTINA NON ARNIM)]
She was by nature and choice the advocate of the oppressed, whenever and wherever met with. The aristocratic élégant Rumohr was obliged to put up with the following from her: "Why are you not willing to exchange your boredom, your melancholy caprices, for a rifle? With your figure, slender as a birch, you could leap over abysses and spring from rock to rock; but you are lazy and infected with the disease of neutrality. You cannot hear the voices saying: 'Where is the enemy? On, on, for God, the Kaiser, and the Fatherland!'" Even Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, who is, according to Bettina, merely a supine hero, fails to elude her electric grasp: "Come, flee with me across the Alps to the Tyrolese. There will we whet our swords and forget thy rabble of comedians; and as for all thy darling mistresses, they must lack thee awhile."
The end of poets' friendships with literary women is not always marked by an anticlimax. Of Margaret Fuller, Emerson wrote in the privacy of his Journal: "I have no friend whom I more wish to be immortal than she. An influence I cannot spare, but would always have at hand for recourse." Words like these Bettina was continually listening for from her poet-idol, but she heard instead only the disillusioning echo of her own enthusiasms. Possessing neither stability of mind nor any consistent roundness of character, she was incapable of rendering herself necessary to Goethe. In her case, however, the gifts that were denied at her cradle seem to have been more than made up to her. Her ardent and aspiring soul, shutting out "all thoughts, all passions, all delights" else, was distilled into longing to share in the unending life of Goethe's poesy.[10]
Through the possession of this quality, Bettina, though not herself of heroic mold, enters the society of the great heroines and speaks to posterity. Ariadne on the island of Naxos lives not more truly in Ovid's poetical Epistles, than Bettina in the Correspondence. But Bettina has not, like Ariadne, had immortality conferred upon her through the verses of two great poets. She has rather taken it for herself, as Goethe said she was wont to do, in anticipating every gift. It is accordingly not in the Elegiacs of Ovid, flowing as a counter-stream to Lethe, that we may discern Bettina's gesture of immortal repose as a metamorphosed heroine. She is a type of the inspired lyrical nature, a belated child of the Renaissance. A graceful English song-writer of the Elizabethan period, Thomas Campion, who was as fond as Bettina of the figure of the flower and the sun, through which she symbolized her relation to Goethe, has in his verses anticipated her pose and her tone of agitated expectancy:
"Is [he] come? O how near is [he]?
How far yet from this friendly place?
How many steps from me?
When shall I [him] embrace?
These armes I'll spread, which only at (his) sight shall close,
Attending, as the starry flower that the sun's noone-tide knowes."
Campion termed his verses Light Conceits of Lovers. It is difficult to weigh Bettina's fancies, for she has, as it were, taken the scales with her when she closed the Correspondence: but it is only just to say of her Letters, that they realize, as a whole, Tasso's description of the permanent state of the true lover: "Brama assai, poco spera e nulla chiede" (Desire much, hope little and nothing demand).