It was in this same month of December, 1834, that Stieglitz's disgust with life reached a sort of climax. His malady took the form of intellectual stagnation, of absolute incapacity to express himself. Charlotte begged him, as if he had been a child, rather to rave and storm as of old than to collapse in this terrible manner; but she begged in vain. It was then that she determined to employ the last means in her power, to take that step which she, with her innocent, high-flown ideas, felt it obligatory to take, in order that a great, simple sorrow might enter into his life, reawaken his genius, and give his poetry new themes.
On the evening of the 29th she came home, knowing that she would have two hours to herself, threw her short fur cape and boa on the hall floor, hurried into her bedroom, locked the door of communication with the kitchen, undressed, washed herself, put on a clean night-dress, wrote a few lines to Heinrich expressing her belief that new life for him would arise out of this misfortune, and exhorting him no longer to be weak, but calm and strong and great. Then she lay down on the bed and with a firm hand plunged the dagger of their wedding tour into her heart.
One's first impression is that these women, Rahel, Bettina, and Charlotte, who all three became famous in the year 1835, have nothing in common. Rahel dies in 1833 at the age of sixty-one, and her real life-work, the first energetic vindication of Goethe's pre-eminence, belongs quite as much to the eighteenth as to the nineteenth century. Bettina, who is fourteen years younger, does not come before the public till a year after Rahel's death; she combines the exalted enthusiasm and the unreality of Romanticism with the reforming tendencies of Young Germany. Charlotte's only achievement was to kill herself, a thing which has been done by women times without number, though probably never for the same reason.
But when we look a little deeper, we find that they have many traits in common. They are all restless, with the restlessness distinctive of their day, which manifests itself, not in outward hurry and strain, but in strong emotions, not in the nervousness prevalent in our own day, but in perpetual introspection. Then there is the peculiarity that none of them transgress the laws of society, though none of them have any respect for these laws. And there is the wonderful, ideal fidelity which they all display. Rahel is Goethe's, from the first breath she draws as a grown-up woman to her last. Bettina is Goethe's, with such absorbing devotion that the scheme of erecting a colossal monument to him which she advocated in her first published work (a monument which she herself planned and had executed in miniature), becomes in her old age an idée fixe. Charlotte so entirely belongs to the man on whom her choice falls when she is sixteen, that she not only lives for him, but dies for him.
Another thing they have in common is enthusiasm. Rahel's burns like a steady, sacred flame; Bettina's breaks out in a pyrotechnic display of ideas and visions; Charlotte's manifests itself in the resolute, uncomplaining sacrifice of her life. It is genius that they all worship; they have the enthusiastic German appreciation of poetic genius; their great desire is to do what in them lies to promote its recognition and glorification, or its development and emancipation; to this task they devote their lives, regardless of the worthiness or unworthiness of the object of their choice. Lastly, the thoughts and feelings of all three are remarkably original. These women resemble no other women. Never, to our knowledge, has there been such another reflective emotionalist as Rahel, such another sylph-like enthusiast as Bettina, such another suicide as Charlotte's, a suicide inspired by a lofty though false æsthetic principle.
Those who look deeper into the matter and view these characters in the light of history, see in Rahel's introspection and self-reflection, the first form which woman's self-emancipation necessarily took in the Germany of this century; this height of intellectual independence had to be attained before the women in a country where they for centuries had been relegated to simple domesticity could rise to anything above it. In Bettina's triple enthusiasm, for Goethe, for the ideas of political liberalism, and for social reform, the student of history descries the transition stage between the era of art and the era of liberalism and socialism. And in Charlotte's suicide he sees an expression of the desire of the women of her day to snatch the men from their literary quietism and place them face to face with the seriousness, the tragedy of life. The whole era speaks when she says to Stieglitz that the song of the violet cannot be sung to the accompaniment of a great waterfall. None of these women could have developed as they did at any other period, and at no other period would they have been understood and appreciated as they were. To-day, already, we find it difficult to understand them.
It is characteristic that the word work finds no place in the description of their lives. They never learned anything methodically, and in their fear of being unfeminine are proud of this—as we observed in the case of Rahel. Even that accomplished linguist, Henriette Herz, is deeply offended because Jean Paul in one of his letters used the expression, "M. Herz and his learned wife." Charlotte Stieglitz has not the faintest idea that talent is developed by work, by obstinate industry, and not by bereavements. And Bettina, the bayadere, who imitates Mignon's egg-dance, has nothing whatever to do with work. This fact impresses itself on us when we are annoyed by the slovenly composition and the want of any real understanding of politics in her book for the king.
About the year 1848 it began to be recognised that all this intellectuality would have been more solid, more real, more lasting, if these women had known something, had followed some course of study, taken up one or other branch of science. All this soaring thought would have been doubly valuable if it had in the first place been subjected to regular discipline. To soar without previous training is often mere waste of power. If Rahel had had a solid foundation of knowledge to build upon, she would have had a very different influence upon posterity. As it is, her ideas, obscure and lucid, chaff and seed-corn, are scattered to the winds.
In the Thirties men still believed in an inspiration that could dispense with knowledge, in a morality of the heart which rendered any reform of the old social morality unnecessary, in a defiance of law which allowed all laws to hold good, but kept clear of them all. This state of matters Young Germany was bent upon altering.