Woman's love is the mainspring of action in poetry. But the sensuous and sensual side of woman's life not alone influenced the character and nature of I may boldly say all the German poets of the storm and stress period as well as of the great classical era. Their religious and ethical being was also powerfully moved by intellectual women. Goethe had become alienated from dogmatic religion, especially at the University of Leipzig, and when he returned sick and despondent to his native city, a friend of his mother, Fraulein von Klettenberg, by her "presence soothed his stormy, divergent passions at least for moments," and even won him over for a time to pietism. The mystic notions of the German Quakers, the Herrenhut brotherhood, besides studies in cabalistic alchemy, took, at least for a time, deep root in his soul. In his prayer he betrays an almost irrational longing for the union with God and separation from earthly things: "O that I could for once be filled with thee, Eternal One," and again: "Alas, this anxious deep torture of the soul, how long does it last on this earth!" Although after his recovery he was saved by his strong healthy nature from sentimental religious weakness, he always preserved a genuine toleration for the religious beliefs and errors of others, and his portrait of Fraulein von Klettenberg in his Confessions of a Beautiful Soul, will always remain a psychological masterpiece.
It was an intellectual woman, too, who succeeded in winning the poet Fritz Stolberg over to the Roman Catholic Church. Princess Amalia Galitzin, called the Christian Aspasia, in Miinster, the centre of Westphalian Catholicism, gathered the North German Catholics as well as the Orthodox Protestants around her, and exercised for a time a powerful influence.
As women at all times affected the hearts and souls of the great poets, there is not one who was not moulded by womanly affections, so they in turn were remoulded by the respective lovers. This is proved by the entire literature of the period. The great ballad poet Burger, scorning the tenets of morality, leads a dissolute life; and this life is reflected even in his best work. He marries Dorette Leonhardt, while he already loves her younger sister Molly, and his passion for the latter grows more impetuous during his married life. As Molly returns his criminal love, the lawful wife resigns herself to a relation which destroys the lives of all three. After having lost both his wives in rapid succession, he commits the error of marrying a third wife, Elise Hahn, who, carried away by his poetry, offers herself to Burger, whom she has never seen, and who romantically accepts her hand. But "the delusion was short, repentance was long." Elise's fickleness, frivolity, and manifest infidelity soon brought about a divorce. Broken in heart and spirit, the great poet, whose life had been wrecked by "the eternal feminine," which, instead of uplifting him, dragged him into the mire, died, solitary, wretched, and reduced to poverty and self-contempt. His poetry bears the traces of his ruined life.
On the other hand, the simple, virtuous and idyllic, pastoral life in Germany is charmingly portrayed in Voss's Luise, and is illuminated by Goethe's poetic genius in Hermann and Dorothea. Goethe, however, not only depicted idyllic life in poetry, but actually lived it in his student days in Strassburg with Friederike Brion, the pastor's daughter, of Sessenheim. The art of painting has immortalized in numberless pictures the charming idyllic forms of the lovely shepherdesses, the Luises, the Mariannes. Miller's Siegwart, a Cloister Story, is one of the many picture books of the feminine soul of that complex period of simplicity and enlightenment. Chodowiecki, the great painter, is perhaps the best delineator of those typical figures of German womanhood.
Sophie La Roche, who had in her youth revolutionized the mind of the great poet Christoph Martin Wieland, was one of the most remarkable women of her time. Wieland, in his youth, conceived a passionate love for Sophie, whom he introduced into the treasure house of poetry, but his enthusiastic love for her did not terminate in marriage. She remained, however, during all her life his intimate friend, though Goethe's overwhelming genius made Wieland's star pale in her later estimate. As the wife of Maximilian La Roche, councillor of the Elector of Mainz, she turned to French literature, especially to Voltaire and Rousseau, and made her home "the place of spiritual pilgrimage on the Rhine for German authors. Young Goethe was received there, and according to his disposition, against which he was quite helpless revered the mother for the sake of her two beautiful daughters, who were just approaching womanhood. When her husband lost favor with the prince, Sophie supported her family by her writings as "the teacher of Germany's daughters." Her novels, written in the spirit of Richardson, are valuable records of the many-colored court life and of the activities of the social personages of her time. A modern author, Ludmilla Assing, has described the life of this extraordinary woman, who is to be remembered not only for her own merit, but as the grandmother of Clemens and Bettina Brentano; because of whom Sophie La Roche may be called the grandmother of German "Romanticism."
It is impossible to give even the most cursory account of the remarkable German women of this later period, for at every step we meet with such an embarras de richesse of extraordinary women, of whom voluminous biographical accounts have been written, that we can only select typical characters.
Besides Caroline Neuberin, the pioneer and founder of a respectable German stage, only one important woman played a role in the life of the grand Lessing. A great love awoke in his heart for Eva Konig, "the only woman with whom he would venture to live." To realize his desire, he accepted a poorly paid position as librarian at Wolfenbiittel. He was forty years old when the betrothal took place, but six years later his circumstances for the first time permitted him to marry. His happiness lasted but a short time. On Christmas eve, in 1777, a son was born to him, who died at birth; and two weeks later, to his inconsolable grief, he lost his beloved wife. His literary references to this great sorrow belong to the most pathetic passages in literature, just as his correspondence with Eva Konig, edited by Alfred Schone, furnishes the most charming portrait of a great man.
Lessing's correspondence with Eva Konig is but an additional proof that among the most valuable documents adduced for the characterization of German womanhood are love letters to and from German women. Such letters are accessible to us from the thirteenth century. During the fourteenth century they become more numerous: a nun corresponds, perchance, with her father confessor; presents are exchanged, and sentiments, not always of a purely religious nature. Now and then the tender phrase is wanting, but is replaced by a crude picture of a heart pierced with an arrow. Later on we find an address like "lovable, subtle, beneficent, well-formed, overloved woman." Luther greets his "friendly, dear 'lord,' Frau Catherine von Bora, Doctor Lutherin in Wittenberg" with teasing endearments, as he complains of the fare at the court of Saxony and expresses his longing for home: "What a good wine and beer have I at home, besides a charming wife, or should I say 'lord!'" An attractive originality shines forth from the letters of Duchess Elizabeth Charlotte of Orleans, and from those of Goethe's mother. Naturalness was the ideal in letter writing of the late eighteenth century, as artificiality had been that of the preceding era. Frau Gottsched, in her letters, reveals a roguish grace that contrasts with the stilted style of her tyrant husband. Goethe's letters of love and longing in Werther will stand as a model as long as literature shall be esteemed in the world, although there is a realistic and totally indefensible sentimentality in Werther's love of Lotte, the wife of another man.
Werther, beautiful of form, spiritual, and highly gifted, had, naturally, frequently aroused love without returning it; now Nemesis seizes him; he loves, loves to madness the wife of another man. The loveliness of Lotte (by the way, she is a real person, Charlotte Buff; while the lover is a composite of Goethe himself and young Jerusalem, who had actually shot himself at Wetzlar for the love of another man's wife), as we see her in pictures of German artists, feeding her numerous brothers and sisters, who cling to her, fans Werther's love, which is stronger than all the other forces of his heart. Unable to resist his passion, he chooses death as an inevitable necessity. The romance presented in the letters of the hero only concentrates the sequence of events forcibly upon the tragic climax. Lotte is the passive instrument in bringing about Werther's suicide. As to Werther he is Goethe himself, the novel is simply a fragment of a great confession.
Goethe's numberless works, touching upon universal interests, are among the most profound and most exhaustive treatises on womanly nature ever written. Women accompany him through his long life and influence him at every step of his career as poet, philosopher, and statesman. His extraordinary mother, of a patrician Frankfort family, spirited, natural, poetic, with a melodious, beautiful soul, instilled into him the sense of the beautiful and perchance gave him creative force.