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).