The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. by Various

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Munich, November 9, 1809.

* * * This is my vow: I will gather flowers for thee and bright garlands
shall adorn thy entrance; should thy foot stumble, it will be over the
wreaths which I have laid on thy threshold, and shouldst thou dream, it
is the balsam of magic blossoms that intoxicates thee--flowers of a
strange and distant world where I am at home and not a stranger as in
this book[12] where a ravenous tiger devours the delicate image of
spiritual love. I do not understand this cruel riddle; I cannot
comprehend why they all make themselves unhappy and why they all serve a
malicious demon with a thorny sceptre, why Charlotte, who strews incense
before him daily, yes, hourly, should prepare misfortune for them all
with mathematical precision! Is not love free? Are those two not
affinities? Why should she prevent them from living this innocent life
with and near each other? They are twins; twined round each other they
ripen on to their birth into the light, and she would separate these
seedlings because she cannot believe in innocence, which she inoculates
with the monstrous sin of prejudice! O what a fatal precaution!

Let me tell you: No one seems to comprehend ideal love; they all believe
in sensual love, and consequently they neither experience nor bestow any
happiness that springs from that higher emotion or might be fully
realized through it. Whatever may fall to my lot, let it be through this
ideal love that tears down all barriers to new worlds of art,
divination, and poetry. Naturally it can live only in a noble element
just as it feels at home only in a lofty mind.

Here thy Mignon occurs to me--how she dances blindfolded between eggs.
My love is adroit; you can rely thoroughly on its instinct; it will also
dance on blindly, and will make no misstep. * * *

November 29, 1809.

I had written thus far yesterday, when I crept into bed from fear, but I
could not succeed yesterday in falling asleep at thy feet, lost in
contemplation of thee as I do every evening. I was ashamed that I had
chattered so arrogantly, and perhaps all is not as I mean it. Maybe it
is jealousy that excites me so and impels me to seek a way to draw thee
to me again and make thee forget _her_.[13]

Well, put me to the test, and, be it as it may, do not forget my love.
Forgive me also for sending thee my diary. I wrote it on the Rhine and
have spread out before thee my childhood years and shown thee how our
mutual affinity drove me on like a rivulet hastening on over crags and
rocks, through thorns and mosses, till thou, mighty stream, didst engulf
me. Yes, I wanted to keep this book until I should at last be with thee
again, so that I might tell by looking into thy eyes in the morning what
thou hadst read in it the evening before. But now it torments me to
think of thee substituting my diary for Ottilie's, and loving the living
one who remains with thee more than the one who has departed from thee.

Do not burn my letters, do not tear them up, for it might give thee
pain--so firmly, so absolutely, am I joined to thee. But do not show
them to any one; keep them concealed like a secret beauty, for my love
is becoming to thee; thou art beautiful because thou feelest thyself
loved!

February 29, 1810.

I will confess to thee and honestly acknowledge all my sins--first,
those for which thou art partly responsible and which thou too must
expiate with me, then those which weigh most heavily on me, and finally
those in which I actually rejoice.

First: I tell thee too often that I love thee, yet I know nothing else,
no matter how, much I turn it one way or the other; that's all there is.

Secondly: I am jealous of all thy friends, the playmates of thy youth,
the sun that shines into thy room, thy servants, and, above all, thy
gardener that lays out the asparagus-beds at thy command.

Thirdly: I begrudge thee all pleasure because I am not along. When any
one has seen thee and speaks of thy gaiety and charm, it does not please
me particularly; but when he says thou wast serious, cool, and reserved,
then I am delighted!

Fourthly: I neglect every one for thy sake; nobody is anything to me,
and I don't care anything about their love; indeed, if any one praises
me, he displeased me. That is jealousy of thee and me, and by no means a
proof of a generous heart; it is a sign of a wretched character that
withers on one side when it would blossom on the other.

Fifthly: I have a great inclination to despise everybody, especially
those that praise thee, and I cannot bear to hear anything good said of
thee. Only a few simple persons can I allow to speak of thee, and it
need not be praise at that. No, they may even make fun of thee a little,
and then, I can tell thee, an unmerciful roguishness comes over me when
I can throw off the chains of slavery for a brief spell.

Sixthly: I have a deep resentment in my soul that it is not thee with
whom I live under the same roof and with whom I breathe the same air. I
am afraid to be near strangers. In church I look for a seat on the
beggars' bench, because they are the most neutral; the finer the people,
the stronger my aversion. To be touched makes me angry, ill, and
unhappy, and so I cannot stand it long in society at dances. I am fond
of dancing, could I but dance alone in the open where the breath of
strangers would not touch me. What influence would it have on the soul
if one could always live near one's friend?--all the more painful the
struggle against that which must remain forever estranged, spiritually
as well as physically.

Seventhly: When I have to listen to any one reading aloud in company, I
sit in a corner and secretly hold my ears shut or, at the first word
that comes along, completely lose myself in thoughts. Then, when some
one does not understand, I awaken out of another world and presume to
supply the explanation, and what the rest consider madness is all
reasonable enough to me and consistent with an inner knowledge that I
cannot impart. Above all, I cannot bear to hear anything read from thy
works, nor can I bear to read them aloud; I must be alone with me and
thee.

Vienna, May 28, 1810.

It is Beethoven of whom I want to speak now, and in whom I have
forgotten the world and thee. I may not be qualified to judge, but I am
not mistaken when I say (what perhaps no one now realizes or believes)
that he is far in advance of the culture of all mankind, and I wonder
whether we can ever catch up with him! I doubt it. I only hope that he
may live until the mighty and sublime enigma that lies in his soul may
have reached its highest and ripest perfection. May he reach his highest
ideal, for then he will surely leave in our hands the key to a divine
knowledge which will bring us one step nearer true bliss!

To thee I may confess that I believe in a divine magic which is the
element of spiritual nature, and this magic Beethoven employs in his
music. All he can teach thee about it is pure magic; every combination
of sounds is a phase of a higher existence, and for this reason
Beethoven feels that he is the founder of a new sensuous basis in the
spiritual life. Thou wilt probably be able to feel intuitively what I am
trying to say, and that it is true. Who could replace this spirit? From
whom could we expect anything equivalent to it? All human activity
passes to and fro before him like clockwork; he alone creates freely
from his inmost self the undreamed of, the untreated. What would
intercourse with the outside world profit this man, who is at his sacred
work before sunrise and scarcely looks about him before sunset, who
forgets bodily nourishment, and who is borne in his flight by the stream
of inspiration past the shores of superficial, everyday life. He himself
said to me, "Whenever I open my eyes I cannot but sigh, for all I see is
counter to my religion and I must despise the world which does not
comprehend that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and
philosophy. It is the wine which inspires new creations, and I am the
Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for men and intoxicates their
spirit! * * * I have no friend and must ever be alone, but I know that God
is nearer to me in my art than to others, and I commune with him
without fear; I have always recognized Him and understood Him. Nor have
I any fears for my music; it can meet no evil fate, for he to whom it
makes itself intelligible will be freed from all misery with which
others are burdened."

All this Beethoven said to me the first time I saw him, and I was
penetrated with a feeling of reverence when he expressed himself to me
with such friendly candor, since I must have seemed very unimportant to
him. Besides, I was astonished, for I had been told that he was
exceedingly reticent and avoided conversation with any one; in fact,
they were afraid to introduce me to him, so I had to look him up alone.
He has three dwellings in which he alternately conceals himself--one in
the country, one in the city, and the third on the bastion, in the third
story of which I found him. I entered unannounced and mentioned my name.
He was seated at the piano and was quite amiable. He inquired whether I
did not wish to hear a song that he had just composed. Then he sang, in
a shrill and piercing voice, so that the plaintiveness reacted upon the
listener, "Knowest thou the land?" "It is beautiful, isn't it, very
beautiful!" he cried, enraptured; "I'll sing it again;" and was
delighted at my ready applause. "Most people are stirred by something
good, but they are not artistic natures; artists are fiery--they do not
weep." Then he sang one of thy songs that he had composed lately, "Dry
not, Tears of Eternal Love."

Yesterday I went for a walk with him through a beautiful garden at
Schoenbrunn that was in full blossom; all the hothouses were open and the
fragrance was overpowering. Beethoven stopped in the burning sun and
said, "Goethe's poems exercise a great power over me, not alone through
their content, but also through their rhythm, and I am incited and moved
to compose by his language, which is built up as if by the aid of
spirits into a sublime structure that bears within it the mystery of
harmonies. Then from the focus of my inspiration I must let the melody
stream forth in every direction; I pursue it, passionately overtake it
again, see it escaping me a second time and disappearing in a host of
varying emotions; soon I seize it with renewed ardor; I can no longer
separate myself from it, but with impetuous rapture I must reproduce it
in all modulations, and, in the final moment, I triumph over the musical
idea--and that, you see, is a symphony! Yes, music is truly the mediator
between the spiritual and the sensuous world. I should like to discuss
this with Goethe; I wonder whether he would understand me! Melody is the
sensuous life of poetry. Does not the spiritual content of a poem become
sensuous feeling through melody? Do we not in the song of Mignon feel
her whole sensuous mood through melody, and does not this sensation
incite one in turn to new creations? Then the spirit longs to expand to
boundless universality where everything together forms a channel for the
_feelings_ that spring from the simple musical thought and that
otherwise would die away unnoted. This is harmony; this is expressed in
my symphonies; the blending of manifold forms rolls on to the goal in a
single channel. At such moments one feels that something eternal,
infinite, something that can never be wholly comprehended, lies in all
things spiritual; and although I always have the feeling of success in
my compositions, yet with the last stroke of the drum with which I have
driven home my own enjoyment, my musical conviction, to my hearers, I
feel an eternal hunger to begin anew, like a child, what a moment before
seemed to me to have been exhausted.

"Speak to Goethe of me; and tell him to hear my symphonies. Then he will
agree with me that music is the sole incorporeal entrance into a higher
world of knowledge which, to be sure, embraces man, but which he, on the
other hand, can never embrace. Rhythm of the spirit is necessary to
comprehend music in its essence; music imparts presentiments,
inspirations of divine science, and what the spirit experiences of the
sensuous in it is the embodiment of spiritual knowledge. Although the
spirits live upon music as man lives upon air, it is a very different
matter to _comprehend_ it with the spirit. But the more the soul draws
its sensuous nourishment from it, the riper the spirit becomes for a
happy mutual understanding.

"But few ever attain this understanding, for just as thousands marry for
love and yet love is never once revealed to them, although they all
pursue the trade of love, so do thousands hold communion with music and
yet do not possess its revelation. For music also has as its foundation
the sublime tokens of the moral sense, just as every art does; every
genuine invention indicates moral progress. To subject oneself to its
inscrutable laws, to curb and guide one's spirit by means of these laws,
so that it will pour forth the revelations of music--this is the
isolating principle of art. To be dissolved by its revelation--that is
the surrender to the divine, which quietly exercises its mastery over
the delirium of unbridled forces and thus imparts the greatest efficacy
to the imagination. Thus art always represents divinity, and the human
relationship to art constitutes religion. Whatever we acquire through
art comes from God; it is a divine inspiration, which sets up an
attainable goal for human capacities.

"We do not know whence our knowledge comes; the firmly inclosed seed
requires the warm, moist, electric soil to sprout, to think, to express
itself. Music is the electric soil in which the soul lives, thinks,
invents. Philosophy is a precipitation of its electric spirit, and the
need that philosophy feels of basing everything on an ultimate principle
is in turn relieved by music. Although the spirit is not master of what
it creates through the mediation of music, yet it experiences ecstasy in
this creation. In this way every genuine creation of art is independent,
mightier than the artist himself, and through its expression it returns
to its divine source; it is concerned with man only insomuch as it bears
witness to divine mediation in him.

"Music gives the spirit its relation to harmony. A thought, even when
isolated, still senses the totality of relationship in the spirit; thus
every thought in music is most intimately and inseparably related to the
totality of harmony, which is unity. Everything electric stimulates the
spirit to fluent, precipitous, musical creation. I myself am of an
electrical nature." * * *

He took me to a grand rehearsal with full orchestra, and I sat back in a
box all alone in the large, unlighted hall, and saw this mighty spirit
wield his authority. Oh, Goethe I No emperor, no king, is so conscious
of his power, so conscious that all power radiates from him, as this
same Beethoven is, who only now in the garden was searching for the
source of his inspiration. If I understood him as I feel him, I should
be omniscient. There he stood, so firmly resolved, his gestures and
features expressing the perfection of his creation, anticipating every
error, every misconception; every breath obeyed his will, and everything
was set into the most rational activity by the superb presence of his
spirit. One might well prophesy that such a spirit will reappear in a
later reincarnation as ruler of the universe!

November 4, 1810.

Dost thou want me to tell thee of bygone days, how, when thy spirit was
revealed to me, I gained control over my own spirit in order the more
perfectly to embrace and love thine? And why should I not become dizzy
with ecstasy? Is the prospect of a fall so fearful after all? Just as
the precious jewel, touched by a single ray of light, reflects a
thousand colors, so also thy beauty, illumined only by the ray of my
enthusiasm, will be enriched a thousandfold.

It is only when everything is comprehended that the Something can prove
its full worth, and so thou wilt understand when I tell thee that the
bed in which thy mother brought thee into the world had blue checkered
hangings. She was eighteen years old at the time, and had been married a
year. In this connection she remarked that thou wouldst remain forever
young and that thy heart would never grow old, since thou hadst received
thy mother's youth into the bargain. Thou didst ponder the matter for
three days before thou didst decide to come into the world, and thy
mother was in great pain. Angry that necessity had driven thee from thy
nature-abode and because of the bungling of the nurse, thou didst arrive
quite black and with no signs of life. They laid thee in a so-called
butcher's tray and bathed thee in wine, quite despairing of thy life.
Thy grandmother stood behind the bed, and when thou didst open thine
eyes she cried out, "Frau Rat, he lives!" "Then my maternal heart awoke
and it has lived in unceasing enthusiasm to this very hour," said thy
mother to me in her seventy-fifth year. Thy grandfather, one of the most
honored citizens of Frankfurt and at that time syndic, always applied
good as well as bad fortune to the welfare of the city, and so thy
difficult birth resulted in an accoucher being appointed for the poor.
"Even in his cradle he was a blessing to mankind," said thy mother. She
gave thee her breast but thou couldst not be induced to take
nourishment, and so a nurse was procured for thee. "Since he drank from
her with such appetite and comfort and we discovered that I had no
milk," she said, "we soon noticed that he was wiser than all of us when
he wouldn't take nourishment from me."

Now that thou art born at last I can pause a little; now that thou art
in the world, each moment is dear enough to me to linger over it, and I
have no desire to call up the second moment, since it will drive me away
from the first. "Where'er thou art are love and goodness, where'er thou
art is nature too." Now I shall wait till thou writest me again, "Pray
go on with thy story." Then I shall first ask, "Well, where did we leave
off?" and then I shall tell thee of thy grandparents, thy dreams, thy
beauty, pride, love, etc. Amen.

"Frau Rat, he lives!" These words always thrilled me through and
through whenever thy mother uttered them in exultant tones. Of thy birth
we may well say:

The sword that threatens danger
Hangs often by a thread;
But the blessing of eternity
On us one gracious glance may shed.

Extract from a letter written in 1822, ten years after the breach in
their relations.

To give perfect expression to thee would probably be the most powerful
seal of my love, indeed, being a creation of divine nature, it would
prove my affinity to thee. It would be an enigma solved, like unto a
long restrained mountain torrent which at last penetrates to the light,
enduring the tremendous fall in voluptuous rapture, at a moment of life
through which and after which a higher existence begins.

Thou destroyer, who hast taken my free will from me; thou creator, who
hast produced within me the sensation of awakening, who hast convulsed
me with a thousand electric sparks from the realm of sacred nature!
Through thee I learned to love the curling of the tender vine, and the
tears of my longing have fallen on its frost-kissed fruits; for thy sake
I have kissed the young grass, for thy sake offered my open bosom to the
dew; for thy sake I have listened intently when the butterfly and the
bee swarmed about me, for I wanted to feel _thee_ in the sacred sphere
of thy enjoyments. Oh, thou; toy in disguise with thy beloved--could I
help, after I had divined thy secret, becoming intoxicated with love for
thee?

Canst thou divine the thrills that shook me when the trees poured down
their fragrance and their blossoms upon me? For I thought and felt and
firmly believed that it was _thy_ caressing of nature, _thy_ enjoyment
of her beauty, that it was _her_ yearning, _her_ surrender to thee, that
loosened these blossoms from their trembling boughs and sent them gently
whirling into my lap.

BETTINA.

IMMERMANN AND HIS DRAMA "MERLIN"

BY MARTIN SCHUeTZE, PH.D. Associate Professor of German Literature,
University of Chicago

Karl Lebrecht Immermann was born in Magdeburg, in April, 1796. His
father, who held a good position in the Civil Service, was a very severe
and domineering man; his mother, imaginative and over-indulgent. Karl's
childhood and early youth were uneventful. After passing through the
regular course of preparatory education in a "Gymnasium," he entered, in
1813, the University of Halle. During his first year there, Germany rose
up to throw off the yoke of Napoleon, and the King of Prussia issued a
proclamation calling the nation to arms, to which the people responded
with unprecedented unanimity and enthusiasm. Schoolboys and bearded men,
laborers and professional men, merchants and soldiers, united in one
patriotic purpose. The regular army was everywhere supplemented by
volunteer organizations. An epoch began which in its enthusiasm, its
idealism, the force and richness of its inspiration, and its
overwhelming impetus deserved, more than any other in modern history,
its title: "The Spring of Nations."

Immermann's sensitive and responsive nature thrilled with the general
impulse, and he asked his father to let him join the army, but was told,
peremptorily, not to interrupt the first year of his studies. He
submitted, and plunged into the study of the literature of the
Romanticists, which, in its remoteness from actuality, offered
distraction from his disappointment. During this time he fell ill of
typhoid fever, from which he did not fully recover until the campaign
had victoriously ended in the battle of Leipzig. He joined, however,
after Napoleon's escape from Elba, the second campaign, in which he took
part in two battles. At the end of the war, having retired as an officer
of the reserves, he returned to Halle to finish his study of the law.

He found a new spirit dominant among the students. This spirit,
characterized by a strongly democratic desire for national unity, pride
of race, and impatience with external and conventional restraints, had a
rich network of roots in the immediate past: in the individualism and
the humanism of the Storm and Stress Movement and the Classic Era of the
eighteenth century; in the subjective idealism of the Romantic school;
in the nationalism of Klopstock, Herder, Schiller, and Fichte, and in
the self-reliant transcendentalism of Kant's philosophy and
Schleiermacher's theology. This spirit had received its political
direction principally through the genius of the Baron von Stein, the
Prussian statesman, whose aim was the restoration of German national
unity. He believed that the political unity of Germany must rest on the
soundness of the common people, rather than on the pretensions of the
aristocracy whose corruption he held responsible for the decadence of
the nation. Following the example of Frederick the Great, he tried to
foster the simple virtues of the common man. He was, however, opposed to
radicalism, seeing permanent progress only in order, self-discipline,
and moderation. His leading idea, which was shared by such men as
Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Niebuhr, and others, was that the principal task
of the time was to arouse the whole nation to independent political
thinking and activity, in order to develop self-confidence, courage, and
devotion to a great unselfish ideal. These ideas became a national
ideal, an active passion, under the pressure and stress of the
Napoleonic usurpation and in the heat and fervor of war and victory.

[Illustration: C.T. LESSING KARL LERRECHT IMMERMANN]

It was unavoidable that this spirit produced among the younger men,
and especially among the university students, traditionally unaccustomed
to patience with restraints, many excesses, absurdities and follies.
An extreme and tyrannical nativism, a tasteless archaism in dress,
manner, and speech, an intolerant and aggressive democratic propaganda
offended and bullied the more conservative. This spirit spread
particularly through the agencies of the student fraternities called
"Burschenschaften," and the athletic associations, the "Turners,"
advocated and fostered by Jahn.

Immermann became the mouthpiece of the conservatives among the students,
and he went so far as to publish some pamphlets denouncing specific acts
of violence of the leading radical fraternity, the "Teutonia." When the
university authorities, who to a considerable extent sympathized with
the radicals, neglected to act, Immermann addressed a complaint to the
King. This move resulted in the dissolution of the accused fraternity
and in governmental hostility to all fraternities, and brought the
hatred and contempt of the radicals on Immermann.

Immermann acted undoubtedly from sincere motives, yet deserved much of
the condemnation he suffered. He had not sufficient vision to penetrate
through the objectionable and tasteless externalities of the liberal
movement--with which he was unfairly preoccupied even at the time of
_Die Epigonen_, a score of years later--to the greater and enduring core
of the aspirations of the modern age. The petty things were too near to
his eye and obscured the greater things which were further removed. He
thought he upheld a higher principle of morality by applying the
principles of von Stein to a new situation; but be failed to see the
new, larger morality imbedded in much confusion. History has reversed
his judgment.

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