Her final exit from the troubled stage of earth was accomplished with difficulty. The village pastor, determined that no actress should be buried in the consecrated ground over which he held sway, locked the churchyard gates and refused to yield up the key. Madame Neuber's coffin was therefore hoisted over the wall and lowered into the grave by two or three old friends. No prayer was spoken; no hymn was sung. But Caroline Neuber's influence for good lives. She performed two great services: she purified the German drama, and she introduced Lessing to the world.
In every time and clime, belles have danced and flirted and laughed and chatted and been happy. Madame Johanna Schopenhauer, the famous mother of her more famous philosopher son, Arthur, has left a pleasing description of fashion's whimseys in the eighteenth century:
"We had no thin ball dresses, for the simple reason that thin varieties of woven material had not then been invented. And yet we danced in our cumbrous company gowns made of heavy silk we were passionately fond of dancing. We were courted, admired, nay, even as much admired as our granddaughters are now in their cloudlike, treacherously diaphanous garments. How it happened, in our hideous disguises, I cannot, at this distance of time, pretend to explain. How well I remember my first ball!
"At least an ell was added to my stature by a monstrous tower of hair which was built up on a wire and horsehair frame, and which was crowned with flowers, feathers, and ribbons. The high heels of my white ball slippers, which were adorned with golden ties, contributed to counterbalance the disproportion in my little person at the other extremity. Though my shoes fell far short of the preposterous height of my hair, they raised my heels so far from the ground as to pitch me on the tips of my toes. A pair of stays with whalebones close together, of a thickness sufficient to turn a musket ball, forced back the arms and shoulders and threw the chest forward. Down toward the hips the corset was laced so tightly as to make one's figure resemble that of a wasp. These stays restricted all freedom of motion. They had only one sensible thing about them, and that was a rather stout iron which kept them from pressing on the breast.
"And now, the hooped petticoat over which was worn a silk skirt with flounces and all kinds of indescribable trimmings up to the knees. Over this was worn a robe of the same material, with a long train. In front this robe was open, sloping on each side from the waist. The sides of the robe were ornamented with the same kind of trimming as adorned the skirt. The neck and bosom were considerably exposed. The whole was completed with an immense bouquet of artificial flowers. The sleeves reached only to the elbows, and were richly trimmed with blond lace and ribbons to the shoulders.
"This, however, was the dress of young ladies only. Our mothers were splendid in stiff brocades and ruffles of blond or point lace. Long sleeves were not worn at all, even for everyday dresses, summer or winter. Hardened by habit, we did not suffer more than we do now. Our mothers dressed much more richly than we did. They were heavily loaded with jewels.
"The fashions were obtained from Paris, but only when they had become rather obsolete there. Though disfigured by exaggeration, they were eagerly sought after. One exception only was made, in our part of the country at least: the French habit of using rouge was not adopted. The few ladies who dared be so heterodox as to paint themselves did it with fear and trembling and with the greatest secrecy, for they ran the risk of being publicly reprimanded from the pulpit. Our Lutheran shepherd was very strict with his flock.
"Another fashion, however, found universal favor with our elegant ladies. A fashion so senseless that I should, certainly, have doubted its existence if I had not, as a child, often played with my mother's mother-of-pearl box of patches. All ladies wore patches, and my mother always kept her box handy, its lid being provided with a small looking-glass, so that if a patch fell off she might at once replace it with another. These little ornaments, made of English court-plaster, were cut in the shape of full, half and crescent moons, stars, hearts, etc., and were stuck on the face with much forethought and ingenuity to heighten the charms of the wearer, and to add a graceful expression to the countenance. A row of tiny moons, gradually increasing in size from the crescent to the full, at the outer corner of the eye, was supposed to make that organ look larger, and to heighten its brightness. A couple of small stars at the corner of the mouth was thought to impart an enchantingly roguish expression to it. A patch on the cheek was thought to bring out a dimple to advantage. There were, besides, patches of larger size doves, cupids, suns, and others known by the general name of 'assassins,' probably because of their killing effect on masculine hearts."
In the last analysis, the position of woman in any given period depends upon the currently accepted philosophy underlying that period. The philosophy of the seventeenth century that of Descartes and Leibnitz maybe condensed in one word mechanism. Woman, with her emotional nature, her wayward, irregular fancies, her insistence upon personal love instead of rigid law, her lack of logic, and her perplexing, often keenly puncturing intuitions, had no place in the well-arranged system of Descartes and Leibnitz. It was even questioned, satirically in France, but seriously in Germany, whether or not woman was a human being. If not, said the learned divines who argued the question in their pulpits, she could not be eligible to salvation. The conclusion, not unanimous, however, finally reached was that women ought to be looked upon as human beings, lower, of course, than man, but a grade or two higher than the beasts of the field.
Of seventeenth century philosophers, Spinoza, "the God-intoxicated man," alone met any of the conscious higher needs of woman. Hence, women, by thousands, accepted the philosophy of Spinoza under the name of Quietism.
Seventeenth century philosophy made woman nothing. Eighteenth century philosophy, springing from the English utilitarians, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, made woman a mere adjunct, a tool of man. Above all things else, an Englishman loves his home. A good wife makes a man more comfortable in his home than a bad one. "Therefore," said eighteenth century philosophy, "'tis the part of worldly prudence to train women toward virtue." This thought is the substance of Locke's Treatise on Education, so far as it concerns women. "A husband of high social standing may be the reward of persistent virtue," added Samuel Richardson, the man through whom Locke's philosophy became potent over women of all ranks in all civilized countries.
For more than half a century Locke's philosophy, filtered through Richardson's novels, colored feminine ideals almost as deeply on the continent as in the author's own country. Rousseau was a third link in the chain a very strong, a mighty link.
Richardson's first novel was Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles Grandison soon followed. Each of these books, translated into German, passed through many editions. French renderings of Richardson's novels also flooded German book stores. This author's books struck both new and old chords in the heart of German womanhood. They dealt with heroines who moved in the humbler walks of life. Before Richardson and Rousseau wrote, the memoirs of highborn dames may be searched in vain for a single expression of sisterly feeling toward women in a lower rank of society than their own. Compassion and almsgiving were not lacking, but the "put yourself in her place" feeling seems never previously to have been awakened. Richardson emphasized chastity a virtue which the early eighteenth century world most sadly lacked. He made the hearthstone once more an altar.
Out of the sentimentalism of the Locke-Richardson-Rousseau school was evolved a type of womanhood which, during the second half of the eighteenth century, made the world purer and better.
About the middle of the eighteenth century, after long and weary years of unfruitful struggle, disappointment and desolation, there begins faintly to glimmer, and then rapidly to shine in broad illumination, a stupendous cultural movement the impelling force of which was the humanizing thought which sprang from the fertile brains of great literary and philosophical thinkers; preeminent among whom were Lessing, the greatest critical genius of the German nation, and Kant, Germany's greatest philosopher. Enlightenment mental liberation from the shackles of tradition and orthodoxy became the watch-word of the time. Through the dominating personality of Frederick the Great (1740-1786), even despotism was made to feel this influence, the scope of which was still further extended, though less successfully, by the reforms of Joseph II. (1765-1790), Maria Theresa's son. The message sounded from beyond the seas in the American Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution spread through the hearts of the nations of Europe, proclaiming the gospel of human rights and equality before God and the law. The French Revolution was its most direct fruit. In Germany, the liberation of thought, of science and art, the emancipation of man and woman alike, had to precede political freedom which, in its full development, could be evolved only by blood and iron.
It is true, however, that, though the idea of humanism then became the ideal of the present, there remained enough of the social and political vices and errors of the past to make this epoch perhaps the most complex and complicated in German history. Divine thought and mystic-sentimental-pseudo-science, the grossest lust and the highest idealism, the most abject servility and the most liberal political views, cynical scepticism and childlike faith, true patriotism and nationalism on the one hand, national treason and anti-national cosmopolitanism on the other, meet and conflict at every step.
But whatever were the conditions of the time, woman was thecausa movens, the underlying force of the cultural life of the nation and of all its leaders. Women contributed to the progress of the storm and stress evolution toward classicism and emancipation; women inspired the bloom of literature; women gave Germany a stage and adorned it with their genius as actresses; women fostered the arts; women on the throne ruled Germany; a German woman, withal the greatest and vilest, Katharine the Great, raised Russia to the rank of a world power; women dominated the nobility and the courts; women elevated the bourgeoisie to higher standards of living and thinking; women strove to emancipate themselves and their peasant husbands from servitude.
The movements of the women of the burgher classes were much more restricted than are those of the women of to-day. They might not walk abroad, or visit theatres, concerts, or public places, without their natural male companions; their chambermaids accompanied them even to church and to stores. Their natural field of activity, their world, was the house. The reading of novels was held in low esteem. Book learning was of a rather elementary kind, but there was plenty of good sense and home happiness, and sensible rearing of large families. It is a painful fact that from Bavaria, a country which was under the fullest sway of the Church, quite different testimony comes to us. We may realize, however, from the base tone of characteristic sermons, communicated to us in Nicolai's works, how low must have been the standard of the clergy of that time. The author and traveller Risbeck describes the degradation of the burgher classes in Bavaria, "where all vie in drinking and immorality, where next to every church stands a tavern and a base house. There a priest touches a fair maiden's bosom, which is half-covered with a 'scapulier.' There one inquires whether you are of her religion, for she will have nothing to do with a heretic. Another discusses during her debauch her spiritual sodalities, her pilgrimages and absolutions, etc., etc."
Owing to their gradual enfranchisement by Frederick the Great and Joseph II., the peasantry had mightily progressed from the brutal feudal oppression. The French Revolution also had some beneficent results for the German peasantry. After the terrible downfall of Prussia and Austria because of Napoleon's onslaughts, a great step forward was taken through the reforms of the statesman Stein, and the Revolution of 1848 accomplished the rest. Therewith the elevation of the women of the peasantry went hand in hand. The many and varied popular festivals of the German peasantry, with their peculiar customs and gaieties, reveal the fact that there was no lack of those harmless social pleasures which are the delight of woman, inasmuch as they give scope to characteristics peculiarly feminine. The festivals of singers, riflemen, and gymnasts, which were then and are to-day observed in nearly every little German town and village, also contributed to the enrichment of the life of the lower classes.
The chapter of wealth and poverty, of overwork and enforced idleness, belongs but incidentally to our theme, in so far as it affects the life and morality of German womanhood. While the record is, on the whole, favorable for the time, yet we cannot conceal the fact that with the pauperism of certain sections of Germany, due to wars, drought, princely maladministration, and unjust taxation, the female vices and crimes which are instigated by poverty attained terrible proportions. The great romantic authoress Bettina von Arnim has given us painful insight into the lives of the poor women in the "family-houses" of Berlin, a sad anticipation of our tenement houses. The female youth of the God-forsaken proletariat then, as to-day, fell almost irretrievable victims to the blasting, soul-consuming vice of prostitution. The numberless examples of the brave, courageous, noble self-sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of pure women of the poorest classes, who through overwork staggered into an early grave, are not statistically reported; but the statistics of prostitution of German cities, which are conscientiously recorded, reveal a terrible state of affairs, not worse than that of other great civilized nations, yet painful enough for the historian of culture.
But let us return to the shadow of the thrones of the second half of the eighteenth century. Under Maria Theresa's father, Charles VI. (1711-1740), the last Habsburger, French morals had been domesticated in Vienna. The monarch officially kept a mistress, maitresse en Hire. Lady Montague, a distinguished British peeress, reported that "every lady of rank in Vienna had two men, one who gave her his name, the other, who fulfilled the duties of the husband." These alliances were so general that it would have been a grievous offence not to invite the two men with the lady to a feast. It is true that with Maria Theresa's ascent to the throne a different morality was forced upon the unwilling court circles. The empress was virtuous and religious in the extreme, an admirable wife and mother, and maintained toward vice an unrelenting attitude.
The political greatness of Empress Maria Theresa does not belong to our theme. To characterize her, however, in a nutshell, we cannot forgo quoting her famous note to Prime Minister Kaunitz, with which she accompanied the treaty of the first partition of Poland in 1772: "When all my States were assailed and I did not know where to bear my child, I insisted upon my right and the help of God. But in this affair, in which not only manifest justice cries to heaven against us, but also right and common reason is against us, I must confess that I have never in my life felt such an anguish and such a shame to allow myself to be seen. Consider, Prince, what an example we give to all the world when, for a miserable piece of Poland or of Moldavia and Wallachia, we throw to the dogs our honor and reputation! I notice well that I stand alone and am no Longeren vigueur, therefore I let things take their course, though not without my greatest grief."
The moral example of Maria Theresa did not, however, in any great degree affect her gallant husband, Francis of Lorraine. His mistress, Princess Auersperg-Neipperg, had all the noble vices of her exalted position. The prime minister, Kaunitz, was utterly immoral, and even dared to take with him in his equipage his mistresses, who waited till his audience with the empress was over. When the latter once ventured to remonstrate with him, he replied: "Madam, I have come here to speak with you about your affairs, not about my own." The so-called chastity commission established by the empress to supervise the morals of Vienna succeeded in compelling those who persistently indulged in vices at least to exercise more caution and discretion; for she remained inexorable against scandalous debauch and inflicted ignominious chastisement upon the offenders, according to the Draconic code of the time. The result was that Vienna had its "Messalinas in toned down colors," as the British traveller Wraxall says, and that "the superstition of Austrian women, though it be traditional and immense, is by no means an obstacle to excesses; they sin, pray, confess, and begin anew."
The brilliant court at Vienna found its counterpart in the frugal, economical bourgeois court of Berlin, while that of Dresden, as mentioned in the foregoing chapters, was sunk in a mire of moral corruption. The memoirs of Marquise Sophie Wilhelmine of Baireuth, sister of Frederick the Great, describe, with humor and sometimes with ingenuous malice, the condition of the court at Dresden. The wife and children of the coarse soldier-king were treated with great harshness and almost deprived of the necessities of life. The marquise tells of a visit to Dresden in 1738, where Frederick fell in love with Countess Orzelska, a natural daughter and mistress of August the Strong. The pen refuses to record the history of the incest practised at that court with and among the three hundred and fifty-four "natural" children of August. August was jealous of the Crown Prince of Prussia, and therefore substituted for Countess Orzelska the beautiful Italian Formera, who became Frederick's first mistress. Later, however, at the return visit of the Saxon court to Berlin, as Scherr reports, Frederick again met the Countess Orzelska, a meeting which did not remain without consequences. Other details of the court life of the time cannot be put on paper: we must refer the reader to Scherr's discussion of Eighteenth Century Court Society, to Lessing's Emilia Galotti, in which in Italian disguise the great classicist chastises German princely rape, and to Schiller's drama, Cabal and Love, which proves that, unfortunately, the victims of princely lust were not always the willing courtesans; but frequently victims chosen from the people.
The court of Berlin is said by some to have assumed a higher standard of morality when Frederick ascended the throne. His consort, Princess Elizabeth of Brunswick, though a noble and pure woman, had never won his love, for he had been forced into the marriage by his father; she did not reside with her royal husband, whose life was now filled with his world-stirring military and political deeds and, for recreation, with music, history, and philosophy. On the other hand, from the report of the British ambassador, Lord Malmesbury (1772), it seems that the great king had not succeeded in raising the standard of morality among the inhabitants of his residence, as the ambassador, perhaps owing to splenetic exaggeration, writes that "there is in that capital neither an honest man nor a chaste woman. An absolute moral corruption prevails among both sexes of all classes, to which must be added a general impoverishment due to the fiscal oppressions of the actual king, Frederick the Great, and their love of luxury since the times of the king's grandfather. The men are constantly occupied with limited means in leading an immoral life. The women are harpies who have sunk so low more from want of modesty than anything else. They sell themselves to him who pays best, and delicacy or true love are to them unknown things." The great traveller and naturalist George Foster confirms that statement at least as regards women, whom he describes as "generally corrupted."
Though Frederick of Prussia and Joseph II. of Austria lived purely, at least after their respective accessions, and were, politically, epoch makers in history, they were both succeeded by rulers who were morally and politically decadent. Leopold of Austria (1790-1792) died after a reign of but two years, his death being caused by sexual excesses and debauchery with his German and Italian concubines. His private cabinet was, after his death, found to be a true "arsenal of lust."
Still more disastrous to Prussia proved the sovereignty of Frederick William II., nephew of the great Frederick; for during his calamitous reign of eleven years (1786-1797) this monarch disorganized the solid forces of the realm to such an extent that, a few years later, at the battle of Jena (1806), Napoleon succeeded, as it were with one blow, in overturning the proud structure of Frederick's state.
His court was the abode of an indescribable dissoluteness. As crown prince, he had been married to Princess Elizabeth of Brunswick, who, though not of good moral repute herself, nevertheless declined intercourse with her dissolute consort. We must waive the responsibility for the following report given by Scherr upon the authority of Dampmartin, the well-informed courtier. "Frederick the Great, desiring the succession to the throne to be ensured before his death, ordered an old chamberlain to communicate to the princess that he, the king, wished she should admit to intimate intercourse the lieutenant of the royal guard N. N. (Von Schmettau), who had impressed the king by the beauty of his form, his conduct, and his bravery. But no eloquence prevailed upon the princess to yield to the shameless demand, whereupon the king resolved upon the divorce of his nephew." Frederick William II. later married Princess Louise of Hesse-Darmstadt, who bore him an heir to the throne, the pure and honest Frederick William III. (1797-1840).
It must be said, however, that lawful marriage was but an episode in the life of the immoral king Frederick William II., while favorite after favorite divided his affections. Wilhelmina Encke, nominal wife of the chamberlain Rietz, later raised to the rank of Countess of Lichtenau, maintained her position with the king during his whole life, not only through the influence of her own charms, but by means of immoral services in connection with other beautiful women. Other ladies of noble birth, Julie von Voss and Countess Sophie von Donhoff, exacted almost a formal marriage from the king while the queen was actually alive, and the Evangelical Consistory was compelled submissively to sanction the royal bigamy. Rich payments to the families of the royal pseudo-wives are on record, and prove the accumulation of a debt of forty-nine million thalers at the death of the king, who had had at his disposal the treasure of Frederick the Great.
It is with relief that we leave the pages stained with the depravity and moral bankruptcy of the era of Countess Lichtenau.
One royal woman, shining in the lustre of purity, genuine nobility, and self-sacrificing patriotism, dispels the moral darkness around her as the sun purifies and warms the atmosphere of the world. Princess Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, consort of Frederick William III., mother of Emperor William I., great-grandmother of the actual German emperor, William II., is one of the purest and noblest of women of all times, and is rightly sanctified in the hearts, not only of all Germans, but of all, whether friend or foe, who have ever contemplated her life, her motherhood, her martyrdom, and her early death. From her pure bosom sprang, to a large extent, the present greatness of Germany.
Truly, were not the age too far advanced, Queen Louise deserved to be canonized. As if fate dared no relapse, no unworthy woman has succeeded her in the house of Hohenzollern. To offset the instances of the degradation of womanhood related for the sake of historical truth, let us twine a wreath of the laurel of fame, the myrtle of chastity, and the lilies of purity for her noble and beautiful brow.
A biographer well says of Louisa Augusta Wilhelmina Amelia, the fair, blue-eyed princess who was born on March 10, 1776, and baptized in the Church of the Holy Ghost, that the child was as sweet and fair as a lily unfolding in the genial sunshine of early spring. When the summer season of her life had run its course, when autumn's winds began to whisper that all bright things on earth must die to be renewed, the lily was gathered and taken away to bloom on in the Paradise above. Many eulogies were written in honor of Queen Louisa; one of the most pleasing is Jean Paul Richter's poetical allegory: "Before she was born, her Genius stood and questioned Fate. 'I have many wreaths for the child,' he said; 'the flower garland of beauty, the myrtle-wreath of marriage, the oak and laurel wreath of the love for the German Fatherland, and a crown of thorns; which of all may I give the child?' 'Give her all thy wreaths and crowns,' said Fate; 'but there still remains one which is worth all the others.' On the day when the death-wreath was placed on that noble forehead the Genius again appeared, but he questioned only by his tears. Then answered a voice 'Look up!' and the God of Christians appeared."
As a maiden of fourteen, Princess Louisa, through a providential circumstance, became with her sister Friederika the guest of Frau Rath Goethe in Frankfort on the occasion of the coronation of Emperor Leopold. Goethe's famous mother considered herself highly honored in being chosen as hostess to entertain the princesses. The occasion furnishes some very interesting glimpses of the character of both those famous women. Frau Goethe found the highborn sisters so simple-minded, so unaffected in their manners, that she was delighted with them. Frau Goethe, young with the young to the end of her days, entered into their enjoyment of scenes and circumstances invested with the charm of novelty for the light-hearted princesses. She never forgot the meeting with the future Queen of Prussia, and often used to tell a story about the pump in the rear of Goethe's house. When Louisa once espied the pump from the back room, she exclaimed roguishly: "I wonder if we could make the water rush out; how I should like to try." Upon a consenting wink, they rushed to the back yard and pumped to their hearts' content. The highborn lady-in-waiting was shocked and objected to their plebeian occupation, but Goethe's mother threatened to turn the door key rather than permit interference with the sport of her princely guests.
Bettina von Arnim, who was on terms of great intimacy with Goethe's mother, amusingly described in a letter to Goethe a meeting with the brother of the princesses, who had invited himself to eat bacon, salad, and pancake at Frau Goethe's house.
After the unfortunate campaign of the allies, Prussia and Austria against France in 1792, while the princes of Mecklenburg were with the army, Louisa and her three sisters were with their grandmother at Hildburghausen, comforting and cheering one another in those days of political desolation. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, the poet, enjoyed the distinction of the friendship of the princesses of Mecklenburg. Louisa, at the age of sixteen, is thus described. She was like her sister Charlotte, had "the same loving blue eyes," but their expression changed more quickly with the feeling or thought of the moment. Her soft brown hair still retained a gleam of the golden tints of childhood; her fair transparent complexion was in the bloom of its exquisite beauty, painted by nature as softly as were the roses she gathered and enjoyed. The princess was tall and slight, and graceful in all her movements. This grace was not merely external; it rose from the inner depths of a pure and noble mind, and therefore was full of soul.
On their return to Darmstadt, the capital of Princess George of Hesse, Louisa's grandmother, the princesses met the King of Prussia and his sons at Frankfort. It was an eventful day. The crown prince, later Frederick William III., whose "age was in sorrow, whose hope in God," as his motto runs, was captivated by the loveliness of Louisa. Long years after her death he revealed his feelings at that momentous hour to Bishop Eylert, his spiritual friend and comforter in sorrow, referring to Schiller's words in The Bride of Messina:
"So strangely, mysteriously, wonderfullyHer presence seized upon my inner life;'Twas not the magic of that lovely smile,'Twas not the charm which hover'd o'er her cheek,Not yet the radiance of her sylph-like form;It was the pure deep secret of her beingWhich held and fettered me with holy might.Like magic powers that blend mysteriously,Our twin souls seemed without one spoken wordTo spring together, spirit stirred to blendAs we together breathed the air of heaven.Stranger to me, yet inwardly akin,Beloved at once I felt graved on my heart'Tis she, or none on earth."
"So strangely, mysteriously, wonderfullyHer presence seized upon my inner life;'Twas not the magic of that lovely smile,'Twas not the charm which hover'd o'er her cheek,Not yet the radiance of her sylph-like form;It was the pure deep secret of her beingWhich held and fettered me with holy might.Like magic powers that blend mysteriously,Our twin souls seemed without one spoken wordTo spring together, spirit stirred to blendAs we together breathed the air of heaven.Stranger to me, yet inwardly akin,Beloved at once I felt graved on my heart'Tis she, or none on earth."
"So strangely, mysteriously, wonderfully
Her presence seized upon my inner life;
'Twas not the magic of that lovely smile,
'Twas not the charm which hover'd o'er her cheek,
Not yet the radiance of her sylph-like form;
It was the pure deep secret of her being
Which held and fettered me with holy might.
Like magic powers that blend mysteriously,
Our twin souls seemed without one spoken word
To spring together, spirit stirred to blend
As we together breathed the air of heaven.
Stranger to me, yet inwardly akin,
Beloved at once I felt graved on my heart
'Tis she, or none on earth."
On April 24, 1793, the double betrothals between the two royal sons of Prussia and the two Mecklenburg princesses were celebrated at Darmstadt. At the encampment of Mainz, Goethe saw the royal brothers and their fiancées walking through the canvas streets. Hidden in his own tent he was entranced by their charms: "Amid all the terrible and tumultuous memories of the war, the recollection of those two young ladies rises up before me like a heavenly vision, which having been once seen can never be forgotten." Princess Louisa may not even have known of Goethe's presence in the camp, but she knew his works well and admired especially his shorter poems. She certainly cherished the recollection of her stay in the great poet's house at Frankfort, in recognition of which Prince Charles Frederick of Mecklenburg had presented to Frau Goethe, as a token of thanks, a beautiful snuffbox which was to her almost a sacred relic.
On December 21st, Prince Charles Frederick, with his daughters and their grandmother, arrived at Potsdam, where they were awaited by the impatient bridegrooms. It was a day of universal joy, and every window of the city was illuminated when the royal visitors passed under the triumphal arch. Two days later there was a solemn entrance into Berlin. Universal was the admiration excited by the uncommon beauty and unaffected grace of the princesses. The foundation of Queen Louisa's popularity was laid. On Christmas eve, 1793, all the members of the royal family assembled in the apartments of the queen, where the diamond crown of the Hohenzollerns was placed upon Louisa's head. The entire court then betook themselves to the apartments of Elizabeth Christine, the unfortunate widow of Frederick the Great. What a contrast between this happy union of love, and that of the poor Princess of Brunswick who had been forced upon the unwilling Frederick! We learn from the court records that Louisa's bridal dress was entirely of silver lace, simply made, but that her corsage glittered with diamonds corresponding to those of the crown on her head.
This is not the place to dwell upon the home life of the royal couple, their happiness, their seclusion from the atmosphere of that corrupted court, Louisa's studies, especially of Shakespeare and the German classics, and the unconscious influence of purity that emanated from her presence. A sad time was approaching, and forebodings of political evil were not wanting. The king, whose private life had undermined his health, was slowly dying; but before the crown prince ascended the throne Louisa bore him two sons, both of whom were to be kings of Prussia, the second son was to be even Emperor of Germany and the restorer of the ancient glories of the empire. Louisa's husband, however, gentle, honest, upright, and his noble queen, the best beloved that ever ruled over Prussia, paid politically the penalty for their private happiness. The great statesman Von Stein rightly deemed him inadequate for the gigantic mission of reforming the decadence that had been going on steadily since the death of Frederick the Great: "I love him," he said, "for his kind, benevolent nature, his well meaning character; but I pity him for living in this iron age, in which to enable him to maintain his position, but one thing is necessary: commanding military talent, united with that reckless selfishness which can crush and trample everything under foot, and is ready to enthrone itself on corpses."
Nevertheless, the queen loyally aided her consort in his effort to improve the condition of the realm. Their travels through the provinces and the newly acquired Polish territories had a good effect. The domestic life of the royal family was a model one and made for morality in the lives of their subjects. The royal couple were patrons of arts and letters, and Queen Louisa was particularly enthusiastic in support of culture. But soon the wheel of fortune turned; the king, pacific in the extreme, did not recognize in time that, unless he would join in the coalition against the overweening pride and power of France, Prussia would, single handed, be compelled sooner or later to meet that power. The battle of Austerlitz prostrated Austria completely, and the doom of Prussia approached.
In the years of threat and war Queen Louisa lost a beloved son, Prince Ferdinand, and the sorrow alarmingly aggravated her previous indisposition. The waters of Pyrmont restored her somewhat, and as for a time painful political events were kept from her, the change of scene and the affections of her relatives and dearest friends brought to her once more a glimpse of happiness, the last that was to come into her brief life. Yet her constitution had been shaken by the harassing anxieties of the situation, and added sorrow was soon to fall upon unhappy Prussia. The army was repeatedly defeated, and blow after blow fell upon the unhappy country. The queen and her children fled to the confines of the realm, to Konigsberg, the coronation city of the Prussian kings. There her third son, Frederick Charles, fell ill with typhoid fever. The child recovered, but his mother contracted the disease and again went down to the brink of death. The famous physician Hufeland describes the anxieties of the crisis: "The queen was in the utmost danger, and all night long the wind howled terrifically. . . . The wind was so strong, it blew down a gable of the old castle. By the blessing of God the queen passed over the crisis of the fever, and was beginning to rally, when suddenly came the news that the French were approaching. It was feared that the queen was not strong enough to bear removal, and it was therefore put off as long as possible, but she begged to be taken away, quoting the words of King David:
'I am in great straits: let us now fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercies are great: and let us not fall into the hands of men.' In a blinding snowstorm and a heavy wind the queen and the delicate prince travelled for three days along the strand of the Baltic to Memel on the Russian frontier on their tedious, painful journey to exile, knowing not whether they would ever return. Hufeland reports in his diary: "The queen spent the first night in a miserable room with a broken window, and we found the melting snow was dropping on her bed. We were very much alarmed on her majesty's account, but she was full of trust and courage, and the fortitude with which she suffered, gave us strength to act. I cannot say how thankful we felt when we came within sight of Memel, and just at that moment the sun burst gloriously through the clouds for the first time since we had been on this journey, and we hailed it as a happy augury." In Memel the queen recovered, though living under the most distressing circumstances.
After the retreat of the French from the frontier the Prussian court repaired again to Konigsberg; the queen and Madame de Kriidener, the wife of the Russian ambassador, the religious friend of Czar Alexander, formed a lasting friendship. They attended frequently to the sick and wounded in the hospitals, and strengthened their faith in a bright future, at least for the unhappy country. After their separation, Louisa wrote to Madame de Krüdener: "I owe a confession to you, my good friend, which I know you will receive with tears of joy. You have made me better than I was before. Your truthful words, our conversations on Christianity, have left an impression on my mind. I have thought with deeper earnestness upon these things, the existence and value of which I had indeed felt before, but I had thought lightly of them, rather guessed at them than felt assured of them. These contemplations brought me nearer to God, my faith became stronger, so that in the midst of misfortune I have never been without comfort, never quite unhappy. You will understand that I can never be perfectly miserable while this source of purest joy is open to me...." And in spite of the loss of one-half of her realm, and in spite of all humiliations, joy was indeed vouchsafed her in the development of her noble children, whom she thus describes to her father: "Our children are our most precious treasures, and we look on them with happiness and hope.... Now you have my whole gallery of family portraits before you, my dear father. You will say they are painted by a foolish mother who sees nothing but good in her children, and is quite blind to their faults or failings. But really, I am watchful, and I do not notice in the children any dispositions or evil propensities which need make us painfully anxious.... Circumstances educate people, and it may be well that they learn to know the serious side of life in their youth. Had they been brought up in luxury they might think it was the natural course of things, that it must be so...."
When we consider that Louisa speaks of the future king and the future Emperor of Germany, many things in the after history of Germany become clear to us! She truly estimated the unfolding dispositions of the future rulers of Germany. Posterity does not agree with her first modest words: "Posterity will not place my name among those of celebrated women, but when people think of the troubles of these times they may say: 'She suffered much and endured with patience,' and I only wish they may be able to add 'She gave birth to children who were worthy of better times, and who by their strenuous endeavors have succeeded in attaining them.'" Queen Louisa is the most famous and the best beloved woman who ever sat on a Hohenzollern throne. Even to-day her portrait adorns nearly every Prussian home, and her beautiful form in Grecian attire, as a symbol of pure and noble womanhood, is found in thousands of American homes where the prototype may not even be known by name.
She died as she had lived. In the agonies of a painful death she preserved her patience and loveliness. When free from pain she lay very tranquil, looking like an angel, and now and then repeating to herself a few words of a very simple hymn which she had learned in her childhood. The unhappy king said at her death: "Oh, if she were not mine, she might recover." The king gazed on her dead form for a moment with a look of anguish which wrung the hearts of all who witnessed it; then he left the room, but soon returned with his sons. Her countenance was beautiful in death, particularly the brow; and the calm expression of the mouth told that struggle was forever past.
Sixty years later, in July, 1870, on the day of her death, William I. (1861-1888) visited her Mausoleum, and prayed before the recumbent statue of his great mother, as he did frequently, this time with a heart burdened with hopes and fears, for again a war of tremendous proportions, the national question of "to be or not to be," was pending with the same country under an emperor of the same ominous name "Napoleon." Before Louisa's statue the aged monarch received the inspiration and the strength which nerved him for the last gigantic struggle.
Leaving the saintly Louisa, an entirely different type of royal womanhood demands our consideration, a type rendered noteworthy by sheer intellectual force. Catherine II., the Great, was the greatest woman, politically speaking, ever produced by the German nation; but her genius benefited, or rather raised to world power, a foreign and rival state, namely, the Russian empire (1762-1796). Born at Stettin in 1729, and the daughter of the petty Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, Catherine was married to Peter of Holstein-Gottorp, heir to the Russian throne, whose blind admiration for the great Frederick of Prussia alienated from him the affections of the Russian people; while Catherine identified herself with the Russians, whose future she was destined or determined to rule. Even as crown princess she led a notorious life, at first with Count Soltikof, and later with Count Poniatowski, afterward the ill-fated king of dying Poland; but she never forgot to strengthen herself, all the while, politically, and to secure all the instruments of power against her hated and despised husband. Peter was deposed, imprisoned, and strangled by Gregory Orloff, Catherine's paramour, certainly not without her knowledge (July, 1762). As empress, she forcibly obtained for Russia a controlling influence in the councils of Europe, while civilizing her people and mightily fostering the arts and sciences. Her literary and epistolary works and correspondence with the greatest men of her time prove her to have been a woman of extraordinary genius and literary capacity. As all her talents seemed to be out of proportion to womanly limitations, so were her immorality and passion. She ruled with an iron hand, through a succession of favorites or recognized lovers who, it must be confessed, had nothing to recommend them but the physical advantages of form and animal strength. The brutal Orloff, whom she raised from a low station, maintained himself longest in her favor, until his aspiration for the hand of his imperial mistress worked his undoing. Other men, selected partly from the ranks of the common soldiers, followed in rapid succession; finally, Gregory Potemkin became the most powerful of all of them, until he was banished from the court for trying to win Catherine in lawful marriage. Potemkin endeavored, though with barbarous methods, to build up southern Russia, and remained Catherine's favorite, at a distance, till his death. Meanwhile, she chose her later lovers merely for personal gratification, so as not to endanger her autocracy by the presumption of powerful men. She had brought about the election of her favorite Poniatowski as King of Poland, but she tore the kingdom to pieces when she recognized that the conquest of Poland alone could make her beloved Russia a civilized European or Western power. The domestic reforms which she instituted along all the lines of political, economic, and sociological endeavor are stupendous, and, compared with them, the deeds of Elizabeth of England appear insignificant. Only the Titanic success of pushing forward the boundaries of the empire in all directions, adding to it the Crimea, the country as far as to the Dniester, with Courland and Poland, as well as the beneficence of her rule in the reform of justice, administration, and sanitation, the establishment of schools and hospitals, the building of canals and fortresses, and the improvement of the conditions of the peasants and of the lower bureaucracy, can compensate, in the minds of historians and publicists, for her private moral corruption and the gigantic immorality which she carried on without restraint and in open defiance of civilized moral order. She died of an attack of apoplexy in November, 1796. History remains doubtful which was greater, her boundless energy, ambition, and genius, or her superhuman immorality.
Returning to Prussia, we find weakness to contrast with Russia's strength. Fifteen years after the death of Frederick the Great, we have seen that Prussia was politically in a state of decadence. As of politics, so of morals; and even the good example of the royal family was unable to redeem society from the demoralization that had seized upon the higher classes, and especially upon a great number of the officers of the army. Regarding them a credible report of a contemporary states: "The ranks of officers, already for a long time given over to idleness and estranged from science, are farthest sunk in debauch. They those privileged disturbers trample under foot everything which was formerly called sacred: religion, marital faith, all the virtues of domesticity. Among them their wives have become common property, whom they sell and exchange and seduce mutually. The women are so corrupted that even ladies of noble birth degrade themselves by becoming procuresses and panderers, to attract young women of rank in order to procure their seduction. One finds in the public houses true Vestal virgins as compared with many distinguished ladies who are the leaders in society. There are women of high rank who are not ashamed to sit in the theatre on the benches of public women, to procure for themselves lovers to go home with them. Many dissolute women of rank even unite and hire furnished quarters in company, whither they invite their lovers, and celebrate without restraint bacchanalia and orgies which would have been unknown even to the regent of France. Since Berlin is the central point of the monarchy from which all good and evil spreads over the provinces, the corruption has gradually expanded even thither." Forsooth, the ignominious defeat of Jena was indeed quietly preparing many years before it took place.
Prince Louis Ferdinand, a cousin of the king, a chameleon-like character, composed of some good and many evil qualities, who is still sung in German folklore, owing to his heroic death on the battlefield against Napoleon, was an exponent of that frivolous life. Like his prototype, the Athenian Alcibiades, he was a devotee now to wine, woman, song, now to the strenuous life of a brave soldier and heroic patriot. One woman of wonderful beauty and of the temper of a Messalina, to use Scherr's words, Pauline Wiesel, held him under her demoniacal sway of never satisfied passion. But a woman of an entirely different type, the extraordinary Jewish authoress, and ingenious, spirited conversationalist and epistolographer, Rahel Levin, served him as a true Egeria in pure friendship and intellectual affinity. Rahel Levin is a great factor in the later time of restoration and one of its foremost personalities. Rahel, as the wife of Varnhagen von Ense, and Bettina von Arnim are the leaders of those women who exercised such a tremendous influence in the evolution of German womanhood during the first half of the eighteenth century. Their influence is enduring and makes even to-day for good.
It is incumbent upon us to retrace our steps to give a more orderly account of the literary, intellectual, and artistic woman. The initiators of that class, the Gottschedin and the Neuberin have been mentioned. Since the day of Frau Caroline Neuber, the status of the German stage had risen considerably. The theatrical companies of Schonemann, of Koch, of Ackermann had attained fame through their liberation from French types. Simplicity and naturalness became the ideal of playwrights. Friederike Hensel won the reputation of being the greatest German actress of her time, as Konrad Eckhof became foremost among the actors. These two, and Ackermann, with his daughter, Frau Lowen, and others, became so to speak the charter members of the newly founded National Theatre of Hamburg, for which Lessing was appointed dramaturgiste. After two years the enterprise failed, but nevertheless the ideal of what a German national theatre ought to be, was created and expressed. Gifted women and Lessing an extraordinary combination indeed! had founded it!
Female literary work began more modestly. While a great poet like Lessing celebrated the great era of Frederick, while Ewald von Kleist sang his king and the Prussian army and of death for the fatherland which glory fell to his share at the battle of Kunersdorf, there arose also a female poet, Anna Louisa Karsch, of the newly won province of Silesia, who, in spite of her mediocrity, was celebrated as a Prussian Sappho. The experiences of her life, springing from abject poverty, or rather misery, her service as a stable maid, her marriage to a brutal old husband, and yet her constant endeavors to improve her mind under the most trying circumstances of menial labor and want, her divorce and remarriage with a drunken, lazy tailor, Karsch, who sold even the clothing of her children to indulge in his vice of drunkenness, read almost like a terrible nightmare. But the hour of salvation came. When her good-for-nothing husband was obliged to go to the Seven Years' War, the Silesian Baron von Kottwitz noticed her talent and took her to Berlin. In Berlin she soon became the fashion; she was received in literary circles, and her poetry was encouraged. The "German Horace, the thought-singing Ramler," informed her that Gleim, the poet of Prussian war songs, desired to know "his sister in Apollo." She hastened to write to the "Apollinian brother." Her friends secured her even an interview with Frederick the Great, who promised to take care of her, a promise which he forgot, however, in spite of her repeated rhymed exhortations. Later, he sent her a royal present of two Prussian thalers, which she promptly returned by mail. Frederick's successor directed "that a house should be built for her adorned with all the allegories of the Muses." In this she lived until 1791.
The estimate of her poetic gifts cannot be very high. She was a ready rhymester of a rather mechanical sort, but she was the first of the line of Germanic poetesses of the modern time, and as such her work deserves study and, it may be, praise.
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'sLuise, and is illuminated by Goethe's poetic genius inHermann 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, aCloister 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 anembarras de richesseof 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.
Cornelia, Goethe's only sister, also powerfully influenced and inspired him. She was to Goethe what Frederick the Great's favorite sister, Wilhelmine, was to her brother. Goethe delineated the characteristics of his charming mother in the character of Elizabeth, wife of Goetz von Berlichingen. Poor abandoned Maria is, according to Goethe's allusions, the martyred Friederike. Sister Cornelia inspired the play.
The abiding effect of woman's love upon Goethe becomes manifest when we realize that an unhappily ending early love affair with Gretchen, a young girl of Frankfort, remained imprinted upon his soul for more than forty years, and served him as a prototype for his greatest, most complex, and most pathetic heroine, Gretchen inFaust. It is true that after the unfortunate ending of that romance at Frankfort he found sufficient compensation in his love for Käthe Schonkopf, the daughter of a wine dealer in Leipzig, at whose restaurant he boarded when a student of seventeen at the university. According to the portrait taken from the gallery of Goethean women, Käthe was a fascinating, round-faced girl. She gave up her ardent lover when he tortured her too much with his jealous whims, and the pain of that separation was dramatized by Goethe in his earliest play,The Caprice of the Lover.
We have briefly mentioned Goethe's return, broken in health and spirit, from Leipzig to Frankfort, the influence exerted upon him by Katherine von Klettenberg, his transfer to the University of Strassburg, and his idyl with Friederike of Sessenheim, which the most eminent German-American literary critic Julius Goebel calls, however, more fittingly "a tragedy." His famous poem,The Rose on the Heath, in which the rose is passionately broken by the wanton boy in spite of her protest, sums up in charming symbolism the sad story of Goethe's love for the unfortunate Friederike. What this charming flower of the parsonage had been to his youth, how he left her, the pangs of conscience which tormented him for a long time, his unfailing memory of her who never forgot him, and who died unmarried in 1813, all this Goethe's genius characterized with psychological delicacy in his autobiography: "Fiction and Truth".
Perhaps even more profound was the storm aroused in Goethe's soul somewhat later by his love for Lili Schönemann, who inspired many of his most beautiful songs and reminiscences. The daughter of a rich Frankfort banker, highly educated by her French mother, young and very beautiful, blond and graceful, in the enjoyment of all the social advantages of her position, she keenly aroused Goethe's emotions, while she also was deeply stirred to see that extraordinary man at her feet. She succeeded absolutely: Goethe became hers with life and soul, while, at the same time, he enjoyed with young Countess Auguste von Stolberg, sister of the two poets, a deep romantic friendship which survived all the storms of his eventful life. He never saw the countess, whom he nevertheless addresses familiarly as "Gustchen" and "thou." His correspondence with her sheds a wondrous light on his soul, especially with reference to his love for Lili. Lili tried to win him, now paining him by jealousy, now soothing him by love. At last a formal betrothal was arranged, which was but the beginning of the end. He tried "whether he could live without Lili," and went on a journey to Switzerland with Count Stolberg. But he never forgot her. In a letter to Gustchen he calls her "the maiden who makes me unhappy without any fault of hers, she with the soul of an angel whose serene days I sadden!"
Lili Schonemann became later the wife of the Alsatian Baron von Turckheim, with whom she lived in happy marriage till her death in 1817. She confessed to her daughter as the true reason of her broken betrothal to Goethe the revelation made to her by her mother of Goethe's former relation to Friederike Brion and of his conduct toward her. Lili, though pure and true to her husband, never forgot Goethe; while the latter, in his age, confessed to Eckermann that "he had loved her deeply as no one before or afterward." Lili's biography,Lili's Portrait, written by her grandson, Count Turckheim, is an important chapter in the history of a cultured, high-minded, energetic, and exquisite womanly character, loved and lost by the poet-prince of Germany. It is not accidental that Goethe, distracted by the loss and not knowing where to turn, plunged into and translated just at that time Solomon's Song of Songs, which he described in a letter to his friend Merck as "the most glorious collection of songs of love God ever created." It is also almost providential that he received, even at that period of regret and despair, the renewed invitation of Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar, who had recently ascended the throne of his fathers, and who was destined to become the greatest Mæcenas of the century and, as it were, the sponsor of Germany's greatest intellectual bloom, to establish himself at Weimar. There he arrived on November 7, 1775, at the age of twenty-six, received with universal rejoicing and enthusiasm. "New love, new life," arises for him in Weimar, and with his new love and new life a new era for Germany the era of Goethe, or Classicism proper.