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THE LIBRARY OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
IN MEMORY OF EDWIN CORLE
PRESENTED BY JEAN CORLE
The Century of the Child The Education of the Child Love and Marriage The Woman Movement Rahel Varnhagen
RAHEL VARNHAGEN IN 1817. FROM AN ENGRAVING IN THE LIBRARY OF UPSALA UNIVERSITY.
Rahel Varnhagen
A Portrait
By Ellen Key
Translatfd from the Swedish by
Arthur G. Ghater
«o Introduction by Hiv*i-,K<k Ellis
G. P. Putnam's Sans New York and London 3be fmicfccrbccfeer pte*0
Rahel Varnhagen
A Portrait
By Ellen Key
Translated from the Swedish by
Arthur G. Chater
With an Introduction by Havelock Ellis
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
Cbe fmicherbocfter press
1913
COPYRIGHT. 1913
BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
TTb« ftnicfccrbocfter PKM, Itaw Keck
2035283
" Still und bewegt."
(Holderlin: Hyperion.)
Du schweigst und duldest, und sie verstehn dich nicht, Du heilig LebenI welkest hinweg und schweigst, Derm ach! vergebens bei Barbaren Suchst du die Deinen im Sonnenlichte,
Die zartlichgrossen Sealen, die nimmer sind!
Doch eilt die Zeit. Noch siehet mein sterblich Lied Den Tag, der, Diotima! nachst den Gottern mit Helden dich nennt und dir gleicht.
(Holderlin: Diotima.)
PREFACE
THE following pages are not a study in literary history; no search has been made for new au- thorities, and no stress is laid on literal accuracy in the case of the sources that have been used. Such a work was within neither the aim nor the compass of this book.
My aim has been to give a portrait of the great- est woman the Jewish race has produced; to my mind also the greatest woman Germany can call her daughter.
In spite of the number of works on Rahel the task is not superfluous. Among even cultured Germans, men and women, to whom I have spoken of Rahel, five out of ten knew nothing of her, four had heard something about her, and one had real knowledge of her !
My own impression is not a new one. I was a child when my attention was first caught by a few words about her; when quite young, I read
Vlll
Preface
two essays on her in the Revue des Deux Mondes, by Blaze-Bury and by Karl Hillebrand. Later on, I lived in Rahel, ein Buck des Andenkens, and as long ago as 1885 I wrote in the Revue my first essay on her, which I called "Rahel, a Person- ality." Some parts of that little essay are in- cluded in this book, and there is not one of the views of Rahel which I then held that is not re- produced here, though in a more developed form.
I have concentrated my delineation exclusively around Rahel' s own person. Those who desire a more detailed picture of Rahel's age and con- temporaries may be referred to O. Berdrow's great, conscientious, and sympathetic work, Rahel und ihre Zeit. Furthermore, I have based my portrait of Rahel as far as possible on her own words. These are here quoted either directly or indirectly, or sometimes merely reproduced in their leading ideas. Only by such treatment was the concentration possible which was imposed by the compass of the present work. In the same way, the letters are not always quoted in chrono- logical order: an earlier one may appear later, or vice versa, or a portion of a letter may occur in one place and another portion in a different one; that is, where the chronological connection was unimport-
Preface ix
ant but the psychological connection had to be made clear. I think also that in certain cases Rahel's train of thought is made clearer by this free method of reproduction, and that here and there a slightly altered punctuation has made the direct quotations easier to understand. These liberties, forbidden to the learned historian of literature, are as permissible in tracing a portrait as the liberties a painter takes with a view to bringing out the essential and omitting the acci- dental in the model of whom he seeks to produce a characteristic picture.
Whether I have succeeded in producing such a picture, opinions will of course be divided. My hope of having to some extent understood what is characteristic in Rahel's personality rests ex- clusively on the love she has inspired in me. For a profound love is a guide, when we seek to pene- trate a person's being or work; whether this per- son is still moving with us along what we call the path of life or whether she influences us as one of those dead who live eternally. Each time I have returned to Rahel, my love has increased. More and more clearly have I perceived the truth of Brandes's judgment: that Rahel "is the first great and modern woman in German culture";
x Preface
of Hillebrand's: that Rahel as a woman and Goethe as a man are in the same degree typical of their age. But side by side with this perception of Rahel's objective importance, her subjective value has become to me greater and greater, and there is in the literature of the world no woman's book — except the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning — that I should be more sorry to do without than Rahel's letters.
With this confession of my "lack of objectivity " — and therewith of my conviction that this defect is the real merit of my little work — I now let it go out into the world in the hope that Rahel will once more prove her power as a "guide of the soul " and " consoler of the heart. "
ELLEN KEY.
INTRODUCTION
IT is more than seventy years since Carlyle, shortly after her death, brought Rahel Varn- hagen before the English-speaking world. Yet, even to-day, she is not a familiar personality to us. Many people who count themselves well informed would be puzzled to say who she was and what she stands for. Even among those who are seek- ing to work out her ideals into real life, one sus- pects, not a few feel no responding thrill of blood when they hear the name Rahel.
Carlyle's estimate, indeed, after his wont, was a little grudging. Rahel Vamhagen was a person- ality, not a writer. As she herself well realised, she was constitutionally incapable of attaining artistic expression with a pen. Her concentrated telegraphic method of letter-writing, filled out with notes of exclamation and notes of interroga- tion, the "dashes and splashes," the "whirls and tortuosities, " sorely tried Carlyle's patience. Yet
xii Introduction
he recognised that there were grains of gold hid- den in these packed inarticulate thoughts and emotions. He placed Rahel Vamhagen even above Madame de Stael. She has ideas, he remarks, unequalled in De Stael, and a sincerity, a pure tenderness, a genuineness, which that celebrated woman, if she ever possessed, had early lost.
Carlyle, naturally and almost inevitably, ap- proached Rahel Varnhagen mainly from the literary side. Some forty years later, her person- ality had begun to become clearer, and then, once more, another English writer, this time a woman, approached the subject more rightly as a matter for biography. Mrs. Vaughan Jennings's RaJiel: Her Life and Letters, published in 1876, is a good book, written with much sympathy, skill, and care; it may be read with interest to-day, al- though it is not a complete account of Rahel's life. It was not until 1900 that Otto Berdrow published his Rahel Varnhagen, ein Lebens- und Zeitbild, which may fairly be regarded as the final bio- graphy. Berdrow is completely equipped with all the facts bearing on Rahel, many of them the result of his own research, but his biography, for all its fulness, is no heavy and pedantic work of
Introduction xiii
mere scholarship. He presents a living picture of his heroine, and so far as possible seeks to make her speak to us in her own words. This work, which has appeared in a new and revised edi- tion, is still unknown to English readers, who have, for the most part, to gain their knowledge of Rahel from an occasional essay, such as the quite competent chapter which Miss Mary Hargrave has included in her recent book, Some German Women and their Salons. Rahel Varnhagen has not proved an attractive figure to the literary adventurers in search of a subject.
It is easy to understand why this should be. Rahel was not a brilliant writer; no great practi- cal achievement can be credited to her; there was nothing conspicuously romantic about her life. Her nature never attained full expression. Partly as the result of her youthful struggles, partly, it may be, by natural temperament, her energy was permanently held back from effective action. She was never able to strike out boldly and freely into life. But behind the veil that obscured her the soul of this little Jewess was an ever-burning flame, and the light and the warmth were divined by those who were permitted to come in close
xiv Introduction
contact with her, "a real woman," as Goethe said of her, "with the strongest feelings I have ever seen and the completest mastery of them." Her nature might never become vigorously ar- ticulate in action or even in speech, but in the intensity of its emotional impulse and the clarity of its intellectual vision, it moved freely and audaciously, without regard for the fash- ions of the world, toward a goal that lay ahead.
It thus comes about that, however Rahel Varn- hagen may have been neglected, she really has a hidden significance which only awaits the un- veiling hands of those who possess the genius and the intimate sympathy to reveal it. That is why this book of Ellen Key's is of peculiar value and interest. A woman who is herself one of the chief representatives of some of the most vital move- ments of the day here brings before us, in clear and vivid outline, the woman who, nearly a century earlier, was the inspired pioneer of those movements. For Ellen Key, there is no woman's book in the literature of the world, except Mrs. Browning's poems, that it would be more difficult to dispense with than Rahel Varn- hagen's Letters. It may be that not a few of
Introduction xv
the readers of this stimulating book of Ellen Key's, led by it to the study of Rahel, may come to feel that such a declaration is scarcely extravagant.
WEST DRAYTON, December, 1912.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
PREFACE . I. ORIGIN II. PERSONALITY
III. LOVE
IV. RELIGION .
V. FELLOW-FEELING VI. SOCIAL LIFE VII. GOETHE . VIII. SENSE OF BEAUTY IX. LETTERS . BIBLIOGRAPHY
rvn
ILLUSTRATIONS
RAHEL VARXHAGEN IN 1817 . Frontispiece
From an engraving in the Library of Upsala University.
FACING PAGZ
RAHEL VARXHAGEN IN 1796 ... 2
From the bas-relief by Friedrich Tieck. Photograph by Bruckmann.
Rahel Varnhagen
CHAPTER I
ORIGIN
Now and then we meet in life or in letters with a person — sometimes a man, but more often a a woman — who occupies no exceptional position, either through creative genius, or artistic ex- ecution, or even through learning, energy, or beauty, and yet this being exercises so decisive a power over our existence that our life comes under an indestructible influence, but at the same time one from which our own liberation proceeds.
For the secret of the power of these rare beings is that they themselves are personalities through and through, and intensify the personality in every one else. Such a being may belong to a bygone age and yet fill us with a wonderful sense
2 Rahel Varnhagen
of being her contemporary. Since nothing in her was a matter of custom or convention, we feel not only that she thought but, what is even rarer, that she loved and suffered as we people of the present day, but more deeply. Everything in her is so primordial, so naturally strong, that one imagines one's self to be witnessing the play of the early forces of the race, and at the same time to be confronted by a revelation of the ethical depth, aesthetic sensitiveness, and psychological com- plexity to which the development of humanity may lead as its final result. As we watch the thoughts and feelings of such a glorious being rushing forth in a Dionysiac train, but intoxicated only with vital force, we feel ourselves more and more liberated from semblance and fortuity. We learn to believe that what is peculiar to each is in- dispensable to all; unhesitatingly, indeed without a thought, we begin to be ourselves and, under the influence of this great personality's passion for truth, we do not understand how we have been able to wear our protective disguise or how we can resume the mask beneath which we have con- cealed our real features. We then divine what significance this being — who has produced such emotion in us simply through our having caught
RAHEL VARNHAGEN IN 1796.
FROM THE BAS-RELIEF BY FRIEDRICH TIECK. PHOTOGRAPH BY BRUCKMANN.
Origin 3
fragments of her nature in some journal or letters — must have possessed for her contemporaries. We see that the mere fact of her having lived was an immense contribution to civilisation, a never- ceasing evolutionary force.
Such a personality, the concrete realisation of what the foremost spirits among her contempor- aries aimed at in their ideas — and at the same time the forerunner of our age, since she prophetically taught her contemporaries to hope for the truths we now live on — was Rahel.
But if the first impression of Rahel is this over- flowing wealth of life and primitive force, the next is that in this life also tragedy was the central point of the Dionysia.
The root of her being — like the Orchis maculata — shows a light and a dark hand, tightly clasped in each other.
Rahel herself for a long time regarded her Jew- ish descent as the dark side of her destiny. And she was right in the sense that her descent from a people that had suffered and been humiliated for thousands of years determined her own char- acter and through it her experiences.
Outwardly, on the other hand, Rahel's child- hood and youth coincide with the period of the
4 Rahel Varnhagen
Jewish revival, especially in Berlin ; a period dur- ing which the Jews emerged from their segre- gated and despised position with a rapidity that is more often rendered possible by the influence of the spirit of the age than by legislation.
Frederick the Great did not do much to alter the legal position of the Jews. But the freedom from prejudice, which was diffused around him in ever wider circles, was also to the advantage of the Jews. And to this indirect influence was added a direct one, through Moses Mendelssohn, the liberator of the Jews from their own prejudices, their awakener to a perception of their own powers. Hitherto the Jews, in Mendelssohn's words, had only shown their strength "in prayer and suffering, but not in action." He conjured up in them the desire of freedom and the in- stinct of development. Himself a deist in the spirit of the age of enlightenment, he never- theless remained in the Jewish congregation in order to be able to combat from within such pre- judices as gave rise, for example, to a Jewish boy — a few years before Mendelssohn's first book was published — being expelled from the Mosaic con- gregation for having carried, on behalf of another
Origin 5
person, a German book from one street to another ! Mendelssohn ventured to write in German and to translate the Old Testament ; he caused a school to be opened, in which the Jewish youth learned the German language — until that time the Jews spoke a jargon that was neither German nor Hebrew — and participated in the wealth of Ger- man culture. Thus was spun the first and strongest thread of the bond that thenceforward year by year united the Jews more and more firmly to the German people.
The self-esteem with which the Prussian nation as a whole was filled under Frederick II., caused that of the Jews also to increase. These same Jews, who were still subject to exceptional laws, one of which — renewed as late as 1802 — placed them in one respect in the same category as thieves and murderers; these same Jews, of whom a Moses Mendelssohn still knew what it was to have stones thrown at himself and his children during their walks outside the Jewish quarter, these same Jews now became not only great lead- ers of financial enterprise and generous philan- thropists, but leaders of society as well. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century it was not only the masculine half of the fashionable
6 Rahel Varnhagen
world of Berlin that mixed with the foremost Jew- ish families, but that fashionable world itself that eagerly sought admission to the homes of those families.
No doubt princes, noblemen, and diplomats had often come in contact with the Jewish bankers — in connection with loans. But when, after this, bankers threw open their drawing-rooms to the young members of the aristocracy, they found there so much attraction that it soon became a valued favour, and then good tone to mix in these Jewish circles.
The young men, more or less penetrated by the ideas of the time, found in Jewish houses a more intelligent, unprejudiced, and easy social tone than was permitted by the women of their own families. The young, handsome, cultured, and vivacious women who were the leaders of the Jewish salons invited, for instance, actors and actresses, who as a rule were still excluded from "good society," to their houses. Good music was performed, fine works of art decorated the rooms; scholars, poets, and artists were not only present, but conversed with more freedom than elsewhere, encouraged by their hostesses, who possessed a frankness, a men- tal alertness, a warmth, that were usually absent
Origin 7
in the German ladies of the time. And soon the young men brought with them a sister or a friend, who was anxious to share the social privileges about which the male members of her family were en- thusiastic. In this way the Jewish salons also acquired an indirect influence on the development of social life in wider circles. Thus for the first time the Jewish woman fulfilled a civilising mission in modern society.
In the European history of the Jews themselves more than one woman had distinguished herself before this.1 But the Jewish women's great and rapid receptivity for another civilisation, with different objects from those of the purely Jewish culture, appears first in the time of the Jewish salons of Berlin. It proved that the new "seed fell on an altogether new, virgin soil."3 And when this is the case — Russia and America afford evidence of it in abundance — we always see a setting-aside of time-honoured forms, a break
1 For example, Maria Nunez, who in conjunction with Jacob Tirado founded the first Spanish-Jewish congregation at Amster- dam; Dona Gracia Mendoza, who gave shelter and aid to all the homeless among her people, in addition to promoting Jewish culture; Berusia as a thinker, Rebecca Tiktiner as a writer, and Sarah Copia Sullam as a poet, who were all independent influences.
a Henriette Here.
8 Rahel Varnhagen
with tradition, even in the useful meaning of the word, while their disadvantages are counter- balanced by great advantages.
Among the Jewish youth there appeared both the disadvantages and the advantages we are speaking of: for example, great zeal for cul- ture, mental mobility, and sometimes a profound originality.
The Jewish women in particular, who had more time and leisure than the men, showed in their in- tellectual interests a passion and a capacity for cultivation which did not always imply a cor- responding individuality. Such an individuality was present in certain of these Jewesses; others again appeared original only through qualities which belonged to their race. They were all sub- ject in a peculiar way to the Oriental patriarchal despotism that still obtains to-day in many a Jew- ish home, and the more frequently as one ap- proaches the eastern boundary of Europe. On the other hand they received impressions from the liberal ideas of the time and from its most refined culture. Young Jewish girls had access, through their married friends, to books, studies, acquain- tances, which perhaps their own homes did not offer them. They read Voltaire, Shakespeare,
Origin 9
and Tasso in the original; they revelled in con- temporary German literature, became enthusiastic admirers of Goethe. All the intellectual hunger that had been growing for generations among their people could now at last be satisfied. They lived in a time that took its colour and form from great minds and great events, and their essential development was now determined by their own time, and no longer by the traditions of a thousand years. The strongest and most elastic among them — like Dorothea Mendelssohn — transform the destiny imposed on them by paternal authority, and the social and intellectual emancipation that has imperceptibly fallen to their lot as a con- sequence of the age they live in, is consciously com- pleted by themselves in their deepest personal relations.
Henriette Herz — in a certain sense Rahel's rival in the social life of Berlin — declares that the soul of the Jewish woman, thus awakened, reached its highest development in and through Rahel.
Rahel possessed the characteristics that dis- tinguish great minds among her people: a deep longing for directness of life in sunshine and splendour, in fervour and passion, and an equally
io Rahel Varnhagen
deep longing for the calm of the desert, there to meditate on life, its paths and its goal. The in- tellectual energy that oppression had checked in its outward tendency had in Rahel — as in the foremost of her people — turned inwards. Rahel, through her independence of thought and her passion for liberty, was far in advance of the women of her time, Jewish as well as German. But viewed in connection with the whole de- velopment Rahel is typical of the great move- ment which is still taking place — that movement which seeks to evolve the completely human personality from the feminine creature of sex.
In the innumerable records of admiration that her contemporaries have left about Rahel, her race is scarcely mentioned — a thing that in these days of anti-Semiticism strikes one as almost in- conceivable. But it seems as though the human- ism of that time was so profound that the question of race, among cultivated people, had lost its meaning. Or did perhaps Rahel's own great personality place her beyond and above all cus- tomary points of view where her people were con- cerned? Or were the bright sides of that people
Origin u
more conspicuous and the dark sides less so than in our time?
Whether it was that one of these reasons or all together caused her contemporaries to see in her a personality equally detached and unique — it is certain that this way of regarding herself did not free her from the pain of belonging to a nation so long exiled and wronged, the less so as she — in common with other delicately organised Jews — was doubly pained by all the consequences this past history had left behind in the soul of the people. Every prejudice, every instance of ill- breeding, every baseness that she encountered in those around her afflicted her more deeply than similar things met with elsewhere.
"I imagine that just as I was being thrust into this world a supernatural being plunged a dagger into my heart, with these words: 'Now, have feeling, see the world as only a few see it, be great and noble ; nor can I deprive you of restless, incessant thought. But with one reservation: be a Jewess!' And now my whole life is one long bleeding. By keeping calm I can prolong it ; every movement to staunch the bleed- ing is to die anew, and immobility is only possible to me in death itself . . . ."
" How loathsomely degrading, offensive, insane, and low are my surroundings, which I cannot avoid. One single defilement, a mere contact, sullies me and dis-
12 Rahel Varnhagen
turbs my nobility. And this struggle goes on for ever! All the beauty that I meet with in life passes me by as a stranger, and I am compelled to live un- known among the unworthy!"
It is in connection with this extreme sensitive- ness that we must interpret Rahel's later words: that whole forests of vegetation within her had been laid waste by "parents, brothers, and sisters, men and women friends, and miserable lovers."
That Rahel should have ascribed to her descent all the sufferings that tormented her, is justified in a deeper sense than perhaps she herself intended. Outwardly there was scarcely more than one sorrow in her life that was caused — and that only in part — by her being a Jewess, namely, the break- ing off of her first engagement.
But the decisive point is that Rahel's blood is the blood of a Jewish woman, and that this blood is not only made strong by the best qualities of the race, but at the same time heavy by its most grievous misfortunes.
Jakob Wassermann, in whom the conscious- . ness of his race is deeper than in any other Jewish writer of our time, has maintained in an essay on Rahel1 that "the melancholy intensity and painful
1 Der Tag, March 24, 1904.
Origin 13
shyness, " that Rahel herself suffered from, belong to her as the prototype of the modern Jewish woman of culture; that love of humanity was intensified in her by a mysterious feeling of in- debtedness; that her enthusiasm becomes ecstasy, that her measure is excess ; that her devotion has a fervour that completely embraces, nay, is fused with its object.
Wassermann in this passage accentuates rather the weaknesses of the Jewess's disposition. I have often had the opportunity of admiring its great qualities.
Every one knows — and many acknowledge — the intellectual gifts, creative force, thirst for knowledge, and persevering, clear-sighted energy of the Jewish people. But too little is said of the qualities which nevertheless appear most char- acteristic to those who have seen Jewish women and men at close quarters: their strength in love, their sense of fraternity, their helpfulness and self-sacrifice. It was not an accident that Jesus came of the Jewish people. The attempts now made to prove that he was an Aryan are a waste of labour for those who — as in my case — have more readily found his qualities in those of Jewish than in those of Germanic descent.
14 Rahel Varnhagen
Rahel possessed all the merits of her race, but in a special degree those just mentioned. The deep, warm Oriental disposition, the passionate, rich blood, no doubt found their greatest ex- pression in her erotic experiences. But the Ori- ental force of love appears in all her feelings: in family affection, in friendship, in her worship of her great masters, in her motherliness. She speaks on one occasion of the griefs of parents and says that she can well understand them, for "many realms of grief have I explored." That warm, red blood, that strong, quick pulse, which made her live in love and suffer through love all her life, are racial characteristics, raised in her to their highest power. Her race and her in- dividuality combined made her surround the object of her love, affection, friendship with great devotion — even when she is aware that her feeling is exclusively nourished from sources of her own. She was grateful so long as she could continue to love, she, who had found one of the bitterest of love's secrets to be that people not only do not understand one another, but "do not love one another at the same time." Rahel certainly possessed self-esteem, a feeling to which she gives expression as frank as it is justified. But in her,
Origin 15
as in others who, from one cause or another — an unfortunate exterior, for instance, or a desposed origin — have been injured times without number, this self-esteem was, so to speak, theoretical; it did not gush forth spontaneously, it sufficed neither for due self-assertion in everyday life nor for the uncompromising attitude necessary in exceptional cases.
" Two unutterable faults I have," says Rahel in reference to the bas-relief of her by F. Tieck. This, and another portrait, she found very like, but both were distasteful to her, since she saw in them these two faults clearly expressed :
"Too much gratitude, and too great a regard for the human countenance. ... I should sooner be able to grasp my own heart and wound it than injure a human face or look at one that had been injured. And I am too grateful, seeing that fortune has been against me and my first thought is always of repaying evil with good.
"All this results from bountiful, careless nature's having given me -one of the most delicate, highly organised hearts in the world, which, however, is not seen, since I have no personal amiability. ..." "I have many gifts but no courage, not that courage which might set my gifts in motion, not that courage which might teach me to enjoy life, even at another's ex- pense. I rank the personality of others higher than
1 6 Rahel Varnhagen
my own; I prefer peace to enjoyment and have there- fore never known the latter."
But one need not be a Jewess to make the ex- perience that consideration and thoughtfulness, forbearance and kindness do not result in others behaving to us as we to them, if these qualities are combined with disinterestedness in what con- cerns one's self. The unassuming person is passed by, while the exacting and inconsiderate teach others to show circumspection and tact — that is an experience which all races will confirm. When Rahel's family once gave her a Christmas present that was both useless and ugly, and they excused themselves .by saying that "it was so difficult to find anything for her, " who was thankful for the smallest kindness and provided herself with as little as possible, Rahel broke out into lamentations over her own lack of charm, to which she also ascribed her capacity to assert herself gracefully.
One of Rahel's friends, W. von Burgsdorf, says with profound understanding of her nature, that he at once learned not to take her literally; that behind her words, which often seemed stronger than their occasion, he soon found that she must have been brought up in a long grief.
"For, it is true, a trace of the destiny you
Origin 17
have gone through is visible in you; one notices in you the early acquired silence and concealment. . . . Every scar that fate has left on the charac- ter disturbs your consciousness. ..." But he added with perfect truth: "The same force which strives to go to the bottom of pain, in you returns with equal grace to joy. You are so full of easy, glorious life."
But this long grief was neither exclusively nor even primarily due to her Jewish birth. That she was so much more vulnerable, shy, easily dis- couraged, unpretending than other Jewesses of her circle, depended on the circumstances which determined her childhood and youth.
Rahel herself indicates the suffering of her child- hood and youth when she speaks of the strong heart nature had given her, but which her "hard, strict, violent, capricious, gifted, almost insane father overlooked and broke — yes, broke. De- stroyed all my capacity for action, without, how- ever, being able to enfeeble my character. " And thus she also lost the "courage to be happy" which nature had given her.
Of this father, the banker Levin-Markus — his children afterwards adopted the name of Robert —
1 8 Rahel Varnhagen
there is a portrait in Berlin which shows in- telligence, love of pleasure, an outward bent of mind, and harshness. The cane he holds in his hand was the sceptre he wielded over his family. For at that time the authority of the head of the family was a dogma that had not yet been attacked either in Christian or Jewish homes. But here it must be added that the father was personally a despot, who demanded unconditional subser- vience from those about him, and neither tolerated an independent will nor a contradictory opinion.
And under the rule of this father Rahel grew up, the leading characteristic of whose nature was a most pronounced independence!
Among her father's numerous decrees was one that no birthdays were to be kept in the family. Thus all Rahel knew about hers was that she was born on Whitsunday, 1771, and that it fell in May ; her biographers have ascertained that in that year it was May iQth. She was the eldest child and was so extremely delicate and weak that at first she lay wrapped in cotton-wool in a box. To strengthen her body by suitable remedies was an idea that no more occurred to her parents than to others of the time. One illness after another attacked her susceptible frame during childhood,
Origin 19
and this susceptibility persisted throughout life as a part of her sufferings. But also of her joys. For the delicate organisation, which caused her to sicken from a breath of air and recover in a sunbeam, implied at the same time that extreme sensitiveness to all mental impressions whereby her enjoyment was multiplied. This susceptibility, this Reizbarkeit, in Lamprecht's extended meaning of the word, involved none of that want of consideration, that lack of self- control, which people of the present day desig- nate and excuse by the elastic expression "nerves." Rahel had perhaps to thank the strictness of her home for her rare self-control, in part di- rectly, and in part through its evoking her powers of resistance. To live in spite of all and to live a life rich in meaning, not to allow her suffering to be remarked by those about her, it was to this that Rahel directed from her earliest years the strength of will she had inherited from her race in general and from her father in particular.
For this energy of self-preservation, which was increased by her ill-health, she had full use in the still harder fight for her personal independence against this father, whose outbursts of anger, unreasonable commands, scornful address, and
20 Rahel Varnhagen
brutal assaults made the whole family tremble. Rahel alone ventured now and then to oppose him. Her incorruptible love of truth, her indomitable independence were regarded by her father as defiance and obstinacy, faults which he tried to break, with the same enjoyment as a cannibal breaking human bones. One shudders at the thought of the ill-treatment the girl, equally sen- sitive in mind and body, had to undergo, an ill- treatment which she summed up in the words :
"A more tortured youth cannot be experienced; no one can be more ill or nearer to madness. "
Every child that, from one cause or another, has grown up in harsh surroundings, bears through life the consequences of the first years of its life. So also was it with Rahel. During these years she suffered so much that, according to her own words, she ought to have exhausted all her possi- bilities in this direction! She sees that the lack of charm by which she means candour, self- confidence, ease of manner — of which she is so bitterly aware, has its origin in this childhood of ill-treatment and oppression, for life is kind to those whose "earliest conditions of life have been blessed." And it is true that such people ap- proach life with confidence, while those who have
Origin 21
been unhappy in childhood stand awkwardly and timidly when happiness stretches out its hand, as though they lacked courage to conquer a place for themselves or strength to keep that which they have chanced to win. Rahel's early youth seems to have been made still more difficult through the father being proud of the gifts his daughter had inherited from himself, of the remarks by which she soon attracted attention in his select social circle. His own brilliant intelligence and keen wit brought him and his house into request, and he wished to gain in his daughter a reinforcement of his own influence. Rahel herself says that up to her fourteenth year she was witty and thus fell under the suspicion of her Jewish circle — a remark which implies that she was witty at the expense of others. With adolescence we may suppose that she began consciously to criticise her father's way of using his wit, and thus commenced the tacit or open struggle not only between their wills, but between their souls. He wished to stamp his daughter in his own image, that of the external and bril- liant man of society. But this attempted mould- ing may have been the very thing that awakened Rahel's self-consciousness both to the temptations she ought to avoid and the ideal she wished to
22 Rahel Varnhagen
pursue. The disgust her father and his whole nature inspired in her burned away all possibility of frivolity, of superficiality, and turned her mind inward, in the certainty that only by lonely paths could she find and preserve her essential ego.
Goethe says somewhere that "persistence and directness of aim" are properties that are found even in the most obscure Jew. When these properties are united to a rich material for person- ality, they produce the wholeness, unity, coa- lescence which Rahel recognises in herself — and others in her — as that which separates her from other people in the most distinctive way. "All my life I have only considered myself as Rahel and nothing else," she said once, expressing sur- prise at the attention that was shown her during an illness. But she became Rahel in that "furnace of affliction" from which her personality proceeded as though cast in bronze and her will like hardened steel.
Rahel calls it a gift of God that she always knows what she wants, although in spite of her strength of will she has been "abused and shouted down and thwarted" — a thing which nevertheless concerns only the periphery of her existence.
Her strength of will not only sustained her in
Origin 23
spite of ill-health but multiplied her powers when they were required for others, as nurse, for in- stance. But she derived yet another charac- teristic, important in daily life, from her race: the practicalness, presence of mind and organi- sation which gave her power over the multitude of little, everyday tasks, constantly tending to chaos. This rapid and practical sense of actuality, which is the secret of the Jewish people's success, was enhanced, through Rahel's rich nature, in her to a beneficent development of an eternally fresh life, "composed of nothing but real being," as Varnhagen expresses it. Through order, tidiness, neatness, and supervision, Rahel possessed that grasp of daily life without which it never acquires style or beauty.
Through these qualities she became not only good, but really helpful. And this Oriental com- bination of a sense of reality and mysticism is found wherever the mysticism is deep. Nay, is it not, so to spea^:, the actual characteristic of the founder of religion and is it not by means of this very characteristic that the Orient has given the world all its great religions?
The Germanic race and culture, in the midst of which Rahel grew up, undoubtedly contributed to
24 Rahel Varnhagen
deepen her nature, to give it greater diversity. But the invincibility of its individuality, the in- destructibility of its fire, the lightning rapidity of its clearsightedness, the profundity of its medi- tation, the keenness of its analysis, the wildness of its despair, the jubilation of its gratitude, — all these are as Eastern as the Psalms and Ecclesiastes.
After her father's death in 1789, Rahel's life become easier. Freed from daily suffering, her health, through a "successful revolution," also improved. She felt an inclination for the pleasures of youth, and even learned to dance — but soon had enough of dancing as a social amusement. In the attic under the paternal roof she had plenty of time and leisure for her inner development. But within the family circle there remained, amongst other things, the authority inherited by the brothers from the father over the female members of the family, which to Rahel was espe- cially onerous in questions of money, where, more- over, her mother's parsimony in daily life was more disagreeable than her brother's acquisitiveness.
Her mother seems to have been an insignificant woman, broken down and made melancholy by her husband's tyranny, and Rahel's nature met
Origin 25
with no appreciation from her. Of the others, her sister, Rose, may have been on cordial terms with Rahel, though without any very profound community of souls. Such a community, how- ever, united her to her younger brother Ludwig — her "Herzensbruder" — who, himself an author, introduces her into the society of young poets in Berlin after 1800. The elder brothers again, Moritz and Marcus, are absorbed in financial in- terests, and although in this particular they be- have well to their sisters, they have inwardly little in common.
And Rahel seems to be prepared not to meet with appreciation in the family circle. What she asks is that she may be left in peace. But as usual her mother, brothers, and sisters, even after Rahel had become the celebrated Rahel, saw in her only the daughter and the sister, on whose strong Jew- ish family affection they could always rely, when they needed it in sickness or trouble, sorrow or anxiety. Between whiles they misinterpret, ad- monish, and disapprove with the right of indelicacy which members of a family regard even to-day as their most indisputable privilege in dealing with one another.
Rahel breaks out to a friend:
26 Rahel Varnhagen
" I am made ill by embarrassment, by constraint, as long as I live. I live against my will. . . . My everlasting dissimulation, my circumspection, my compliance are wearing me out. I cannot endure it any longer, and nothing and nobody can help me." " / have been spared no blow, no stab, no thrust, or sting,'1 she says in the connection.
It may be presumed that Rahel, like most strong natures, suffered for a very long time be- fore something, trivial in the eyes of the others, made her break out. She says herself: "Few are more explosive than I: I can keep it in for a long time, but sooner or later it has to come out. " Probably she could be hasty, rough, and un- reasonable with her own people, as with Varn- hagen, in questions where, against them as against him, she was nevertheless right in the main. Like others, she had les defauts de ses qualites.
On the whole she shows by her actions how deep her family feeling is.
She writes to her family :
"Do I not tell you everything? Do I ever allow myself any rest before you have had all the intellect- ual, agreeable, social, and other news I can get? Have I ever said I? Do I not always say we ? — and God knows how incessantly I think it ! I am no hardened egoist, but a joyful and sensitive expander of life."
Origin 27
Rahel has a need of worshipping, of looking up to people.
" I cannot speak of him — for I can only be just," she says on one occasion. "With my nature I have been sufficiently revenged, if I can no more love." She always believes in a person from the first. "It is one of my estimable stupi- dities always to take people seriously," she says. "My only talent is being able to see things on a large scale, my only pleasure — and only levity — being able to forget myself," she writes on another occasion. And of these talents those about her also had the benefit.
But it was precisely her quality of "life- expander" that above all displeased her timorous and narrow-minded mother, who had diffused about herself a cool and musty spiritual atmos- phere. Rahel's love of her family was what she herself calls "fibre-love, " the feeling which nature intertwines with every fibre of our being and which keeps its strength even when one has scarcely a thought in common. When there was need of it she could sacrifice for them time, strength, money, pleasures, and their real interests went "right to the bottom of her heart." But to their petti- ness and narrowness she would not yield. The
28 Rahel Varnhagen
criterion that her family circle had imposed upon itself was the point of view Rahel hated: "What was fitting and proper." According to this valua- tion the trivial became great and the significant of small account. When Rahel was herself — dar- ing, animated, sparkling, unprejudiced — the least of her relatives assumed a right to preach to her of duty, consideration, moderation, and prudence !
Meanwhile indignation accumulated within her. And when her "heavily charged store of ideas found an outlet, " it is evident that she caused consternation by the passionate force of her opinions; that she was considered overbearing and domineering, or any other of the words that are used about people of strong convictions by those who are incapable of a strong conviction. But all those, on the other hand, who themselves had views, found Rahel delicately sensitive, tactful, forbearing, tolerant of everything but pretentious stupidity, slander, and lying in all its forms — whether more or less conscious, more or less impudent.
When Rahel takes a schoolgirl's delight in driving with an opera singer to a dress rehearsal on the Sabbath, one can understand how the pressure
Origin 29
of Jewish customs came to the aid of that of the family.
On the whole, however, Rahel's relations with her brothers remained good. And when she ex- claims that "they neither regarded her nor loved her," these words must not be taken absolutely, but only relatively to Rahel's own capacity for devotion.
With her mother, on the other hand, her rela- tions became finally so strained that she insisted on Rahel's leaving the paternal house in Jagerstrasse, which in spite of all had become dear to her, where the mother then lapsed into "her dismal, thread- bare, uncomfortable solitude," in "pitiful miserli- ness. " But Rahel, thus exiled, visited her mother daily, although the latter received her with the greatest indifference, until in 1809 her mother lay on her death-bed and for four months Rahel nursed her day and night. The approach of death dispersed the many misunderstandings which had concealed the daughter's real nature from the mother. The grateful love her mother now at last showed Rahel, as well as the courage with which she bore her sufferings, made Rahel tend her with a "passionate pain." But Rahel no more altered her relation to her than to her father:
30 Rahel Varnhagen
they had each had their share in the sufferings of childhood and youth under which her heart had groaned, and Rahel did not forget. But while she could never forgive her father, she forgave her mother, since she had been the father's victim as much as Rahel herself.
The sufferings that had only darkened her mother's narrow nature, kindled in Rahel's a great light: that of sympathy; and gave her a great strength: that of solitude. The power of introspection and absorption that solitude, and only that, can give, had a determining effect on Rahel's nature. However much she may after- wards become a woman of society, she yet lives, until Varnhagen appears, in a perpetual inner solitude as a consequence of the circumstances of which she says that through them her life has been murderously taken from her.
In a letter to Varnhagen, Rahel says :
" This week I have thought out what a paradox is : a truth which has not yet been able to find room to re- veal itself, which violently thrusts itself into the world, and is twisted out of joint in the process. ... So am I, unfortunately, and this will be the death of me. Never can my soul gently glide into fair undulating motions .... How truly, beloved friend, and how
Origin 31
sadly do you compare me with a tree that has been pulled up out of the earth and then had its top buried therein. Nature has designed me too strong."
And just as the peculiar force of Rand's thought can only be understood as the result of solitude, so must her peculiar tone of feeling be understood as derived from suffering.
Rahel belonged in a spiritual sense to that class of persons who are called in a physical sense "bleeders." A scratch, which in another person would easily heal, may in them occasion prolonged bleeding, and the film over a wound is so thin that it breaks at the slightest shock and causes a fresh flow of blood.
No one who does not perceive this can ever un- derstand Rahel, when she uses the strongest words about sufferings long past or when she is painfully distressed at what seems to others a trifle.
For with this little wound all her other wounds are opened, and in this complaint are echoed all the lamentations of her people.
Whether or no Rahel perceived what she had to thank her race for, it is certain that the bitterness with which in youth she speaks of her birth, dis- appears with time. Perhaps this was simply due
32 Rahel Varnhagen
to the growth of that amor fati, which is to the human being what flowering is to the aloe, the great feat of strength before death ?
"I no longer envy anybody anything but such things as no one has" — these words of Rahel's are significant of her state of soul in the last years of her life.
Rahel had always been willing to acknowledge her descent. Indeed, in Paris she laid stress on the fact that she was a Jewess from Berlin, and rejoiced that she did honour to her native city. So also did she rejoice when, during the war, she could manifest the patriotic self-sacrificing of the Jews in her own person and through her co- religionists. That on her marriage she went over to Christianity was neither a defection from Judaism, which she had never embraced as a believer, nor an act of faith as regards the Christian religion, but only the drawing of a sign of equation between herself and the man whose position in life she was to share. When the patri- otic fever that succeeded the Napoleonic wars evoked manifestations of anti-Semiticism, she was deeply ontraged and expressed to her Christian friends her detestation of this brutality. The more she learned, freed from dependence on her
Origin 33
own relatives, to look upon Judaism objectively, the more was she reconciled to the fate that made her a member of that nation. And on her death- bed, when she finally saw her whole life from the point of view of eternity, she praised in affecting words the destiny which had made her, the fugitive from Egypt and the land of Canaan, so beloved and cared for by her dear ones.
" In solemn transport I think of this origin of mine, and of the whole interconnection of destinies through which the oldest memories of the human race are associated with the present state of things, and thus the forms most widely separate in time and space are connected with each other. That which for so long a period of my life appeared to me the greatest igno- miny, the bitterest suffering and misfortune, namely, being born a Jewess, I would not now renounce at any price."
3
CHAPTER II
PERSONALITY
IN Rahel's, as in every other pronounced person- ality, one can point to certain component parts by which the race and the family have contributed to its composition ; one can even divine the process of moulding. But the means by which just this personality results from these component parts and from the treatment which in others would have produced quite different forms — that remains the eternal riddle. The individual features of the personality, its peculiar style, its unique charm, can no more be described or grasped in dealing with the living work of art — a consummate personality — than in dealing with the statue of bronze. Not only the work of art, as Kellgren has said, has "sprung from the womb of a glowing imagination": the individuality too springs from such a womb, that of Nature herself. Her imagi- nation works as mysteriously as that of genius, and
34
Personality 35
her style it is equally impossible to catch in the scant, grey meshes of words.
Several of Rahel's most eminent contemporaries have attempted to describe her personality. The most successful among them were probably those who approached most nearly to her own self- analysis. For if it can be said of any one that she really knew herself, then that person is Rahel. In the whole world of women there is no one who can be better compared with Rahel in courage and inclination for exploring her own soul, in zeal of self-examination, and candour of self-revelation, than Marie Bashkirtseff. For there is need to remind certain modern authors of feminine con- fessions that shamelessness is not synonymous with candour, nor communicativeness with know- ledge of self.
Rahel's letters, published after her death, were to her contemporaries a revelation of a new type of woman in the same degree as Marie Bashkirt- sefFs Journal was to our time. However differ- ent their natures may be at times, they are alike in this, that their life of the soul and will is so indi- vidual, so marked, and that it revealed itself so directly and so consciously, that it became at once a spiritual power with which one was brought into
36 Rahel Varnhagen
relation, sympathetically or antipathetically, but indifference to which was impossible.
For the rest, the manner of the two self-portraits is as different as the times in which they appeared. The young Russian paints herself en plein air, in a pitiless, all-revealing morning light; Rahel's picture appears in a chiaroscuro, in which the longer one looks the more one discovers.
In attempting to reproduce my impression of Rahel's personality I am reminded of her own words : that we see ourselves in concave but others in convex; that when we try to penetrate and judge a person, we encounter ourselves, and this makes true objectivity impossible. "For the resem- blance," Rahel concludes, "that exists between persons, extends only to the outer limits of their being."
As one cannot reproduce one's impression of a personality directly, one tries to do so by means of images. Thus, for instance, I may say that to me Rahel has the same deep purple, almost black tint as Eleonora Duse; that the perfume which comes nearest to her nature is that of the yellow narcissus, while the music which expresses her most perfectly is Beethoven's Appassionato,. But
Personality 37
in these images I have at the most given an idea of my conception of Rahel to those who receive from this tint, this perfume, and this music impressions of the same tone of feeling as my own.
For in relation to the great, mystical reality — the unique personality — the image is as the Egyptian hieroglyphic sign for life in relation to living life itself.
There is only one objective way of drawing a marked individuality: to compare the person's own utterances and actions with the impression his personality produces on contemporaries. For a person's own words often deceive one, his actions not unfrequently, other's opinions more often than all. But if all three agree, one can be certain that in the particular case, the unity and cohesion of the personality at least are beyond doubt.
And it is precisely this agreement between the impression Rahel produces on others and the in- sight she gives us into her own nature, which justifies the conclusion that she was what she says she was, and that one can best form her image from her own confessions.
What Rahel always and before all else lays stress upon is that "God and Nature" meant well with
38 Rahel Varnhagen
her but that destiny and fortune have been against her ; that nature was proud, nay, overbearing, when she came into the world; that she ought to have been "high-bom," and that the exuberant powers of happiness she possessed within her only re- quired a little exemption from direct suffering to show their strength. She knows that she is fash- ioned to enjoy life, not merely to undergo it, and it is this source of light in Rahel's nature — its healthy, beautiful sensuousness, its desire of sunshine, its "joy over what lies nearest," its delight in the happiness of all who are happy — which gives Rahel her direct warmth. And it is only with this vital energy as the founda- tion of one's being that a really deep suffering is thinkable; a vital energy that rebels against its torments, that is by turns vanquished and victorious but never acknowledges pain as the meaning of life. Rahel calls herself a "fresher, gayer, more brunette Hamlet, " and Veit, the friend of her youth, says that with "Philine's gay dis- position she combined Aurelia's genius and heart, her goodness and tendency to melancholy." . . . All who have profoundly understood Rahel, above all Varnhagen, lay stress on what I would call the chiaroscuro in her nature as the secret of its charm.
Personality 39
In a letter from Jean Paul to Rahel, which begins with the words: "Winged one! — in every sense" — he says: "You treat life poetically and consequently life treats you in the same way. You bring the lofty freedom of poetry into the sphere of reality, and expect to find again the same beauties here as there. " . . .
This judgment reaches the core of Rahel's nature It is this pristine character of Rahel's that she feels ought to have been her fate. But her fate, from the causes mentioned later, was a different one. She cannot live according to her character, but at least she dies according to it, as she says every one really does. She knows that every human being "has his altogether special fate," since he is "a moment of the whole, which can only exist once"; and she demands of existence at least her own special unhappy fate, since it has not given her the happy fate.
Thus she wrote during the cholera at Berlin: "I claim a special, personal fate. I cannot die of an epidemic like a straw among other ears of corn in the open field, scorchejd by marsh-gas. I will die alone of my malady; this is /, my character, my person, my physique, my fate. "
And every one has his fate, Rahel thought, since every one has his individuality. Originality, she says, is much more common than frankness; in-
40 Rahel Varnhagen
deed, most people might be original if they would only be true! Of herself she can bear witness — without any one having challenged her — that she has devoted herself to a god, Truth, and that each time she has been saved in the misery of life, it has been through this divinity.
There is no subject to which she returns more often in her letters than originality, and where it existed she forgave almost anything. "He who honestly asks and answers himself, is always occupied with realities and is constantly finding things out. ... In order to be able to think, honesty is above all necessary. ..." What she hated most of all was pedantry, "for its origin is inward emptiness, therefore it clings to forms. . . ." A person who is not true, honest, and innocent can neither be poet, artist, philosopher, human being, friend, member of a family, man of the world, busi- ness man, nor ruler. ... It is love of truth that is wanting in us; that is the diseased spot of the race, the cause of all our epidemics of the soul. . . . It depends upon ourselves to become human be- ings (i. e., original). But for this an infinite courage is needed. ... "It does not matter at all how one is, if one cannot be as one wishes. "
All these utterances denote the nature that gave
Personality 41
vent to itself in the following answer to Varnhagen, where she playfully says that she ought to be re- cast so as to be more tractable: "Then I should spurt out of the mould ! "
"Some people have too little understanding to find the truth within them, others no courage to acknow- ledge it, and the great majority neither courage nor understanding, but they wander and lie and grope or stagnate through life even to the grave. "
Another time she exclaims: "I am beside myself! For so we call it when the heart really speaks. "
Honesty is to her the necessary condition for keep- ing one's youth: "When one is honest in one's thoughts, one is true. And only in truth is health to be found. He who has not this, grows old: wrinkles alone do not make us old. "
Nay, Rahel assures us that downright, pure brutality revives her, when she has been wearied by insincerity!
To a young male friend (Bokelmann) Rahel writes these profound words: "What makes the mind and soul of man colder than inactivity? . . . Think always ceaselessly! This is the only duty, the only happiness. ..." And she goes on to implore him, however often he may have thought out a thing, never to cease from "ploughing through it" afresh; never to allow any dear and honoured
42 Rahel Varnhagen
friends, not even herself, to seduce and master him so that he forgets the duty of incessant mental work. He must always have the courage to hurt himself with questioning and doubts; to destroy the most comfortable and beautiful edifice of thought — one that might have stood for life — if honesty demands it; to dare ceaselessly to put such questions to himself as may shake to their foundations all his relations to other people ; never to allow himself to be lulled to sleep by any system of morality established once for all, protective and becoming; never to lapse into the routine of custom in any respect and thus bar the gates of his soul; constantly to remain mentally restless, unquiet, and to remember her — Rafael's — everlasting mobility and freedom, her strict, ever- examining love of truth; not to allow himself to be led astray by any one or anything into a belief or imprisoned in a bond which will make him sigh out his lif e as a duty ; not to prize anything merely because it is old and bears a good name.
To Rahel herself this kind of honest thinking and honest communication of the result was as much a mental condition of life as breathing a physical one. In the vital necessity of such honesty lies its deepest significance as regards Rahel.
Personality 43
Every one thinks more or less for the benefit of some particular belief, idea or feeling, and with- holds from himself and others whatever conflicts with this; Rahel, on the other hand, is, as she says herself "innocent" in her thinking.
What Rahel loves in Angelus Silesius — that he turns to God in innocent questioning, demands no answer, makes no asseverations, but is capable at the same time of "regretful renunciation" and of being "a child's soul full of courage" — all this may be said of Rahel herself. This childlike quality of Rahel is accentuated also by her friends. And this is just the condition that gives her courage to speak out fully on everything, careless as to the effect, naively profound like a child, to which things established, sanctioned, and acknow- ledged have not yet disclosed their trenched am- buscades and barbed-wire entanglements, but which moves fearless and unconstrained so long as it is free from preconceptions, thinking for itself and discovering itself. But such a child Rahel remained all her life.
Rahel' s influence on her friends of the same age takes especially that form which is shown in the letter to Bokelmann, quoted above. The highly gifted physician, David Veit, Rand's oldest male friend,
44 Rahel Varnhagen
speaks of how ready he was to be guided by Rahel, for she did not wish to dominate him, although she unconsciously did so through the power of the highest human nature, through "her dear, princely soul. "
G. von Brinckman, who was a Swede by birth but had been educated at a German university and ab- sorbed the most refined culture of the time as a diplo- mat at the capitals of Europe, is even in Rahel's youth one of her most appreciative friends. He, like Veit, ascribes to Rahel a profound influence on his develop- ment. Brinckman said that he received from Ra- hel's exhortations to "Geistesmut" an impression as strong as if he had suddenly been transported to an altogether new mental world. Rahel's mental force, her independence, her certainty that "higher morality is reached through higher liberty," all this trans- formed his own point of view in many cases. "What I had sought in vain in the wise and the pious: undisguised truth, independence of thought, and in- tensity of feeling; this came upon me as a holy revelation in the garret of this extraordinary 'Selbst- denkerin,'" says Brinckman. To look into her "divinely beating heart," to cultivate the exchange, of confidences with her, became to him a necessity, passionate as a love, he says. In the presence of wise men and princes he boasted of being Rahel's dis- ciple, and during his whole life her influence on him remained as "spiritually powerful and highly human" as ever. The correspondence between Brinckman and Tegn£r, published by Professor Wrangel, is an important aid to our knowledge of the former.
Throughout her life, in a hundred different
Personality 45
passages, Rahel says that she has always known that she neither could nor should possess anything but herself; that she therefore confines herself to "the strength of my own heart" and to "what my mind shows me"; that she knew that only by keeping within these bounds assigned to her by nature was she powerful, in all else nothing.
Frequently, too, she speaks of "the great, thorough-going connection between all my facul- ties, the eternally indestructible connection and ceaseless co-operation between my feeling and my thought." On account of this she is able to say: "I am as much alone of my kind as the greatest manifestation here on earth. The greatest artist, philosopher, or poet is not above me. We are of the same element, of the same rank, and are fellows." This is one of those utterances of Rahel's that must be understood in connection with her individuality described above. Any one who interprets this quotation as boasting knows nothing of the individuality's certainty of self, as imperious as any other certainty.
Rahel's constant heralding of the value of individuality would not have been worth much, if she herself had not revealed it. From the beginning of her life to its close, from the first to
46 Rahel Varnhagen
the last hour of each day, there never occurred with Rahel what she calls by a happy expression "life-pauses." We all recall hours and periods that were not permeated by the essential life of our personality; during which we allowed our- selves to drift ; allowed the bowstring of our will to slacken, or let another draw it tight, while we acted, spoke, judged in a dozing condition of soul. There is scarcely any great personality in whom such pauses cannot be pointed out; in Rahel never. Sorrowful or glad, ill or well, resting or active, she filled the cup of the moment to the brim with the fulness of her being. We receive this impression from everything Rahel wrote and from everything that was written about her. That she lives in a "forest of people" no doubt hinders her, like every other social being, from extending her own branches as far as they could reach. But it transforms her nature no more than the beech, for instance, is transformed by the surrounding pine forest. She is herself, though not the whole of herself, as necessarily as is the growing tree.
" Why should I not be natural? " Rahel exclaims. "I could not affect anything better or more varied. "
Again: "Even if I stood before the guillotine, I
Personality 47
should not be able to say what I am. I am helpful and I breathe, more than that I cannot remember. "
These two contradictory utterances are signifi- cant. For Rahel's consciousness of her nature and worth is as real as her unconsciousness, a thing which only seems impossible to the un- tutored in self-knowledge, but which is the dis- tinguishing feature in all great, original natures.
Just because Rahel at every instant is in perfect harmony, one quality balances the other; her excitability does not become hysterical, her sensi- tiveness sentimental, her wit ironical, her analysis vivisection, her directness does not become licence nor her consciousness a mirroring of self.
Thought and feeling, meditation and action, seriousness and gaiety, everything with her is of a piece; nothing contradicts or cancels, everything confirms and intensifies the rest in this harmonious nature. *
Rahel knew that the unconscious is the source of strength in our nature. Thus she says, for in- stance: "In proper, deep sleep the soul goes home
1 Schleiermacher, the connoisseur of personality above all others, pointed out this very unity as Rahel's chief characteristic. See Chapter VI, Social Life.
48 Rahel Varnhagen
and bathes in God's lake; otherwise it would not be able to endure."
But at the same time Rahel knows that the fundamental instinct of her being is the thirst for lucidity. Her honest and keen-sighted self-analy- sis tells her that this instinct in her is not merely the universal one of human nature, but that with her it is a self-defence : only by thinking over things do the joints of her being hold together, so explosive is the effect of personal experiences with- in her. She cannot take anything calmly; every- thing, so far as it has any power to affect her, is "insuperably important." Indeed, she is un- doubtedly right that she would have been near to madness, if among her other passions she had not had that of thinking over things, not only suffering through them. Or, in other words, if in addition to her other sorrows she had not had that of thought.
"I must know, with regard to everything, how it comes about and how it is: thus ever since my childhood I have had the greatest desire to look at corpses." . . .
"I should have been a very incomplete creature in the eyes of all, if there had not existed in me a broad conception of the nature of all things and that forget- f ulness of the personal, without which the most gifted
Personality 49
people on earth and in every branch of knowledge would not be gifted. "...
"From my youth up my inner life has been rich and in accordance with truth. Nature acted keenly and truly upon keen organs: it has given me a firm, sensitive heart which always duly put life into all other organs."
Again: "One. does not have such gifts as mine for nothing: they have to be paid for! My keen appre- hension, with its power of definition and analysis, the great sea within me, my accurately adjusted, great and deep connection with nature, in short, the light amount of insight I have into it, which nevertheless is of so great value — all this costs me a good deal. What pangs, what uneasiness, what privations are neces- sary to make anything sprout, and how I have to prepare the soil!"
Rahel's childlike freedom from prejudice, al- ready alluded to, shows itself most clearly in the ethical sphere, where she revalues current pre- judices with equal boldness and thoroughness.
She well knows
" that the need of morality continues, but also that the conceptions of morality cannot remain unaltered. . . . The present age is sick with such old imaginings. . . . All existence is progressive, gains unceasingly in in- tensive vision; in this way earthly life is raised and that life which falls outside its bounds. The more insight we obtain, the more we shall come into har- mony with life itself. . . . Life is not a dead
4
50 Rahel Varnhagen
repetition but a development to insight and through insight. ..."
But Rahel sees that this development is just what is least of all permitted in the sphere of morals. And thus existence is split into two parts, since one does not with an easy conscience commit the actions, the so-called "crimes," to which one is driven by development.
"We ought to submit at once to being called ' wicked ' and taken to task, and yet we poor wretches go on with our little morals and our little laws! Sick Europeans I always call us in my own mind. ..."
One of Rahel's new ethical ideas was that per- sonal liberty involved the right to end one's life when one wished to suffer no longer. Against the talk of self-conquest and patience in suffering Rahel breaks out:
" Yet we cannot suppress our nerves and fibres, nor our wishes; are these last alone to be unholy? Ought we not to begin to regard them with the same pious awe as other works of nature, nay, as expressions of the deep craving within us to attain the right? I know that there exists only one intolerable evil ; when one has not satisfied this need and one's conscience is therefore diseased."
During the last year of his life Heinrich Kleist
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often visited Rahel, who suffered in his sufferings. After his suicide Rahel disclosed already the most highly developed modern views of such a "free death" (Freitod), to use F. Mauthner's new word for our new conception of this act. Rahel re- joices that her friend "did not prefer the unworthy part," and she knows that her understanding of him is now the only way in which she can honour his memory.
"I cannot bear that the unfortunate should drain their sufferings to the dregs. ... Is every kind of misfortune to be allowed to fall on me? Is any wretched fever permitted to kill me, any block of wood, any roof-tile, any piece of clumsiness, but not myself? .... Courage it is and nothing else. Who would not leave a worn-out, hopeless life, if he did not dread the dark possibilities still more? Our liberation from what is desirable is already accomplished by the course of the world. "
But voluntary death should be the conscious choice of a personality, not a precipitate act, Rahel thinks. She knows that only through the former do our so-called crimes become moral acts. Thus she, the worshipper of truth, can say: "Lying is fair, when we choose it, and an im- portant item in our liberty; but degrading, when we are driven to it. " She can say, in speaking of
52 Rahel Varnhagen
a highly developed person: "He is so far in ad- vance with his ideas that it can no longer be a question of whether he is good or not good : this lies far beneath him. "
She knows that there exists a first innocence which knows nothing of evil; a second, which has reached the other side of good and evil, and she says: "Innocence is beautiful; virtue is a plaster, a scar, an operation. " She knows how little this kind of virtue is worth: "People are all 'good' but they are of no use for anything. "
She knows that personal morality is the most responsible. She expresses a thought which is in unison with one of George Eliot's: "Our actions are the children of our minds. . . . However they may turn out, we must put up with them; they have so independent a life that they are able to kill us. ... They have children in their turn and become a whole race. "
But while George Eliot uses the most serious ethical idea of the new age in order to inculate the old morality, Rahel has the courage to set aside the latter on important points.
It results from what has been said here that Rahel may more rightly be called a pre-Nietzschian than a romanticist. Like Nietzsche she practises
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consideration for others, loyalty to duty, self- discipline, but like him she demands a revaluation of just those virtues which she practises, since each has found by personal experience what dangers to a fully human existence these virtues may involve.
A virtue, says Rahel, may be a much poorer thing than a passion, and "fulfilment of duty is often nothing else than a form of punctiliousness and officiousness ! " She abhors the doctrine that patience in suffering is an unconditional virtue. Courageously to grasp what one's nature passion- ately demands was to her a greater virtue, and she underlines, with the fullest agreement, Goethe's words: "To be just in all things is to destroy one's own ego.".
Rahel was too honest to believe that we can love others as ourselves except in the case of a very great and rare feeling. And she knew that her own propensity for putting others higher than herself was a weakness, not a virtue.
"Through my too great consideration, " says Rahel, "I therefore am really destroying myself, who, strong in many ways, was intended for other things by care- lessly prodigal nature. So it is! Thus I must con- tinue to die: I have already died many times. ..."
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In connection with these words she makes the remark that she knows "something of the eagle's nature" is indispensable for living one's life, but that she unfortunately lacks this kind of nature.
When Rahel accuses herself of exaggerated con- sideration for others, which prevents her from living, in the full sense of the word, we must remember that she always lays stress on her un- qualified courage in the domain of ideas and opinions. For no one's love will she ever sacri- fice her "truer conviction," she says. And, as F. Schlegel said of her, speaking of her holding aloof from the numerous "brotherhoods" of the time, she was "far too eminent a personality" to be able to accept the slightest restriction of her mental freedom.
When she accuses herself of cowardice, it is thus exclusively in the sense that she has left her per- sonal demands of life unsatisfied in cases where their satisfaction would have involved a want of consideration for others or for the accepted morality.
In one respect the ethical ideals of Goethe, of the romanticists, of Rahel, and of Nietzsche are in complete agreement: in the feeling that genuine morality first appears when one has found one's
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own essential nature and acquired a good con- science of living according to this essential nature. But while the romanticists permitted a "living out one's life," like certain disciples of Nietzsche in our time — that is to say, where not the essential but the accidental is the motive force — Rahel, like Goethe, like Nietzsche, was convinced of the im- portance of making one's choice between essenti- ality and what is only coarseness or caprice, accident or fashion, among our inclinations. Thus, for instance, Rahel, like Goethe, disapproved of the romantic trifling with marriage, the disso- lution of which Goethe thought justified when genuine feeling demanded it, but not on account of fashionable tendencies in sentiment, tendencies in which seriousness was absent even from passion.1 But, far more positively than Goethe, Rahel at
1 Moral fanatics now make use of some words of Goethe's on the sanctity of marriage — words which were occasioned by the frivolous divorces of the time — to represent him as a guardian of the sanctity of marriage. That he dedicated the deepest feeling of his life to a married woman and could only decide after a very long time to legalise his own "free love" are facts, however, which ought to free Goethe from the suspicion of having seen in mar- riage the sole criterion of erotic morality, unless we would assert that his life and his teaching were in direct opposition to each other! But he who demanded that every function should be per- formed seriously, regarded the function of marriage as serious, and one for which he himself, according to his own words, was unsuited and therefore unwilling to undertake.
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all periods of her life maintains the freedom of love, and the fact that the romanticists, and afterwards Young Germany, do the same has nothing to do with her opinions in this respect. She, like Rousseau, like Goethe, like the romanti- cists, like Young Germany, draws her erotic views from her own observation, from her own soul and its power of loving personally and pas- sionately: none of them is the others' teacher, though the spirit of the age may give courage to acknowledge these views and to act according to them.
At every stage of her life Rahel asserts what I would call the wisdom of the heart, assuming that one really follows one's heart and does not create any of those "simulacra," the paltriness of which brings love's freedom into disrepute.
"The heart is entirely in darkness, entirely alone, one might say, and it alone knows everything best. Only by looking into it can one gain real insight, since none of the confused lights of the world penetrate there and since the heart, so to speak, takes its standard from another world ; it has a yes or a no, nothing else. "
"The more I see and meditate upon the strivings of this world, the more insane it appears to me day by day not to live according to one's inmost heart. To do so has such a bad name, because simulacra of it are
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in circulation. . . . But pure as the seed-leaf of an almond is the inmost, true desire : what is sensitive is also holy!"
With Rahel as with the romanticists, Schleier- macher above all, the demand for love's freedom is a necessary consequence of the demand for individualism, for originality in every manifesta- tion of life, above all those in which the person- ality reaches its highest expression: love, belief, creation. Rahel insists that only when a person follows his nature's inmost demands is he true to himself, and only when he is true to himself is he moral. She consistently applies this conviction in her judgment of people who in their erotic re- lations thus live according to their hearts. One of her female friends declared that nobody under- stood everything in the same degree as Rahel. But this reservation must be added: where she met with nature and truth. The artificial and false found in her an incorruptible judge.
Those natures that are most readily charac- terised by calling them pagan Hellenic, won Rahel's unqualified love. Pauline Wiesel, who enraptured men as the most perfect revelation of Aphrodite, was and remained Rahel's dearest
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woman friend on account of the complete and naive frankness with which she lived in accordance with her pagan nature. When Pauline left her husband, Councillor Wiesel, Rahel gave her com- plete approval; her "strong heart was not made to suffer," Rahel wrote. As the mistress of Prince Louis Ferdinand, and of many others, Pauline showed such inconstancy in her love, combined with such innocence, such ease of conscience, and such kindness, that she appeared like a Philine brought to life. The strength and genuineness of her nature inspired in Rahel not only unalterable devotion, but admiration.
Pauline's Greek, or childlike, or godlike, naivete in the question of love's freedom, a right that appeared to her as incontestable as it did to the gods of Olympus, was as unlike Rahel's own conduct of life as possible. But Pauline, in Rahel's opinion, had thus led a more fully human existence than Rahel herself. Indeed, she com- pares Pauline with herself: "Nature has dealt largely with us both. . . . We are designed to witness the truth in this world. ..." And Rahel complains that she herself has only wit- nessed the truth in the realm of thought, while Pauline has had the courage and the good fortune
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to be true in action also to her inmost nature. Herself married at the time, Rahel gave the follow- ing unqualified expression of her sympathy for Pauline Wiesel: "She saw what I saw, understood what I understood; we laughed, observed, ad- mired, and despised in common. ..." She had a feeling for "the confirming and understanding existence in another. " And when she seemed de- void of feeling, it was, says Rahel, "because she, like myself, suffered from too deep a sympathy. She and I," Rahel continues, "could be agitated like no one else." She was an experimental, warlike, "light-hearted, or rather light-lived nature"; "/ never found any one deeper, truer, or dearer.1" Rahel not only felt that she and Pau- line both belonged in an exceptional degree to "great, dark, bright Nature, who produces life after life"; she even thinks that "nature intended to make one being of us, but she had to make two. " And, therefore, Rahel adds, in one of her offhand utterances, which open up an infinite psycho- logical perspective — "therefore she acts forme," that is, in those things where Rahel herself has not had the courage and good fortune, while perhaps Pauline felt that Rahel cultivated certain other qualities on Pauline's behalf!
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Varnhagen, who felt hurt on Rahel' s behalf by this comparison of herself with Pauline Wiesel, insists that the latter was a double nature, while Rahel's extraordinary power and charm depended on the perfect unity of her nature. And in truth Rahel's unity is of a kind rarely met with : genius, disposition, instincts, co-operate and strengthen each other, instead of being opposed to each other, as is usually the case. But Rahel herself so often laid stress on her dissatisfaction with the want of harmony between her will and her courage for ac- tion, that we must take her seriously and not praise what she herself called her weakness: that she did not dare what, in accordance with her inmost nature, with the approval of her conscience, she •wished. She knows that it is often "one's better knowledge" that demands what society calls "sin"; that it may be a greater sin to allow life's possibilities of happiness to escape one or patiently to drag along the mistakes of one's life.
It is no ascetic or Christian conviction that hinders Rahel: it is the inborn resignation in her blood, and in her race; it is her father's tyranny, her physical weakness, the knowledge of her lack of charm — Rahel thought her appearance insigni- ficant and quite devoid of attraction — that to-
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gether break down her vital courage. And when once this is crushed, it is no more capable of flight than a broken wing. Rahel, like all great natures, was born self-sacrificing and exacting. That she had full opportunity for satisfying the first-named instinct never consoled her for the great debt life owed her. For she was convinced that her whole nature was "willed by God," and that thus her demands were as holy as her desire of self-sacrifice.
Pauline Wiesel is certainly the most decisive evidence of Rahel's attitude to love's freedom, but there are many other examples. Among them the Bohemian, Countess Josephine Pachta, whose blonde beauty and brisk amiability made her seem like a kindly force of nature, a sunny child of the woods. This friend became even dearer to Rahel when she threw away her brilliant external posi- tion to follow Meinert, the object of the love which thus made her sacrifice position and reputation. When Rahel is summing up the most significant impressions she'has received from women, she calls Josephine Pachta the greatest female character she has known, since nothing could restrain her from acting according to her inmost nature.
When Dorothea Mendelssohn was separated
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from her husband and lived for a number of years, before they could be legally united, in a free re- lationship with F. Schlegel, Rahel stood faithfully by them. A fourth of Rahel's friends, the actress Augusta Brede, lived in a free relationship with Count Bentheim. Rahel not only approved of her friend's conduct but stayed with her during her visit to Prague.
But on the other hand Rahel could not reconcile herself to the erotic-aesthetic flirtations of Henri- ette Herz, which never overstepped the bounds of "virtue," but exhibited just that kind of "simulacrum" which was antipathetic to Rahel while she declares, and proves in her friendships, that "I am indescribably fond of genuine frivolity ! "
Among men also Rahel admired natures of the same kind as Pauline Wiesel's. Her favourites were, for instance, Prince Louis Ferdinand1 and Gentz. The former visited Rahel's garret to find a sympathetic, consoling friend, whose friendship appeared to him "much sweeter than anything
T The erotic colour given to Rahel's relations with the prince by Fanny Lewald, in her novel Prince Louis Ferdinand, is entirely fanciful and without any foundation in fact. Rahel herself calls the relationship "almost entirely impersonal." It was to Rahel he complained of his inconstant mistress, Pauline Wiesel, and Rahel had the thankless task of trying to put matters straight between them.
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else. ' ' Rahel perceived his ' ' disorderliness ' ' while at the same time she loved his exceptional soul and kept her promise of giving him direct "gar- ret-truths" when he required them. Rahel la- mented that their correspondence was lost, for it did credit to both : to her by the perfect frank- ness with which she told the prince home-truths, to him by the generosity with which he received them, feeling that the "little one," as he called her, always appealed to what was finest in his soul against his lower nature.
With regard to Gentz Rahel shows the same clear perception of his many faults and the same predilection for his inmost personality.
In this statesman and man of the world, so differently judged, usually condemned, Rahel had discovered a genuine "child's mind" with "the untroubled, pure truthfulness that produces last- ing naivete." It was this disposition that Rahel loved unalterably in this man, who was wanting in character just because he was like a child; a care- less creature of the moment, who showed all his weaknesses with the most perfect frankness. Wo- men excused them on account of his charming manners, men on account of his rich gifts, among which was his tactful way of making other people
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appear to advantage. Thus, for example, he would only take up the thread of conversation after an interval of silence and hesitation and modest attempts to get a word in, and then, as one of the most brilliant conversationalists of his time, would spin it farther, fine as silk and varied in colour, as no one else could. Rahel, too, for- gave him on account of this quality, which one may call as one pleases either lack of conscience, or freedom of conscience, or ease of conscience !
Rahel was to Gentz, as to Prince Louis, a mother confessor, a consoler, an oracle. He has the same profound understanding of her nature as she of his. Nothing is more characteristic of both than their letters at the time when Gentz, late in life, fell in love with the dancer Fanny Elsler with a young man's fervour. Rahel congratulated him in the warmest words on being still capable of such fine feelings at his age ! While others had nothing but frivolous raillery for Gentz's passion, Rahel saw so deeply into his nature that she compared his feel- ing with her own for a child, that had proved her still to be possessed of " ein Liebherz," capable of all the pangs and joys of love. It throws light on them both when Gentz writes that Rahel was the only one to whom he dared to confess the feeling
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which from an old man had made him young again, since she alone was deep enough to see in it the proof "that he had preserved within himself a pure and real humanity." And among the "floods of blessings" for his "paradisiacal letters, " which flow from Rahel's heart to his, we find the words, that in the eternal youth of feeling, above all in the power of love, unvanquished even by years, lies the strongest proof of immortality: "Well formed hearts can always be in love and al- ways wish to be. " This is Rahel's final word on the subject of the love of Gentz's old age. And when Fanny Elsler came to Berlin, Rahel treated the young dancer, who was a mistress of the art Rahel so much admired, as a daughter.
Whether a love is called by the world unreason- able or reasonable, immoral or moral, unhappy or happy, matters nothing to Rahel in compari- son with the conviction which she expresses some- what in these words : that loving is the state of life that makes our days rich, bright, and full of mean- ing; that only through love does one learn to know one's own existence; nay, that love is to such an extent the kernel of life that even a semblance of it is capable of awaking our sympathy.
Some one censured in Rahel's presence a
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woman who had begged a man for his love, even calling it a disgrace. Rahel exclaimed : " It was stu- pid, since it could do no good, but why disgraceful? " Rahel continued the conversation and swore by Heaven that never in her life had she controlled a weakness. And how could one do so? she asks. One's actions one can control, but one's heart, "which is soft, which is of flesh and blood, how could one turn it into brass? " How deeply the subject af- fected Rahel is shown by the fact that immediately after this conversation she had an attack of fever! Another pagan nature for whom Rahel cher- ished great affection was Heine. He had some of the faults that Rahel particularly loved; some of the qualities she valued highly, but also that ruth- less "ego-morality" which she only forgave when — as in Pauline Wiesel and Gentz — it was com- bined with a genuine naivete. Heine lacked this, for he suffered from an ambition in which Rahel saw the cause of his want of balance, insincerity, vanity, and capriciousness. Rahel finely sums up her own highest ethical commandment, the com- mandment of individualism, in a single word: "Heine must become 'real'."1 Since he possessed
1 Rahel borrows the word "real" (wesentlich) from Angelas Silesius's verse: " Mensch, werde wesentlich, " etc.
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no depth or seriousness, he lacked coherence in his personality and a synthetic view of exist- ence, and this made Rahel uneasy. In spite of these defects, which, owing to Rahel's frankness, caused occasional periods of coolness in their friendship, Heine remained her tenderly cher- ished favourite, whom she believed in, whom she consoled, and of whose fate she felt an anxious foreboding.
From all this we may conclude that Rahel carried out her first and greatest demand on others as on herself, "to be true and upright," while at the same time she insisted that this honesty does not exclude, but on the contrary necessitates, that self-cultivation without which no one arrives at his essential nature. Like Goethe, she knows that "man is a work of art . . . material, artist, and workshop are within ourselves. How beauti- ful each success seems to us, how hard the re- verse!" She regarded the years of one's youth as "the most virtuous, most beautiful, and easiest set on fire, " and therefore she forgave youth "no- thing bad, but a good many follies." She thinks older people are profoundly unjust towards youth, in expecting it to be wise without having yet had the opportunity of "distilling the essence from the
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tree of life.'" For Rahel says in another place: "Experiences are crude; their value is only that to which we succeed in ennobling them." And be- sides, what is the rationality of the elders? Sel- dom wisdom, Rahel thinks with perfect justice, but "usually only want of courage. "
It was, moreover, her experience that, however a person may conduct himself, he nevertheless at every stage of his life acts in the last resort accord- ing to his character; that is to say, Rahel explains, according to the sum and substance of his qual- ity ; human beings like the air, move according to eternal laws. And to "have character" means to her merely to have courage, since this sets the other capabilities in motion towards their goal. Thus, while every one else called a Gentz or a Pauline Wiesel deficient in character, to Rahel they were characters ; their courage to act according to the sum and substance of their qualities rendered them, as others called it, faith- less, untrustworthy, weak, but as Rahel called it, sincere. Among the majority she found weak- nesses equally plentiful, but with a good deal less honesty !
It was honesty and naturalness that Rahel
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looked for in vain in European sexual morality; and it was on account of these deficiencies that she demanded reforms so thoroughgoing that even to-day they are called "destructive of society."
Freedom for love — which is morality — but war against unchastity — which is sexual relation with- out love — that is Rahel's fundamental idea, from her young days in her lonely garret till the late phase of her life, when George Sand is already appearing like a streak of fire on the horizon.
Rahel's sense of liberty, sense of truth, and sense of beauty are revolted in an equal degree by the sexual morality that is protected by society. Marriage is to Rahel an oppression, comparable with other forms of compulsion; an oppression that has given rise to the dual standard of male and female sexual morality and the compulsory fidelity in which the social lie triumphs. Rahel touches upon this subject sometimes seriously, sometimes in irony.
"It is hard that in Europe men and women should form two different nations: one moral, the other not. This will never answer — without dissimulation, and chivalry was one form of dissimulation. These few words are very true; they summarise much unhappi- ness and much evil. Some day a book will be written about this."
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"I now perceive that human beings are so wicked, that they are obliged to make their declaration d' amour before a priest and an official. They know one another!"
"Is not an intimacy without charm or transport more indecent than ecstasy of what kind soever? Is not a state of things in which truth, amenity, and innocence are impossible, to be rejected for these reasons alone?"
On another occasion she says of marriage: "Away with the walls! Away with the ruins of them! Let this pernicious custom be levelled with the ground, and then shall flourish everything that has life in it — a whole vegetation ! "
She sums up the stains upon Europe in these words : "Slavery, war, marriage — and they go on wondering and patching and mending!"
Since the highest personal morality consists in being true, in every smallest trifle and at every moment, in "always proceeding from reality and not from appearance," coercive marriage must be the great social lie above all others!
Rahel asks: "How can an inclination subsist without charm?" She asks why people do not provide themselves with a legal, external guaran- tee for their relations of friendship, private or open, instead of allowing the duration of these relationships to be determined by their feelings? And on the objection about children she asks
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whether home life as such is bound to be sacred? Whether the children really can only be protected by remaining in their home, when the parents are capable of physically and morally torturing them to death there?
She points out that it is as absurd as it is im- possible and unreasonable to try by one's love to bind and restrict a human being in any action or at any point of his existence. Only those mar- riages which are contracted through mutual love, only those in which the free consent of both, not the right of either, determines the union, only those in which full, clear truth prevails, does Rahel re- gard as moral. And above all, behind the "closed doors" of matrimony the fullest freedom is a necessity. How little Rahel believed in the possi- bility of such freedom and truth in the existing institution of marriage, appears from her ex- clamation that those who are already married must remain so, but that she for her part would never be willing to sanction the marriage of a child of hers. ShS scorns "preconceived opinions de luxe" of all kinds, but especially those which have created the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children, and she would level this distinction as radically as those who are
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striving at the present day for the right of the mother.
"Children ought only to have mothers and to bear their name, and the mothers ought to be in possession of the authority and power in the family : so nature ordains it. We have only to make nature more moral ; to act in opposition to her — even as regards the solu- tion of the problem in question — is never successful. Nature is terrible in this respect, that a woman can be misused and can bear children against her incli- nation and her will. This great injustice must be re- dressed through human intervention and dispositions, but it shows to what a great extent the child belongs to the woman. Jesus had only a mother. For every child an ideal father ought to be appointed, and every mother ought to be considered as innocent and held in as high honour as Mary. "
It is characteristic of Rafael's attitude to her own sex that it was not among the blameless she, who was herself perfectly blameless, found her closest friends. And it is not from her own sex but from men that the most discriminating judgments of Rahel are derived. Rahel herself has no cause to complain of a woman not being permitted to think or to utter her thoughts, for she found listeners both eager and admiring in the foremost men of her time. Rahel uses a bad argument to defend woman's right to use her intellectual powers,
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when she asks whether Fichte's works would have been inferior if Frau Fichte had written them ? For this question could only carry weight if it were proved that Frau Fichte — or any other woman — actually had written Fichte's works. Then un- doubtedly men would have been as willing to acknowledge that woman's force of thought as they acknowledged that of Rahel herself.
Fortunately it is not with such weak reasoning that Rahel elsewhere defends woman's right to make use of her intellectual gifts; to secure "room for her own feet" legally and socially; to be res- cued from having to occupy herself only with trifles, and, in an intellectual sense, from having to be "worn away by her husband's or son's exist- ence"; from being forced, through her husband's erotic coarseness, into insincerity and coquetry; from being of less account owing to her bringing-up and her existence.
Rahel says of women: "They are so surprisingly feeble, almost imbecile from lack of coherence. They lie, too, since they are often obliged to, and since the truth demands intelligence. And lying bores me to death. ..." Again: "I know women: what is noble in their composition keeps together stupidity or madness. ..." In a third place she speaks of women's " clumsy, terrible stupidity in lying. "
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That women nevertheless even at that time were able to find "room for their own feet, " if they only had a strong enough will to do so, is proved by Rahel herself. Without financial independence, she nevertheless, when only in her twenties, suc- ceeds in reading, corresponding, travelling, choos- ing her friends, and forming her social circle with the same freedom as a financially independent woman can do so now. If Rahel, after her father's death, still speaks of constraint, it is only in the sense that unintelligent and indelicate criticism, and a pretentious and irritable family circle are always a constraint. At that time this constraint was only exercised by the family; in our day it is still exercised by the family and by societies and other forms of social co-operation as well.
From every well-thought-out system of individ- ualism— and Rahel's was as thoroughly thought out as it was instinctive — it necessarily results that any hindrance to the use of his powers imposed by society upon one of its members is tyranny, so long as the exercise of his powers involve no inter- ference with the rights of others. And how much more true is this, when laws and prejudices have placed such hindrances in the way of half mankind ! As an individualist, therefore, Rahel is a "feminist "
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with all her heart and turns her irony upon those who, on account of preconceived opinions as to woman's nature, seek to exclude her from the so- called masculine spheres of work and thought.
"Has it been proved by her organisation that a woman cannot think and express her ideas? If such were the case, it would nevertheless be her duty to renew the attempt continually. . . .
"So many women miss their true vocation, that it can hardly make much difference if a few do so by writing."
Rahel reproaches women — in her time there was occasion for it — with humbly excusing them- selves when they ventured to write a book ! Why should not a woman write books, why should she not study at the universities, if she has "the intelligence and the gifts through which her studies will be really fruitful? " Why should she not work at the sciences, if she is capable of doing so? asks Rahel with justice. But in our day Rahel might have asked: Why must a woman write books, study, practise science — even when she has not "intelligence and gifts"? How Rahel, who ex- horted every one to effect his own education, who thought that nature intended with every human being to produce an original, not a "manufactured
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article," would have abhorred the school exami- nations and university courses of to-day, the fac- tory work by which men and women are turned out by the dozen!
How Rahel, who knew that the liberation of our own true individuality "costs a whole life, full of effort," would have detested present-day parlia- mentarism and societies, administrations and com- mittees, where the effort consists in suppressing the personality for the sake of the so-called result ! How Rahel, who exclaims: "One spends one's life in institutions — fritters it away!" — would have detested the frittering-away of life that all such modern institutions involve! How she would have detested seeing the need of bread driving women together with men in the great herd, which only "desires and is quieted by food"! How she would have detested all those "women of the cause" who in our time confirm Rahel's observa- tion "that insignificant people with little spirit become harder with years, while an increasing gen- tleness is the characteristic of the notable person and of the mobile spirit " ! How Rahel would have abhorred the tyrannical treatment of each other's opinions, the cramping narrow-mindedness, the envious jostling, the petty importance of nobodies,
Personality 77
which the women's cause now exhibits every- where, since, from being a movement for liberty in great women's souls, like Rahel's own, it has become a movement of leagues and unions, in which the small souls take the lead!
It was in the performance of motherly social functions — nursing and relief of distress — that Rahel desired to find "a regular occupation." But no one would have been unhappier than Rahel if this "occupation," as is the case with organised co-operation, had fettered the freedom of her own initiative and actions. And a Rahel would be the first to assert now that there are other limitations of liberty and independence than those created by law and custom, namely those that arise from fashions and tendencies of the age, by which a person is carried away from his deepest nature and loses the power of self -limitation with- in his real sphere.
How Rahel with her lucidity of thought would have exposed the modern superstition that it is in outward departments of work that woman gives expression to her human "individuality," while a mother only acts as a sexual creature! How miserable Rahel would have found the modern
78 Rahel Varnhagen
tendency that tries to turn the home into a mere Sunday treat, and motherhood into a mere pro- duction of children ! How profoundly Rahel sees, in pointing out the final distinction between the essential being of man and woman, when she says that nature — she does not know from what eco- nomy— ' ' keeps woman nearer to the plant " !
This "economy" is easily understood; it is be- cause the tender life is woman's creation and be- cause that life requires tranquillity for its genesis and growth; because powerful instincts, deep feelings, sincere relations only arise where calm and warmth, coherence and unity are to be found ; because a woman taken up by the problems of external life, tied by obligations of public work, harassed by competition or the struggle for exist- ence, no longer possesses the psychological quali- fications which are indispensable in order that a child's soul may grow in peace and joy, sur- rounded by seriousness and affection; because, in other words, children need mothers, not only for their physical birth, but for their human bringing up.
Rahel hits the very centre of the spiritual task of motherhood when she says that, if she had a child, she would help it to learn to listen to its own in-
Personality 79
most ego; everything else she would sacrifice to this. To be successful in this, says Rahel, is the mother's loftiest task, her greatest talent, and those who do not fulfil the task, who do not pos- sess the talent, are not worthy to be called mothers, but only breeders of children. That a number of children, Rahel knew this only too well, are ill-treated within the family fold; furthermore, that few mothers perform their high office well, all this Rahel insists upon, without its misleading her into any of the foolish proposals of the present day for remedying the evil.
Far from believing mothers to be incapable of improvement, Rahel would redouble their power and with it their responsibility. For the pro- gress or ruin of humanity depends, in Rahel's prophetic view, upon the capacity of the mothers for performing their task.
I have elsewhere described Rahel's own deep feeling of motherliness, the feeling which made it one of the sorrows of her life that she herself had never had a child, and which caused her to find in the children of her relatives objects upon which she could lavish her stores of tenderness.1 And every woman who has what Rahel calls "ein
1 See Chapter III, Love.
8o Rahel Varnhagen
Liebherz, " knows that a general love is not enough ; that only the particular, personal, intimate love brings us happiness. Or, as Rahel in her later years expresses it: "The life of our heart alone is true and real. I knew this, even when I was actually a child; and, triumph! I know it still."
But a nature so constituted that it will "only receive and only give from the heart" becomes in this existence, as it still is, a tragic figure. And as such we shall find Rahel in what follows, according to her own unsurpassable definition of the tragic.
"Tragedy is something which we are quite unable to understand, to which we have to submit, which no prudence, no wisdom can do away with or avoid; to which our inmost nature drives, pulls, entices, and irresistibly leads us, and there holds us fast; when it destroys us, we are left with the question: Why? Why is this done to me, why was 7 made to this end? — and all one's mind and all one's strength only serves to grasp, to feel the desolation or to divert one's self thereat."
To sum up, I would maintain that Rahel, like Fichte, saw "the radical evil" in inertness and cowardice, but the way of life in courage and will ;
Personality 81
courage to take all claims and all vital decisions in perfect seriousness, will to put one's whole personality into every situation in life and to bring to all vital questions the most perfect honesty.
But this makes Rahel in her ethics just what I have called her: a pre-Nietzschian. To him also courage, veracity, mental rectitude were the basis of all morality. And when Rahel speaks of feel- ing "wounded in her nobility, " or thanks God that she is "born noble," she gives the word the same meaning as Nietzsche, when he shows that the word "noble" originally meant in Greek one who was something, who had a firmly united reality, which the cowardly and untruthful person has not. That Rahel' s train of thought was a similar one is shown, amongst other things, by her connecting women's "lack of coherence" with their untruth- fulness.
The final judgment on Rand's individuality is, then, that she was a born aristocrat, who neverthe- less, owing to her origin and circumstances, found herself hindered from showing the world her whole nature as confidently and freely as she had wished, but that in spite of this she remained, at every period and in every situation of her life, "Rahel
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and nothing else." And one who can truthfully bear such testimony of herself has a right to be described by the greater, infinitely misused word: a personality.
CHAPTER III
LOVE
IN spite of Strindberg, Weininger, and other de- spisers of women, our time has witnessed a rapid increase in man's appreciation of woman's per- sonality. One among many signs of this is that marriages and love affairs between younger men and women who are a few or several years older than themselves, are becoming more and more numerous in our time.
Of course such connections have always oc- curred. But formerly they were due in some cases to the man's gratitude for help or appreciation, in other cases to calculation, to win a kingdom, for instance, an inheritance, or an appointment ; some- times, finally, they were the result of the charm certain women have preserved to an advanced age. What is new in our time is that the cause is more and more frequently mutual love. Stendhal
83
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cites Mme. du Deffand, with justice, as a proof that "/' 'amour passion," which Rahel calls "the new European love," may arise at an advanced age. In our time instances might be multiplied. Love more and more frequently resembles that crocus which flowers in the autumn as well as in the spring. And, to complete the simile, the flower, which is innocuous in spring, is said to be sometimes dangerous in autumn.
Nowadays it is no uncommon thing to see a man who, like the young Spaniard Mora for Mile, de Lespinasse, entertains an ardent love for a woman ten years older; or even, like the young Italian Rocca, for one twenty years older than himself. Rocca was seized by this feeling the instant Mme. de Stael bent over the litter on which the wounded youth lay. When his friends told him she was old enough to be his mother, he replied that that was one reason the more for lov- ing her and that he would love her so devotedly that she would end by marrying him, as indeed she did. George Sand, the most wonderful of all womanly natures — fiery as wine, motherly as milk, healthy, fertile, and rich as the earth she trod, fascinating, uncertain, and dangerous as the sea which witnessed some of her love-adventures —
Love 85
George Sand was loved by younger men, as well as by those of her own age or older. Elizabeth Barrett was some years older than Robert Brown- ing, a difference in age which was of no import- ance to their happiness. Other famous women might be cited in this connection; I will confine myself to recalling George Eliot. Her marriage with Mr. Cross, who was thirty years younger than herself, was to me, and to many others, an enigma, until I heard an explanation from one who knew the circumstances. The ' ' marriage of conscience " between George Eliot and G. H. Lewes, who could not be legally divorced from the wife who had de- ceived him for years, was apparently not founded according to my informant, upon true erotic feeling on his part, but only upon intellectual sym- pathy and devotion. George Eliot had never her- self been the object of a great emotion, an emotion capable of extravagant acts — in other words, the emotion every true woman desires to have met with before she dies — until she found it in the young man whom she married at the age of sixty !
To these celebrated women, who found at last in a younger man the love they had dreamt of all their lives, Rahel also belongs.
Her marriage with a man fourteen years younger
86 Rahel Varnhagen
was her only bold experiment in life, whereas her views on erotic questions were most unprejudiced. George Eliot, on the other hand, expended all her courage on her marriage of conscience, and not the shadow of a thought of reform in the erotic sphere is to be found in her books. Renunciation, sub- mission, sympathy, fidelity are what she preaches. She accomplished the task, at that time extremely important, of showing that the evolutionary view of life included sufficiently powerful motives to produce all the old Christian virtues. But she never examines the value of these virtues from an evolutionary point of view! With a psychological intuition comparable only with Shakespeare's she revealed the dramas that take place among simple conditions of life and half -awakened souls: those of children and of the people. But George Eliot, in spite of the circumstances of her own life, no more extended the psychology and ethics of love and marriage than our even more gifted Selma Lagerlof has done so. In this respect the im- portance of George Sand has been incomparably greater than that of George Eliot. Mme. de Stael and the sisters C. and E. Bronte have told us in two or three books more about the loving heart of woman than George Eliot in all her works; a Mme.
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du Deffand, a Mile, de Lespinasse, a Sister Mari- ana, a Rahel, have done so merely in a few letters.
In Delphine Mme. de Stael attacked indissoluble marriage ; in Corinne she presented the tragedy of the gifted feminine personality : that of wounding her husband's prejudices on the subject of "woman- liness" and thus weakening the erotic attraction of her own personality. Rahel herself went through the latter experience with Finckenstein and Ur- quijo, she expressed even before Delphine and long before George Sand ideas as rebellious as those of either French authoress. And while death soon solved what was problematical in Mme. de Stael's and George Eliot's last marriages, the union of Rahel and Varnhagen became a happy omen for those ties of love by which many a woman of the present day has attained the erotic consummation of her nature when already advanced in years.
Like Mme. de Stael and George Eliot, Rahel had already given her great emotion to another, and thus none of them experiences the happiness of loving as she is loved. But they discover that their feminine personality, in its fully developed, gifted individuality, is capable of inspiring a great
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love. They are thus notable examples of the evolution of masculine love, which Mme. de Stael despaired of in Corinne.
Rahel' s three love-stories are typical of the three fundamental forms of woman's amatory feelings: love of her own love, love of the man, and love of the man's love. They may pass into each other in a thousand delicate transitions, but in every woman's love one of these forms nevertheless predominates.
Man's love has at present only two funda- mental forms: in love the majority of men love themselves, only a minority the personality of the woman.
And yet that is the only love the modern woman wants.
The new woman, whose victorious advance our time is witnessing, began to appear as early as the eighteenth century. One of her first mani- festations was our H. C. Nordenflycht, equally remarkable for her poetry, her culture, her in- tellectual emancipation, and her power of love. Another was Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin in Eng- land ; in France many names might be mentioned, among which the first is Mme. de Stael. The German counterpart of these women is supplied by
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Rahel and a few other notable figures, especially among the women of the romantic school.
What is common to all these women is that they do not look upon love as the majority of their con- temporaries still did — as the playful Cupid, who only gave slight wounds — but saw in it the fatal figure of Eros. Love was not to them a brief episode of their youth, upon which they looked back with smiles or emotion — from the serious- ness of life itself. These women possessed the highest intellectual culture of the age, exactly as Heloise had that of her time. But this does not prevent them, any more than it prevented her, from abandoning themselves to a primitive, power- ful, flaming, and consuming passion.
At whatever period and in whatever country a woman has loved with this great and entire love, it has implied in her the unity of soul and senses, and at the same time the demand, or at least the hope, to be loved as she herself has loved : with a love that envelops the man's whole personality, his human as well as his masculine characteristics. *
And Goethe's letters to Frau von Stein, Dide-
1 See, for instance, Letlres d'une Religieuse Portugaise, edited by Karl Larsen; the letters of H61oise, edited, from the original Latin, by Dr. Moth, and the letters of Mile, de Lespinasse now published complete by Comte de Guerin.
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rot's to Sophie Voland, show that even in the eighteenth century there were men who could love with the most delicate appreciation of the loved one's personality; who delighted in all its transi- tions, who wished to share everything with the be- loved, from the solemn hours of thought to the fruits of the summer day, and who only felt rich when so sharing.
But on the whole both these women and these men were far in advance of their time as regards the emotion which Rahel calls "the new European love."
The first martyr of this love was Heloise, who
with her conscious will devoted her whole soul and
all her senses to love; who preferred to be called
Abelard's paramour rather than an emperor's
consort; who with reckless honesty confesses her
white-hot passion, her longing, her suffering, who
feels with pride that her soul is made great by this
fire, and that her fidelity to herself is her nobility.
She already possessed the new woman's clear view
of herself and of her love, and she already suffers
yjthe pangs innumerable women in our time have
I suffered, when they found that the man's love had
'never embraced their soul. In Heloise we find
already the unity of love, glowing passion, and
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intense affection; we find defiance of the destiny which denies her the satisfaction of her need of love — the loftiest and purest need of her being — we find the courage to suffer, nay, to be crushed, rather than not to have loved, that is, not to have lived.
Heloise has certainly had sisters here and there in the course of the centuries, though they have not had her power of giving expression to their souls. x
But the type of man these women had waited for first appeared in Werther, a man with such freedom of soul, so responsive a sensitiveness, so profound a need of love, that to him, too, love was the vital question ; a man who could love a Heloise- nature as such a " grande amoureuse" would be loved, with all his senses as a woman, but with all his soul as a personality. 2
1 See, among other works, Kurt Breysig's Die Entstehung der Liebe.
3 Dr. W. Nowack, in his interesting study, Liebe und Ehe im deutschen Roman zu Rousseau's Zeiten, reminds us how during the Renaissance woman as well as man aspired to completeness of personality without any kind of "emancipation movement," since her right in this respect was undisputed; that even then spiritualised love appeared among exceptional natures and al- ways without marriage, whereas Rousseau, on the other hand, was lacking in comprehension of the development of the feminine personality. Goethe, who had absorbed with every fibre of his
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Rahel began by sharing the fate of the woman who is before her time, in not meeting the man who was worthy of her love.
The fact that young Count Karl von Fincken- stein not only fell in love with, but also became engaged to Rahel, who was remarkable neither for beauty, social position, nor wealth, shows that he was a man who already belonged to the new age in spirit, although in other ways his disposition was not such as could sustain this spirit.
He and Rahel saw each other for the first time at the opera, and their profound love of music, which in him was united to a remarkable talent for singing, was the real community of souls which brought them together. They met in society, for Rahel was just then in the phase dur-
heart the new gospel of the triumph of passion over reason, was the first to extend Rousseau's doctrine and to be the discoverer of modern love. Werther spiritualises his love into affinity of the soul, he is enraptured by what is individual in the loved one 's being, by the poetry in her nature. In Stella Goethe sought al- ready to resolve a matrimonial conflict in the spirit of our time, and he saw that the custom would have to be transformed, if it was not to become immorality. In all his works Goethe shows that reverence for the harmony and beauty of woman's soul, without which no refined soul-life is possible between man and woman, without which passion can be neither lofty nor enduring. And what Goethe had begun was continued in Germany by the romantic school and Young Germany, and in France by St. Simon, Michelet, Stendhal, and others.
Love 93
ing which she made up for some of the pleasure of which ill-health and mental suffering had deprived her in her first youth. She appeared at this time younger than her age, with a reserve of appetite for social enjoyments. Thus Rahel, who was already twenty-five, seemed more like other young women, and it was not until later that Finckenstein, who was a year and a half her junior, felt the oppression of Rahel's superior personality, while at first he had soul enough only to feel its charm.
He was a man who might have been purposely made to be idealised by Rahel. In the first place his nature had the refinement, ease, and grace of the aristocrat, which possessed the strongest attrac- tion for Rahel throughout her life. In addition to this he was unusually handsome. His fine figure, his noble features, his mild blue eyes, the golden hair, fine as silk, which surrounded his forehead in natural curls, all gave him the appearance of a prince of fairy-tale come to life. His singing, his many-sided culture, his feeling for nature, and his admiration for Goethe, his impressionable sensitiveness, all made Rahel believe in a pro- found affinity of souls between them. And his letters, which, together with a lock of his wonder-
94 Rahel Varnhagen
ful hair, were found among Rahel's private treasures after her death, are sufficiently full of meaning and warmth to make Rahel believe what he constantly assured her — that he belonged to her "for ever"; that she set in motion all the good within him, that she formed his personality, that he found in her a clarity and truth, a diversity and a strength of feeling as in no one else. The know- ledge of her love makes him weep with happiness, as he reads her glorious letters under the flowering acacias, and when in her little room they look up together towards the stars he feels a perfect bliss.
Since she loved him herself, Rahel could not doubt his having strength of will enough to prepare a future for their love.
But how often is young love strong? As sel- dom as it is clear-sighted. In most cases this young love is an enchanting and intoxicating feel- ing that at last one experiences for one's self this wonderful thing of which poets have sung and round which one's dreams have circled; that one knows its suspense and anxieties, exchanges its ex- pressions of tenderness, hears and pronounces its great and beautiful words! During all this Rahel, like countless highly developed young women be- fore and after her, transformed Finckenstein into
Love 95
something that he was not. Only by degrees did she discover that she did not know his real nature, that which only actions can reveal. The words, again, which lovers say or write to each other, only show what they wish to be or what they believe themselves capable of becoming, not what they are. When put to the test, Finckenstein proved to be a weak child, incapable of entertaining a great feeling, still less of fighting for the feeble one he harboured.
His father was dead and he lived on the family estate with his mother and his many sisters. These female relatives worshipped him with a jealous affection which grudged him to any other woman. And to this was added the aristocratic prejudice which was deeply wounded at the thought that he should introduce a wife of middle- class, and, what was worse still, Jewish, birth into their circle. No doubt some of the rich and handsome Jewesses of Berlin had made fashionable marriages, but this had not been a source of joy to the families they had married into. Thus Finckenstein's mother and sisters found many arguments to prove to him that his marriage with Rahel would turn out unhappily for himself! And so he begins, like all weak souls, to lament
96 Rahel Varnhagen
his fate in his letters to Rahel. By turns he assures Rahel of his love and tells her that he cannot bear to see his mother and sisters suffer. Rahel, who loves him, still hopes "to love him into love." She believes his protestations, suffers in his suffering, and acts "foolishly and uselessly, " as she afterwards called it, in holding to him as long as she believes in his asseverations. "Neither of us was a hero, " she says, "neither he in his way nor I in mine. " But by degrees she perceives and at last she says openly, that he does not feel happy with her, nor she with -him, in the same way, because she overawes him. She understands that his relatives are gaining power, while she herself is losing it, since he feels ill at ease under the in- fluence of her strong personality. Time after time she gave him the choice between herself and his own people: he returned to her, but only to re- commence his lamentations. Rahel did not hasten the decision, nor was she driven to it by wounded pride, but by the knowledge that no happiness could be real unless it was necessary to both of them. Their engagement lasted from 1796 to 1800, with unremitting protestations of love and tears on his part, interspersed with the inevitable assurances of a nature like his: that he did not
Love 97
lack energy, but — that his heart suffered in causing pain to those nearest him!
And so the decision was the usual one in such cases. Rahel, who had most right to suffer, but who complained least, was sacrificed and the jealous, selfish, narrow-minded sisters carried off the victory.
So blind was the man who had won the first love of a Rahel. But it cannot be doubted that Finckenstein's feeling for Rahel was real enough to have enabled her to give him strength to de- cide otherwise. Most women in Rahel's place would have used all the resources their love, their suffering, and their personality gave them.
Rahel did not do so. She hoped to the last that his feeling was as strong as his words. When she saw that it was as pale and weak as his good looks, she gave up the struggle.
But she did so only after sufferings, in which all the bitterness of the past was mingled. Even to begin to hope had been difficult to her, who through her birth and early sorrows had become so convinced of being destined for suffering; who had stood in shadow by the way along which the fortunate passed, had stood with closed hands, certain that no golden apple would fall into her
98 Rahel Varnhagen
grasp. And since the marvel had befallen her that life had opened her clenched hands and laid in them its most beautiful gift, she could not re- gard love as a thing to fight for. Even should she once more be lonely after having tasted com- panionship, humiliated after having been raised up, poor after having possessed riches — she must bear this rather than do violence to her inmost consciousness, the consciousness of the new woman : that no human being has the right to retain an- other by any other power than that other person's inmost necessity. Unless the requisite strength existed in the loved one himself, in his emotion, to ensure the happiness of both, there was no meaning to justify their union or to give it reality. It was no false pride, no ill-applied consideration, that determined Rahel. For she possessed in a high degree the knowledge that belongs to the new love : that one has duties in the first place towards one's love, above all that of sacrificing the unessential to the essential.
And when Rahel gave Finckenstein full freedom of choice, she still cherished in her inmost heart the lover's hope, that hope which can live even on improbabilities, that he would choose her. He showed, on the contrary, how right one of Rahel's
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friends had been in comparing his heart to a toy watch, with figures and hands but no works !
Rahel was left disappointed, not only of her happiness, but disappointed in her lover's nature. She did not accuse him; he had acted, she said, according to his nature, the fault was hers, who had not seen what his nature was. But such a per- ception is never a consolation, or at least the way to such a source of consolation is very long. Rahel now felt, like others who have gone through simi- lar experiences, that all blows are light in com- parison with that of finding one's self deceived in a person. It is this pain which may make the very joints of the personality go to pieces, which may bring a dissolving poison into the spiritual organ- ism. And natures like Rahel's are above all ex- posed to this pain. For they have a boundless confidence in the nobility of others, and all life is suddenly thrown out of gear when this confidence is shaken through the very person who has in- spired it. The traces of such suffering are never effaced.
Yes, there is always a drawn sword between us, and life after this, just as it smiled most brightly upon us, suddenly took us by the throat like a murderer. Our childlike confidence in life is im-
ioo Rahel Varnhagen
possible when we have discovered that it does not mean well by us. And Rahel, who had already suffered so much, thought herself destined for un- happiness. She expresses the experience of her- self and many others in a profound word when she speaks of the sense of guilt one feels through sorrow. This feeling is not the brooding over the faults and mistakes through which one may have helped to bring about one's own sorrow. No, it is, as Rahel says, the sense that one is no longer one of nature's pure beings, a worthy sister to all its calm, healthy, beautiful creatures, since one has undergone the ill-treatment, has sunk into the despair, in which one would have thrown away existence merely to escape suffering.
"Oh, do not think that what I tell you is exag- gerated. I am only afraid, when anything happens to me, that it is everlasting. To wound a sensitive spirit is to destroy it. If I showed my wounds they would remind you of the shambles. . . ."
" Acquaintance with misfortune is degrading, that is an opinion I will never relinquish. One is no longer a pure creature of nature, no longer stands in the re- lation of a sister to the calm things of life, when once, terrified by pain and humiliation, one would gladly in one's despair have given one's life not to be able to feel pain; when one has seen cruelty in everything — all nature. . ." "One has to look forward either to
Love 101
madness or to death or to recovery. Neither of the first two has happened to me. But still I cannot say that I am better; I have got over it, let me say. . . ." " What I have not received I can forget; but what has happened to me I cannot forget. God protect any one from understanding this."
From this time Rahel no longer felt herself indivisible, that is to say, she lived with two views of the world : one of inmost despair, which had be- come her direct view; the other life-loving, which was no longer direct, but was the hard-won faculty of continuing to impart the riches of existence "more purely, more willingly, and in greater variety than any one else. "
Rahel saw Finckenstein again eleven years later, the same year that he died. And how deeply she had suffered is shown by her words, both after their meeting and after his death. He came to her "cold as a frog, shamefaced as a knave caught in the act"; he talked about his handsome wife, and Rahel afterwards wrote some pages in her diary which show that she found the explanation of her inability to inspire a real love in Finckenstein in her own lack of beauty, charm, and power of attraction. But after his death she feels once more that the contempt he inspired in her when
102 Rahel Varnhagen
alive has not disappeared. For death could not alter her judgment of his paltriness.
It may be disputed whether Weininger is right in his opinion that the chief component of genius is memory, lit is certain, however, that this is a fundamental condition of depth of feeling. \ Rahel was one of those who are never induced by death or lapse of time to change their feelings. Her heart had cried aloud "murderer, " as Finckenstein sat calmly before her. And she would not change this heart of hers, which nature herself had fash- ioned "rebelle et douce." J A sea of bitterness rose within her at the thought that that man had had this power over her, nay, still had it. {
"I felt like an animal that belonged to him. He had had it in his power to devour me. ..."
"But out of every flame I have hitherto brought my heart unscathed, and this heart, even when it is deeply stirred, lives entirely for itself. ... If by a magic ring he had yesterday been able to undo all that has passed in these twelve years, he would have had the power, if he had wished, once more to possess himself of my whole life. But this vice in me — (how shall I otherwise call it or regard it ? I do not reproach myself; I know my heart perfectly: it must love; it is faithful, for it is strong and whole) — this vice is called virtue in women who are favoured by fortune ! "
Rightly to understand the force of these words
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it must be remembered that when Rahel wrote this she was engaged to Varnhagen.
The most lenient judgment she passed up- on him was severe enough: that he was a child, destroying values of the greatness of which he was unconscious.
During the first few weeks after the rupture, Rahel was helped in the best possible way by an illness, which gave her time and an excuse for fighting her way in solitude to resignation. When she then began, with the receptivity of the con- valescent, to reopen her mind to new impressions, a friend, the Countess von Schlabrendorf, took her with her to Paris. The wealth of experiences this visit occasioned, came at the right time. Rahel' s full receptivity and her shrewd appre- hension are shown in her letters to those at home, among whom both Jean Paul and F. Schlegel con- sider that a truer picture of Parisian life and of the French could not be imagined.
But Rahel's best help in her efforts to regain her love of life came from a young compatriot.
This was a youth of twenty, named Bokelmann, who was sent to her by a friend they had in com- mon. With unusual good looks he combined a
104 Rah el Varnhagen
soul as open as a flower. He attached himself warmly to Rahel just at the moment when every heart is most susceptible of affection: when its wounds are beginning to close.
The young man's appreciative sympathy acted like gentle breezes upon trampled grass. Blade after blade rose again and caught the dew and the sunshine.
But Rahel was not yet ready for a new love, and her delight in the rich, pure, young feeling that she encountered did not develop into any other kind of love than that in which one desires no- thing, in which one "does not wish to possess the lovable thing, but only to see it bloom." And when they part, after a couple of months of each other's society in Paris, we see from Rahel's letters that she is also trying to transform his inclination into the fine feeling without a name, which Rahel so well characterises in saying that we can delight in each other as we delight in and love a lovable child, met by chance, a happiness which may belong to every one and which does not involve any desire to possess the object loved. And on both sides, after a few years' corre- spondence, the relationship became nothing more than a beautiful memory.
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On her way home from Paris Rahel visited a married sister at Amsterdam. She took in the natural beauties and art of Holland and Belgium with fine appreciation.
And all the glories of art she had become ac- quainted with on this journey made her long for Italy. But, as she says later, the good fortune of "seeing Italy with my senses and a joyful, strong heart" never fell to her lot.
That she was again capable of longing, and that this longing turned to the south, proves that she felt once more that love of life which she had thought extinct.
She expresses her consciousness of the change in the words: "Without wishing to do so, we are always playing rouge et noir with ourselves; whether we win or lose we feel that we are thus living. "
Even during her deepest suffering Rahel had told herself that life had still some sources of joy left, though they were then obscured by sorrow.
Through Bokelmann she had experienced "as much of love as was needful. "
"Some one must be rejoiced by what was a neces- sity to us and what our never-resting conscience bade
io6 Rahel Varnhagen
us create ; and so we begin again to take delight in our work."
She could now return consoled to her garret, though filled with the resignation which makes one still young feel old.
"My soul has regained its peace, my mind its equilibrium, my spirit its due elasticity. ..."
"When all is said and done, all our tears and bitter- est suffering are only about possession ; (but one can never possess anything but the capacity for enjoy- ment .\ .
"What really makes people thoroughly unhappy is, that they cannot make up their minds not to be happy. But when once we are thrust into this, old age suddenly sets in. Our aspirations are no longer directed to the infinite; we parcel out life and live, as we say, for the hour. 'Tears, splendour, and fury have an end.' We stiffen, grow kind, and get wrinkles. Old age comes suddenly — like every other perception — not gradually, as people think. "
In true old age, however, resignation is pre- cisely our only means of still feeling young. And Rahel was still a long way off that age.
No trait is more significant of Rahel's nature — and nothing makes her to a greater degree our contemporary — than her never regretting the love which had caused her so much suffering, nor yet
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trying to persuade herself that she will never love again. She knows that "they who have pain, have yet the most of life."
"Like Posa, I have lost. But I should not wish to be one of those who do not hazard themselves. ..."
"He who goes about in this hard world without armour on his breast must be wounded. I did not know this. The terror of it is the worst, and when one still looks upon bleeding as death. Wounds will still come, but no longer unexpectedly. "
And in this trait the great nature reveals it- self. They only live who are lavish of them- selves.
Rahel expressed a great truth when she said that privileged souls, regal natures, long remain inno- cent; that they only learn with difficulty to per- ceive that there is such a thing as baseness, and constantly ignore this experience in the sense that they return again and again with confidence to men and life, in spite of their having neither for- gotten nor avenged the wrongs they have suffered.
Rahel herself was one of these natures, who remember the evil without the memory having a warning effect, who learn from all experiences
io8 Rahel Varnhagen
except from this, that there are natures less noble than their own..
And thus the experience of sorrow could not prevent Rahel from loving once more, and this time again a man who was to make her suffer far more deeply.
Rahel had now reached the dangerous age in a woman's life, the age of thirty, when, as never be- fore or after, a woman is ready for love in the full sense of the word. Of the Northern woman, at any rate, and as such Rahel may be regarded, it is true that in her first youth she only loves with her soul. But at the age we speak of her senses as well as her soul are awake; with her whole being the woman then desires the consummation of her nature through love and motherhood. She still desires it with the whole freshness of youth, but with a new strength. The girl's love-longing has life before it; the mature woman knows she must soon begin the descent, and that with every year the possibility becomes greater of her being com- pelled to die without having lived, in life's own holy and full sense.
Few are the natures that use up their whole power of loving on a first love. And least of all was Rahel one of them. The tempest of spring
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had broken a branch just when it should have flowered, but a fresh warmth in the air was all that was needed to make all the buds burst.
This came about when, in 1802, Rahel became acquainted with the man who was the object of the great love of her life, that love which never comes twice in a human life, for which every earlier love is only a preparation and of which every later one is only a memory. It is this love that makes all the forces of the being rise as the spring floods rise in rivers and streams; that fills the whole being as the wine-press is filled with the ripe grapes of the vineyard; that collects in a sacrificial cup all tears formerly shed in sorrow or gladness. This love is never unrequited, it is al- ways the daemonic attraction of two beings. This irresistible and fateful passion may unite for their happiness or their ruin two beings fully worthy of one another. But it may also force together two beings of very unequal worth to the misfortune of one or both. And such was Rahel's fate in the love that turned her whole being to flame and burned her youth to ashes.
It was psychologically necessary that this fate should befall Rahel in the person of a man in all respects unlike Finckenstein, unlike him as the
no Rahel Varnhagen
south is unlike the north or the red blood unlike the blue.
The Spanish Secretary of Legation in Berlin, Don Raphael d'Urquijo, was introduced to Rahel by his Minister. All the rare beauty and chival- rous charm of his nation was present in him, to- gether with the directness and vivacity of the child of nature, which always exercised the greatest attraction upon Rahel. Urquijo came from his country home in northern Spain and his exterior was typical of the Basque race. His refined fea- tures possessed nobility and strength in the same degree, his eyes were such as Velasquez painted, now flaming, gleaming fires, now deep, dark wells. His Spanish dignity and southern charm were united to a natural ease which made his every movement graceful. His voice had the music that ennobles even the commonplace word and renders that of affection irresistible.
To all these charms was added the novel singu- larity of his foreign nationality. This has at first the effect of a mysterious and personal peculi- arity. It requires time to discover that this interesting quality, which allures one with its unknown treasures and strange fascination, only
Love 1 1 1
belongs to the nature of the nation or race, not to that of the person himself.
With Urquijo as with Rahel love appeared at their very first meeting, and the time that imme- diately ensued was a very happy one. They were united by sympathetic exchanges of ideas, sincere affection, and erotic attraction. The only un- easiness in their companionship was due to the scruples his sense of honour imposed on him in re- gard to a youthful love affair in Spain, scruples which, however, were soon removed, as Urquijo heard that this love of his youth had thrown him over long before he had ceased to love her. But now a more serious conflict arose, between Rahel 's frank and generous nature, her confident love, free from all jealousy, and the Spaniard's sensitive and jealous feeling of proprietorship. Besides the inevitable misunderstandings due to their ignorance of each other's national customs, others constantly arose, through this difference in the manner of thejr love. Rahel, who attributed to Urquijo nothing but great, pure, and good feelings, hoped that his jealousy, however unreasonable, mad even, it seemed to her, was nevertheless a proof of the strength of his love. She did all she could to show him how dearly she loved him.
1 12 Rahel Varnhagen
But she could not love wildly and jealously like a Spanish woman, she had to love with the lofti- ness and wholeness of her own nature. And it availed her nothing that she was perfect in her generous purity of soul, in her childlike confidence. For just these qualities, which proved her de- votion, seemed to him to prove her coldness.1 That Urquijo himself took an erotic relationship seriously is shown not only by the scruples lately mentioned but by the fact that he afterwards married a Berlin girl, insignificant from every point of view, who had become his mistress. But he could not see the earnestness of Rahel's feeling, because it was so unlike his own. It was an external difficulty that Urquijo only under- stood but could not use the German language and that Rahel did not know Spanish, so that their correspondence, except when now and then Rahel relapses into German, like their conversation, was carried on in French. Only a small part of their correspondence has been preserved, but from this remnant one can form an idea of what Rahel 's
1 " Love is the greatest of convictions " — eye, ear, feeling, heart, are all irresistibly convinced; if one can resist, then one no longer loves; that is why only human beings, that is, "lofty beings, capable of conviction," love — this is one of Rahel's profound sayings of love.
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letters must have been, which Varnhagen was afterwards permitted to read and in which he found such "exuberance of life," so glowing a warmth, that he could imagine only one counter- part, Rousseau's letters, also destroyed, to Mme. d'Houdetot. Of Urquijo's letters only a few unimportant notes remain.
The conflict which finally parted Rahel from Urquijo was not, as with Finckenstein, the old- fashioned one between love and the prejudice of birth. It was an entirely modern one, between the man's and the woman's way of loving. And in this case it was further complicated by Urquijo's having not merely the Spaniard's, but much more than the Spaniard's share of jealousy in addition to a poor measure of self-confidence.
Where there is an Othello, an lago soon appears. This part was here taken by Urquijo's friend, a Spanish count, who had proposed to Rahel but had been rejected, and now constantly put for- ward Rahel's superiority as a ground for Urquijo's distrusting her. When Rahel found that her numerous friendships and social pleasures were looked upon by Urquijo as a theft from him, she gave up society, moved into the country, and saw no one but him. But not even this could convince
8
ii4 Rahel Varnhagen
him. Thus passed a year and a half, during which Rahel could reckon her happiness in moments, while her distress increased with every day. His power over her was still the same. After the most agitated scene a tender word from him is able to "heal her soul completely," to open her heart anew, to awaken her love again and again, and cause it to flow to him. How is it conceivable, asks Rahel, that his morbid distrust should not be curable and that they should not end by being happy since they love one another; since they are both good, simple, pure in heart, in other words have everything that is necessary to be able to love? For one cannot love, Rahel continues, with profound truth, unless one has these essential qualities; the same that are necessary for reli- gion. How can he think she has too much genius to be able to love him? Her whole genius is no- thing but her power of loving! Does he not see that "the magic works so" that she belongs more and more to him; that his presence constantly frees her from a sense of pain? She tells him that, whatever may happen, her heart belongs to him for life — and ought not she to know this better than he, since the heart is hers?
How can he disapprove of her letting every one
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see her feeling? Is it not a woman's nobility to be able to love? Indeed, women have no other rank and no other position, and she for her part would always show her love, would never conceal the fact that she lived only for him.
"Faithfulness is a matter of course, it is a condition of love. Without a faithful spirit one cannot love at all — cannot live, I might say; for what does one know of one's self, unless one feels one's self to be true? Without this one could not recognise one's self! ..."
"How I love you, your soul! Believe me, I under- stand it, penetrate it; none of its movements escapes me. Mine is worthy of it, and I divine yours. That is my genius, my wit; never believe that I have any other than this! I am made to love you, and that is all. . . . What a marvel that you love me! Yes, I believe it, but it is much . . . "
She begs him not to divide his intelligence from his heart. For, if we rightly listen to the former, it always confirms the latter. She tells him again and again that her appearing incomprehensible to him is due to his failure to perceive how she is one with her love ; how entirely unworldly she is ; that she is "simple even to stupidity," and that this is just the quality she loves in herself.
At every moment when she has been in harmony with him, she has felt the religious consecration of
n6 Rahel Varnhagen
their love and hoped that it would hallow their whole life. For even now love makes one of them holy to the other, and she relies upon his seeing that their union — "full of soul, of feeling, of up- rightness of heart" — is the only reality, while his doubts are nothing but unreality.
How great — and how imprudent — is Rahel, in her assurances that she relies upon his love! But those women who want to put their lovers' affection to the test are, according to Rahel, either "mad, or they are lying, or they do not love.'1 She would wish to take all suffering upon herself, so that he might be spared pain, and still she would be happy in the midst of her sufferings, if only he loved her. She tries to get him to see\ that love, when it is genuine, is " a force of the heart, afire of the soul, a unity of the spirits, a purity of the whole being"; nay, that this warmth of the heart is the same that has founded religions and won battles, that has reared the fabric of existence and formed all holy bonds.
She complains that nature and circumstances have denied her the revelation of her soul through outward beauty. For it would have been her highest happiness thus to reveal herself to him, "for whom alone I would buy every attraction
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with my blood, for whom alone I live and would wish to be beautiful. "
When Urquijo, before a journey, had rested a few hours at her home, she told him afterwards how she had sat by him and rejoiced at his calm sleep ; how she watched over him like a sister, like a woman who was his as surely as the heart in his breast; how the air around him had glowed with tenderness, and how she had intertwined their souls and raised them both in a silent prayer.
It remained to Rahel an everlasting, torment- ing enigma that a woman, who thus showed the unity and intensity of her feeling in every action and every word, should not be able to convince its object of it. For it was manifest as the warmth of the sun, the freshness of the air; why was it not seen and respected as much as these great things of nature?
And when she was forced to tell herself again and again that he yet doubted, all existence became in- coherent, as though its fundamental laws had been cancelled. If Urquijo had not returned her love — that she could have understood and submitted to. But Rahel's whole being rebelled against this ill- treatment of her feeling, this blindness to her nature, this impenetrable and cruel riddle.
n8 Rahel Varnhagen
Among Urquijo's letters are a few lines, written during an illness, which give a clue to the under- standing of the riddle, especially if we look at them in connection with his subsequent history. He writes: " Your calm, which under other circum- stances would have caused me unhappiness, some- what relieves my hard lot. I will see you as little as possible, unless you desire the contrary. You must be able to guess the reason. Your words console me, but your presence adds fuel to the fire." When, later, Rahel asked herself with bitterness why he believed in the insignificant girl who became first his mistress and, when he was sure of her love, his wife, perhaps the answer was this: that she gave him that proof of her love which Rahel had not given, and which, to the southern lover, is the only convincing proof. To this it must be added that Urquijo with good reason found him- self inferior to Rahel, and that he saw her inter- est in her gifted men friends. Urquijo doubtless suffered deeply from his incapacity for con- viction, just as Rahel suffered from her inability to convince him.
Indirectly Rahel has confessed that she re- gretted the want of courage which prevented her from surrendering herself completely to love,
Love 1 19
when she compares herself with Pauline Wiesel and praises the latter's courage, which, together with her irresistible charms, gave her a different fate.
"There is a difference between us: you live every- thing, since you have had courage and fortune; I imagine most of it, since I have had no fortune and was not given courage — not the courage to force my happiness from fortune, to pluck it out of her hands. I have only learnt the courage of endurance," Rahel writes to Pauline Wiesel.
Rahel complains also of the error of "madly letting one's life run away in pain, imbecility, aridity, sand, and chaos, regardless that no drop flows twice, and that one is committing a theft and an atrocious murder upon one's self. Simply because we are everlastingly seeking an approbation that is really indifferent to us, and are not brave enough to say boldly in the face of mankind what we desire and demand. Nothing is so holy and true and so direct a gift of God as a genuine attachment; but this will always be resisted in de- ference to an approved cipher. We allow ourselves to be burdened with what is most foreign to us, and thus our true selves are lost . . . . "
"Only inclination and the heart's desires! If I cannot live for them, if I am too pitiful, too abject, too down-trodden and misused, then I will hence- forward explore them in myself and worship them. It is God's strong will in the heart — the dark heart, heaving with blood — that has no name among us, and therefore we cheat ourselves, until it is dead."
120 Rahel Varnhagen
Even if these utterances are based upon many experiences, others' as well as her own, it is never- theless probable that some particular neglect of the call of passion was in Rahel' s thoughts when she wrote these words. But if it was what is hinted at above, then it is certain that Rah el's want of courage was not due merely to the con- siderations she mentions, but, as with many other women, to the conviction that she lacked the power to charm which makes the bold stroke successful. The man whose love Rahel was to keep, must, she felt, coalesce with and understand her soul.
Here lay probably the focus of all their con- tradictions: that between northern and southern blood, between the love of a man and that of a woman and between a highly developed woman and an ordinary man, who were moreover of different races and nationalities. And finally the contrast between two widely different tem- peraments and two widely different conceptions of love.
It is this last antagonism which makes Rand's misfortune typical of the developed women of our time. Rahel was one of the ever-increasing class of women who no doubt have their share of sensu-
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ousness but do not try to win the man by means of this, desiring rather that sensuous unity shall be a result of the combined flame of two souls. Men, on the other hand, feel more attracted, and be- lieve themselves more loved, by those women who by the power of their own sensuousness awake that of the man, and thus, if they themselves possess a soul, by degrees win his soul also. The purity and truth of Rahel's nature made her in- capable of using the kind of means by which such women retain and dominate men. And it was Rahel's unspeakable torment to see Urquijo's feel- ing dwindle through what she felt to be the strength and beauty of her own. Rahel's love also included passion ; but this was only the surf in a sea of devotion and fidelity.
From Rahel's words one can understand the nature of Urquijo's complaints. Among the scenes which were repeated daily, she had de- scribed one, which gives us an idea of the rest.
They were walking together in the Thiergarten, when Rahel caught sight of an unusually pretty woman, unknown to her, and wanted to look at her more closely. This interest of Rahel's in an- other than himself made Urquijo furious, and when Rahel sighed at his reproaches, he exclaimed :
122 Rahel Varnhagen
" Finckenstein treated you badly too, you ought to be used to it."
At these words Rahel went through one of those moments when our existence breaks in pieces, moments in which all our surroundings are im- pressed upon us with the utmost clearness. Rahel always remembered that when these words were spoken they were standing "in the depth of the wood, facing the water, in the evening sun, " and she answered: "If those words had been spoken in a play, the hearers would have shuddered and burst into tears." "That is true," he replied. "But that ought to set you free from me and show you that we cannot live together."
Rahel had held out as long as she believed in his love, had even held out when he said: " I love you but do not respect you' ' ; said that he believed she deceived him with others ; said that she did not love him. But when at last he said that he respected her but did not love her, she found strength to free herself, though every fibre of her body trembled with pain and every drop of her blood was rilled with the charm he still possessed for her and never lost.
So long as he had spoken of his own love, of his doubts of hers, while all the time he was goading
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hers to madness by his jealousy, a rupture had appeared to her impossible. Now, as she after- wards said, she found courage, but only in in- dignation at his unworthy treatment of her, only in the conviction that now "the value and possi- bility of her existence" were at stake, although it was still "the purest flame that consumed her heart."
" Once I lived entirely for one person. I loved him to madness ! For he, his aspect, was to me the present and the future, — and in a certain sense this was true. And in my soul I never thought I should give him up. "
"I lied: I did not utter my heart's demands, the claims of my person, lest I should hear in words the murderous No; I let myself be smothered, since I would not be pierced through. Miserable cowardice! Unfortunate being that I was, I wished to defend the life of my heart; I placed myself in front, I placed myself behind, I lied and lied and lied."
"Even in the greatest passion one ought not to allow one's self to be torn and dragged along sode- gradingly by pain. We abandon ourselves to love, whether good or bad, as to a sea, and then our luck, strength or art "bf swimming takes us over, or else it swallows us up as its own. ' As Goethe says : ' He who abandons himself to love, does he take any thought of his life?/ . ."
' ' Then, armed for murder, I seized my own heart and went, as though out of life. For I knew it was a dark death I was going to, and I wrote: I choose
124 Rahel Varnhagen
despair, which I do not know. It was a slow murder. And there arose a desolation more terrible than pain, rupture, and loss of the beloved. Blame me, as I my- self blame this cowardly baseness. But consider this: that nature had given him a fascination for me, and thereby given me an infatuation, which the clearest consciousness of thought was not rapid enough to counteract. The impression was stronger. That is love."
"All this life has been snatched from me, even did I carry heaven within me. ... I feel a whole flood of tears in my breast over my heart, and a single thing is enough to remind me of all. Nothing appears to me isolated any more: I feel wholly a prisoner. I do not console myself with the higher life! This would not exclude a beautiful earthly life. Every moment heightens and intensifies my intimate, ever deeper sense of the inconceivable loss ! — No joy reaches to my heart; like a spectre he stands outside and closes it with a giant's strength, and only pain comes in. This spectre, this distorted image — I love. ..."
"Oh, this one favour true grief grants us, when she forces upon us the reflection that she never can return, that she has really cut us off from that part of our life which she so cruelly tore. So it has been with me." [End of 1806.]
In her first despair Rahel told herself that Urquijo had never loved her, since he could be so blind to her deepest nature; and she calls both him and Finckenstein merely "shadows, coloured by my fire. " But even in the face of this thought
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Rahel had the strength of soul not to wish to erase from her life any of the events that had condemned her to remain solitary, though people crowded about her, and to "be compelled to die unsatis- fied, " though she herself had a world to give.
"Pangs of the heart are benefits, love-sorrows, slighted love, bliss. . . .
' ' Therefore I regret nothing. And I repose deliciously upon the torments and outrages I have suffered as though upon laurels and fairest myrtle. He who probes as I have will fare no better. My suffering is too human and too great for a little wailing!"
"Never have I lived and never said what life is: a love which does not turn to poison or remain with us as pain. "
Often as she asks herself, like countless other women, why her loftiest feeling has been the most outraged, she yet feels in her heart the certainty that is made up of innumerable, indescribable, and unutterable things and that cannot be de- stroyed by brooding: the certainty that in spite of all she was really loved by Urquijo. And when, several years later, he again visits Rahel and she is thus prompted to read his letters again, she feels that these, as surely as her own, were the expres- sion of a real love. She then determined to put
126 Rahel Varnhagen
to him the question which she had turned about like a dagger in her soul for days and nights with- out number, whether he had really believed that she deceived him? When Urquijo vehemently protested that he had never believed it, all the horror inspired by years of meaningless pain gath- ered in Rand's face and voice, and she exclaimed:
" Then why did you say so? "
Urquijo did not answer the question, but de- clared in the greatest agitation that for one who loves there is no peace; that he in particular had a very unhappy heart; that he constantly felt him- self to be the least handsome, the least amiable, the least significant of men, and therefore could not believe in a woman's love.
That Rahel calls this his "old litany" shows what an important part his want of self-confidence had played in the conflict, and that she under- estimated the genuineness of Urquijo's suffering. He declared, for instance, again and again that it seemed incredible to him that such a rare being as Rahel could love a man like him. Thus Rahel, who was hoping for a drop of consolation, that he might at last see and acknowledge her love, did not obtain it. As she herself says, Urquijo thought she wanted reparation for her feminine
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virtue, and that he gave her. But what she was longing for with her whole burning soul — repara- tion for her love — was not forthcoming. / And the idea never occurred to her, who saw him glorious as a young god, that with him as with her the frail wings of self-confidence had perhaps been broken in childhood.
The only defence she found for him was that he had killed her as innocently as "the axe that be- heads a great man," since with his nature he could not even divine the existence of such a being as she was!
But she did not thereby explain the mystery, she only removed it to the sphere of the unconscious.
The delicate threads that with irresistible power bind one human being to another were spun thousands of years before we were born, by in- numerable beings that have gone before and countless mysterious influences.
When, in later years, others were surprised at
Rahel's love of a man with so many defects, she
I replied that no doubt she had always seen his
faults — for love, is not, as people thought, the
\blind god, but the most clear-sighted one — but
that such a perception had nothing to do with love.
128 Rahel Varnhagen
It was true that she had tried to "dissect this love, so that it might never come to life again." But she had not the strength to do it, for she was seized by "the new European love" in all its fateful might.
"I believe that if the director of this earth had wished to give an example of this kind of love in all its trans- formations and possibilities, in its highest power, genuineness, and purity, combined with the highest self-knowledge and thus in the highest degree con- scious of its own torments, so as to reflect every pain from the whole compass of the soul, as though it were furnished with facets, — I believe that I should have sufficed for this."
She is still without an answer to her own question, why it should have been this man of all others who for the first and only time in her life made her feel "that fever of love, that perfect satisfaction in the contemplation of his person. "
"This person, this being has exercised the greatest magic over me, and consequently exercises it still. To him I gave . . . my whole heart, and this can only be given back by love and worthiness, otherwise one never gets it again. Is there then a magic of curses? Can one devote one's self to a devil? When he left the room I fell down with a loud cry, my heart burst- ting against my ribs, and asked God whether one can
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make away with one's heart, for he knew that without a heart one can live no longer.
" . . .It seems as though he must leave me some- thing that he has of me, and as though his love could still kindle and heal me. ... Until I can love some one more deeply ... I am deprived of the part of me that is necessary to my happiness, the source of my brightest, most intimate being is buried under heavy curses and magic. "
"Ah, eternal fate, thou wilt remain true, so long as the smallest fibre is left of me. True thou wilt ever have been! True! True were the eternal things I eternally wrote to the unfeeling one . . . true that I found the symbol of my senses; that I threw away my heart to him for ever ; true that he did not under- stand me; true the frightful dissonance. How few love! Of whole generations only one. . ."
" Oh, what a disease is love! How much caprice, how much folly there is in it. . . . And this is our real love — not the first — wherein not a speck of us remains behind, wherein we honestly give the last drop of our blood. It only remains to suffer honestly."
Rand's confessions of Urquijo's continued power over her, here quoted and in part addressed to Varnhagen, have an interesting parallel in a letter which Mme. de Stae'l, then married to Rocca, wrote to Benjamin Constant; a letter in which she indirectly tells him that so long as her heart beats, he will have a place in that heart which no one else has had or can have.
9
130 Rahel Varnhagen
That a certain voice, a certain smile, a certain look, a certain temperament above all other be- ings, near or far, can force the one who loves them to remain within their magic circle, even when that magic circle is a circle of hell — that is the enigma. And Rahel pondered over it as long as she lived.
But pondering may make the hair white with- out bringing a spark of light into the irrationality of love's nature. Nor did Rahel gain from all her brooding over the fate of her love any knowledge but this: "I know the disease, I have enjoyed it. "
In 1807 she still felt, not "as one wounded, but as one destroyed," and knew that she could never "grow together." But she was "not dead to contact with the world," although she no longer possessed that point of the soul "to which life flows." Yet by degrees she felt that she was alive, capable of enjoyment and amusement; in- deed, she says that she had grafted on her heart many a liking that she had no name for. She begins to feel "calmness, broadness of vision, and joy" through contemplation of herself. By de- grees new growth has sprung up in the desert she calls her heart; she has begun to find out that "there is a clearness and happiness in and through
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ourselves"; that a heart full of "maltreated love" may return to itself, to "its own inner country." Indeed, she feels that "so long as one lives, one loves, when one has once loved. And this afflic- tion is moreover one of the best. I do not resist my heart : therein lies my art. "
Rahel was not one of those poor, inert, and self- centred natures that insist upon sorrowing, that tear open their wounds as soon as they begin to close.
A woman who in spite of all her sufferings pre- serves her vivacity, who has "a gay spirit but a sad heart," usually exercises a great attraction upon youth. And just at this time Rahel gained a new intimate in a young man who, like David Veit, remained only a friend, but was a friend in the fullest sense of the word. To him, as to Veit, many of Rahel's most significant letters were written.
This young jnan was Alexander von Marwitz, belonging to a noble family whose estate was near Berlin. He was twenty-two when he made Ra- hel's acquaintance in 1809, and had lately aban- doned a military career, which was not to his taste, in order to live on his estate as an agriculturist
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and scholar. But, like most young men of a serious turn of mind at his age, he was rendered unhappy by the gulf between his ideal will and the reality by which he was surrounded, between his eager young powers and the insignificant aims to which he could direct them. And his melancholy took the form of thoughts of suicide.
In this gloom he found help in Rahel, of whom he wrote in his admiring gratitude: "She must surely be the greatest woman now on earth. "
She helped him not only with sympathy in his suffering, but by letting him feel that he was necessary to her. She taught him that natures "with the double gifts, the twofold spirit" must learn to bear solitude and find their consolation in working for others, for the life of one who does no- thing but complain is a miserable one. No doubt it was true that the time offered no opportunity for a great achievement, but it remained for all "to do well what lay nearest. "
' ' You cannot escape the age. Every one is bound to his time. Our time is that of consciousness, mirroring itself to infinity, even to vertigo. . . ."
"To live, love, study, be diligent, marry, if it so turns out, to perform every trifling act properly and with life, that is in any case to have lived. ..."
But in order to impart this understanding and this
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advice, Rahel herself had had to gain the wisdom she compresses into such words as these :
' ' The hardened heart, the soul prepared for every- thing, which has nothing left but its own conscience, can await its fate from this inmost point of being, relying on itself."
"There is a universe, in it we develop. And it matters not at all what fate is ours, when we have ar- rived at the perception that development is our fate. "
What is here quoted shows how Rahel healed her own wounds. And to help her friend to per- ceive that a human being can bear greater pain than his own youthful Weltschmerz, she did not shrink from revealing to him her deepest sufferings.
She was really successful in saving her friend, of whom she says that his presence had become to her "what the eye is to the world," so much consolation and joy had he brought her during a companionship, the nature of which she thus characterised: "We live like two students, one of whom is a woman."
And it was not as a suicide but as a hero, in the struggle for liberty of 1813, that Marwitz ended his life.
3
While Rahel was thus helping others she was
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still herself a sufferer. After the great volcanic eruption she wrote: "There will always be a Herculaneum to explore."
She was still buried in the ruins when she heard outside her grave a young voice sing an alluring song of new life.
It was during the agitated period of Rahel's relations with Urquijo that Varnhagen saw her for the first time at a house in Berlin, where he was tutor. He regarded the celebrated Rahel with interest, but at a distance; probably she hardly noticed the youth of eighteen, otherwise than as a member of the group of literary young men to which her brother Leopold belonged.
Varnhagen von Ense was born at Dusseldorf on February 21, 1785. His father was a medical man, and at his death the fifteen-year-old boy determined to follow the same profession. But lack of means delayed his studies, and before they were finished he had changed his plans more than once.
His second post as tutor was at Hamburg. And there he fell in love with the mother of his pupils, Fanny Herz, a widow and several years his senior. As she returned his inclination, it led to a secret
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engagement. This lasted during the years of his studentship, so that he was still engaged to Fanny Herz when in 1807 he met Rahel for the second time, again in her circle of acquaintance in Berlin. She at once made a powerful impression on him, and his presentiment of her unique excellence became certainty when he saw the unqualified admiration, nay, reverence, with which his great teacher Schleiermacher treated Rahel. Varn- hagen afterwards saw her at Fichte's lectures. But it was not until the spring of 1808 that he ventured one day to approach Rahel in the course of a walk and to enter into a conversation, in which he succeeded in interesting her so much that she asked him to call.
Rahel, who was then thirty-seven, at first looked upon the twenty-three-year-old Varnhagen as a young man whom, like Marwitz, she could assist in the battle of life. But she soon found that her experience with Bokelmann was repeated, and that a soulful youth gave his enthusiasm the name of love. And, as before, she regarded this erotically- tinted enthusiasm as a transient emotion and at first could only herself feel that calm sort of love which consisted in joy over the youth himself and gratitude for his sympathy.
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But the result was different and Varnhagen acquired an importance in her life which surpassed that of Bokelmann as much as Urquijo's im- portance surpassed that of Finckenstein.
Varnhagen was one of those men, rare then as now, to whom the element of soul in love out- weighs, or at least counterbalances, that of the senses; to whom psychological interest is the strongest intellectual passion, and in whom mental receptivity is greater than creative power. Goethe calls Varnhagen a "separating, searching, discriminating, and criticising nature, " and this description covers a whole class. It is in general men of this type who form the little group just mentioned — those who love the feminine personal- ity. Exceptions may no doubt be found, above all, Goethe. But as a general rule men who are full of their own force are not transported in their whole being by the feminine life of the soul and feminine qualities. A man who is power- fully creative and sunk in his own world does not often afford the woman he loves the hap- piness of feeling herself understood and appre- ciated in her most personal qualities; to him she is always the sexual creature. The unproductive,
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or but slightly productive observer more frequently proves an eager listener to a woman's soul, more delicately responsive, more rapidly vibrating. Such men often have many women friends and, if their outward appearance is not unmanly, they also inspire profound erotic feelings. The feminine life of the soul has for them the same attraction as the physical woman for the mascu- line majority; for they are provided with a new sense: a sense of the woman-soul. Often it is men of just this kind who in youth do not feel attracted by young girls. To their own refined sensitiveness, their intellectual maturity, their passion for culture, above all culture of the soul, their interest in psychological inquiry, young girls appear too undeveloped or indeterminate or insignificant. And this is even more the case since, before the age of twenty, and often even longer, the most soulful young women conceal the individuality they are forming as shyly as certain buds conceal their colour until the flower is fully open. In women of a maturer age, on the other hand, the young men we are speaking of find more readily the completed personal charac- ter, the complicated life of the soul, intensified by experience, the refinement of sensation, the many-
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sided culture, which to them form the greatest attraction in a feminine being. And since women in our time, owing to the richer, freer life they are able to lead, preserve both their outward and inward youthfulness better than formerly, love affairs and marriages between men of this type, but also of other types, and women older than themselves are becoming more and more usual.
No sign of the times is more significant of the evolution of man's love than this. For this love has then, in most cases, run the same course as that of the soulful woman ; it has first kindled the soul, and the flame of the soul has kindled the senses.
No doubt it happens not unfrequently that such a man is seized in his maturer years with love for a young woman. From the point of view of the race this is even desirable, and sometimes, perhaps, the older woman is prepared to have to repay, by a final renunciation, the second spring- time her life has received. In any case, connec- tions of this kind between younger men and older women often assist in a high degree the develop- ment of both. Nietzsche went so far as to re- commend them. They are only "unnatural,"
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as the thoughtless call them, when the woman re- tains the man, either by the brute force of the law or by the more delicate means her grief can command. So long as coercive marriage exists — and until human beings have reached that stage of development when they will no more retain with them a loved one with the corpse of his love within him, than they would keep his dead body itself — so long will unions between men and wo- men, where the difference in age is great, be never- theless frequently unnatural, not in their early, but in their later stages. But in our time we see more and more often an enduring happiness achieved either by an older woman and a younger man or the reverse, when these persons possess a true sense of responsibility with regard to the success of their life's experiment and a true per- ception of the means whereby love may be kept alive.
In these, as in so many other respects, Rahel was far ahead of her time. She understood from the very beginning that perfect mutual freedom and frankness are the only ties that bind.
Perhaps the greatest power over women of the men just described lies in their boundless need of
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women. These Don Juans of the soul are not wholly captured, as Rahel said of Varnhagen later, by any particular woman; but the whole female sex captures them all the more irresistibly. Everywhere they find women to whom they can confess their adventures, complain of their suffer- ings ; who console them when their sensitiveness is wounded, support them when their self-confidence fails. Woman is the mirror in which their self- contemplation shows them their own image magni- fied, or the oil their working-machinery cannot dispense with.
And this is confirmed in Varnhagen's relations to Rahel. He met her at the time when, in addi- tion to the wide and gracious receptivity of his own nature, he also had that of youth; when his many-sided culture and intellectual maturity were far in advance of his years, while his personality was still a chaos of mutually conflicting pro- pensities, desires, and feelings. In the matter of a career, no less than in that of his view of life and his love, he was seeking that which accorded with his true nature. And now through Rahel he felt himself "as though raised at a stroke to a higher plane of life." He was confronted by a nature that was the opposite of his own ; a nature as pro-
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nounced as it was complete in its individuality. This nature was, moreover, that of a woman, a woman whose perfect frankness permitted him to look into the depths of her soul and whose bound- less generosity could only be compared with her inexhaustible wealth.
Varnhagen thus describes his first impression of Rahel: " A slight, graceful figure, small, but strongly built, with strikingly small hands and feet. Her face, surrounded by a wealth of black hair, gave evidence of intellectual superiority ; the rapid, but firm glances of her dark eyes left one in doubt whether they gave or received more; an expression of suffering lent a gentle charm to the clear features. She moved almost like a shadow in her dark dress, but freely and firmly, and her greeting was as unconstrained as it was friendly. But what surprised me most was her voice, sonorous, soft, sounding from the inmost soul, and the most wonderful speech I have ever heard. In easy unpretending sentences, of the most original humour and turn of mind, were united naivete" and wit, severity and amiability, and all this was infused with a deep veracity, hard as iron, so that even the strongest felt at once that it would not be easy to twist or break anything in her utterances. At the same time a beneficent warmth of human kindness and sympathy allowed even the humblest to rejoice in her presence. "
And Varnhagen describes their early intercourse thus: "Infinitely charming and fruitful was this springtime of an enchanting companionship, to which
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I too contributed the best I had .... Our confi- dential intimacy increased day by day. . . . Far from meeting with approval in everything, I was often blamed, and could guess at further displeasure which was left unspoken ; yet I could feel that her sympathy for me did not suffer thereby, but rather increased, and this gain prevented me from taking the rest to heart. ... It was vouchsafed to me to look into the richest life . . . . "
. . . " This life appeared indestructibly young and strong, not only as regards the mighty spirit that soared freely above the waves of daily life, but also as to the heart, the senses, the veins, the whole bodily ex- istence, which was all immersed in freshness and brightness; and the purest, most refreshing present stood between a perfected past and "a future rich in hope."
There was nothing irresistible in Varnhagen' s exterior. He was tall and fair, with wavy hair about a lofty, intelligent forehead; blue-gray, observant, but yet gentle eyes; a delicate nose with sensitive nostrils; a still more delicate and sensitive mouth. His whole appearance was agreeable without being out of the common; the weakness that the face exhibits in later years was probably even more apparent in youth. Such as he was, he exercised no fascination upon Rahel. She herself has said that her wounded and out- raged heart had no strength to love alone; that it
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was his love that won her; that she was ashamed so long as he loved alone, but when she saw that he really loved, that he had found the inmost con- tinuity of her being, then she on her side did not restrain her heart. But, she continues, her feeling was now not only gratitude for his gifts but emo- tion at his love. This would have been repugnant to her, if she had not also discovered his "love- charm" ; if her heart's highest flame had not united with his. Rahel's last love is a confirmation of the Danish poet Paludan-Muller's words: that our heart is like the violin, which, once broken, gives a better tone but a weaker sound.
She had, of course, twice encountered love. But the first time it had not been so strong that the jealousy and prejudice of petty feminine souls could not conquer it ; nor was it so fiery the second time that her lover's own jealousy and pre- judice could not quench it. She had, of course, had many friends. But these had sought her on their own account, because they needed conso- lation or strength or stimulation. In a word, she had either been loved without being understood, or understood without being loved; sought after and delighted in like a great and rare phenomenon. But no one had ever surrounded her with the feel-
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ing that delivers us from loneliness, that is a loving comprehension of what is unique and in- dividual in our soul. In her deepest sorrow Rahel had learned that people understand each other so little that they do not even hear the wailing "that bursts forth from the breast of each, " or, if we hear it, we cannot help even those we love the best, whom we wholly understand, and whose sufferings torture us.
. . . "We are lonely. This cell, in which every human soul is held and where love now and then marries life to life, this is what makes us grow stiff. "
But of all the manifestations of Rahel's feel- ing of loneliness, none is more significant than the fact that she, who "was a disciple of Shakespeare, " was early and often occupied with thoughts of death. But never had her own death moved her; never had she thought that her death "would hurt a single person. From you," she wrote to Varn- hagen, "I learned it; and it was for the first time in my life that I thought it and knew that I had thought it. So lonely have I lived. "
Varnhagen, the born student of human nature, not only observed Rahel with the most eager in- terest, but absorbed her with the most implicit
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devotion. With a knowledge of self extraordinary for his years, he was aware of his own fundamental defect: "My spirit came quite poor into the world ... no spring wells up in me. ... I am empty." But with equal clearness he perceives his chief qualities: receptivity, intelligent and profound assimilation of the thing received, strength to admire, and strength to wait.
"I am a slender thread by the side of your beautiful, tall tree, I know it. And I almost despair at my want of strength, which is thus placed by love beside your bubbling, strong-flowing life; I feel my poverty in every sense through your richness. ..."
"But in this complete emptiness I always remain open : a ray of sunshine, a movement, a form of beauty or merely of strength never escapes me; I simply wait for something to happen, like a beggar by the roadside. , . . "
"You traverse every sphere, whilst I move only in a few. . . . But when you visit mine, you will al- ways find me, and if you enter a house where I cannot follow, I shall wait quietly by the door. . . . "
The last-named quality is the rarest of all, among people in general and young people in particular. It depends upon the power of losing one's self so completely in the person one loves that one can wait with absolute confidence the
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unravelling through that person herself of what- ever may seem unreasonable, unjust, or incom- prehensible in her. And Rahel caused Varnhagen, as he did her, not a few difficulties, especially by her unqualified frankness. It is characteristic of this that several of her already quoted confidences on the subject of her feeling for Urquijo were made to Varnhagen, between 1808 and 1812, and equally characteristic that she often directed her penetrating criticism against Varnhagen him- self. But his belief in Rahel stood every test.
Rahel, who felt too exhausted by suffering to believe in the possibility of a personal happiness, awoke day after day with growing wonder and emotion at this new thing that had come to her.
During the summer of 1808, she lived at Char- lottenburg, which was then rural. Varnhagen went there every afternoon to exchange ideas and ex- periences, while they walked in the cool, flower- scented park, or beneath the avenues and along the bank of the Spree, or on the shady green be- fore the house. The moon rose, the stars came out, but their conversation continued, with or without words. And Rahel felt the atmosphere about her transformed by this intimate under-
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standing, which every soulful person dreams of, seeks in friendship and love, and hardly ever finds. But when we have found it, there is no more need of disguises or masks, protective armour or weapons of defence. Then we are transported to Paradise, where the air is always mild, naked- ness always natural, weapons always needless, for there we move like a happy child in the warmth of loving eyes. The richer, the more complicated a person's nature is, the more difficult is it for him to find this all-loving comprehension. But if he finds it, it will transform existence as the spirit of a walk is transformed, when we leave the hot, dusty highway and turn into the mossy, sun-flecked, perfumed woods; as the atmosphere is transformed when a leaden sky is cleft and a flood of sunlight is poured over the earth ; as the landscape is transformed when, at a sudden turn of the road, we leave the Alps behind us and see Italy at our feet, in the season of vines and roses. He who has experienced this, if only for a day, can divine what Rahel felt, when she first heard steps approaching "the calm, unvisited lake in the depths of the soul," when she no longer felt her- self lonely, when by degrees she was filled by the sunshine of all-embracing, all-penetrating sympa-
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thy, when she encountered a longing that desired her being in all its transitions, with all its an- omalies and mutability. Rahel speaks of their companionship, "our dear, gay, childish, happy intercourse, our running, eating, enjoying the air and hunting for pleasure; our unassuming exist- ence without plan or aim . . ."; and what she lays stress on as the best of all was that it never occurred to them " to try to imagine anything. "
Before she had found Varnhagen she wrote: "I know excellent people. And they are friendly to- wards me and like to see me as they would look upon a rock, a mass of clouds, a stormy sea or the like. None of them harbours the human being in me, with whom, however, they all seek shelter." ... " You are the only one in the whole world who has ever been fond of me, who has treated me as I treat others. Yes, I gladly confess this to you with all the impulse of gratitude : of you I have learned to be loved, and you have created something new in me. It is not vanity, . . . that continually penetrates my be- ing with satisfaction, that you must know — you, whose right understanding of me forces the tears to my eyes — it is at last the healthy, strong, true, real conception of the soul. // takes and gives, and so a true life is born to me ! Rejoice, if you really value me and look upon my life and being as something out of the ordinary: you have put the stamp of humanity on it. "
"What I love in you is, that you appreciate my
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nature and that your appreciation reveals itself, acts and expresses itself as it does. I return your love with extreme affection, as you have seen a hundred times. ..."
And later : "Only one in the whole world recognises my claim to be a personality, and does not wish merely to use and swallow up some part or other of me ; loves me as nature created me and fate distorted me; understands this fate; is willing to leave me the re- mainder of my life, and to gladden it and draw it nearer to heaven; and, for the happiness of being my friend, will be, do, and leave all for me. This is the man who is called my bridegroom."
Varnhagen describes his impression of that sum- mer in the words : " I feel as if I had spent the sum- mer in Athens. " In Rahel's conversation he had found the loftiest speculation, "as this must take form in life, the inmost marrow of philosophy," and he felt that he came from her with liberated powers, with "a newly-illuminated nature"; that she had revealed to him what was deepest and best in himself. "Your influence flows in me un- brokenly, in a thousand streams, " he wrote.
But just as Rahel had emptied the urn that con- tained the ashes of the past and again approached the altar, whence she might take new fire, just as she had carried her heart, as one carries a child after a winter's illness, out into the green grass
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of May, the "passionate suspense" that she had feared began to be felt in this relationship, as in the others. She, who thought she had done with life and expected nothing from it but " a little sun- shine, fresh air, and green leaves" and who could thus look forward "cheerfully and without con- straint" to the morrow, now felt that the day was no longer her own: "This godlike feeling, my only happiness, is mine no more. " And the reason was that Varnhagen, on account of his awakening love, his desire of winning hers, his fear of being un- worthy of her, his continued feeling for the lady he was engaged to, and his connection with her, was so unbalanced that she felt him to be hostile to her and their intercourse to be "strangely jarring and painful. "
"You treat me like a mine: with pick-axes, crow- bars, and tools you try to get something out of me that I withhold, you try to remove the slag, crush, burn, break up, and thus purify it for your use! But sup- posing it were otherwise, and you were crushing a plant? ..."
" I feel oppressed and anxious at having to perform something, ashamed and vexed at not being able to do it . . .
And so this pain broke in upon Rahel, that she had allowed her sleeping heart to wake, only to
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see it killed anew ; that she had hardly begun to feel that Varnhagen had become indispensable to her, before she was faced by the possibility of losing him. And the danger of this was twofold: it came from her own past and from his. For Rahel did not conceal from him that neither he nor any one else could evoke a passion such as Urquijo had in- spired in her, and she made it clear to him that any claims in this direction would only disturb the beauty of the new feeling that was growing up between them. She lets him read all her letters to Urquijo, although she feels that perhaps this will part them. But in giving him the letters she (/ warns Varnhagen against being too ready to let her go. For in her he would lose a world ; nowhere would he find any one with whom life would be easier and more manifold, inmost fidelity more sincere, security and harmony greater. For it was true that she was "nothing in any particular di- rection, but she knew, as surely as one knows of one's own existence, that the good in her was unique." And not only that, but she knew that her sentiment for Varnhagen was growing, that the pain of losing him would be greater than all that had gone before. But this does not prevent Rahel, when he begins to speak of his continued
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feeling for Fanny Herz, of the intimate letters he was still writing to her, of her waiting for him, of his sorrow for her suffering, from acting in full concord with her principles, since these were one with her nature. In her bitter grief at having once more come pure and honest and being obliged to go away "poor and injured," the thought no doubt flashed through her that this time she would not give way, that she would hold her own against this woman who was her inferior. But Rahel, pure and serious as a flame, soon gave up this idea. Varnhagen, with his lamentations over the perplexity to which he could see no issue, in which he could choose neither Rahel nor Fanny, seemed to her an object of pity rather than of scorn. Perhaps he was right in saying that he was a "hyper-modern" person, that he could really love two women at the same time, that he required many love affairs as he required many friends. He was one of the " disintegrated moderns, the sick Europeans" and he had to follow his nature, as Rahel hers. She acknowledges that with her extremely explosive nature she could no doubt be hasty, abrupt, unjust, but "how should one perse- cuted by God be amiable?" In spite of the ship- wreck that had stranded her in the region the