TRILOGIE DER LEIDENSCHAFT: THE EXEMPLARY GOETHE?

T R I L OGIE D E R LE ID ENSCHA F T: THE EXEMPLARY GOETHE?

BY R. T. LLEWELLYN

TRILOGIE DER LEIDENSCHAFT

An Werther

Noch einmal wagst du, vielbeweinter Schatten, Hervor dich an das Tageslicht, Begegnest mir auf neu beblumten Matten, Und meinen Anblick scheust du nicht. Es ist, als ob du lebtest in der Fruhe, Wo uns der Tau auf Einem Feld erquickt, Und nach des Tages unwillkommner Muhe Der Scheidesonne letzter Strahl entzuckt; Zum Bleiben ich, zum Scheiden du erkoren, Gingst du voran-und hast nicht vie1 verloren.

Des Menschen Leben scheint ein herrlich Los: Der Tag wie lieblich, so die Nacht wie gross! Und wir, gepflanzt in Paradieses Wonne, Geniessen kaum der hocherlauchten Sonne, Da kampft sogleich verworrene Bestrebung Bald mit uns selbst und bald mit der Umgebung; Keins wird vom andern wunschenswert erganzt, Von aussen diistert’s, wenn es innen glanzt, Ein glanzend Aussres deckt mein truber Blick, Da steht es nah-und man verkennt das Gluck.

5

10

15

20

Nun glauben wir’s zu kennen! Mit Gewalt Ergreift uns Liebreiz weiblicher Gestalt: Der Jungling, froh wie in der Kindheit Flor, Im Fruhling tritt als Fruhling selbst hervor, Entzuckt, erstaunt, wer dies ihm angetan? Er schaut umher, die Welt gehort ihm an.

Ins Weite zieht ihn unbefangne Hast, Nichts engt ihn ein, nicht Mauer, nicht Palast; Wie Vogelschar an Waldergipfeln streift, So schwebt auch er, der um die Liebste schweift, Er sucht vom Ather, den er gern verlasst, Den treuen Blick. und dieser halt ihn fest.

Doch erst zu fruh und dann zu spat gewarnt, Fuhlt er den Flug gehemmt, fuhlt sich umgarnt,

25

30

~~~~ ~

100 TRIL OG IE DER LEID E.VSCHA F T

35 Das LViedersehn ist froh, das Scheiden schwer, Das b’ieder-Wiedersehn begluckt noch mehr, Cnd Jahre sind im Augenblick ersetzt; Doch tuckisch harrt das Lebewohl zuletzt.

Du lachelst, Freund, gefuhlvoll, wie sich ziemt : Ein grasslich Scheiden machte dich beruhmt; Wir feierten dein klaglich Missgeschick, Du liessest uns zu Wohl und Weh zuruck; Dann zog uns wieder ungewisse Bahn Der Leidenschaften labyrinthisch an; E n d wir, verschlungen wiederholter Not, Dem Scheiden endlich-Scheiden ist der Tod ! Wie klingt es ruhrend, wenn der Dichter singt, Den Tod zu meiden, den das Scheiden bringt! Verstrickt in solche Qualen, halbverschuldet, Geb’ ihm ein Gott zu sagen, was er duldet.

40

45

50

Elegie Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qua1 verstummt Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen, was ich leide.

Was sol1 ich nun vom Wiedersehen hoffen, Von dieses Tages noch geschlossner Blute? Das Paradies, die Holle steht dir offen; \Vie wankelsinnig regt sich’s im GemUte!- Kein Zweifeln mehr! Sie tritt ans Himmelstor, Zu ihren Armen hebt sie dich empor. So warst du denn im Paradies empfangen, Als warst du wert des ewig schonen Lebens; Dir blieb kein Wunsch, kein Hoffen, kein Verlangen, Hier war das Ziel des innigsten Bestrebens, Und in dem Anschaun dieses einzig Schonen Versiegte gleich der Quell sehnsuchtiger Tranen.

Wie regte nicht der Tag die raschen Flugel, Schien die Minuten vor sich her zu treiben! Der Abendkuss, ein treu verbindlich Siege1 : So wird es auch der nachsten Sonne bleiben. Die Stunden glichen sich in zartem Wandern Wie Schwestern zwar, doch keine ganz den andern.

Der KUSS, der letzte, grausam suss, zerschneidend Ein herrliches Geflecht verschlungner Minnen. Nun eilt, nun stockt der Fuss, die Schwelle meidend, Als trieb’ ein Cherub flammend ihn von hinnen; Das Auge starrt auf dustrem Pfad verdrossen, Es blickt zuruck, die Pforte steht verschlossen.

5

10

15

20

TRILOGIE DER LEIDENSCHAFT 101

25

30

35

40

45

50

55

60

65

Und nun verschlossen in sich selbst, als hatte Dies Herz sich nie geoffnet, selige Stunden Mitjedem Stern des Himmels urn die Wette An ihrer Seite leuchtend nicht empfunden; Und Missmut, Reue, Vorwurf, Sorgenschwere Belasten’s nun in schwuler Atmosphare.

1st denn die Welt nicht ubrig? Felsenwande, Sind sie nicht mehr gekront von heiligen Schatten? Die Ernte, reift sie nicht? Ein grun Gelande, Zieht sich’s nicht hin am Fluss durch Busch und Matten? Und wolbt sich nicht das uberweltlich Grosse, Gestaltenreiche, bald Gestaltenlose?

Wie leicht und zierlich, klar und zart gewoben Schwebt, seraphgleich, aus ernster Wolken Chor, Als glich’ es ihr, am blauen Ather droben, Ein schlank Gebild aus lichtem Duft empor; So sahst du sie in frohem Tanze walten, Die lieblichste der lieblichsten Gestalten.

Doch nur Momente darfst dich unterwinden, Ein Luftgebild statt ihrer festzuhalten; Ins Herz zuruck, dort wirst du’s besser finden, Dort regt sie sich in wechselnden Gestalten; Zu vielen bildet Eine sich hinuber, So tausendfach und immer, immer lieber.

Wie zum Ernpfang sie an den Pforten weilte Und mich von dannauf stufenweis begliickte; Selbst nach dem letzten Kuss mich noch ereilte, Den letztesten mir auf die Lippen driickte: So klar beweglich bleibt das Bild der Lieben, Mit Flammenschrift ins treue Herz geschrieben.

Ins Herz, das fest wie zinnenhohe Mauer Sich ihr bewahrt und sie in sich bewahret, Fur sie sich freut an seiner eignen Dauer, Nur weiss von sich, wenn sie sich offenbaret, Sich freier fuhlt in so geliebten Schranken Und nur noch schlagt, fur alles ihr zu danken.

War Fahigkeit zu lieben, war Bediirfen Von Gegenliebe weggeloscht, verschwunden ; 1st Hoffnungslust zu freudigen Entwiirfen, Entschlussen, rascher Tat sogleich gefunden ! Wenn Liebe je den Liebenden begeistet, Ward es an rnir aufs lieblichste geleistet;

102 TRILOGIE DER LEIDENSCHAFT

Und zwar durch sie!-Wie lag ein innres Bangen Auf Geist und Korper, unwillkommner Schwere : Von Schauerbildern rings der Blick umfangen Im wusten Raum beklommner Herzensleere; Nun dammert Hoffnung von bekannter Schwelle, Sie selbst erscheint in milder Sonnenhelle.

Dem Frieden Gottes, welcher euch hienieden Mehr als Vernunft beseliget-wir lesen’s-, Vergleich’ ich wohl der Liebe heitern Frieden In Gegenwart des allgeliebten Wesens; Da ruht das Herz, und nichts vermag zu storen Den tiefsten Sinn, den Sinn, ihr zu gehoren.

In unsers Busens Reine wogt ein Streben, Sich einem Hohern, Reinern, Unbekannten Aus Dankbarkeit freiwillig hinzugeben, Entratselnd sich den ewig Ungenannten; Wir heissen’s : fromm sein !-Solcher seligen Hohe Fuhl’ ich mich teilhaft, wenn ich vor ihr stehe.

Vor ihrem Blick, wie vor der Sonne Walten, Vor ihrem Atem, wie vor Fruhlingsluften, Zerschmilzt, so langst sich eisig starr gehalten, Der Selbstsinn tief in winterlichen Griiften ; Kein Eigennutz, kein Eigenwille dauert, Vor ihrem Kommen sind sie weggeschauert.

Es ist, als wenn sie sagte: ,Stund’ um Stunde Wird uns das Leben freundlich dargeboten, Das Gestrige liess uns geringe Kunde, Das Morgende, zu wissen ist’s verboten; Und wenn ich je mich vor dem Abend scheute, Die Sonne sank und sah noch, was mich freute.

Drum tu wie ich und schaue, froh-verstandig, Dem Augenblick ins Auge! Kein Verschieben! Begegn’ ihm schnell, wohlwollend wie lebendig, Im Handeln sei’s, zur Freude, sei’s dem Lieben; Nur wo du bist, sei alles, immer kindlich, So bist du alles, bist unuberwindlich.‘

Du hast gut reden, dacht’ ich, zum Geleite Gab dir ein Gott die Gunst des Augenblickes, E n d jeder fuhlt an deiner holden Seite Sich augenblicks den Gunstling des Geschickes ; Mich schreckt der Wink, von dir mich zu entfernen, Was hilft es mir, so hohe Weisheit lernen!

70

75

80

85

90

95

100

105

TRILOCIE DER LEIDENSCHAFT 103

110

115

120

125

I30

135

5

10

Nun bin ich fern! Der jetzigen Minute, Was ziemt denn der? Ich wusst’ es nicht zu sagen; Sie bietet mir zum Schonen manches Gute, Das lastet nur, ich muss mich ihm entschlagen; Mich treibt umher ein unbezwinglich Sehnen, Da bleibt kein Rat als grenzenlose Tranen. So quellt denn fort und fliesset unaufhaltsam! Doch nie gelang’s, die innre Glut zu dampfen! Schon rast’s und reisst in meiner Brust gewaltsam, Wo Tod und Leben grausend sich bekampfen. Wohl Krauter gab’s, des Korpers Qua1 zu stillen; Allein dem Geist fehlt’s am Entschluss und Willen, Fehlt’s am Begriff: wie sollt’ er sie vermissen? Er wiederholt ihr Bild zu tausendmalen. Das zaudert bald, bald wird es weggerissen, Undeutlich jetzt und jetzt im reinsten Strahlen; Wie konnte dies geringstem Troste frommen, Die Ebb’ und Flut, das Gehen wie das Kommen? Verlasst mich hier, getreue Weggenossen ! Lasst mich allein am Fels, in Moor und Moos; Nur immer zu ! euch ist die Welt erschlossen, Die Erde weit, der Himrnel hehr und gross; Betrachtet, forscht, die Einzelheiten sammelt, Naturgeheimnis werde nachgestammelt. Mir ist das All, ich bin mir selbst verloren, Der ich noch erst den Gottern Liebling war; Sie pruften mich, verliehen mir Pandoren, So reich an Gutern, reicher an Gefahr; Sie drangten mich zum gabeseligen Munde, Sie trennen mich-und richten mich zu Grunde.

Aussohnung Die Leidenschaft bringt Leiden !-Wer beschwichtigt Beklommnes Herz, das allzuviel verloren? Wo sind die Stunden, uberschnell verfluchtigt? Vergebens war das Schonste dir erkoren! Trub’ ist der Geist, verworren das Beginnen; Die hehre Welt, wie schwindet sie den Sinnen! Da schwebt hervor Musik mit Engelschwingen, Verflicht zu Millionen Ton’ um Tone, Des Menschen Wesen durch und durch zu dringen, Zu uberfullen ihn mit ew’ger Schone: Das Auge netzt sich, fuhlt im hohern Sehnen Den Gotterwert der Tone wie der Tranen.

104 TRILOGIE DER LEIDENSCHAF7 ~ ~~

Und so das Herz erleichtert merkt behende, Dass es noch lebt und schlagt und mochte schlagen, Zum reinsten Dank der uberreichen Spende Sich selbst erwidernd willig darzutragen. Da fuhlte sich-o dass es ewig bliebe!- Das Doppelgluck der Tone wie der Liebe.

15

My title has a question-mark and let me say a t once that my answer to the question posed is in the affirmative. In the last resort the Trzlogie der Leidenschaft does embody the exemplary Goethe but with an essential modification-it embodies the exemplary attitude not of the classical Goethe but of a Goethe who had lived on almost three decades into the nineteenth century, of a Goethe who had after the creation of such sane and ideal works as ithigenie auf Tauris, LVilhelm Meisters Lehyahre and Hermann und Dorothea lived to experience such diametrically opposed presentations of the world and man’s place in it as that of the first flowering of German Romanticism and that of Heinrich von Kleist-the world of transcendence on the one hand and the enclosed enigmatic world of human entanglements and grim enactments on the other. And in the 1830s Kleist’s view of the world was to be taken further and presented in more modernistic form by Buchner. But Goethe never knew the latter. Anyway he had already rejected both tendencies as artistic misadventures-the romantic transcendental attitude and the realistic, agnostic attitude much earlier in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Most of Goethe’s explicit objections to these modes of artistic expression are to be found in the conversations he had with Eckermann and such friends as the musician Zelter, Riemer, Meyer and Kanzler von Miiller during the last twenty years of his life.

But knowing what we do of the biographical matters that gave rise to the trilogy, and indeed if we take into account some of the startling statements about the futility of life in it, how are we justified in claiming that i t embodies an exemplary attitude? The basic biographical facts are these: in the summer of 1823 Goethe, then seventy-four, fell in love with an eighteen-year old girl, Ulrike yon Leletzow, proposed to her and was unsuccessful. His wooing had taken place in the Bohemian spa of Marienbad completely in the public eye of the beau monde. He even pursued her and her family to Karlsbad where the gossip reached the proportions of a scandal-the general tenor of which was that there‘s no fool like an old fool, especially if it is the grand old man of Weimar. Back home in Weimar there were to be squalid scenes with his son and his daughter-in-law, who were more concerned at losing Goethe’s legacy, should he marry, than with his happiness. From such a wretched experience Goethe wrote the ‘Elegie’, known as the ‘Marienbader E1egie’-he actually wrote its first draft in an upsurge of despairing passion during the post-chaise journey back to Weimar from Karlsbad-and the following year he fashioned the trilog) by placing ‘An Werther’ before it and concluding with ‘Aussoh- nung’.

The episode has of course attracted much attention from Goethe’s biogra- phers and others. Thomas Mann described i t as a sad tale with ‘schauerlich-

~


komischen, hoch-blamablen, zu ehrfurchtigem Gelachter stimmenden Situationen’.’ And when he set out to write his most severe critique of the questionable nature of art in general and the vulnerability of the artist who assumes an exemplary role in life, Mann first thought of writing a ‘Novelle’ with the title Goethe in Murienbud but respectfully transposed the material into Der Tad in Venedig. In 1927 Stefan Zweig wrote an essay entitled ‘Die Marien- bader Elegie’ in Sternstunden der Menschheit-<wolf historische Miniaturen. I t is an imaginative and tactful re-creation. In recent years Friedenthal in his biog- raphy of Goethe pulls no punches-he even tells us that Goethe went as far as to consult a doctor then to find out whether he was up to the physical side of marriage !

The pathetic story of an old man in love with a young girl was one that Goethe had shaped himself on several earlier occasions. In Wilhelm Meisters Wunderjahre there are two interpolated ‘Novellen’, Die pilgernde Tdrin and Der Mann uonfunf i ig Juhren, which deal with this very situation. The Major in the latter ‘Novelle’, like Thomas Mann’s Gustav Aschenbach, even undergoes a course of cosmetic rejuvenation in order to impress the young girl. Here in the didactic Wunderjahre, Goethe is dealing with the problem of ageing gracefully, showing his masculine readers that they should not desire things that old age has no right to expect. The Major is saved from public ridicule. Goethe in Marienbad was not. But Goethe was a lonely old man who just previously to the summer of 1823 had recovered from an illness that had nearly killed him-he spoke of himself as having returned from the dead-and when the opportunity of the possibility of living with an attractive girl presented itself he reached out for it. He himself failed to exercise the ‘Entsagung’ he had recom- mended in the Wunderjahre. The personal consequences were painful but the poetic result was first the ‘Elegie’ and then the ‘Trilogie der Leidenschaft’. And in this trilogy all the elements that oppose and seek to undermine ‘Entsagung’ are presented-the self-destruction of Werther, the pathological introversion of the poet Tasso, love presented as a religion, the power of music and an obsess- ion with death, Yet paradoxically they serve in one way and another to help Goethe to resolve to go on living and thus avoid bleak suicide or the Romantic spiritual ‘Liebestod’ which the situation invited.

The exemplary nature of the trilogy lies not only in its final affirmation of life but also in the nature of the poetry itself. This is not merely a matter of form. It is obvious from the appearance of the regular strophes on the page that Goethe has, particularly in the ‘Elegie’, distilled a disorderly and disintegrating situation into strictly ordered, coherent poetry, but there is also the mature Goethe’s approuch to the writing of poetry, namely, the way in which he refuses to allow poetry complete autonomy over the situation and experiences it is encompassing in words. This is what Goethe meant when in a conversation with Eckermann on 17 September 1823, just twelve days after his return to Weimar following the Marienbad episode, he said ‘Alle meine Gedichte sind Gelegenheitsgedichte, sie sind durch die Wirklichkeit angeregt und haben darin Grund und Boden. Von Gedichten aus der Luft gegriffen halte ich nichts’. And he goes on in this conversation to develop this idea in detail. Poetry should be


occasioned by events in the real world and should present them and that world in a very substantial sense-the poetry should not overlay and blur reality. The result will be poetry that is not excessively poetic-it will ennoble life artistically because of the strong measure of reality in it now transposed into poetry, and it will in itself be a life-enhancing entity. For the mature Goethe, poetry should occupy the middle-ground between the excessively poetic and the prosaic. This explains Goethe’s reluctance to use metaphor and simile too fre- quently as he matured as a poet, for such devices tend to distance and blur reality. It explains also why Goethe’s poetry, compared with the poetry that was written in the nineteenth century, seems a t first acquaintance to many, particularly to the non-German speaking world, unremarkable, even unpoetic. T. S. Eliot’s early misjudgement of Goethe as a lyric poet is understandable in this context.

In the full spate of his Classicism, that is up to the death of Schiller in 1805, Goethe was able to adhere to these principles of writing poetry fairly suc- cessfully, even to the extent of writing formal ‘Gelegenheitsgedichte’, among which ‘Ilmenau’ is the outstanding example. He was even able to do this in extended works like Iphigenie auf Tauris and Hermann und Dorothea, but the problematical work in Goethe’s Classicism in this respect is the drama Torquato Tasso, the least satisfactory of his major Classical plays. Tasso is the prototype of the new kind of poet, the chameleon poet who has no real stable identity but is merely the mood behind whatever poetic mask he chooses to assume. Tasso is too inward; he cannot relate to social reality. This is borne out by his endless soliloquies. By the end of the play he is in great disarray, and although Goethe posits in Tasso’s final speech his synthesis of Tasso and Antonio, poet and man of action, it remains unconvincing, if we take into account the complex psychol- ogy of Tasso. His only consolation is that he can transpose his sufferings into poetry. And i t is that proud, if anguished, assurance that Goethe introduces at the beginning of the ‘Elegie’ to alleviate his own plight and to illuminate the fate of the artistically inarticulate Werther who dominates the first poem of the trilogy.

I t is when the Tasso aspect of Goethe intrudes in his post-Classical phase that he has great difficulties in writing the kind of ideal ‘Gelegenheitsgedicht’ he set up as his ideal in his conversation with Eckermann. In Pandora, which so signally marks the end of Goethe’s true Classicism, the speeches of Epimetheus, that ‘gesteigerter’ Tasso, have a quality of inward lament that could have come from the pen of Holderlin, a poet who was regarded with suspicion by Goethe because he did not focus intently enough on the real world. And it must be admitted that parts of the ‘Elegie’ retreat into the sheer inwardness of the kind that Goethe deplored in the young poets around him at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The ‘Elegie’ is judged by many to be Goethe’s finest love- poem.’ If i t is, it certainly does not always conform to what Goethe really wanted of poetry. Yet he is obviously attempting to avoid too excessive a poetic effusion. On the one hand he does his best to keep to the external reality and setting of his plight, and on the other hand he generalises it to a certain extent in order to avoid too personal an impact. Nevertheless this poem must rank

TRILOCIE DER LEIDENSCHAFT 107 ~~~

among the most inward poetry Goethe wrote, but it is also apparent that he is desperately trying to anchor it as a ‘Gelegenheitsgedicht’ of the ideal kind, whereas ‘An Werther’ and ‘Aussohnung’ are conventional ‘Gelegenheitsge- dichte’. Knowledge of the biographical details is, however, essential if the full import of the trilogy is to be understood.

This exposes the anachronistic nature of Goethe’s situation as a poet in Weimar. At a time when the dominant trend among the artists of his own generation in Germany was to avoid the restricting patronage of petty rulers or the Church, and therefore to be able to write, paint and compose according to their own personal promptings, Goethe not only chose to write within a courtly milieu but even went to the extent of writing formal occasional poetry and plays for that court. I t was of course part of his system of self-discipline, as the poem ‘Ilmenau’ so clearly reveals. In this respect Goethe largely avoided the personal and financial problems that such artists as Mozart, Lenz and Holder- lin encountered in their rejection of patronage and, in addition, he had around him a known circle of readers, the educated classes of Weimar, on whose responses he could count. It is to these men and women that the works of his Classicism, particularly his poetry, are addressed, and often to such a personal extent that outsiders and posterity are very dependent on explanatory foot- notes. ‘Ilmenau’ is just such a poem. The Trilogie der Leidenschuft belongs of course to the post-Classical phase of Goethe, to a time when he was aware that his works would cease to remain within the preserve of a cultured dite and would be at the disposal of an unknown reader~hip .~ But it is clear that the trilogy, particularly the ‘Elegie’, was written primarily for Goethe’s own private use and a small audience made up of men like Eckermann, Zelter and Kanzler von Miiller, much in the same way as Baroque poets, Hofmannswaldau for example, read their poems from manuscript to a circle of intimate friends and only published them much later.

‘An Werther’ was written at a publisher’s request in the spring of 1824 to preface a special edition of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers which had appeared fifty years previously. I t was both easy and difficult for Goethe to write this poem. He had just been Werther again, but he had no wish to recreate the moods he had grappled with in the ‘Elegie’, for they were now behind him, distilled into poetry and exorcised by repeated ceremonial readings with his intimate friends. The result is a cool, somewhat perfunctory poem. T o begin with he addresses Werther patronisingly as a pathetic weakling from the now rather ridiculous age of ‘Empfindsamkeit’. But Werther is not entirely de- valued. What he suffered once in his impossible love for Lotte is to be re- enacted by Goethe in the ‘Elegie’. Perfunctory as this poem is, it touches in its final lines on the raw exposed nerve of the ‘Elegie’ and sets off the throbbing paip that ebbs and flows throughout that poem. In this sense ‘An Werther’ is a loosely argued prelude. It touches on motifs, ideas and moods without devel- oping any of them profoundly. Its attitude towards life is in general dismissive and cynical. Nature alone is a source of delight, but the unhappy lover, Wer- ther and Goethe himself in the ‘Elegie’, is alienated from this solace because of his plight. The work-world of civilization is dreary, ‘nach des Tages un-


willkommner Muhe’, but love which promises transcendence of that prosaic reality is problematical. Hence Werther’s suicide and the existence of Goethe’s ‘Elegie’. This is all tersely expressed in the last two lines of the first strophe:

Zum Bleiben ich, zum Scheiden du erkoren, Gingst du voran-und hast nicht vie1 verloren.

Such pessimism is far removed from the exemplary Goethe but its validity is borne out by some remarks of Goethe some thirteen years earlier, namely, that he could now write a second Werther which would make people’s hair stand even more on end than the first But these were temporary moods of pessimism, and in the trilogy as a whole these lines present in objective form a pre-echo of the vastly more personal final two lines of the ‘Elegie’. They will be, however, effaced by the life-affirming resolution of the final strophe of ‘Aussoh- nung’. What gives ‘An Werther’ such a defeatist air is Goethe’s skilful use of the final line of the first three strophes. Each of these lines is broken by a caesura, in the first two strophes violently so with abrupt dashes and in the third less disruptively with a comma. All three of these broken lines have a staccato rhythmic emphasis which strongly contrasts with the relatively easy flow of the preceding lines, an emphasis tellingly conveying a sober factual truth aimed at shattering any illusions about life and love. The final line of the fourth strophe is not broken by a caesura but states at full length the ineluctable final farewell from life and love which everyone, not only Werther, must experience. And here the poem begins to move towards the more vital dimensions of Goethe’s personal experience at Marienbad, his farewell from love. The ‘scheiden’ motif, twice used in the very first strophe, is now almost manically developed. I t is reiterated five times in the last two strophes and the fifth time it is bluntly equated with death, of whose reality the aged Goethe was only too well aware.’ Only one consolation is possible: the poet can sublimate the agony of farewell in poetry, but this is a god-given gift and the final line of the poem is a plea to this end. Implicitly, one of the reasons for Werther’s fate is contained in these lines, for he was an artist manqui with a fatal leak between his emotions and formative ability. And just as Goethe in real life transcended the fictional Werther, so here he once more avoids his fate by being able to state in the subtitle to the ‘Elegie’ that he has the ability to express his suffering in poetry. This is the first positive step towards the assimilation and conquest of his unhappy experience in Marienbad :

Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qua1 verstummt Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen, was ich leide.

This slightly modified quotation from Torquafo Tasso also marks a change of poetic standpoint and voice in the trilogy, turning from the patronising second- person form of address which dominates ‘An Werther’ to the anguished, lyrical ‘I’ of the ‘Elegie’. Rhythmically it is a modulating cadence leading over from the irregular first poem into the regularly scanned, modified Italian stanzas of


the second one. This, Goethe’s last and longest love-poem, falls into three sections. There is an introductory strophe in the present tense, followed by twenty strophes expressing the bliss and agony of Goethe’s unhappy love. The final two strophes return to the bleak present. In the fair copy which Goethe made of the ‘Elegie’ in the September of his return to Weimar these sections are clearly demarcated by swung dashes. I t is immediately evident that the vocabulary and imagery of the ‘Elegie’ is derived primarily from the Bible, the very opening strophes of the poem presenting Ulrike’s rejection of him as the expulsion from Paradise, and lines 73 and 74 paraphrasing the words of Saint Paul to the Philippians (4, 7 ) . Yet it is also clear that this biblical imagery has been detached from traditional Christian notions, a ploy which is confirmed by Goethe’s use of the indeterminate ‘ein Gott’ twice (in the quotation from Tor- quato Tusso and line 104) and the equally indeterminate ‘Gotter’ linked with the myth of Pandora in the final strophe. Goethe’s long-standing tendency to equate the ecstasy derived from being in love with a woman with religious ecstasy receives in the ‘Elegie’ its most extensive and explicit treatment. The uplift of such love was a necessary stimulus for him as a writer, as Madame de Stael observed when she said to him : ‘Sie brauchen die Verfuhrung’, a sentence of which Goethe approved and which he was fond of repeating to others.6 And from his Strasbourg days he used religious vocabulary in his love-poetry. ‘Mai- fest’ has the language of the psalmist: ‘Wie lacht die Flur!’; ‘Kunstlers Morgen- lied’, addressed to Charlotte Buff, conceives her as a madonna; and even in the Romische Elegien and the Westiistlicher Divan, where pagan mythologies dominate, the equation between love and religious experience is still insisted on. All this shows Goethe’s allegiance to that growing tendency of the late eighteenth century to make a religion out of love, an enterprise aimed at giving life a spiritual significance when orthodox religious belief is no longer persuasive. In the seventeenth century, religious poets such as Friedrich von Spee and Angelus Silesius, men of orthodox belief, used erotic imagery in their poetry to convey the ecstasy of their mystical transports, a procedure derived from the Song of Songs, whereas Goethe and others reverse the process and wish to justify the spiritual validity of their love-experiences by using biblical vocabulary. I t is a questionable and dangerous enterprise, for its central figure, the beloved, is inevitably a source of frustration, for there is always the possibility of her rejecting the wooing man and finally the certainty of the separation that death brings. This rejection or separation results in a crisis in which the self is not only alienated from the world but from itself, the end-stage of the ‘Elegie’:

Mir ist das All, ich bin mir selbst verloren, Der ich noch erst den Gottern Liebling war.

In the opening strophes the situation of the happy/unhappy lover is presented in terms of paradisaical existence and the subsequent expulsion from it attended by the cherub with a burning sword. The illusion of an eternally beautiful life, already hypothetically phrased: ‘Als warst du wert des ewig schonen Lebens’, has been shattered and the poet’s heart (to be the subject of

110 TRRILOCIE D E R LEIDE.NSCHAF7

’Aussohnung’) has closed itself to the external world (lines 25-30). We then see Goethe attempting to relate to nature, by regarding its beauty and order, a familiar safety-device. The world is evoked in solid terms, its substantiality being conveyed by rhythms more deliberate than in the preceding strophes because of the rhetorical questions employed :

1st denn die Welt nicht ubrig? Felsenwande, Sind sie nicht mehr gekront von heiligen Schatten? Die Ernte, reift sie nicht? Ein grun Gelande, Zieht sich’s nicht hin am Fluss durch Busch und Matten?

I t is not that Goethe sees the world as meaningless, but simply that he cannot relate to i t because the religion of love has failed him. The regular rhythms of the ‘Elegie’ are resumed in the last two lines of this strophe:

L:nd wolbt sich nicht das uberweltlich Grosse, Gestaltenreiche, bald Gestal tenlose?

And with them we move back into the unsubstantial world of inwardness. Goethe’s solid universe is crowned by an ever-changing vault of cloudscape, something he had investigated as a scientist. H e was indeed at that very time engaged on a work of meteorology, Versuch einer Witterungslehre, and had also written poems about cloud formations in his Trilogie zu Howards Wolkenlehre i 182Ck22 1. Goethe had earlier actually corresponded with the English meteo- rologist Luke Howard. But that was a very different trilogy from his TTilOgze der Leidenschaft, in the ‘Elegie’ of which Goethe is unable to maintain an exemplary balance between empirical experience and a poetic rendering of that experi- rnce. Cut loose from the real world, he has lost his anchor of objective scientific enquiry into i t , and the result is an almost symbolist piece of poetic halluci- nation, the clouds assuming the shape of the dancing Ulrike. At first she hovers forth ‘seraphgleich’ (for her the epithet stems from the angelic order and she is given a double superlative) and by the end of the strophe her grace is conveyed by the balletic rhythms of her dancing at Marienbad:

So sahst du s k in fr6hem Tanze wilten, Die likblichsti. der 1ikblichsti.n Gestilten.

But this \.ision is too wispy to last and is condemned by the poet as being only a ‘Luftgebild’, as befits a poet who told Eckermann that he did not esteem poetry ’aus der Luft gegriffen’. But his next move is anything but exemplary. I t is a deliberate retreat into inwardness, the tactic of Werther and Tasso when the rxternal world did not behave at their behest:

Ins Herz zuruck, dort wirst du’s besser finden, Dort regt sie sich in wechselnden Gestalten; Zu vielen bildet Eine sirh hinuber, So tausendfach und immer, immer lieber.


His heart becomes a fortress to safeguard his experience with her and continues to beat only for that reason: ‘Und nur noch schlagt, fur alles ihr zu danken.’ (line 60). This motif of the heart beating in gratitude will be developed and intensified in a more positive sense in ‘Aussohnung’.

Then Goethe makes his explicit comparison between love for woman and religious feeling. I t is broached by the lines :

Wenn Liebe j e den Liebenden begeistet, Ward es an mir aufs lieblichste geleistet; Und zwar durch sie!

After he had almost died in the preceding winter Goethe, at his recovery, was still lacking in enthusiasm for life and the reason for this was because, as he said in May 1822, he was not in love with anyone and no one was in love with him.’ But within months his life had become totally meaningful for him again through his meeting with Ulrike who vivified him spiritually, as the unusual verb ‘begeistet’ expresses. This is developed in the lines:

Dem Frieden Gottes, welcher euch hienieden Mehr als Vernunft beseliget-wir lesen’s-, Vergleich’ ich wohl der Liebe heitern Frieden In Gegenwart des allgeliebten Wesens; Da ruht das Herz, und nichts vermag zu storen Den tiefsten Sinn, den Sinn, ihr zu gehoren.

Notice the almost throwaway interjected ‘-wir lesen’s-’, as if Goethe were saying that when we read Saint Paul we merely read it, but it is only when we are in love that we truly feel it. But even so it cannot last and the inevitable last kiss has already been given, an agonised double superlative this, ‘den letztesten’ (line 52). And Goethe is unable to take the exemplary advice he had so often given to others, but now with rich irony puts into the mouth of the young inexperienced Ulrike (lines 91-102). As in his Classical period it is woman who teaches restraint and moderation to the unreasonable male. In his attempt to avoid poetic excess Goethe introduces realistic colloquial phrases such as ‘Du hast gut reden’ (line 103), a favourite poetic device of his,8 but such is the nature of his deprivation that he prefers to experience anguish rather than live again in a world now meaningless: ‘Da bleibt kein Rat als grenzenlose Tranen’ (line 114).

With the last two strophes we return to the present and stark truths are stated. Scientific scrutiny of nature is impossible for he cannot relate to it. Goethe dismisses the companions who accompanied him on geological field- excursions during his stay at Marienbad. They can be active in a meaningful world :

Nur immer zu! euch ist die Welt erschlossen, Die Erde weit, der Himmel hehr und gross; Betrachtet, forscht, die Einzelheiten sammelt, Naturgeheimnis werde nachgestammelt.

112 TRILOGIE DER LEIDE,MSCHAFT

But he seeks solitude in a setting of Romantic melancholy ‘am Fels, in Moor und Moos’, reminiscent of the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich of which Goethe in his exemplary mood disapproved. The final strophe completely re- verses the way in which Goethe presented the myth of Pandora in his Classical period. There she brought bounteous gifts for man and ushered in an ideal age of the arts and sciences. Here in the ‘Elegie’ she is ‘reicher an Gefahr’, alien- ating the poet from the world, preventing the practice of science and oc- casioning poetr) which is far from ideal, an inward lament which ends with an abject admission of total defeat, one of the starkest conclusions in all Goethe:

Sie drangten mich zum gabeseligen Munde, Sie trennen mich, und richten mich zu Grunde.

Two points need, however, to be stressed here. Firstly, Goethe has justified the prefatory quotation from Torquato Tusso; he has been able to objectify his suffering artistically. And we know from Eckermann, Zelter and von Miiller that repeated solemn ritual readings of the ‘Elegie’ by Goethe himself to others and later by Zelter to Goethe during another severe illness helped to make sense of the deprivation and heal him. Zelter claimed that Goethe was eventually healed by the spear that had wounded him, that is, the real dangerous experience had been fashioned into an aesthetical artifact of therapeutical value. Wilhelm von Humboldt, to whom Goethe read the ‘Elegie’, was one of the first to diagnose the true import of the poem in this respect. He shrewdly wrote to his wife :

Es ist mir sehr klar geworden, dass Goethe noch sehr rnit den Marien- bader Bildern beschaftigt ist, allein mehr, wie ich ihn kenne, mit der Stimmung, die dadurch in ihm aufgegangen ist und mit der Poesie, rnit der er sie umsponnen hat, als mit dem Gegenstand selbst. Was man also vom Heiraten und selbst von der Verliebtheit sagt, ist teils ganz falsch, teils auf die rechte Weise zu verstehen.’

Throughout his life Goethe needed the uplift of love, but far more important in the final instance was the uplift he derived from his ability to distil poetry from it , whether the love be requited or not. Detached from the trilogy the ‘Elegie’ does not embody the exemplary Goethe. I t largely deserves Kierkegaard’s cen- sure that Goethe falsified life aesthetically by turning any situation that threat- ened him into a poem.” Yet in the way it presents that situation in articulate poetry, the poem already represents a step towards the conquest of its intrinsic pessimism and that of ‘An Werther’. This brings me to my second point, namely, that Goethe did not leave the ‘Elegie’ alone as a poem in its own right. He chose to allow a formal ‘Gelegenheitsgedicht’ to form a positive coda to the lament of the ‘Elegie’. And in a conversation with Eckermann ( 1 December 183 1 ) he emphasized that he regarded ‘Aussohnung’ as a conciliatory ending following the dark moods of the preceding poems.


‘Aussohnung’ was written in August 1823 in Marienbad as a poem of homage to the beautiful Polish pianist and composer Maria Szymanowska, to whom Goethe was also greatly attracted. She had played the music of Hummel and her own compositions to him. Her music has an intimate yet restrained lyrical quality and Schumann, who admired it, said that her piano pieces were delicate, azure wings that no one should touch roughly.

(At this point a recording of Szymanowska’s Nocturne in B flat major was played) .I1

Now Goethe tended to be very wary of music, especially as regards the way it developed with the onset of Romanticism. We know he regarded Beethoven’s music as being dangerously disruptive, but it was above all the abstract quality of music which he disliked, the very factor which led Schopenhauer to consider music as the most valuable mode of artistic expression available to man in his attempt to escape the domination of the Will. Music for Goethe had to enhance life, not efface it, as was the case with Schopenhauer and many Romantics. Maria Szymanowska’s music, like that of Hummel, is restrained and polite in the manner of the best salon-music. To use the favourite adjectives of the later Goethe it is ‘anmutig’ and ‘gesellig’ with little of the inwardness of Schubert, whose art Goethe refused to acknowledge. Her art did not transport him out of the real world nor did it drive him back into himself, but soothed and relaxed him, or as he put it in a letter to Zelter (24 August 1823), it unfolded him in the way a clenched fist becomes an open hand.12

The final poem of the trilogy brings yet again a change of poetic voice. The ‘I’ of the ‘Elegie’ is objectified into ‘das Herz’, the first step away from self- indulgent lament, from monologue to declaration. The heart is the subject of this poem and it is its ever strengthening beat in the final strophe, conveyed by Goethe’s subtle use of rhythm, that expresses his will to live and his resolution to relate to life. The poem is dominated at first by the stunned apathy present in the closing strophes of the ‘Elegie’. His alienation from life continues :

Trub’ ist der Geist, verworren das Beginnen; Die hehre Welt, wie schwindet sie den Sinner.!

The mind is dulled certainly, but the possibility of taking up the threads of life again is at least stated. As the world recedes music vivifies the heart in the way love had done so in the ‘Elegie’. Its spiritual message makes tears meaningful, and thus the heart beating at first hesitantly becomes stronger and stronger in its wrK to live :

Und so das Hkrz erliichtert mkrkt bqhknde, Dass es noch lkbt und schlagt und mochte schligen, Zum rkinsten Dink der uberrkichen Spknde Sich selbst erwidernd willig darzutragen. Da fuhlte sich-o dass es ewig bliebe!- Das Doppelgluck der Tone wie der Liebe.

114 TRILOGIE DER LEIDE.VSCHAF7

The first line of this strophe has an irregular accentuation with more weak than strong beats, but the second line eventually assumes regular strong beats, each one of which is a powerful verb, and the third line emphasizes the strengthening process of a once wounded heart which is now vigorously beating. The will to live is there as well as the realistic recognition that the uplift of love and music cannot be permanent, for the interpolated exclamation ‘-0 dass es ewig bliebe !-’ is in the imperfect subjunctive, indicating its impossibility. The final affirmation is h a r d - ~ o n . ’ ~ It has taken two kinds of art, his own poetry and the music of Maria Szymanowska, to make sense of his bitter experience and wish to live on. And of course Goethe did live on. He resumed his scientific enquiries and completed his Versuch einer Witterungslehre. Despite another severe illness, during which Zelter repeatedly read the ‘Elegie’ to him, he went on to complete Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and the second part of Faust. He never attempted to see Ulrike again even when she visited Weimar, and when Marianne von U’illemer wrote to him wishing to resume their association she received no encouragement. Goethe now addressed himself whole-heartedly to the given reality around him, his Spinozan ‘Gott-Natur’ universe.

Goethe’s morally based safety-measures in the arts and sciences were little heeded by his contemporaries and the nineteenth century as a whole. The artistic principles he discussed with Eckermann went largely unnoticed. I t was left to Nietzsche at the very end of the century to point to their value. The mature Nietzsche, looking back on the nineteenth century in Germany as a whole and seeing i t as being largely an artistic disaster crowned by the suspect philosophy and music of Schopenhauer and Wagner, drew up a short list of salutary reading for those who wished to avoid Romantic shipwreck or prosaic boredom. Included in that list is Eckermann’s Cesprache mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, the source-book of the utterances of the exemplary Goethe. His Trilogip der Leidenschajl represents a hard-won poetic realisation of those utterances, for its final impact is that of life-enhancing poetry in the face of daunting odds.

S O T E S

’ R. Friedenthal, Goethe Stin Leben und seine Znl, Xlunirh 1963, p. 643

Cf. E. Heller, The Po& Selfand the Poem. London 1976, pp. 1-2 and R. Gray, Goethe A Critical

See Goethr’s conversation with Eckermann. 25 February 1824, and the lines from the dedication

l n~oduc t ion . Cambridge 1967, p. 215.

t o FauJI:

hiein Lied ertiinr der unbekannten Menge, Ihr Beifall selbst macht meinem Herzen bang

‘ Letter to Zelter, 3 Decrrnber 1812

The motifs ‘Scheidcn’ and ‘Lebewohl’ were recurrent ones in the eighteenth century. The slowness of the post-chaise meant that journeys were lengthy affairs, inevitably entailing consider- able absenres, whirh those left behind felt so keenly that they came to regard such departures as a foretaste of the ultimate departure. death. Bach’s Cuprzccio iiber die Abreise eines gelzebfen Bruders and Beethoven’s Piano Sonata ‘Das Lebewohl’ iop. 81ai both end with the return of the loved one, but later artists trnd towards pessimistic portrayals, as Goethe does here.


Friedenthal, op. czt., p. 639.

’ Heller, 0). cit., p. 9.

See, for example, An Schwuger Kronos. Goethe would certainly have approved of T. S. Eliot’s

Friedenthal, op. cit., p. 647.

Heller, op. cit., p. 25. Polish Preromantic Piano Music, played by Regina Smendzianka on Muza XL 0355, a recording

available in Great Britain.

Thomas Mann was surely thinking of this letter when in De Tod in Venedig he described Aschenbach’s exemplary life as having the tension of a constantly clenched fist.

l 3 Opinion is divided as regards the effectiveness of the concluding poem of the trilogy. Some hold that after the powerful lament of the ‘Elegie’ its impact is not weighty enough, whilst others such as E. M. Wilkinson in her Goethes Trilogie der Leidenschaft als Beitrag Cur Frage dcr Katharsis, Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurter Goethemuseum, 1957, see it as a convincing conclusion. In its short span it conveys a bitter-sweet but vigorous affirmation of life rather in the way the short final movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor (op. 132) follows on after the profound slow movement, ‘Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit’, written after a nearly mortal illness.

dictum that poetry is at its best when it is closest to the spoken idiom of its day.

Documents

TRILOGIE DER LEIDENSCHAFT: THE EXEMPLARY GOETHE?