And he went to the singer and reached up to shake her hand as well as the count’s. Toward Ulrike he bowed gently. People applauded and he directed their applause to the two performers. Then he motioned to Julie von Hohenzollern as he always did when he needed her help. She was by his side in a flash and led him out while he acted more in need of help than he was. When he had bowed toward Ulrike, his shoulders had involuntarily performed a kind of shrug while his hands signaled helplessness or even begged for forgiveness. Ulrike had immediately understood and moved her head atop the roll collar back and forth, but really only the slightest bit, a gesture of complete agreement. It meant, Not the least reason to apologize. The whole thing superhumanly lovely, heartfelt, relaxed. A second of harmony on which the world would draw for a thousand years. In that mood, he left the hall.
Meanwhile, Julie von Hohenzollern said, “If I know the Privy Councilor, he’ll be wanting a lager from Eger right now.” And she led her charge with the flair she displayed under all circumstances into the Prince’s Taproom.
When he had taken his first, deep draught he said, “Princess, how many times will you continue to rescue me?”
And she: “Rescuing Goethe—that would be my favorite occupation.”
And he: “I fear you have your work cut out for you. Cheers.” And he drained his glass.
In the evening, after dinner, Amalie wanted to know why Herr Privy Councilor had not looked at her.
“Or me,” Bertha chimed in.
“Or me,” added Frau von Levetzow.
Before Goethe could answer, Ulrike said, “You were sitting right next to him but I was way out at the end of the semicircle. Imagine how he would have had to turn his head to look at you—impossible. So only I remained. And seriously, ladies, I’m not sure if what he said about me would have occurred to him about you. Through his description, I could really imagine how I had been listening.”
“Oh of course,” said Amalie. “Don’t pretend you didn’t notice that he kept looking at you. Then you just provided him with the face he needed.”
Count Sternberg begged to differ. In fact, no matter where one sat, one had to notice that for the Privy Councilor, Ulrike was as important as Frau Milder. He, for example, had followed the Privy Councilor’s gaze. Looking over quickly now and then at the figure sitting way out on the left flank, he understood why the Privy Councilor kept looking over there. If he might express it, he would say that Ulrike’s objectivity in listening was the controlling factor.
“But it was also a bit embarrassing,” said Amalie, “that staring at Ulrike.”
“Not for me,” said Ulrike merrily. “I’ve learned how to be stared at this summer.”
“And enjoyed it,” said Amalie.
“T-O-Y,” cried Bertha.
Ulrike quickly whispered to him, “Typical of you.”
“That’s enough,” commanded Frau von Levetzow, and without even attempting a transition, said that she’d always considered the most plausible distinction to be that hardened men like Napoleon loved soft, melancholy music and gentle men like perhaps our dear Goethe were more for lively, cheerful tones.
“If that was true,” said the count, “then beginning today it isn’t true anymore.”
“Correct,” said Ulrike.
Goethe’s favorite conversations were those that got along without him. In his room, he sat down at the desk and wrote:
A Man in Love
Women are the objective sex. A man experiences everything only as a mood. As his mood. The woman always experiences the thing. The thing itself. Then she deals with the thing, about which she has an opinion. The opinion is determined more by the thing than by her. This constitutes her objectivity. The man judges according to what he’s feeling at the moment. His opinion has less to do with the thing than with himself. If the world is to be administered more in harmony with itself, it must be administered by women. When will that be? Men belong in the sandboxes and the ivory towers, women at the helm.
Since he is a man, this statement says more about him than about its object. Wanting to maintain a bit of accountability, he has to add that.
A woman is more transparent than a man. Ulrike almost said it: the more she reads by him, the less she knows who he is. Only someone sure of herself can talk that way. High-flown tall tales is what she called his writing. But who is he? she asked quite objectively. He will ask Ulrike before they part—i.e., tomorrow—he will ask her if he still seems as ambiguous as he did in his works, if he is still only who he is in any given situation.
One isn’t responsible for oneself. Know thyself: an agreeable illusion. Or an invitation to invent yourself. Then it’s not you, but an invention. Only others can know you. The more they love you, the more precisely they know you.
He is clearer to himself now than ever before. Through Ulrike. All vagueness ends with her. The way she reacts to him shows him how he is, who he is, what he is. He will become freer toward her. Involuntarily. She will know him as the person he is through her. That’s who he will be. Through his love for her.
Already, in anticipation, he senses how the world will be then: peaceful, because those who need each other have each other. Then they will need nothing else. The world is no longer a globe with nerves. It is a benevolent event when those who love each other are together. If that succeeds a single time, Ulrike, the world will be changed forever. Not a leaf or bloom, not a jailor or president will remain untouched by it. All the ills of the world have arisen through lack of love. Ulrike and he will redeem the world of all evil because they are sufficient unto themselves.
Even he can see his own grandiosity, Ulrike. His tone sounds exaggerated because humanity is trained to suppress, denigrate, and silence. To belittle.
The explosiveness of his words comes from something that was missing his whole life long: love. And now it’s here. So it exists. That is not just playing with words. It is the greatest precision possible. It is the most vivid possible presence and fills you to the brim. The greatest possible certainty.
He gives himself over to Ulrike’s objectivity. He has no defense against it. The result is that he can forgo everything in the world except her. He is defined by his love for her. He is his love for her. A declaration of love, whenever hats occur: whenever he sees women wearing ambitious hats, he imagines them on Ulrike. Every last one of those hats, even the most outrageous, becomes beautiful only when Ulrike wears it.
There he stopped writing. He sat and experienced the feeling that when she was not there in person, he had to write. As long as he was writing, she was there. As soon as he stopped, she was gone. But since she was missing only until breakfast, her absence was bearable. If he always knew when he would see her again, there would be no suffering. This had been rehearsed all summer long. In the pauses, everything increased that would burst out in an excess of feeling when he saw her again.
Chapter Three
FROM KARLSBAD TO Diana’s Hut.
At breakfast, Ulrike had given him a look that let him know her mother had agreed to allow them that afternoon a last walk up to Diana’s Hut without the family.
Frau von Levetzow could not resist including in the way she formulated her farewell to the two of them the information that it was she who had permitted this walk and that they should please not violate her trust. That was the stuffy gist of what she said. But the manner in which she couched her moral rules and regulations and the rhetorical and oratorical flourishes with which she expressed them, came straight out of the best French farces. That is, nothing was said that couldn’t be said amusingly. Madame de Pompadour, the splendid courtier in her motherly role.
Both the cautioner and the cautioned could always act as if it were just a game. They would soon discover it was unmistakably serious if they thought the playful tone was only a playful tone. Goethe liked playing along. He acted the virtuoso of rococo, outdoing Madame de Pompadour in half-playacting. It pleased him that the family accepted his frightful seriousness as a farce. And so
they would part for four hours—the excursion to Diana’s Hut should not be, must not be, was not permitted to last longer—the perfect closing scene for the third act of the five-act farce entitled “The Uncle as Nephew.”
As soon as they were really alone, Goethe thanked Ulrike for the pale red bow with which she had reminded him of Werther’s birthday on his birthday. And he begged her pardon that he had snatched her lavender-blue silk glove half by accident, half on purpose. Before he could say he would like to keep it, she said “But it belongs to you” in a serious tone that was rare for her.
Goethe said, “When you express too much thanks for something, you suggest that you haven’t earned what you’re thanking someone for.”
“Shall I turn that assertion around?” she asked.
“You may do anything,” he said.
Well then, for the next four hours she wanted to address him with the familiar du. Keep the Excellency, but use du. It would please her to be on familiar footing with an Excellency.
He would like to be on a familiar footing with the Contresse Levetzow, he said.
“For how long?” she asked.
“For …” he pretended to think about it, calculate it, and then said in the simplest tone in the world, as if there was nothing as sensible, predictable, and unsensational as what he was now saying with such utter nonchalance, “Forever.”
She said, “W-H-G-T-Y.”
And to prove he had learned their abbreviation language, he said, “We haven’t gotten there yet,” and added “B-S.”
She: “What does that mean?”
He: “But soon.”
“Ah, Excellency,” she said and involuntarily began walking faster.
If she weren’t walking with him, she would go faster and faster. On the promenade in Marienbad he first of all had to teach her how slowly one needed to walk on a promenade among so many famous persons. She then took his arm and more or less let him guide her, but even then she kept applying forward pressure. It did him good to put the brakes on her will to accelerate with the same energy she used to apply it. On the way back from the promenade to the Klebelsberg palais, however, she fell into her pace and he had to keep up. It was something of a climb. When he drove out into the country around Weimar in his carriage, he liked to walk much of the way back home. And in his house he would walk back and forth for hours through a suite of six rooms and write standing up. There was no question of sitting in an armchair or on a sofa unless he was receiving visitors. When she could walk the way nature intended, Ulrike was another person. Her walk had nothing to do with hurry. She was so light, her limbs flew on ahead of her all by themselves. It was glorious to watch her walking, but he had trouble keeping up. He was a heavier person than she.
Now, on the steep path to Diana’s Hut, as she raced off without meaning to and without noticing and despite the steep path, he pretended it was the right tempo for him, too. If she was going to go as quickly and lightly as she wanted, he was not about to lag even a bit behind. It was unimaginable to fall behind or call to her to please moderate the tempo. On the contrary, he not only caught up but forged a half-step ahead at her pace. She noticed, looked over and, since he was a head taller, up. They were as united and attuned to each other as they had been in Marienbad, dancing. As they raced up the mountain, they were the same age. If she had begun to sing it wouldn’t have surprised him. But she didn’t sing; she began to recite a text he recognized. She recited by heart a passage from his Werther novel. Without getting stuck or hesitating or any other sign of uncertainty, she recited an entire Werther-episode. It didn’t slow her uphill progress at all, on the contrary, the text seemed to just make her lighter. Now it was unthinkable that he fall behind or ask for a more leisurely pace. And this is what she said:
On September 15
It’s enough to drive one mad, Wilhelm, that there are people without sense or feeling for the few things on earth that still have value. You know the honest parson’s walnut trees beneath which I sat … with Lotte, those marvelous trees that, God knows, always filled my soul with the greatest pleasure! How intimate they made the yard of the parsonage, how cool! And how marvelous their branches were! And the recollection going back to the honest clergymen who had planted them so many years ago. The schoolmaster often mentioned one name in particular that he had heard from his grandfather, and he was said to be such a virtuous man, and the thought of him was always sacred to me as I sat beneath those trees. Believe me, the schoolmaster’s eyes were filled with tears yesterday when we spoke about their being chopped down—Chopped down! I shall go mad. I could murder the dog who made the first cut. I who could die of sorrow if a few such trees stood in my yard and one were to die of old age, I had to stand by and watch. Dear friend, there is one good thing about it! What are human feelings! The whole village is grumbling and I hope the pastor’s wife will notice from the eggs and butter and other donations she will not receive what a wound she has struck. For it is she, the wife of the new pastor (our old one has died), a gaunt, sickly creature who has good reason not to care about the world, for no one cares about her. A foolish woman who pretends to be learned, meddles in discussions of the canon, labors away at the new-fangled moral-critical reforms of Christianity and shrugs her shoulders at Lavater’s enthusiasms, has ruined her health and therefore takes no joy in God’s earth. Only such a creature could have chopped down my walnut trees. As you see, I can’t get over it! Just imagine, the falling leaves are making her yard dirty and dank, the trees are blocking the sunlight, and when the nuts are ripe, boys throw stones at them and that gets on her nerves, disturbs the profound contemplation she devotes to comparing Kennicott, Semler, and Michaelis. Since I saw how dissatisfied the villagers were, especially the old ones, I said, Why did you allow it?—Around here, they said, if the mayor is for it what can we do? But one good thing happened. The mayor and the pastor (who wanted to get some profit from his wife’s foolishness, since it wasn’t making his soup any thicker) intended to sell the wood and share the returns. But the village treasurer’s office found out about it and said, Step right in here! For it had old claims to the part of the parsonage yard where the trees stood, and they sold the wood to the highest bidder. They have been felled! Oh, if I was the prince! What I would do to the parson’s wife, the mayor, and the treasurer—prince!—If I was the prince, what would I care about the trees in my country?
When she stopped there and declared the Werther recitation over, she had no intention of standing still—for instance, to hear what the author of Werther had to say about this passage or even about her recitation. Soon after they had first met one another, all the Levetzows had read something aloud and requested and received from him wise advice for improving their recitations, and now she had recited Werther in a way that had never been discussed in the long evenings spent talking about how to read aloud, because no one had ever done it like this—neither he nor any of the other readers in the family. In July while they were still in Marienbad, the outspoken Bertha had taken pleasure in repeating that two years ago, he had criticized Ulrike more than anyone else. She needed to work on developing more energy and a livelier presentation. And dispassionate Ulrike had answered calmly that she had no desire to be another Tieck.
Now he understood why Ulrike had mustered neither energy nor a livelier presentation as a reciter of Scott’s novels. Her nature refused to produce anything that didn’t come from within. She was against all artificiality, even if it was art. She was the soul of unbending objectivity. She had allowed the sentences to form unpretentiously, as if they came of their own accord, without any attempt at expressiveness on her part, but with unconcealed interest for these sentences. He could definitely sense enthusiasm. But it wasn’t her enthusiasm; it was the enthusiasm of the sentences. An enthusiasm that pressed inward without the need for external support.
Without speaking further, they came through the mature forest to the hut. Only when there was he able to tell her, “Ulrike, how lucky it is that at your
suggestion we’ve used the intimate form this afternoon, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be able to say that that passage can never have been read like that before. And the fact that you chose that passage—”
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