• 136a. Friedrich Schlegel to Wilhelm Schlegel in Amsterdam: Leipzig, 13 November 1793 [*]
[Leipzig] 13 November [1793]
. . . I had planned to write you an extremely long letter today, an answer concerning the notion of system, [1] but a crushing headache that has kept me in bed till now prompts me to put it off until next time, for I do not want to present my ideas to you in the gloomy light of a sick person. Moreover you have enough to read for today and thus can be satisfied enough, and the modest news that [Caroline] B[öhmer] is doing as well as you could possibly wish is better than any treatise. Could you but join her and share her wonderful joy at such unjust happiness. . . .
C[aroline] openly gave me the enclosed 218th letter to read freely. [2] I am not pleased with it at all, and find much in it that is almost ignoble. Especially that he now wants her, too, to be unhappy because unnatural nature has made him into such a miserable knave. [3] She acquiesces to necessity in a beautiful and human fashion. “I can never have a low opinion of this man — and will always recall with love what I have lost,” she wrote with regard to the letter. [4] . . .
I have long heard nothing from Hannover. I am on good terms with Charlotte; she suspects nothing. [5]
Friedr. S.
Notes
[*] Sources: Walzel, 140–41; KFSA 1:156–57. Includes the excerpt constituting letter 136a in Erich Schmidt (1913): Caroline to Friedrich Schlegel in Leipzig: Lucka, November 1793 Back.
[1] Continuing an earlier discussion of poetics. Back.
[2] Although KFSA 23:442n9 states that this “218th letter” was from the father of Caroline’s child, namely, Jean-Baptiste Dubois de Crancé, it offers no supporting documentation. Walzel, 140n2, asks “From Cranz [Crancé]?” Nor is there any explanation of the designation “218th letter.” There is reason to believe (see below) that the letter was in fact not from Jean-Baptiste Dubois de Crancé at all. Back.
[3] The letter seems to have been from Georg Ernst Tatter, whose position as a person of low birth intimately associated with the English royal house better accords with such a description. See esp. Tatter’s letter to Friedrich Ludwig Wilhelm Meyer on 20 December 1790, just before joining the entourage of the sons of George III (Elise Campe, Erinnerungen, 1:315):
We are now preparing to depart; in January 1791, the princes will be leaving Göttingen and going to Hannover. You may well ask what my own plans are. Well, they are saying I might yet be useful [Tatter had been tutoring the princes in German, among other things] and would like to keep me in the entourage. I will be going along, as it were, unwillingly, that is, not fully persuaded that this business with being “useful” is really as clear cut as they say, and will be entering into circumstances in the residence where the one thing will oppress me even more than the other.
My dear Meyer, I am simply not at all made of the stuff from which the kind of human being can be shaped of the sort one might find worthy of exhibiting in that particular gallery. Why can I not simply say, “Just let me go my own way”? But one becomes so invisibly ensnared and entangled that is impossible to stir even a single hand or foot in which a bit of joie de vivre might yet remain. . . .
I must address yet another passage in your letter: Everything you prophesy about my future that is beautiful and good appears under a very different guise to me. I myself have banished all hope; there are circumstances outside me and dispositions within me that exclude me from so-called happiness.
See Caroline’s description of Tatter in her letter to Meyer on 12 August 1793 (letter 114), esp. the following lines anticipating the derogatory reference to “knave”:
. . . a person, born to be a hermit, who surrendered to love like a child — the most sensitive stoic — whose touchiness over against freedom prompted him to fetter himself with unnecessary chains and who observes the most precious obligations more poorly than the most superfluous.
See also her letter to Meyer on 15 June 1793 (letter 129), echoing Friedrich’s reference to the letter writer wanting Caroline, too, to be unhappy:
Tatter will torment himself — but why was that the only thing he was able to do for me? He did not want to be happy — and for me the time had also passed when doing without constituted a pleasure.
Tatter’s passages cited above may allude not just to his professional situation, but also, perhaps even primarily, to his incapacity to commit to marriage with Caroline. Back.
[4] Caroline’s statement here similarly supports the assumption that the letter was from Tatter, whom she seems genuinely to have loved, and since she otherwise nowhere refers to or even intimates such love for Crancé. Back.
[5] About Caroline’s identity, confinement in Lucka, and son (König. Grossbr. u. Churf. Braunschweig. Lünen. Genealogischer Kalender auf das 1779. Jahr; Inhaltsverzeichnis deutscher Almanache, Theodor Springmann Stiftung):
Translation © 2011 Doug Stott