• 16. Caroline to Luise Gotter in Gotha: Göttingen, 16 June 1780 [*]
Göttingen, 16 June 1780
|26| . . . Far be any romantic notions from me! [1] I do feel I could come to prefer Link to all others, I know he deserves the preference I accord him, and I hope that because my inclinations toward him are based on the characteristics of his soul and on his excellent manner of thinking, they are innocent and cannot be displeasing to our kindly father in heaven. [2]
Problems from both sides may prevent our alliance. My father does not know him, and how could one expect him to surrender his daughter, for whom he has such fatherly love, to someone he does not even know? [3] Although Link is indeed quite rich, he is extremely dependent on |27| an uncle; will the latter even allow it?
I know all these things and am remaining calm. If it is right for me to become happy in this way, then God will find a way to unite us. If it is not right, then he will separate us, and I will have the truly divine comfort of knowing that every fate I may encounter will ultimately serve my well-being. I am not so romantic to say that I will never want to marry anyone besides him. No, I will leave everything to God’s providence so completely and with such a serene soul that I cannot possibly be unhappy.
So becalm yourself, my tender friend, and allow me simply to think of him with the affection that preserves me from so much foolishness and that has already improved so much in my own heart, where it has left not even a flicker of pride. I look at Link as a friend, not as a beloved. And even were he to wish quite the opposite, he himself will remain within the boundaries of friendship. He has loved me since the first moment he saw me, quite unchanged for three years now, right up to the present, but his modesty toward me has always been the same, and though he never paid me a compliment or spoke a tender word to me, the vehemence of his feelings is evident in his letters. It was his friend who asked him to write me; he himself did not want to at all.
I still remember the first time I spoke to him after he had already been here for several years; it was only last winter, at a ball. He trembled and could hardly speak, and your poor Caroline, alas, did not fare much better [4] — but away with such memories! They can only disrupt the beautiful, constant serenity of my heart. Why should I, in the blossom of life, make myself so anxious? I want to enjoy my springtime — being but 16 years old and already getting gray hair from worry and care? that is not my thing . . .
Notes
[*] Luise Stieler had married Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter on 30 March 1780. Back.
[1] Caroline uses the German term romanhaft here rather than romantisch (similarly Fr. romanesque in letters 5, 9). See Raymond Immerwahr, “‘Romantic’ and Its Cognates in England, Germany, and France,” “Romantic” and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word, ed. Hans Eichner (Toronto 1972), 55:
The first major German writer to make frequent use of the adjective romantisch was Christoph Martin Wieland. During and for about six years after his early pietistic period he uses the then prevalent romanhaft; romantisch appears fairly frequently in the 1760s and increasingly thereafter.
Without ever abandoning the older word or clearly differentiating the two, Wieland used both with conscious reference to literary romance and with the wider connotation of a rich stimulus to the imagination. He made an unparalleled contribution to the popularization of romantisch both through his own published works and through his journal, Der Teutsche Merkur, published from 1773, where the word occurs in articles reviews, and extensive excerpts from a great variety of German and foreign authors.
Concerning the peculiarly negative connotation of the word as Caroline uses it here, see ibid., 56:
The remarkable thing about Wieland’s influence on that word romantisch is that he helped to strengthen the very tendencies that he was consciously opposing as he used it. Basically, the romantic for Wieland is what it was in England in the third quarter of the seventeenth century: an exalted view of life nurtured by the uncritical reading of popular fiction and the consequent acceptance of literary imagination as real.
This realm of imagination he associated with enthusiasm (Schwärmerei), the impractical, idealistic, and sentimental view of life that had to be surmounted for the attainment of true maturity . . . In particular, Wieland’s literary creations warn repeatedly against the notion that sentiment and idealism can triumph over the erotic impulses of human nature. It was of course this hedonistic denial that idealistic aspiration can or should triumph over the senses that made Wieland the object of such intense hostility by the German romanticists, notably Ludwig Tieck and Wilhelm Schlegel.
Concerning Wilhelm Schlegel’s anticipated (but never fully realized) critical “annihilation” of Wieland, see Friedrich’s letter to Caroline on 20 October 1798 (letter 205) with note 15. Back.
[2] Frontispiece to Christian August Wichmann, Das Frauenzimmer im dreyfachen Stande, als Tochter, Frau und Mutter: Eine wahre, moralisch-komische Geschichte, vol. 1, Das Mädchen, oder die Tochter (Breslau 1782):
Although no extant portraits of Wilhelm Link seem to exist, he might plausibly have resembled the young men in the following illustrations from 1784 (Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki [1784]; National Gallery of Art Washington DC) and 1794 (Goettinger Taschen Calender Für das Jahr 1794):
[3] Although Link had doubtless visited Caroline at her home, nonetheless her father, Johann David Michaelis, was generally occupied with his scholarly work and had little to do with the daily social lives even of his daughters (frontispiece to Andreas Josef von Guttenberg, Der Arzt und das Mittel: Posse in einem Aufzuge [Leipzig 1802]):
[4] Illustrations from the period frequently portray the occasional awkwardness of encounters between love interests (title vignette to August Heinrich Julius Lafontaine, Theodor, vol. 2 [Berlin 1800]):
The following scene portrays an encounter between two distant cousins who, initially quite at odds with each other personally, meet briefly at a winter piquenik held by an aunt at her estate; the man discovers to his surprise and confusion that the woman has managed to persuade the aunt to invite the man’s love interest — but the man, touched by his cousin’s solicitude, who earlier had expressed an element of jealousy toward the other woman, now finds that he himself feels differently toward the cousin. In the scene, the woman briefly remarks to the man, “Well, good cousin, I imagine that today you are quite pleased with me after all,” viz., for having the love interest invited (A. G. Eberhard, “Zwist und Liebe,” Neues Taschenbuch zum geselligen Vergnügen 1 [1801], 2–65; illustration in the next volume [1802]):
See in this context also the supplementary appendix on Lotte Michaelis’s stay in Mainz during January 1791, note 3. Back.
Translation © 2011 Doug Stott