1064
PARTISAN REVIEW
annals of German romanticism. "I am a born temple-worshipper,"
writes Bettina, "where the breath of the sanctuary does not reach me,
I am unsure of myself and like one that is lost. You are my temple."
And again she writes: "The spirit is born to worship." This is the
mood in which she writes her whole book.
If
in one place she says
that she will forswear her idolatry-Ach,
ich will dem Gotzendienst
abschworen!-it
is only because she feels that her case is made, "for,"
she says, "which of the prophets denies that you are a god?" Her in–
tention to devote the proceeds of the book to the building of a gigantic
Goethe monument was never fully executed. Perhaps fortunately. But
the book remains in all its fervor and devotion.
Discreeter in its idealization is the second book, the even more
famous
Eckermann,
which began to appear the year after (1836).
This is the book that Nietzsche with characteristic but pardonable
excess described as the best in the language-<ias
beste deutsche Buch
das es giebt-and
it is as much alive and as impressive today as ever.
But how many of those who derive their conception of Goethe from
these fascinating pages realize how subtly the Eckermann portrait is
stylized, how consistently the raciness and the roughness of Goethe,
which we know enough about from other quarters, has been toned
down and a gentler, serener, more seraphic, note substituted? Ernst
Beutler in his recent account of the book recognizes Eckermann's
deliberate intention to weave a myth about Goethe, to translate
everything from the mundane level of Weimar to some "Arcadian
landscape of the spirit," and so to make a sort of seer or Merlin of
him.
"We talked," says Eckermanil, "of great and good things, he
turned the noblest part of his nature towards me and my spirit took
fire from his." This is many degrees cooler than Bettina, but the
idealization is there. When in his closing paragraph Eckermann con–
templates Goethe's dead body laid out for burial he sees what some
of the late portraits scarcely show-a perfect man in all his beauty
-Ein Dollkommener Mensch lag in grosser Schonheit Dor mir.
On the whole the Germans have yielded to this mythologizing of
Goethe more than they have resisted
it,
as we can see from the res–
ponses of Heine who by the whole trend of his talents and associations
belonged to the opposition yet admitted ironically that when he
visited Goethe in Weimar he could not help glancing aside to see
whether he had Jupiter's eagle beside him with lightning in its beak.
