III
Goethe is twenty-two years old, he is living in Strasbourg, and then there is the famous episode of his passion for Frederica Brion which he remembers with nostalgia well into his old age. This passion enabled him to overcome the curse put on him by one of his previous loves, Lucinda by name, against all amorous attachments to other women and, in particular, against kissing on the lips.
The scene is worth describing. This Lucinda has a sister, a little too shrewd to be honest, who is busy convincing Goethe of the devastating effect he is having on the poor girl. She pleads with him both to go away and to give her, the sly little minx, the token of the last kiss. It is then that Lucinda surprises them and says, „May those lips be cursed forever. May evil befall the first one to receive their tribute.” It is clearly not without good reason that Goethe, absorbed then in the infatuations of swaggering youth, takes this curse as a sanction that will henceforth bar the way to all his amorous undertakings. He tells us then how, elated by the discovery of this charming girl, Frederica Brion, he succeeds for the first time in overcoming the prohibition and feels the ecstasy of triumph following on this fear of something stronger than his own self-imposed, internal prohibitions.
This is one of the most enigmatic episodes in Goethe’s life, and no less extraordinary is his abandonment of Frederica. As a result, the Goethesforscher—like the Stendhalians and the Bossuetists, that very singular breed of people who attach themselves to one of those authors whose words have given form to our feelings and who spend their time rooting around in papers left in closets in order to analyze what the genius left behind—the Goethesforscher have concentrated on this fact. They have given us all kinds of explanations which I will not catalogue here. One thing is certain: that they all smack of that kind of philistinism inseparable from such research when it is pursued in the usual way. It cannot be denied either that there always is, in fact, some obscure concealment of philistinism in the manifestations of neurosis, for it is such a manifestation we are dealing with in Goethe’s case, as will be shown by the observations I will now set forth.
There are a number of enigmatic features in the way Goethe approaches this adventure, and I would almost say that the key to the problem can be found in its immediate antecedents.
To be brief, Goethe, living at the time in Strasbourg with one of his friends, has long been aware of the existence in a small village of the open, kind, friendly family of Pastor Brion. But when he goes there, he surrounds himself with precautions whose amusing aspect he relates in his autobiography; actually, when one looks at the details, one cannot help being astonished at the truly contorted structure they reveal.
First of all, he thinks he must go there in disguise. Son of a grand bourgeois from Frankfurt, distinguished among his comrades by his smooth manners, his impressive dress, his air of social superiority, Goethe disguises himself as a theology student in an especially seedy and torn cassock. He sets out with his friend, and they are full of laughter on the way. But of course he is very vexed as soon as the reality of the visibly dazzling charm of the young lady against the background of that family setting makes him realize that, if he wants to appear at his handsomest and best, he must change as quickly as possible out of this astonishing costume which does not show him to advantage.
The justifications he gives for this disguise are very odd. He invokes nothing less than the disguises the gods put on to come down among mortals—which, as he himself emphasizes, seems clearly to indicate (even allowing for his adolescent mentality) something more than self-conceit—something bordering on florid megalomania. If we look at the details, Goethe’s text shows us what he thinks about it. By this way of disguising themselves, the gods sought above all to avoid vexation, and, to put it bluntly, it was for them a way of not having to take the familiarity of mortals as insulting. What the gods risk most when they come down on a level with humans is losing their immortality; and precisely the only way of avoiding that is to put themselves on their level.