Chapter 11 Two Gifted Women

In: Goethe's Faust I Outlined
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Evanghelia Stead
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11.1 Goethe’s and Byron’s Gifts

Apart from a singular exception (minute almanacs for the ladies in Chapter 3), female readership has played little part until now in this book. Now, the select gift—to a woman by a poet—of Moritz Retzsch’s Faust prints lies at the heart of this chapter. The two editions offered differ in form and language and are no mere instruments of seduction, which renders their choice all the more interesting. However configured, they remain gift books. As proffered and accepted, they transmit a series of signs and translate into symbolic language, as though, delivered and opened, the book began to speak. The stories involve twelve bottles of wine, a rose, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Lord George Gordon Byron (who named himself Noel in order for his initials, N. B., to coincide with Napoleon’s). Both poets harboured mutual esteem, even fascination, despite lack of German preventing Byron from reading Goethe in the original. Two women step up: Marianne von Willemer (1784–1860) and Catharine Potter Stith (1795–1839).1

At first glance, it seems that they have nothing in common and can be compared only in terms of their differences. Foremost is the nature of their ties with the male protagonists, fleeting on the one hand (Byron/Stith), enduring and profound on the other (Goethe/Willemer). Equally, their biographies diverge. Marianne Jung was the illegitimate child of an Austrian actress who had sought fortune in Germany. At the age of fourteen, she enchanted the audiences of Frankfurt’s theatres with her ethereal dancing, acting, and singing (Clemens Brentano fell madly in love with her). The banker Jakob Johann von Willemer, twice a widower, took her aged eighteen into his family alongside his two daughters. When Goethe met her twelve years later in August 1814 in Wiesbaden, where he was taking the waters, he described Miss Jung to Christiane, his own wife, as Willemer’s “little companion” (kleine Gefährtin).2 Barely two months later, on 27 September 1814, the banker made Marianne his third wife, putting an end to gossip, possibly at Goethe’s instigation. She was thirty years old. For Goethe—then sixty-five—she became the object of a great passion, centrally related to the composition of his lyrical collection West-östlicher Divan on which he was working at the time. In addition to being his amorous muse and inspiration for the famed Suleika of the Divan’s eighth book, Marianne also contributed at least three poems to it. The soul mates saw each other one final time in September 1815 but a three-way correspondence (between Goethe, Marianne, and Jakob) continued until the poet’s death in 1832. Goethe’s gift is set in this November 1816 context. So far as I know, Marianne and Jakob were the first among Goethe’s friends to receive Umrisse zu Goethes Faust, an original exemplar of Retzsch’s prints, sent by the poet himself from Weimar on 8 November 1816, only a few days after he himself had received it from his publisher Cotta. It is not known where this is now, nor indeed whether it has survived, but the Willemers responded to the dispatch with a joint letter. Marianne wielded the pen, Jakob made do with adding the postscript.

Catharine Potter Stith’s situation was quite different. Born 1795 in Philadelphia, she married Townshend Stith in September 1818, and in June 1819 followed him to Tunis where he was to become American Consul. In May 1822, the Stiths found themselves in Leghorn, likely on a return journey to the United States (Townshend Stith would die 2 November 1823 in Gibraltar). They joined other Americans aboard the USS Constitution, to which Lord Byron had been invited as guest of honour. He wore a rose in his buttonhole, which was either given to or taken by Catharine Stith (versions differ) as a precious souvenir with which to return to her country. Today the rose, relic of eros (an established metaphorical anagram), lies under glass at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It is even available for consultation, bearing, as it does, a shelf-mark, as though a book (cf. Fig. 11.1a–b). This rose also prompted the gift of a book. Indeed, the very next day, Byron sent a Faust to Mrs Stith, accompanied by a letter urging her to accept “a memorial less frail than that which you did me the honour of requiring yesterday.”3 The book was Faustus: from the German of Goethe, the second edition of the English version of Retzsch’s outlines, copied by Moses and published by Thomas Boosey and Sons (1821). The book also contains, as noted, a long summary of Goethe’s play interspersed with passages translated into blank verse, controversially attributed to Coleridge (Chapter 5). It is with a view to producing this version that Boosey had approached Coleridge in May 1820. And it is this same edition, sent by John Gisborne, that Percy Bysshe Shelley, also in Italy, and close to Byron at the time, was consulting in 1822, as he himself went about translating Goethe’s Faust into English. Whether this Faustus troubled (Coleridge), inspired (Shelley), or aroused curiosity (Byron), it relates to three major English Romantics beyond serving as a gift in epistolary exchange.

In his letter to Mrs Stith, Byron hastened to justify his choice (he had none of his own works to hand) but his reasoning appears all the more poignant. In parallel, he had almost certainly given his Don Juan to George Bancroft, who also witnessed his encounter with Catharine Stith. Proprieties had to be observed but proffering a Faust rather than a Don Juan (two figures connected in literature) remains an equivocal choice. A book in which Margaret loses her honour and her life, against a rose, the sensual symbol par excellence. Why this Faustus? And what of the flower? The episode raises questions, which, while they may offer no conclusive answers, encourage a flight of the mind, the results of which are worth setting out.

Despite differences in social status, context, and occupations, several features are common to Catharine Potter Stith and Marianne von Willemer: their literary talent and cryptic authorial status; musical aptitude; strong interest in the education of women; and their silence. Marianne is a well-known figure who has been studied from various perspectives. Catharine, on the other hand, remains elusive beyond what we know of her from Arthur Burnett Benson’s short biographical study, based on correspondence and her papers. He describes her as “a woman of rare physical charm, twenty-seven years old, an accomplished musician on the piano, guitar, and harp, a linguist and student of considerable ability, and a person who possessed exceptionally broad intellectual attainments and interests.”4

Both women were considered fascinating, whether for beauty (Catharine) or charm (Marianne), and both later taught music and singing. Catharine, an expert musician who sang, like Marianne, set several poems to music, including two by Friedrich Schiller. When she returned to the United States after her husband’s death, she opened a school for young girls in Philadelphia in 1826 and advocated a liberal education in Thoughts on Female Education (1831). The songs she composed include “Our Friendship,” of which the first line (“It died in beauty, a rose blown from the parent stem”) is, however fortuitously, evocative of Byron’s token. As with Marianne in the Divan, her poems published in journals did not bear her name. And just as Marianne ceded her poems to Goethe, so would Catharine publish, independently of her relationship with Byron, under the dual mask of translation and anonymity. She spoke fluent French, knew Italian, and translated several German authors and poets into English without putting her name to these versions.5 She even published a novella in Godey’s Lady’s Book of broad readership.6 Which is all to say that Byron’s gift (of a Faustus doubly translated into word and image) already hints at a hidden, but nevertheless fervent literary activity, as daring as the anonymous authoress’s quite public pluck of a rose from the rebel poet’s lapel. Benson supposes, with good reason, that their relationship was more prolonged. Byron’s letter supports this hypothesis: “I feel much flattered and gratified by the interest which you have been pleased to take in my writings,” he wrote, words which are difficult to explain simply by their meeting on the frigate Constitution. The letters written to Catharine Stith between 1832 and 1833 by the novelist-adventurer Edward John Trelawny, touring the United States, also reveal ties with the circle of English poets exiled in Italy.7

Both women refused to yield their secrets. The relationships, which linked them whether briefly or enduringly to Byron and Goethe, remain closed chapters. Catharine showed great reserve when invited by L. Gaylord Clark, editor of a New York journal, to write an article entitled “Recollections of Lord Byron” for the Knickerbocker, despite ingratiating compliments about her intellectual capacities and a good financial incentive. As for Marianne, upon Goethe’s death, she thanked God for having honoured her with his long friendship and kept the secrets of her heart to herself alone. Their biographies are therefore a fit setting for paths opened up by Retzsch’s outlines: a substitute for the rose (Byron), a thank-you offering in return for twelve bottles of wine (Goethe). Retzsch’s Faust, whether in its original portfolio (Umrisse zu Goethe’s Faust) or as an English copy (Faustus: from the German of Goethe), becomes a token of desire mediated by a flower (Byron) or the fruit of the vine (Goethe). Calling cards for chequered affection, these two outlined Faust serve as a link between the male poets and a female author, whether amorous or simply bold. Highly literary, they lend themselves to two readings: that of Marianne and Jakob, the readers of yesteryear, and my own reading, thanks to Catharine.

In both cases, that which is dictated by desire, stirring the imagination, transcends biography and the learned footnoting of correspondence. It goes so far as to suggest the hypothesis that Umrisse zu Goethes Faust and Faustus: from the German of Goethe serve to reflect, in the former case, the very different reactions to Faust stirred in both Jakob and Marianne, and in the latter case, Byron’s timidity, his propensity for seduction, and the fascination he exercised over others.

11.2 The Book as a Rose

Did Catharine seize the rose? Or did Byron give it to her? Catharine Potter Stith’s encounter with Lord Byron gave rise to at least six diverging accounts: a chapter by George Bancroft, passenger on the USS Constitution, who would become a renowned American historian;8 three passages in Byron’s correspondence (to his publisher John Murray, close friend and poet Thomas Moore, as well as friend, financial advisor, trustee and banker Douglas Kinnaird); the content of Byron’s letter sent with the book; a short manuscript by Catharine Stith’s granddaughter, Emily Brandegee;9 and a later article by the historian William M. Sloane, Bancroft’s personal secretary, who expanded upon the latter’s memories.10

The brazen gesture was indeed her own, although her granddaughter, keen on propriety, would reverse the roles (claiming the poet held the flower out to her). As for Bancroft, he offered a vivid version of the scene, gracefully toned down:

One lady, of great personal beauty, put out her hand, and saying, “When I return to Philadelphia, my friends will ask for some token that I have spoken with Lord Byron,” she gently took a rose which he wore in the button-hole of his black frock-coat.11

Bancroft added, in terms reminiscent of Byron’s letter to Catharine, which he no doubt consulted: “He was pleased with her unaffected boldness, and the next day sent her a charming note and a copy of ‘Outlines to Faust’ as a more durable memento.” Byron, on the other hand, boasted of the encounter. In two of the three passages, he emphasized the rose (in italics), placed himself at the centre of the scene, and ascribed different meanings to it. The Murray version sees him detached, the woman’s gesture consigned to the background, but the homage to him magnified, much like the rest of the letter which provides a litany of tributes to his own renown. The intention was to impress his publisher: “an American lady asked for a rose which I wore—for the purpose she said of sending to America something which I had about me as a memorial.” The Kinnaird version focused on the bold gesture and the way it reflected upon him: “an American lady took a rose (which I wore) from me—as she said she wished to send something which I had about me to America.” Finally the letter to Moore offered a more detailed and personal account, adding a significant detail: the rose had been a gift from another woman that very morning (“given to me by a very pretty Italian lady”). As he pondered this keepsake, Byron added: “There is a kind of Lalla Rookh incident for you!”12 Literary auspices sketch out a novel between the lines, to which Retzsch’s Faust adds images.

It is some story. That most symbolic of flowers decorating Byron’s lapel had been given to him by his lover, Guiccioli. Catharine had taken possession of another woman’s declaration. Lalla Rookh, an oriental poem by Thomas Moore (1817) had already met with considerable success (Bancroft recounts that it had been lavishly represented on stage at the court in Berlin, and Goethe’s Über Kunst und Altertum reports on the performance). It shows its eponymous heroine, the daughter of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, falling in love with a poet while journeying to meet another man, her royal fiancé, who in fact turns out to be the poet in question. Was the allusion to Lalla Rookh the covert wish of an aroused poet? Byron’s imagination creates a lovers’ knot around the rose. He is no doubt also exploiting the image—in the nymph’s song next to Azim, included in “The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan,” the first part of Lalla Rookh—of faded roses, symbolising the passage of time, and blossoms distilled into the fragrance of reminiscence.13 Implicit in the triumphant exclamation (“There is a kind of Lalla Rookh incident for you!”) is the invitation to imagine another romance poem. The rose is already an evocation of things past.

On the American frigate, however, the incident became the epicentre of frenzied women competing for the rose leaves: “the ladies on board of the ship begged the leaves,” notes Emily Brandegee, “but the rose is still able to tell of that distinguished visitor.” Today, all that remains of the flower, stripped of these leaves, is a shrivelled corolla and a withered calyx (2.5 cm × 3 cm), reverently pressed between two panes of glass in a gilt wooden frame (Fig. 11.1a). The glass is cracked (Fig. 11.1b), making the object, enclosed in a small case, an unexpected twin of Marcel Duchamp’s famous glass The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. The roles have been reversed with Byron and his rose in place of the bride …

Figure 11.1a
Figure 11.1a

Corolla and calyx of Lord Byron’s rose given to Catharine Potter Stith, 3 × 3 cm, dried and pressed between two sheets of glass in painted wood frame 38 × 36 × 4 cm

Courtesy Beinecke, YCGL MSS 54 (Art), Yale University
Figure 11.1b
Figure 11.1b

Lord Byron’s rose under the cracked glass pane

Courtesy Beinecke, YCGL MSS 54 (Art), Yale University

Another singular detail: filial piety and a sense of propriety prompted Emily Brandegee to insert children to the narrative in place of women fascinated by the poet’s good looks and scandalous reputation. Indeed, the model granddaughter specified that Catharine’s rose was “to show her children.” The watered-down story met with the favour of William Sloane: “when the consul’s wife laughingly said that her children would want some proof that she had seen Lord Byron, she was permitted to take the rose from his buttonhole.”14 But the justification is somewhat fanciful if not jarringly incongruous. In reality, Catharine Stith and Lord Byron had both just lost children. In Catharine’s case, her first-born and only male heir, Bolling Buckner Africanus Stith, born in Tunis on 8 April 1820 (hence Africanus) and buried in Leghorn two months previous, on 18 March 1822; in Byron’s case, Allegra, his illegitimate daughter by Claire Clairmont, had died at the age of five on 20 April 1822. Her remains were shipped to England on 26 May and the first part of the letter to Murray, mentioned above, outlined the poet’s desired funeral arrangements. His paternal affection was said to be slight but he had just written to Moore: “I have lately lost my little girl Allegra by a fever, which has been a serious blow to me.”15 A few months earlier, in Florence, Catharine, for her part, had given birth to a daughter, Ann Florence Stith, born on 8 November 1821.16 She would have a second daughter, Victorina Sprague Stith, born in Gibraltar, who would die at the age of twelve. This might explain the rewriting of the episode after the event, but there can be no doubt that adults were involved and not children.

The letter to Catharine is explicit. The book Byron asks her to accept from him “contains an outline and some designs from the famous Faust of Goëthe [sic]—which have been much admired both in Germany and England.” “Outline” refers to the synopsis of the play but this is not the reason for the gift. It is Retzsch’s copied prints (“designs”) that steal the limelight. At the heart of the book (pp. 49–51 of a volume containing a total of 86), two of them depict Margaret’s seduction through a flower whose petals she removes one by one: Gretchen plucks them off to discover the secret of her beloved’s heart. In his Faust, Goethe structures this scene around a cunningly constructed antithesis that opposes two couples in an Edenic garden (F 3073–3204). While Faust is courting Margaret and learning about her simple life, Martha tries to extract a promise of marriage from Mephistopheles that would suit her down to the ground, given her recent widowhood. On the one hand, greed, cunning, and the circumlocutions of a language designed to entrap; on the other, innocent amorousness and passionate sincerity. Shameless calculation versus the giving of oneself without counting the cost: Margaret invests the naïve game of petal plucking with all her trust. Unlike in French, where the ritual has various degrees (“he loves me a little, very much, passionately, madly, more than anything, not at all”), in German as in English, it is binary: “he loves me, he loves me not.” In Goethe’s Faust, the final petal, removed, declares “He loves me” (F 3184). With a great flourish, Faust declares his passion, given over to a rapture that he would wish to last forever (eine Wonne | Zu fühlen, die ewig sein muß!, F 3191–2). Intimidated, unable to believe her happiness, stunned that a grand gentleman should have set his heart on her, embarrassed by the intensity of her feelings, Margaret flees. Then follows the brief scene in the summerhouse and their embrace.

In the Faustus with Retzsch’s copied engravings that Byron gave to Catharine Stith, the synopsis is however quite different: a short introduction mentions the alternation between the couples but their dialogue is in fact suppressed. Foreshortened, the scene focuses on the plucked daisy as proof of love and Faust’s passionate declaration. The fleeing Margaret is immediately found again by Faust in the summerhouse and, once in his arms, abandons herself to a passionate kiss that betokens sexual consent. The rougher adaptation renders her seduction more complete and rapid. Reduced to a set of contours without shading, the outline image emphasizes the immediacy and explicitness of desire. The two Moses re-engravings summarising this episode, The Decision of the Flower (pl. 14, Fig. 11.2) and Margaret Meets Faust in the Summer House (pl. 15, Fig. 11.3), both on the right-hand side of the opening, draw the reader’s gaze to the very heart of the book. Not surprisingly, as shown in Chapter 7, they both flourished independently of the full set.

Figure 11.2
Figure 11.2

Henry Moses, The Decision of the Flower, engraved copy after Moritz Retzsch, in Retsch’s Series of Twenty-Six Outlines, Illustrative of Goethe’s Tragedy of Faust (London: Boosey & Sons, Rodwell and Martin, 1820), pl. 14

Courtesy HAAB, F gr 5785, Weimar
Figure 11.3
Figure 11.3

Henry Moses, Margaret Meets Faust in the Summer House, engraved copy after Moritz Retzsch, in Retsch’s Series of Twenty-Six Outlines, Illustrative of Goethe’s Tragedy of Faust (London: Boosey & Sons, Rodwell and Martin, 1820), pl. 15

Courtesy HAAB, F gr 5785, Weimar

The title-page of the exemplar that Byron offered to Mrs Stith bears his ex libris, “Noël Byron | Pisa—1822.” Below, in paler ink and a different hand, the words: “Presented by him to Mrs Stith,”—the inscription that turned the book into a memento.17 As it changed hands, it perhaps carried a message in its engravings. To retrieve it, the reader had to leaf through its pages, just as Gretchen plucks the daisy petals and the ladies on the USS Constitution grabbed at the rose leaves. The beautiful Mrs Stith was about to return home bearing a book and a rose—a book in which a flower leads to the flaring of passion, consummated love, and perdition. The poet’s choice was just as singular as the 27-year-old woman’s ardent gesture. Boldness had met with boldness. The petals had become the leaves of a book, endlessly turned, so much so that, as withered as the rose, it would require repair, unlike the rose, sheltered beneath its glass. This book is today one of the gems of the Speck Collection, despite its modest state. By dint of being perused, it has lost one leaf of text, has been rebound, and five of its engravings are placed nonsensically. These flaws reveal nevertheless its true value: its contribution to Byron’s legend through an episode that, while marginal in many ways, is also central to what it has to say about literature as a living, ardent pulse, subject to the laws of desire and imagination.

But let us stick to reason. The legend should not overshadow the political dimension to Byron’s visit aboard the USS Constitution.18 This was not just any ship: her name, chosen by George Washington, made the frigate the symbol of the United States’ liberation from the imperial British yoke. Launched in 1797, she is one of the first six American navy battleships and the third to be built. She distinguished herself during the 1812 war by capturing several British merchant ships and defeating five British warships, and was the flagship of the Mediterranean and African squadrons, hence the presence on board of Townshend Stith, the US Consul to Tunis. Affectionately known as “Old Ironsides,” the ship is today the oldest commissioned naval vessel still afloat in the world and is used for important official occasions. In 1822, the visit of a rebel aristocrat—Byron, banished from Britain—was a deliberate snub to English dominance, as well as an explicit identification with the democratic ideals that animated him despite his lordly rank. Byron’s letter to Mrs Stith echoes this: “I have also been ever a Wellwisher to your Country and Countrymen in common with all unprejudiced minds amongst my own.”

As if in jest, the Consul’s wife approaches him, extends her hand, and takes the rose. The tension between the two countries evaporates with this act that emancipates her. With her, it liberates all women to come, whether fascinated or not by the magnetic charm of handsome poets. More than bold, her act was above all disarming. It demilitarised and depoliticised the visit, winning her the favour of a young god: “I found him unpretending, natural: he seemed to me like a sensitive, gracefully bashful boy,—a young Jove, hiding his thunderbolts,” she would later declare, writing anonymously.19 Had things been different, Catharine Potter Stith could well have met with the same fate as Semele, the mortal who wished to see Zeus (Jove) in full glory as proof of his divinity, and was consumed by flames. Yet, not a bit of it. And so it was that she came away with both book and rose: a book that perhaps enfolded secrets like a rose.

11.3 Twelve Apostles and a Faust

The rose could well have led to she who was “rose of all roses” and “lily of all lilies,” her very image garlanded with gilded roses, were Marianne von Willemer a single woman.20 Not only is she now wedded but her letter of November 1816 is not the only one of its kind. It adds to a body of correspondence struck between two men. Her reaction to Retzsch’s prints was swift and spontaneous, as though finding her voice for the first time. Until then, she had only sent Goethe the poem “I count myself among the little ones” (“Zu den Kleinen zähl ich mich”), ascribing to each of them roles of diametrically opposed standing.21 Alongside the grandest, der Größte, whose multiple connotations designated Goethe as poet and privy counsellor, this antithetical baptism endows die Kleine—the little one—Marianne’s usual nickname in the Willemer household, with social and literary dimensions that refer to her physical stature to underscore it. For this reason, her immediate identification with Gretchen, in the Willemer correspondence that interests me here, is all the more striking.

The November letter itself orchestrates this transformation. Until then, with the exception of the 1 August 1816 missive (in which she speaks directly and anxiously after an accident had befallen Goethe), Marianne had only ever addressed the poet in the company of others (Jakob and his daughter Rosine, or Jakob alone) and from the background. Her letter of 12 October 1816 testifies to this. Mostly flavouring the expressions of her husband, who wielded the pen, her voice is only discernable second or third hand, when her words are not sparingly relegated to the postscript. They recall the silver-bowled golden apples evoked by Goethe in one of the poems he sent her, on which Jakob comments: a gilt-like veneer of propriety covers their apple-core intent.22 Customary good manners. In November 1816, however, on receiving Retzsch’s original prints, her voice rings out, carried by Gretchen, little in years and rank, like Marianne herself. The simple refinement of the portfolio (cf. Fig. 2.1a–b), the economy of means, the starkness of the medium, its apparent modesty and delicate lines, all served to touch the heart of a poetess in love. What Schlegel had said about the hieroglyphic function of outline drawing, fit for emotion and poetry, triggering the imagination that reconfigures the poem, is traceable in Marianne’s reading of the etched Faust outlines. Suddenly she takes up her pen and gives free rein to her impressions. It is Jakob who must fit his words into the postscript. Roles have been inversed.

There is more however than meets the eye. Goethe sent Retzsch’s prints on 8 November in response to a gift from Jakob: twelve bottles of wine, likened to twelve apostles knocking on his door shortly before Christmas, or as Three Kings (the Three Magi), an image borrowed from a sextain by Jakob, a six-line stanza that accompanied the bottles.23 Goethe’s wife, Christiane, had died on the 6 June 1816 and the poet was in mourning. The comforting and enlivening tonic he received was Eilfer wine of 1811 “comet” vintage, well-known as an exceptional year in winemaking (the Great Comet having preceded the harvest). The consoling gift, neither the first nor the only one of its kind, rekindled in Goethe the spark extinguished by grief and the cold of winter. About this unique beverage, their correspondence took on a brilliant and animated tone, rich in literary allusions. Grateful for the precious present, Goethe reciprocated by sending the portfolio with Retzsch’s outlines, which says much of his appreciation, while naturally he refers to his own Faust. The perfect opportunity had come to forget his pain an instant, especially since from the previous delivery only one bottle remained. Jokingly, he admits trying to multiply them without success. He forcefully alludes to pagan, even infamous, practices (heidnische, ja noch schlimmere Handlungen) in favour of a garden gnome who might assure multiplication, as well as to pierced tables (die angebohrten Tische). The one character he singles out from Retzsch’s set (beikommende Figur), namely Mephistopheles himself, refers to an episode from Faust: the devil’s supernatural trick in Auerbach’s tavern, figured in Retzsch’s plate 5 (cf. Fig. 9.17). Mephistopheles famously drills holes in the tavern’s tables to fulfil the wishes of drunken students. Three different wines flow copiously before turning into flames while Faust and Mephistopheles escape. Save that, by staging the devil, the banter in Goethe’s letter changes. What had been a joke changes tone. A sniff of sulphur lends new colour to the desired multiplication. Goethe re-appropriates the biblical story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes and figures the twelve apostles as bottles. His 8 November letter invokes a pagan Last Supper that borders on the sacrilegious: it well and truly subverts the mission of the twelve apostles and the status of wine in the Eucharist.

No doubt the joke exceeds the equivocal, but there is more to it. By placing Mephistopheles at the centre of the discourse (to the extent that certain commentators even thought that he had only sent Retzsch’s pl. 5 to the Willemers), Goethe turned him, still jokingly, into his own messenger: a herald who would arrive before he himself could “play a dear song on the zither of a friend” (eh ich noch das liebliche Lied zu einer freundlichen Zither vernommen habe). We might think of the flea song struck up by the devil in Auerbach’s tavern, were it not that the zither rather alludes to a much more troubling scene: Mephistopheles’s mocking serenade at Gretchen’s door, interrupted by her brother Valentine (F 3650ff). This sarcastic song to the sound of a zither (Singt zur Zither, F 3681) about Margaret’s deflowering and her pregnancy provokes the duel rigged between Faust and Valentine and the latter’s murder. Should one not point out that Goethe’s letter, as grief-stricken as it is haunted by desire, ends with a ghost (das Gespensterwesen), a spectral figure embodying an ardent wish who comes knocking on the Willemers’ door in the middle of the night (wenn es in tiefer Nachtzeit am ernsthaften Tore zuweilen poltert und klingelt) … none other than Goethe himself?

The triangular relationship (which has given rise to much speculation) is spectrally projected through the depraved song at the windowsill of Margaret-Marianne. The allusive scene functions as an epithalamium, once again re-appropriated: no longer the song of the bridegroom’s best man, extolling the groom’s virtues to his future wife, but of the drunken and ghostly friend who knocks at the door in the middle of the night. Hoping perhaps to gain admittance to the bride with the connivance of the groom? Goethe as Mephistophelean intruder thanks to Retzsch’s prints? Quite possibly so: 1811 Eilfer was after all an exceptional vintage.

Measuring readers’ reactions in terms of reception is generally considered a tricky business for lack of specific period testimony. However, the Willemers’ 16 November response is for such purpose a Grail, and provides a reading both double and antithetic: it would be difficult to find a better illustration of the different ways in which a man and a woman, of such different position and status at the time, might read Retzsch (and Goethe).

Jakob’s postscript reveals a synthetic, shrewd, double reading: he immediately sees the value of the dual item and the impact it will have on iconography. Thanks to Retzsch, there is another way of looking at Goethe’s tragedy. Henceforth, according to Jakob, there will be essentially two Faust: he of artists and he of philosophers, without either exhausting the story of good grappling with evil, well suited to this era of recurring spectres. The latter detail responds to Goethe’s ghost knocking on the door, but everything that matters has already been said: posterity would vindicate Jakob’s highly pertinent analysis.

Although Mephistopheles had been granted a starring role, Marianne, for her part, does not hesitate for a moment to give precedence to Margaret. Better still, she imposes on Mephistopheles a reign of happiness to which she alone has the key. Even the devil should make the best of it, and leave a joyful impression (ja selbst Mephistopheles mußte sich gefallen lassen, den heitersten Eindruck zu machen)! She had nevertheless perused the prints more than once and his diabolical portrait had struck her. She provides one of the earliest and most accurate comparisons between Retzsch and Cornelius, discerning a key feature of Retzsch’s engraved set, namely its humanity. The tone is hurried. Dispensing with any opening address, the letter begins immediately with “the goodly Gretchen” (Das gute Gretchen), even though she only appears in the set from plate 8 onwards: Marianne clearly identifies with her. The neutral Das and the diminutive Gretchen are connected, since Marianne sees in the figure of Faust’s “goodly” friend her own “little” self. Is she not the dear friend of an ageing poet, rejuvenated and regenerated by a miraculous wine—a substitute for a witch’s potion? No sooner, though, has she given her aesthetic verdict, than she beats a hasty retreat, ashamed, and afraid that Goethe will laugh, or worse, at her brazenness. For her impertinence does not only take the form of spoken words (a child is forgiven for babbling nonsense). She has dared much more: she uses a pen to set out her opinions in writing, and has taken control of the letter by opening it with a comparison between two artists. The outrage is comparable to Catharine Stith’s evasion through anonymity: in writing, wielding a pen, becoming an author. In Marianne’s very words, there is an echo of those Gretchen utters at the beginning of the first garden scene: “I’m quite ashamed, I feel you’re being so kind | And condescending, just to spare | My feelings, sir!” (F 3073–74, trans. D. Luke). The dependent and submissive relationship that Marianne forms with Goethe not only reflects the strong emotions his imposing figure inspires, but also her subordinate status as a woman, albeit one who—so deeply touched by these etchings—dares put forward her ideas.

Two further scenes from Faust project themselves onto the final paragraphs of Marianne’s letter: the daisy petal-plucking game and a song. Say it with flowers … women knew this language by heart, whether of daisies or of roses. Marianne has thought about the garden scene but doubts the flower oracle as reliable, for the fields are covered in frost and the rivers in ice, leaving no blossom to interrogate love from afar. The Blumenorakel only works in the spring, and Faust may ultimately be little more than a play about Spring endangered by the frost of old age.

A melancholic mind might project two further poignant images upon these lines. One is an engraving by Käthe Kollwitz (for whom Goethe was a key author) of her little Gretchen, a poor pregnant worker in a snow-covered landscape, contemplating the ghost of her drowned child in the river’s flow (Fig. 11.4). This same sombre mind might read Margaret’s lament at the spinning wheel, subject of a fine outline by Retzsch that Marianne herself must have contemplated (cf. Fig. 3.1b), into the song that she sends, and would like to sing for Goethe. But that would be morose. For Marianne, these two scenes offer a pretext to weave into her letter subtle allusions to her second reading of her great friend’s Italian Journey, which had warmed both her imagination and her heart. Goethe is a sun that drives away any allusion to the winter. Similarly, her song charms: it transforms, as though by enchantment, the ghostly knock at the door into the bright light of truth (Möge sich doch einmal die freundliche Dichtung vom ernsthaften Tore und dem nächtlichen Klingeln und Poltern in klare lichte Wahrheit verwandeln).

Figure 11.4
Figure 11.4

Käthe Kollwitz, Gretchen, 1899, line etching, dry point, aquatint and burnisher, green-black on Japanese paper, 26.7 × 21 cm, Knesebeck 45 IV

© Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln, Cologne

Strengthened like Gretchen in her humble choices, Marianne, the writer and dear friend, was able to dispel with a play of allusion and expert hand the nightmares of men that follow in the footsteps of Mephistopheles. A previous letter from Jakob, sent from the spa town of Soden, was headed “Bad Soden and Gomorrah” in a clear allusion to the two cursed cities destroyed by fire and brimstone.24 In Marianne von Willemer’s happy gift for transforming the most disastrous of auguries, we may confidently discern a joyful disposition, a luminous personality, and the happiness she spread around her.

Exceptional examples, Marianne’s and Catharine’s, show the extent to which readers and Goethe lovers of the time may have invested Faust through prints. They represent a unique case, deserving choice treatment, indeed a chapter, evidencing how, within a broader cultural history, literature penetrated individual lives and circumstances. Most readers however could not enjoy such privileged relations. Alongside the play and its prints, they settled for substitutes, objects of variable value and status, as the following last chapter shows.

1

A somewhat different French version of this Chapter, titled “Le Faust comme don,” features in Aurélie Foglia, Georges Forestier, Juliette Kirscher, Henri Scepi, and Nicolas Wanlin, eds., “Une transparence du regard adéquat:” Mélanges en l’honneur de Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Hermann, 2023), 603–19.

2

WA 4, 25:14.

3

Beinecke: YCGL MSS 6, box 1, folder 38–39.

4

Benson, “Catherine Potter Stith and Her Meeting with Lord Byron,” South Atlantic Quarterly 22, no. 1 (Jan 1923): 12.

5

Ibid., 21.

6

Mrs Townshend Stith, “The Chest of Bones,” Godey’s Lady’s Book (Apr 1833): 145–59a.

7

Benson, “Catherine Potter Stith,” 14–17.

8

Bancroft, “A Day with Lord Byron,” in History of the Battle of Lake Erie (New York: Robert Bonner’s Sons, 1891), 190–210.

9

Beinecke: YCGL MSS 6, box 1, file 32.

10

Sloane, “George Bancroft—in Society, in Politics, in Letters,” Century Magazine 33, no. 3 (Jan 1887): 473–87.

11

Bancroft, “A Day with Lord Byron,” 192.

12

For these letters, close in time (26 May 1822 to Kinnaird and Murray, 8 June 1822 to Moore), see “In the wind’s eye”: Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 9, 1821–1822, ed. L. A. Marchand (London: John Murray, 1979), 164, 162–63, and 171. In the first two rose is underlined by Byron in cognizance of the act’s boldness and implications.

13

The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore Collected by Himself, vol. 6, Lalla Rookh (London: Longman etc., 1841), 77–78.

14

Sloane, “George Bancroft,” 478.

15

Byron’s Letters and Journals, 160.

16

I am very grateful to Sandra Markham for precious information on her ancestry.

17

Beinecke: Speck Ck99 R3 +821 copy 2.

18

Peter Cochran, Byron’s Romantic Politics (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 169–71.

19

Benson, “Catherine Potter Stith,” 19.

20

GBW, 37 and 33.

21

GBW, 11–12.

22

GBW, 22–23.

23

GBW, 49.

24

GBW, 42.

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