lustration: THE GOETHE MONUMENT (BY BETTINA NON ARNIM)]

She was by nature and choice the advocate of the oppressed, whenever
and wherever met with. The aristocratic _elegant_ Rumohr was obliged
to put up with the following from her: "Why are you not willing to
exchange your boredom, your melancholy caprices, for a rifle? With
your figure, slender as a birch, you could leap over abysses and
spring from rock to rock; but you are lazy and infected with the
disease of neutrality. You cannot hear the voices saying: 'Where is the
enemy? On, on, for God, the Kaiser, and the Fatherland!'" Even Goethe's
Wilhelm Meister, who is, according to Bettina, merely a supine hero,
fails to elude her electric grasp: "Come, flee with me across the Alps
to the Tyrolese. There will we whet our swords and forget thy rabble of
comedians; and as for all thy darling mistresses, they must lack thee
awhile."

The end of poets' friendships with literary women is not always marked
by an anticlimax. Of Margaret Fuller, Emerson wrote in the privacy of
his Journal: "I have no friend whom I more wish to be immortal than she.
An influence I cannot spare, but would always have at hand for
recourse." Words like these Bettina was continually listening for from
her poet-idol, but she heard instead only the disillusioning echo of her
own enthusiasms. Possessing neither stability of mind nor any consistent
roundness of character, she was incapable of rendering herself necessary
to Goethe. In her case, however, the gifts that were denied at her
cradle seem to have been more than made up to her. Her ardent and
aspiring soul, shutting out "all thoughts, all passions, all delights"
else, was distilled into longing to share in the unending life of
Goethe's poesy.[10]

Through the possession of this quality, Bettina, though not herself of
heroic mold, enters the society of the great heroines and speaks to
posterity. Ariadne on the island of Naxos lives not more truly in Ovid's
poetical _Epistles_, than Bettina in the _Correspondence_. But Bettina
has not, like Ariadne, had immortality conferred upon her through the
verses of two great poets. She has rather taken it for herself, as
Goethe said she was wont to do, in anticipating every gift. It is
accordingly not in the _Elegiacs_ of Ovid, flowing as a counter-stream
to Lethe, that we may discern Bettina's gesture of immortal repose as a
metamorphosed heroine. She is a type of the inspired lyrical nature, a
belated