However, Berlin must not be abandoned without the inevitable climax:
"Before he left Berlin Weiss, the old theatre producer, took him once again into the theatre. A strange feeling came over the youth as the friendly old man led him into the great auditorium where the busts of German dramatists have been placed and with a gesture towards a few empty niches said meaningfully:
'There are still some vacant places!'"
Yes, indeed, there is still a place vacant awaiting our Platenite [9] Gottfried who solemnly allows an old clown to flatter him with the exquisite pleasure of "future immortality".
"Bonn, Autumn 1835 -- Autumn 1837" "Constantly balancing between art, life and science, unable to reach a decision, active in all three without firm commitment, he resolved to learn, to gain and to be creative in all three as much as his indecision would permit" (p. 89).
Having thus discovered himself to be an irresolute dilettante Gottfried returns to Bonn. Of course, the feeling that he is a dilettante does not deter him from taking his Licentiate examination and from becoming a Privatdozent at the university of Bonn.
"Neither Chamisso nor Knapp [10] had published the poems he had sent them in their magazines and this upset him greatly"(p. 99).
This is the public debut of the great man who in private circles lives on intellectual tick on the promise of his future eminence. From this time on he definitely becomes a hero of dubious local significance in belletristic student circles until the moment when a glancing shot in Baden suddenly turns him into the hero of the German Philistines.
"But more and more there arose in Kinkel's breast the yearning for a firm, true love, a yearning that no devotion to work could dispel" (p.
103).
The first victim of this yearning is a certain Minna. Gottfried dallies with Minna and sometimes for the sake of variety he acts the compassionate Mahadeva [11] who allows the maiden to worship him while he meditates on the state of her health.
"Kinkel could have loved her had he been able to deceive himself about her condition; but his love would have killed the wilting rose even more quickly. Minna was the first girl that could understand him; but she was a second Hecuba and would have borne him torches and not children, and through them the passion of the parents would have burnt down their own house as Priam's passion burned Troy. Yet he could not abandon her, his heart bled for her, he was indeed wretched not through love, but through pity."The godlike hero whose love can kill, like the sight of Jupiter, is nothing but an ordinary self-regarding young puppy who in the course of his marriage studies tries out the role of the cad for the first time. His revolting meditations on her health and its possible effects on children become the occasion for the base decision to prolong the relationship for his own pleasure and to break it offonly when it provides him with the excuse for yet another melodramatic scene.
Gottfried goes on a journey to visit an uncle whose son has just died; at the midnight hour in the room where the corpse is laid out he stages a scene from a Bellini opera with his cousin, Mlle. Elise II. He becomes engaged to her, "in the presence of the dead" and on the following morning his uncle gladly accepts him as his future son-in-law.
"Now that he was lost to her forever, he often thought of Minna and of the moment when he would see her again. But he was not afraid as she could have no claims on a heart that was already bound" (p. 117).
The new engagement means nothing but the opportunity to bring about a dramatic explosion in his relationship with Minna. In this crisis we find "duty and passion" [12] confronting each other. This explosion is produced in the most philistine and rascally way because our bonhomme denies Minna's legal claims upon his heart which is already committed elsewhere. Our virtuous hero is of course not at all disturbed by the need to compound this lie to himself by reversing the order of events in the matter of his "bound heart".
Gottfried has plunged into the interesting necessity of being forced to break "a poor, great heart".
"After a pause Gottfried went on: 'At the same time, Minna, I feel I owe you an apology -- I have sinned against you -- the hand which I let you have yesterday with such feelings of friendship, that hand is no longer free -- I am engaged!'" (p. 123).
Our melodramatic student takes good care not to mention that this engagement took place a few hours after he had given her his hand "with such feelings of friendship".
"Oh God! -- Minna -- can you forgive me?" (loc. cit.)"I am a man and must be faithful to my duty -- I may not love you! But I have not deceived you" (p. 124).
After re-arranging his duty after the fact it only remains to produce the unbelievable. He dramatically reverses the whole relationship so that instead of Minna forgiving him, our moral priest forgives the deceived woman. With this in mind he conceives the possibility that Minna "might hate him from afar" and he follows this supposition up with this final moral:
"'I would gladly forgive you for that and if that were the case you can be assured of my forgiveness in advance. And now farewell, my duty calls me, I must leave you!' He slowly left the harbor ... from that hour on Gottfried was unhappy" (p. 124).
The actor and self-styled lover is transformed into the hypocritical priest who extricates himself from the affair with an unctuous blessing; Siegwart's sham conflicts of love have led to the happy result that he is able in his imagination to think himself unhappy.
It finally becomes apparent that all of these arranged love stories were nothing but Gottfried's coquettish infatuation with himself. The whole affair amounts to no more than that our priest with his dreams of future immortality has produced Old Testament stories and modern lending-library phantasies after the manner of Spiess, Clauren and Cramer [13] so that he may indulge his vanity by posing as a romantic hero.
