PART II.
FROM THE YEAR 1794 UNTIL SCHLEIERMACHER’S APPOINTMENT AS PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF HALLE IN 1804.
SCHLEIERMACHER remained in Landsberg until the year 1796, and was then appointed chaplain to the establishment of the Charité in Berlin, whence he was removed to Stolpe, in 1802, as court preacher. This place he left again in 1804, having obtained an appointment as professor in, and preacher to, the University of Halle. No letters of his from October, 1794, until August, 1797, are in possession of his family, and even those to his sister Charlotte seem to have been destroyed. Later communications from Schleiermacher to this sister, ranging from 1797 to 1802, are, however, extant, and extracts of these are given.
How intimate was the communion between sister and brother, in spite of the difference in their culture and in their sphere of life, will be seen from these letters. Charlotte Schleiermacher possessed a lively mind and a warm heart; and whatever was presented to her by her brother, to whom she was devotedly attached, became, as it were, part of her own life, and, was in a great measure assimilated by her through her warm sympathies. Otherwise she was a true Herrnhuter, and her outward as well as her inward culture was quite in accordance with the congregation in which she had lived since her childhood, and to which she adhered with steady attachment up to the day of her death, remaining unmarried and devoting herself to the education of children. She died in the house of the congregation in Berlin in 1831, to which—having first spent several years as a beloved inmate in the house of her brother—she retired to enjoy that quiet which had become necessary to her in consequence of the impaired state of her physical health, though her mind remained to the last robust and active.
During the period embraced in the present section, began Schleiermacher’s connection with Frederick Schlegel, together with whom he dwelt for some time in Berlin; and also with Henrietta Herz, for whom Schleiermacher retained to the end of his life a faithful friendship; whereas his connection with Frederick Schlegel was soon to be, if not entirely dissolved, at least greatly weakened—more, perhaps, as a consequence of inward divergencies than of outward circumstances.
[Henrietta Herz was the daughter of a Jewish physician in Berlin, by name Lemos, and was married in her fifteenth year to Dr. Marcus Herz, a gentleman of the same religious persuasion, who enjoyed a considerable reputation as a medical practitioner, as a man of science, and as a philosophical writer, but who was more than double the age of his bride. In spite of this disparity of years, which was further increased by a certain disparity of temperament and tastes, and although the extraordinary beauty of the young wife, combined with great natural abilities and a high degree of culture, soon rendered her an object of universal admiration, the union proved a happy one, and the house of the Herzes was for many years the centre of a sociable and intellectual circle, which not only embraced all that was most celebrated in literature and science in Berlin, but also every stranger of note who visited that capital; while the loveable feminine character and high moral worth of Henrietta Herz also gathered around her the many distinguished women who then adorned the society of Berlin. Among the latter none were so remarkable for intellect and mental culture as Rahel Levin and Dorothea Veit. Rahel is too well known to require mention here, but of Dorothea Veit—who held a high place in Schleiermacher’s friendship, and whose name often occurs in his letters—a few words may not be superfluous.
Dorothea was the daughter of Moses Mendelsohn, and like the most young Jewesses of that day, was given away in marriage without her consent being asked. Mendelsohn had, with great acuteness, perceived the germs of future excellence which lay dormant in the banker Veit, whom he selected for his son-in-law, and which were, indeed, subsequently developed; but his daughter, a girl of seventeen, full of intellect and imagination, whose mental culture had been directed by her illustrious father, in whose house she was accustomed to be surrounded by the most enlightened minds of the times, was little satisfied with this draft upon the future, and from the beginning felt herself very unhappy in her union with the husband of her father’s choice, who had neither elegance of manner, brilliant natural gifts, nor high mental cultivation to recommend him. Even after she had borne him two sons, and time and experience had developed the high moral qualities and noble sentiments of Mr. Veit, she did not learn to love him, but merely accorded him her esteem, and her life seemed withered in the bud. Her friends, who witnessed with pain the mental and moral prostration which was the result of this ill-assorted marriage, proposed to her to divorce, a step which was neither rendered difficult by law nor by public opinion in Prussia; but fear of the grief which such a disclosure of her misery would cause her father made her reject the proposal. A few years later, however, Frederick Schlegel arrived in Berlin, and soon conceived a strong passion for Dorothea Veit, whom he saw for the first time at the Herzes’. Unfortunately, his passion was responded to, and Moses Mendelsohn being then dead, Dorothea now solicited that dissolution of her marriage which she had previously resisted. Her husband, who, content with the undisturbed friendliness of the relations that had ever existed between himself and his wife, had never suspected that what was happiness to him was misery to her, was thunderstruck at the proposal, and at first refused his consent; but when Henrietta Herz—who, as a friend of both parties, undertook the painful task—had afforded him a glimpse into the true state of Dorothea’s affections, he at once yielded and acted throughout with a delicacy and generosity truly touching. Dorothea Mendelsohn had received no dowry and no inheritance, and Frederick Schlegel had nothing to depend upon but his literary labours. To secure her from penury, and at the same time to spare her the humiliation of receiving a provision from the husband she was abandoning, Mr. Veit gave his consent to her eldest son remaining with the mother, and paid her a considerable sum yearly for the child’s maintenance. Subsequently the second son also was, at the earnest solicitations of the mother, given over to her care, and Veit’s interest in his highly gifted wife never ceased. He saw her several times after her marriage with Schlegel, and at one period, when the circumstances of the latter were particularly embarrassed, even afforded them pecuniary assistance without allowing them to know whence it came.1 Dorothea Veit became a Christian when she married Schlegel, and ultimately went over to the Roman Catholic Church.