The chief point of difference in our mode of viewing these matters is, however, that you are upon the whole opposed to any one mixing themselves up much with others, taking part in a great many things, or entering into intimate relations with many persons; and I, on the contrary, am a great advocate for this. But tell me, dearest, do you not regard the matter too much from the point of view of the state of society among the Herrnhuters, leaving too much out of consideration the difference between the brotherhood and the world? In the congregation men are educated in solitude and calm contemplation; the education of the world, on the contrary, consists in manifold and complete activity. The roads are different, but they are both good; and each individual has merely to take care to choose that one which is most suited to his nature, and then to take up such a position in it as will allow him to follow the bent of his nature. A man who mixed himself up with the affairs of various persons, and desired to be a friend of the house in many families, would be a very superfluous personage in the congregation, nay, he would even be deserving of censure, and, in every case, he would do best to withdraw from the congregation, as he would be completely at variance with the prevailing views and principles. But, on the other hand, a man who should live in the world according to your principles would be equally reprehensible; he would not fill his place properly; in fact, in the midst of the world he would be a member of the congregation, and he would therefore do better to return to the latter. I am sure I should be able to find in the world hundreds, nay thousands, of very estimable persons who would not in the least understand you, were you to tell them, that this diversified life, that these divided interests, prevent self-contemplation and the knowledge of one’s own heart. They would answer that, on the contrary, they are the only means of attaining these; that those who have no opportunity of observing themselves in independent activity can know themselves as little as they can know others, and that much that is in us must, of necessity, remain latent, if it were not drawn out by a variety of circumstances and occurrences. This will show you from what different points of view a thing may be looked at, and also with how much right each may assert the correctness of his own. It is with the soul as with the body: he who is not accustomed to excitement will be considerably affected by what may in itself be very insignificant, while he who is accustomed to strong emotions will require strong stimulants to rouse him. The first is the case with you in your quiet and simple life; trifles, which a man of the world would hardly notice, suffice to awaken reflection, and to reveal to you new truths—a state of things which, it must be confessed, is a great advantage; and it is due to my sojourn in the congregation, that I possess this advantage in a superior degree to any of the persons living in the world, whom I know—while the man of the world must be deeply stirred before he is led to reflect. Do not, however, think that what I have just boasted of is at variance with my endeavours to justify my mode of life; for if I did not possess, in a considerable degree, the faculty acquired in the congregation, the rest of my life would be too retired and simple in proportion to the stirring incidents in which my duties as a citizen, a preacher, and, if I may be allowed to say so, as a future savant, necessarily and inevitably involve me; and, accustomed to see so much activity without, I should lose the power of discerning what is quietly going on within me. As it is, my life is in truth a medium between the life of the world—not the dissipated world, but the rational and professional world—and life such as it is in the congregation. In order to compare the two points of view, take further into consideration that every human being must, as a matter of course, live in a state of sociableness; he must have one or more persons to whom he can communicate his innermost thoughts and feelings, and the ways in which he is led. In a word, everything that is in him ought, if possible, to be communicated to another. Thus it is ordained in accordance with the divine dictum: “It is not good for man that he should be alone.” Such is the social relation in which, in the congregation, you stand to your labourers and labouresses; and, in consequence, you rarely require any other confidential friend. In the world, however, such relations are not regularly provided; and, as it is customary to be very reserved towards others on matters relating to one’s inner life, it is necessary to gain the special friendship and confidence of a person before we can draw any of these particulars from him or her; while, in order to form such friendships, it becomes necessary to cultivate the intercourse of many persons, that among these the required friend may be sought and found. This is the light in which you must look upon the matter, and, in reality, in relation to all persons to whom I am very much attached I hold more or less the position of a labourer in the congregation, and so do they to me. And now you have my confession of faith in respect to this matter in as distinct terms as I can at present embody it. I trust you will at least see from it in what a serious light I regard your friendly warnings, and how anxious I am to lay my heart and my life open before you, and to place you in the best possible position for forming a correct judgment of both. You will ever find me equally frank, for most sincerely do I desire that the relations between us should always remain the same.

Your health is, I trust, good, since you say nothing to the contrary; but be it ever so good, I entreat you not to give up the idea of visiting some bath in the summer. Do not allow yourself to be deterred by pecuniary considerations; in a few weeks I shall be able to send you a little assistance; should it not suffice, pray tell me so candidly, for I do not understand what is necessary for you women. Before the bathing season comes round I shall be able to send you more, without putting myself to the least inconvenience, for my circumstances are pretty good this year.

That I am able to sacrifice even what is dear to me, when I think it right, I have learnt by the experience of the last six weeks, while I have been staying here, at a distance from all my friends (for four miles are as much as twenty as regards this matter), in a place where I have not yet found a single person in whom I can take even a distant interest. I am here to perform the duty of old court-preacher Bamberger—(Mrs. Eichmann’s father), whose total incapacity has obliged him to retire—until the king, who keeps the living in his own immediate gift (because he attends the church every Sunday when he is here), shall have appointed a successor. I was not obliged to come hither; I do not derive any advantage from it, nor have I any reason to expect gratitude, because the persons whom I serve by so doing do not know what a sacrifice I make, and cannot therefore appreciate it. But as it was represented to me as the most proper thing to do, I considered it my duty to do it, and came away in God’s name, leaving everything else at a standstill for some months. Sometimes I am provoked at the thought that it was only a precipitate step on the part of the ministry and the church directory that rendered it necessary; but, nevertheless, I bear my exile pretty calmly. It is pleasant to me to be able to preach to a new and large congregation; for the church here is always pretty full, and I value this more than the honour which I enjoyed yesterday of administering the sacrament to the king, although I am really heartily inclined towards him. To-morrow morning I shall be in the congregation in spirit. Be happy among your dear ones there on the 31st, and think of me with the same sincere love and friendship with which my thoughts will turn to you. I embrace you with all my heart; and beg you, on account of existing circumstances, to be indulgent towards this epistle, which is far from containing all that I desire to say to you; but it is night, and I have still some matters to attend to, so that I shall hardly get to bed before day dawns. Your faithful Fritz.

Schleiermacher to Henrietta Herz.

[C.] 24th March, 1799.

I have enjoyed your letter while taking my coffee, and now I will indulge in a little chat with you. I am just in a most disagreeable epoch; this is the time of the short days with me. At midnight already I am sleepy, yet I do not get up before seven, and nevertheless there is an eclipse of the sun after dinner. Yesterday, however, I was pleased with myself; I composed a great portion of my Religion, and in the evening I did not, indeed, do more Religion, but I did something very religious: I wrote a long epistle to my sister, containing a circumstantial explanation of my mode of life and my principles in relation to various matters. The dear girl had had all kinds of misgivings about me, about my relations to women, to my office, &c. &c. It was to me a sacred duty to afford her these explanations, and I should have liked to have given you the letter to read. It was a whole sheet written almost as closely as the one I sent you this morning, and I wrote it without interruption, with exception of the cups of tea which I drank the while. Such a letter is in truth a work, and in a certain sense it may therefore be said to come within the denomination of doing, though it flowed directly from the heart. I am most anxious to see the dear girl, but there is not the slightest prospect of my being able to accomplish this.

[CI.] 27th March, 1799.

It is most unfortunate that you should each time have neglected to read the last pages, for in that way you cannot possibly have obtained an impression of it as a whole, and I am not, therefore, even secure against the unfortunate possibility that it leaves no impression of wholeness on the mind. If the two thoughts, viz., that all religious persons are priests, and that all are one, do not run through the whole, I have entirely failed in my aim, and have given too much scope to polemics against the present state of things, however important these may be. Why were you in such a hurry to return the sheets? After all, Unger cannot send them to the censor until the discourse is completed.

[CII.] 28th March, 1799.

… . I have been meditating a long while on Christianity, and my thoughts will soon take outward shape, though I dare say they must be left to grow inwardly some days longer; and as Schlegel has begged me to be very lazy and to give myself plenty of time, I will allow the inward process to go on for another week.

[CIII.] Potsdam, 31st March, 1799.

… . Parson P—— was here yesterday. He is to preach before the king next week, and was in a state of great distress at having come too early, and being thus obliged to carry about in his mind for so long a time such a precarious matter as the sermon on which his fate depended. I endeavoured to make him feel that he took quite a false view of the matter when he supposed that his fate depended upon this one sermon; for this, like all his other sermons, must bear the impress of his general views, of his clerical principles, and of his peculiar manner; and whether he failed or whether he succeeded, the result would be due to all these, and not to the one sermon. Do you think he understood me? And yet he is one of the most sensible members of my profession.

[CIV.] Potsdam, 1st April, 1799.

… . I am as exhausted by the many letters I have written as a man who has been at a succession of parties, and has been obliged to furnish all the entertainment himself, provided this man were not a publican. And hereupon follows very naturally the second complaint, that I have been good for nothing since yesterday evening. I was obliged to dine with the B——s upstairs yesterday, and to play at whist; and subsequently I felt so stupified and so good for nothing that I was driven to bed early. To-day I have been very limp the whole day. First, when I felt myself in this state, I tried to escape the necessity of doing, by taking up an English annual, which, however, I could only get half through; then I tortured myself for a long while with vain endeavours to write, and at last, with a hope of getting into a better mood, I took hold of Plato; but even he produced no effect. Do you not think that this is a very sad state of disquietude, and one regarding which you ought not to preach resignation? What is, then, this unknown something in me which dares to prevent me from doing what I will and ought? And why should I allow it to remain quietly beyond my control? I ought to make every effort to master it, and this is, perhaps, the only true, at all events it is the only moral, benefit that I shall ever derive from doing.

… . . I have captured a rich prize, and light begins again to dawn upon me. But I am at a loss for a beginning to my fifth discourse. Why is the beginning always so difficult? It almost seems as if ideas also obeyed the laws of gravitation. The weighty ones gather in the middle, and the lighter ones spread so gradually into surrounding space, that you seek in vain for the outer extremity of the line of connection, and are obliged at last to define arbitrarily the limits of the atmosphere. With the conclusion it is different; but why so? The conclusion of the fifth discourse I have already almost completed. The individual discourses might be allowed to terminate abruptly, but the whole series must be drawn to a regular conclusion, and this can only be done with a view into infinity. Is it not so? Should I be so fortunate to-day as to lay hold of a beginning, I will send it to you at once; and I should be delighted, for my visit to Berlin next week depends almost exclusively on this… . . Vivant tea and quiet evening hours, which, if they do not bring gold into your purse, at least bring thoughts into your head! I have found a beginning!

[CV.] 4th April, 1799.

… . . Your letter, dear friend, has done me more good than the coffee, and I fancy myself quite well again. For the Religion there is again hope, and for the fourth discourse, and so far all is well. I will, however, first complete the fifth, that it may be sent as soon as possible to the censor, and then I will entirely recast the fourth; for there ought to be something more elevating in it than you all seem to have found; and it must be my fault that you have not found it. The Church ought to be the most exalted of all human institutions and concerns, and I must work out a representation of it as such.

[CVI.] 12th April, 1799. Evening.

Only fancy, E—— has already heard of the impropriety of the Lucinda,¹ probably through Parthei and Nicolai. How much it must be spread already! Some time ago I formally requested her not to read my discourses, because I feel that they are obscure, and that no one with whom I have not otherwise discussed the subject, will quite understand them. Now she writes to her mother that she has heard that Schlegel’s Lucinda is so natural, so very natural, that no respectable woman ought to read it; and thus she is so unfortunate as to be forbidden to read the books of both friends—the one because it is too high for her, the other because it is too natural.

I have been looking through Nicolai’s Adelheid to-day, which I ought rather not to have done; as I might have used the precious time for my Religion, of which I have only done one page. That is another bad book. What stupidity and at the same time what treachery, to place on the lips of a person in conversation things that stand in the Fragments, and to let a man speak to his beloved sentences taken verbally from Kant and Fichte. The most naïve part of the whole is, that Adelheid writes to ask who that Fichte may be of whom he speaks? Then there is a puss in boots who walks about upon the roofs of the dramatic art—can this be the same? I suppose that is Nicolai’s theory of womanliness, that a woman is to be such a listener. Here and there extracts from my writings are quoted. At these I have laughed heartily.

[CVII.] 14th April, 1799.

Oh! divine idleness, thou art my true element! Only conceive, it is near upon midnight, and I am still engaged on the last sentences of Christianity, and yet the whole only fills two pages. What I say about the historical element in Christianity will not, I think, be to your taste, but you will be able to see, nevertheless, that it is good of its kind. The conclusion is, indeed, a view into infinity; but I will introduce no ornament, but, on the contrary, the greatest simplicity; for the splendour of the conclusion ought to be infinite, and such I cannot produce. It is, almost finished in my head, but to write it there will be no time. You see that it will not be possible for me to keep my word, to put the finishing dash under it to-day, even if I were obstinate enough not to go to bed until it is completed. How sweetly I shall sleep on my laurels! … .

At this moment, 15th April at 10 o’clock in the morning, the finishing dash has been put under the Discourses on Religion. Here they are; let them go forth and meet their fate.

I shall not write a preface. But do you not think it may appear in Nicolai’s next book? Schlegel will say that religion—that is to say, my discourses on it—in conclusion annihilates itself; and it is quite true; but nevertheless this seems to me better than all the contemptuous tirades against doing that I might have introduced in the preface.

What a strange state I was in last night, old fool that I am! I went to bed full of my work and tossed about sleepless for more than an hour and a half. It was not that I was excited by my work, for it had gone on slowly, calmly, and easily. No! it was the first awakening of the paternal feeling and a fear of death. Do you know that for the first time in my life I was seized with the feeling that it would be a great pity were I to die that night. In this feeling there was also a kind of annihilation of the division of time, for evidently I looked upon the whole period during which the discourses were coming into being as one day.

Among the sweetest of my dreamings yesterday, was that of sending the discourses to Wedike. What a delight it will be to me to do so as soon as they have been endowed with a corporeal existence. There is many a thing in them which he will find difficult to digest, but upon the whole I anticipate with pleasure the impression that the work will make upon him. The meaning and the power in it he will thoroughly appreciate.

As regards Heindorf’s innocence, I still deplore it. I do not mean that innocence at which Schlegel laughs, but the other. He is so thoroughly innocent that he knows nothing about men; he only knows pure ideas without admixture of anything human, of anything real; and you must allow that some time or other he may be made to pay dearly for this.

[CVIII.] 16th April, 1799.

When your letter arrived, I had just been reading The World turned upside Down, and was in such good humour that I was less affected than I might otherwise have been by what you tell me of the publicity of my authorship. When people speak to me about it, I will ask them whether they are not aware that I have written anonymously. You must read The World turned upside Down. It is really exceedingly witty, and made me laugh immoderately. Tieck is certainly unique in his way. But what Bernhardi has done in the Bambocciade, seems to me even worse than the first part. I would give a great deal that Tieck had not taken up with Bernhardi! But who knows if many people do not say, “I would give a great deal that Schlegel had not taken up with Schleiermacher!”

It is settled that I start on Monday, and had I money it should even be on Sunday, for a few hours are better than a few dollars. That I shall be with you as much as possible, you know. I rejoice at the thought of the evening to be spent with Heindorf; I really like him very much, but that you have not detected his innocence, when speaking to him about mankind, I cannot understand. With this kind of innocence a man never learns to know the world through others, because he will always start from false suppositions. There is in these matters also a kind of intuitive perception: and he who has not this, will never do anything in that direction. I shall one day write an essay on Innocence. In fact, I think I know a great deal about men and women, that is to say, about their inner being, for as relates to this I have clear sight; but in what is called knowledge of the world, in the knowledge of routine and of all their little tricks, I am a veritable tyro. This knowledge never seems to me worth one’s while to acquire. The former costs me nothing but time, and for this time was given.

I should like some day to write a book about everything; but I shall have to postpone this a good many years. I should require a long time to gather my materials and should also be somewhat at a loss about the form. It is a strange coincidence that one of my sermons should have appeared at the same time as my Discourses on Religion. My name thus stands among a number of great theologians and preachers, and in order to excuse himself for having placed it there, B—— has been so bold as to say in the preface, that I am highly valued in Berlin on account of my talents and my knowledge. The Fragments, the Sermon, the Discourses on Religion, and the Calendar make together a wonderful entry into the literary world. What may I not still become in this sublunary sphere!

[CIX.] Potsdam, 29th April, 1799.

I knew it, and how could I otherwise than know it, that Plato, more especially the class of dialogue to which the Kriton belongs, would produce a delightful and exalted impression on you. How much I wish I could have witnessed the first tribute of your feelings to this great mind; for the second will hardly be the same as the first. You are now for ever chained to the Greek language. Plato will bind you much closer and much more lastingly than Homer. Schlegel wrote to me a short time before my last visit to Berlin, that he was meditating a great coup, in which I was to be associated; and this was nothing less than a translation of Plato. Ah! it is a glorious idea! And I do believe that no one could do it better than we two; but for some years to come I cannot venture upon it, and then it must be undertaken quite independently of all secondary considerations, and no account must be kept of the number of years spent upon it. But the undertaking is a secret, and the execution of it still far off.

That my coming was required, dear Jette, to awaken your confidence in yourself, is a brief summary of your whole history; and the more I think of it, the more I am confirmed in my opinion of your earlier friends. No one, who had great confidence in himself, ever understood you as I do… . . My self-confidence I have obtained in a very different way, through my irrepressible and almost universal combativeness.

Alas! when people love us and esteem us, and yet their reason for so doing is not the right one, what a feeling it is! But there is one thing I have to beg of you, dear, incomparable Jette, and to beg very earnestly: a time may come—yes, in spite of all my self-confidence, I say this—a time may come when I shall be nothing! When this happens, do not, I implore you, believe that I never was anything; do not then mourn over your affection for me, though you mourn over me; do not either force yourself to keep this affection alive, but afford it a sweet sepulchre in your heart. Ah! may this be a vision, and not a prophecy!

[CX.] 1st May, 1799.

In reference to what your friend S—— asserts about Goethe, we, who do not know the man Goethe, can, in fact, have nothing to say. There is, in general, in written works, a certain something—though what it is I cannot at this moment define—which, even in the case of a poet, enables one to judge with certainty from the writer to the man. Is this also the case as regards Goethe? I think not. To say of a man, “He is trivial and common,” is very ambiguous; but I am not loth to believe that in common life (that is to say, in that part of his life which is neither literary, artistic, nor ministerial) he has a certain taste for the trivial and the common. Only picture to yourself his connection with Miss Vulpius. However much you may try to throw a poetic halo around it, it will ever remain low. Nevertheless, it is very presumptuous of the young man to say such a thing (I am in earnest, and use the term presumptuous in its full meaning), and I therefore recommend you to give him a good set down for his presumption.

[CXI.] 2nd May, 1799.

I have read in the papers to-day of Fichte’s little humiliation. One false step always draws on another. He could not, indeed, do otherwise than tell the people, when they were giving him his dismissal, that they should not, under these circumstances, refer to his having asked for it, but it ought to have been in a very different manner. And to say, about several of those who are to succeed him, what he says in his first letter, he must be very sure of his subject and of his people. Fichte will scarcely find another professorial chair, and I must confess that, upon the whole, I consider it rather an advantage that his philosophy has been driven away from the lecture-room, for which it is not at all suited. Spinoza refused a professorship, although he was undoubtedly as enthusiastically attached to his philosophy as Fichte can possibly be to his, and he was quite right in doing so.

[CXII.] Potsdam, 3rd May, 1799.

Only imagine what I have been doing and what I am still doing! I am reading Nicolai’s book about his own learning, and about his relation to critical philosophy. It is a wonderful production, and in fact this is all that can be said about it, except that when you have at last found the right point of view, it is surprisingly naïve. The condescendingly compassionate tone which I foretold he would use in speaking of Fichte is already there, although when this was written there was only a question of confiscation. As regards Kant, he has, indeed, made some hits in reference to certain very glaring defects, but in spite of his thousand declarations to the contrary, his entire ignorance of the subject in question may be read in every page of the book. But what, after all, have I to do with Nicolai’s book, when I have so many things to say in reference to your letter.

The commission which you give me concerning Heiendorf is, I fear, somewhat at variance with my theory regarding difference and congeniality of nature, and you know that this forms part of my religion. If Heiendorf is capable of appreciating A—— he will not fail to draw near to him; if not, you must know that words would be of no avail. If you think that he may possess sympathetic elements, but that they require to be roused, then this cannot be done by talking, but only by making application of the subjects to himself. Into exhausted lungs you blow air, temporary deafness is cured by a strong explosion, and a sleepy eye is forced open by a strong light. Let us, therefore, wait patiently. It would besides be lost labour to endeavour to make him understand A—— in himself. We must first act as mediators. Only by learning to understand us better can he learn eventually to understand him, and we must first see how far we can bring him in this respect.

But how can you dislike him, merely on account of his natural deficiencies. Dislike can only exist in relation to something positive, a negative merely occasions a lesser degree of liking. Do not say that this is merely a quibble, for there is a great deal in it, and we should be anything but pleased if you were to find many persons of whom you could say in this sense, that you did not dislike them. That would be more than we could bear.

As for my recent mood, dear friend, to be candid, it was a fit of true Christianity, such as sometimes comes over me. In what manner I connect these words with Christianity you will find in my fifth discourse. The cause is deeply seated in my nature, for it belongs to the consciousness that I am a plant which requires a peculiar soil, and that the elements of my nature can only be kept alive by constant circulation and assimilation. It is not so much through the destruction of my being from within—although this is also possible—as through displacement that I shall cease to exist. If I be torn up from the soil to which I belong I am lost. The belief in eternity is not incompatible with this. In this place the mood in question is quite natural to me, because here hours do occur in which I may in truth be said to be nothing.

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Footnotes

1. A work by Friedrich Schlegel. ↩