sufficient, he might return to Zürich and marry her, and then devote himself to philosophy at his leisure. A curious wavering followed in the mind and conduct of Kant’s new disciple. He wrote to his brother that Fräulein Kahn was indeed the noblest soul in the world, but that for one thing he himself was a wanderer, an independent creature, and that for the rest something new had just come into his life, which seemed to drive him out to conquer the whole world afresh. Marriage would clip a man’s wings, would imprison him yonder in Switzerland, would perhaps hinder his philosophizing in this wondrous and novel way. He felt restless; he was even often disposed to flee altogether and never write to her again.
To Johanna herself, Fichte’s letters expressed of course nothing of these rebellious sentiments, and I mention them only to suggest a little of the ferment which in this needy young tutor’s soul was then under way. He must do everything, — teach Johanna the new insight, marry, cease this wavering that had made him like a wave of the sea; and yet, he must also convert the whole world to the Kantian doctrine, in all its spirituality and earnestness; he must save his countrymen in this time of revolution and of corruption; he must wander, work, think incessantly. One has here, you see, something of the typical erudite German of the story-books, crude and elevated in one — lover, world-stormer, sentimentalist, and cynic, all at the same time. For Fichte, too, was occasionally a bit of a cynic. “When I met Johanna,” he once writes to his brother, “my heart was empty. I just let her love me. I didn’t care much about it.” “Dear one,” he writes to her in all sincerity, at about the same time, “take me with all my faults. What a creature I am! Men have attributed to me fixity of character, but I have always been merely the creature of circumstances. You have the stronger soul. Give fixity to my waverings.”[1]
- ↑ The present sketch is dependent largely upon that of Julian Schmidt, as given in the fifth edition of his Geschichte d. deutschen Literatur seit Lessing's Tod, vol. i. p. 347 sqq.
