What Mockel had in common with Kinkel was the fact that her talents too had gone unrecognised by the world. She was repulsive and vulgar;her first marriage had been unhappy. She possessed musical talents but they were insufficient to enable her to make a name with her compositions or technical mastery. In Berlin her attempt to imitate the stale childhood antics of Bettina [von Arnim] [20] had led to a fiasco. Her character had been soured by her experiences. Even though she shared with Kinkel the affectation of inflating the ordinary events of her life so as to invest them with a "more exalted, sacred meaning", owing to her more advanced age she nevertheless felt a need for love (according to Strodtmann) that was more pressing than her need for the "poetic" drivel that accompanies it. Whereas Kinkel was feminine in this respect, Mockel was masculine. Hence nothing could be more natural than for such a person to enter with joy into Kinkel's comedy of the misunderstood tender souls and to play it to a satisfying conclusion, i.e. to acknowledge Siegwart's fitness for the role of Heinrich von Ofterdingen and to arrange for him to discover that she was the "Blue Flower".
Kinkel, having been led to his third or fourth fiancee by his sister was now introduced into a new labyrinth of love by Mockel.
Gottfried now found himself in the "social swim", i.e. in one of those little circles consisting of the professors or other worthies of German university towns. Only in the lives of Teutonic, christian students can such societies form such a turning point. Mockel sang and was applauded.
At table it was arranged that Gottfried should sit next to her and here the following scene took place:
"'It must be a glorious feeling', Gottfried opined, 'to fly through the joyous world on the pinions of genius, admired by all' -- 'I should say so', Mockel exclaimed. 'I hear that you have a great gift for poetry. Perhaps people will scatter incense for you also ... and I shall ask you then if you can be happy if you are not...' -- 'If I am not?' Gottfried asked, as she paused" (p. 188).
The bait has been put out for our clumsy Iyrical student.
Mockel then informed him that recently she had heard "him preaching about the yearning of Christians to return to their faith and she had thought about how resolutely the handsome preacher must have abandoned the world if he could arouse a timid longing even in her for the harmless childhood slumber with which the echo of faith now lost had once surrounded her" (p. 189).
Gottfried was "enchanted" (p. 189) by such politeness. He was tremendously pleased to discover that "Mocker was unhappy" (loc. cit.). He immediately resolved "to devote his passionate enthusiasm for the faith of salvation at the hands of Jesus Christ to bringing back this sorrowing soul too into the fold" (loc. cit .). As Mockel was a Catholic the friendship was formed on the imaginary basis of the task of recovering a soul "in the service of the Almighty", a comedy in which Mockel too was willing to participate.
"In 1840 Kinkel was appointed as an assistant in the Protestant community in Cologne where he went every Sunday to preach" (p. 193).
This biographical comment may serve as an excuse for a brief discussion of Kinkel's position as a theologian. "In 1840" the critical movement had already made devastating inroads into the content of the Christian faith;with Bruno Bauer [21] science had reached the point of open conflict with the state. It is at this juncture that Kinkel makes his debut as a preacher. But as he lacks both the energy of the orthodox and the understanding that would enable him to see theology objectively, he comes to terms with Christianity on the level of Iyrical and declamatory sentimentality à la Krummacher. That is to say, he presents a Christ who is a "friend and leader", he seeks to do away with formal aspects of Christianity that he proclaims to be "ugly", and for the content he substitutes a hollow phraseology. The device by means of which content is replaced by form and ideas by phrases has produced a host of declamatory priests in Germany whose tendencies naturally led them finally in the direction of [liberal] democracy. But whereas in theology at least a superficial knowledge is still essential here and there, in the democratic movement where an orotund but vacuous rhetoric, nullite sonore , makes intellect and an insight into realities completely superfluous, an empty phraseology came into its own. Kinkel whose theological studies had led to nothing beyond the ****** of sentimental extracts of Christianity in the manner of Clauren's popular novels, was in speech and in his writings the very epitome of the fake pulpit oratory that is sometimes described as "poetic prose" and which he now comically made the basis of his "poetic mission".
This latter, moreover, did not consist in planting true laurels but only red rowan berries with which he beautified the highway of trivia. This same feebleness of character which attempts to overcome conflicts not by resolving their content but by clothing them in an attractive form is visible too in the way he lectures at the university. The struggle to abolish the old scholastic pedantry is sidestepped by means of a "hearty" attitude which turns the lecturer into a student and exalts the student placing him on an equal footing with the lecturer. This school then produced a whole generation of Strodtmanns, Schurzes and suchlike who were able to make use of their phraseology, their knowledge and their easily acquired "lofty mission" only in the democratic movement.
* Kinkel's new love develops into the story of Gockel, Hinkel und Gackeleia . [22]
