idea. Happiness is not for her. She must renounce it all. She must
atone--atone--for her awful sin. For a moment they plan to send her back
to school, but she cannot tear herself away from Edward's sinister
presence. At last she refuses food and gradually starves herself to
death. The wretched Edward does likewise.

Any just appreciation of Goethe's art in _The Elective Affinities_ must
begin by recognizing that it is about Ottilie. For her sake the book was
written. It is a study of a delicately organized virgin soul caught in
the meshes of an ignoble fate and beating its wings in hopeless misery
until death ends the struggle. The other characters are ordinary people:
Charlotte and the Captain ordinary in their good sense and self-control,
Edward ordinary in his moral flabbiness and his foolish infatuation. His
death, to be sure, is unthinkable for such a man and does but testify to
the unearthly attraction with which the girl is invested by Goethe's
art. The figure of Ottilie, like that of her spiritual sister Mignon, is
irradiated by a light that never was on sea or land. She is a creature
of romance, and we learn without much surprise that her dead body
performs miracles. One is reminded of that medieval lady who is doomed
to eat the heart of her crusading lover and then refuses all other food
and dies. That Edward is quite unworthy of the girl's love, that the
death of the child is no sufficient reason for her morbid remorse, is
quite immaterial, since at the end of the tale we are no longer in the
realm of normal psychology. A season of dreamy happiness, as she moves
about in a world unrealized; then a terrible shock, and after that,
remorse, renunciation, hopelessness, the will to die. Such is the logic
of the tale.