Flora Unveiled

452 i Flora Unveiled

the ideal of beauty and love. The play ends with a paean to “The Eternal Feminine” spoken
by the “Mystic Chorus”:

All that is transient

Is but a likeness;

Here the ineffable

Becomes known;

Here the inexpressible

Turns into deeds;

The Eternal Feminine

Draws us on.^64

David Duke quotes Goethe as stating in 1828 that he regarded Part I as a youthful and
naïve effort compared to the lofty idealism of Part II.^65 Although Part II never enjoyed the
popularity of Part I, it provides a useful window into Goethe’s philosophical metamorpho-
sis in old age. This transformation from weiberliebe and passionate striving to the cares and
disappointments of old age, attended by mystical hopes for transcendence in death, can
also be seen in Goethe’s ambiguous, but changing definition of pollination from a sexual,
biological function to an asexual, mystical final stage of life.

Goethe and the Nineteenth- Century Asexualists

Back in 1804, during their leisurely stroll through the University’s Botanical Garden at Jena,
Goethe was gratified that Schelver had based his arguments against the sexual theory on his
own theory of metamorphosis. Schelver pointed out that, according to the theory of meta-
morphosis, plant development proceeds stepwise from seedling emergence to flower, fruit,
and seed production on its own, using its inherent “force and power.” Goethe described
the conversation sixteen years later, when he was seventy- one, in his essay Pollination,
Volatilization, and Exudation:

Schelver proceeds literally from the concept of healthy and regulated metamorphosis,

which holds that plant life, rooted in the earth, struggling upward toward light and

air, is forever raising itself by its own bootstraps and developing step by step, scattering

about even the last seed by its own force and power. The sexual system, on the other

hand, requires for this final act an external agent, which is conceived as the coun-

terpart of the flower itself, exerting influence and being influenced— with, beside, or

even apart from the flower.^66

Schelver reminded Goethe that, according to his own theory of metamorphosis, plant
development involves a process of gradual refinement, leaving behind the “material” and
“base” so that only the “higher, incorporeal, and better” remains:

Schelver pursues the tranquil course of metamorphosis which, in advancing, is refined

to such a degree that it gradually leaves behind all that is material, insignificant and

base, permitting what is higher, incorporeal, and better to emerge in greater freedom.