His own strong, undivided feeling was unsettled and perplexed again and again. In conformance with the custom of his family, he became a Prussian officer; but family tradition and his own inclinations were at variance; he could not endure the discipline, and left the army. He fell in love and pledged himself. His feeling for Wilhelmine was strong, but his instinct of self-preservation as an artist was stronger; here, too, there was perplexity of feeling, and he broke off the engagement. He had the feeling that he was a poet, a genius, but the result of all his efforts was a conviction of his want of real capacity, and in dire perplexity he determined to enlist in the French army, hoping to find death in its next campaign. All this explains his perpetual circling round the theme of perplexity of feeling. We have the idea very plainly in the admirable little tale, _Die Marquise von O_. The Marquise knows as little as Alcmene who it is that has embraced her in the dark; her feelings, too, are perplexed and confused; her nearest and dearest suspect her; and when the Russian officer, whom she looks upon as her saviour, but who proves to be the delinquent, returns to her, loving and repentant, her innocent soul is rent by alternate paroxysms of hatred and love. In much the same manner, the sense of justice, originally so strong in the soul of _Michael Kohlhaas_, is confused by the wrongs he suffers. Wounded pride led Kleist to quarrel with friends and acquaintances; a wounded sense of justice tempted him to insult Goethe. He sent his _Penthesilea_ to the great master, whom he envied as much as he admired, and was bitterly disappointed when, as might have been expected, it was entirely disapproved of. Goethe, who, unfortunately, was only keen-sighted as regarded the repellent side of Kleist's character, said of him: "In spite of my honest intention to be sympathetic and judge mildly, Kleist aroused in me nothing but shuddering aversion, resembling that produced by a body which nature has made beautiful, but which is attacked by some incurable disease." When the comedy, _Der zerbrochene Krug_ ("The Broken Jar"), failed in Weimar, owing to Goethe's arbitrary rearrangement of its acts, Kleist's feelings became entirely "confused," and he wrote epigrams on the great man's private life, among others the low, ugly one on the child, "the precocious genius," who wrote the epithalamium for his own parents' wedding-day.