STUDENT IN LEIPZIG
OCTOBER, 1765--SEPTEMBER, 1768
As we follow the life of Byron, it has been said, we seem to hear the
gallop of horses,[15] and we are conscious of a similar tumult as we
follow the career of Goethe from the day he entered Leipzig till the
close of the "mad Weimar times," when he was approaching his thirtieth
year. _Jugend ist Trunkenheit ohne Wein_, he says in his
_West-Ostlicher Divan_, and, when he wrote the words, he may well have
had specially in view the three whirling years he spent in Leipzig.
"If one did not play some mad pranks in youth," he said on another
occasion, "what would one have to think of in old age?" Assuredly
during these Leipzig years Goethe played a sufficient number of pranks
to supply him with materials for edifying retrospection.
[Footnote 15: X. Doudan, _Mélanges et Lettres_, i. 524.]
Our difficulty in connection with these three years is to seize the
essential lineaments in a character so full of contradictions that it
eludes us at every turn, and has presented to each of his many
biographers a problem which each has sought to solve after his own
fashion. Of materials for forming our conclusions there is certainly
no lack. In his Autobiography he has related in detail, even to
tediousness, the events and experiences of his life in Leipzig.
Contemporary testimony, also, we have in abundance. We have the
letters of friends who freely wrote their impressions of him, and from
his own hand we have poems which record the passing feelings of the
hour; we have two plays which reveal moods and experiences more or
less permanent; and above all we have a considerable number of his own
letters addressed to his sister and different friends, all of which,
it may be said, appear to give genuine expression to the promptings of
the moment. The materials for forming our judgment, therefore, are
even superabundant, but in their very multiplicity lies our
difficulty. The narrative in the Autobiography doubtless gives a
correct general outline of his life in Leipzig and of its main results
for his general development, but its cool, detached tone leaves a
totally inadequate impression of the froward youth, torn to
distraction by conflicting passions and conflicting ideals. With the
contemporary testimonies our difficulties are of another kind. The
testimonies of his friends regarding his personal traits are often
contradictory, and equally so are his own self-revelations. On one and
the same day he writes a letter which exhibits him as the helpless
victim of his emotions, and another which shows him quite at his ease
and master of himself. And he himself has warned us against taking his
wild words too seriously. In a letter to his sister (September 27th,
1766), he expressly says: "As for my melancholy, it is not so deep as
I have pictured it; there are occasionally poetical licences in my
descriptions which exaggerate the facts."[16]
[Footnote 16: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i., 68-9.]
Fortunately or unfortunately, the town of Leipzig, which his father
had chosen for his first free contact with life, was of all German
towns the one where he could see life in its greatest variety. "In
accursed Leipzig," he wrote after his three years' experience of its
distractions, "one burns out as quickly as a bad torch." Even the
external appearance of the town was such as to suggest another world
from that of Frankfort. In Frankfort the past overshadowed the
present; while Leipzig, Goethe himself wrote, recording his first
impressions of the place, "evoked no memories of bygone times." And if
the exterior of the town suggested a new world, its social and
intellectual atmosphere intensified the impression. "Leipzig is the
place for me," says Frosch in the Auerbach Cellar Scene in _Faust_;
"it is a little Paris, and gives its folks a finish."[17] The
prevailing tone of Leipzig society was, in point of fact, deliberately
imitated from the pattern set to Europe by the Court of France. In
contrast to the old-fashioned formality of Frankfort, the Leipziger
aimed at a graceful _insouciance_ in social intercourse and light,
cynical banter in the interchange of his ideas on every subject,
trifling or serious. In such a society all free, spontaneous
expression of emotions or opinions was a mark of rusticity, as Goethe
was not long in discovering. The true Leipziger was, of course, a
Gallio in religion, and Goethe, who, on leaving his father's house,
had resolved to cut all connection with the Church, found no
difficulty in carrying out his intention during his residence in the
little Paris. But, so far as Goethe was concerned, the most notable
circumstance connected with Leipzig was that it had long been the
literary centre of Germany. There the most eminent representatives of
literature had made their residence, and thence had gone forth the
dominant influences which had given the rule to all forms of literary
production--poetry and criticism alike. At the time when Goethe took
up his residence in the town the two most prominent German men of
letters, Gellert and Gottsched (the latter dubbed the "Saxon Swan" by
Frederick the Great) were its most distinguished ornaments, though
the rising generation was beginning to question both the intrinsic
merit of their productions and the principles of taste which they had
proclaimed. What these principles were and how Goethe stood related to
them we shall presently see.
[Footnote 17: On the occasion of a visit he paid to Leipzig in 1783,
Goethe says: "Die Leipziger sind als eine kleine, moralische Republik
anzusehn. Jeder steht für sich, hat einige Freunde und geht in seinem
Wesen fort."]
Into this world Goethe was launched when he had just turned his
sixteenth year--"a little, odd, coddled boy," and, as he elsewhere
describes himself, with a tendency to morbid fancies. If he had come
to Leipzig with the resolve to fulfil his father's intentions, his
course was clearly marked out for him. He would diligently sit at the
feet of the professors of law in the university, and at the end of
three years he would return to Frankfort with the attainments
requisite to make him a future ornament of the legal profession. But,
as we have seen, he had other schemes in his head than the course
which his father had prescribed for him, and, if we are to accept his
own later testimony, in forming these schemes he was but following the
deepest instincts of his nature. "Anything," he exclaimed to his
secretary Riemer, when he was approaching his sixtieth year, "anything
but an enforced profession! That is contrary to all my instincts. So
far as I can, and so long as the humour lasts, I will carry out in a
playful fashion what comes in my way. So I unconsciously trifled in my
youth; so will I consciously continue to do to the end."[18] The step
he now took is a curious illustration of the solemn self-importance
which was one of his characteristics as a youth. To the professor of
history and law of all people he chose to announce his intention of
studying _belles lettres_ instead of jurisprudence. The professor
sensibly pointed out to him the folly and impropriety of his conduct
in view of his father's wishes; and his counsels, seconded by the
friendly advice of his wife, Frau Böhme, turned the youthful aspirant
from his purpose for a time. On his own testimony he now became a
model student, and was "as happy as a bird in a wood." He heard
lectures on German history from Böhme, though history was distasteful
to him at every period of his life; lectures on literature from the
popular Gellert, on style from Professor Clodius, and on physics,
logic, and philosophy from other professors.
[Footnote 18: _Gespräche mit Riemer_, Anfang 1807.]
But alike by temperament and previous training, Goethe was indisposed
to profit by professorial prelections, however admirable. He had
brought with him to the university a store of miscellaneous
information which deprived them of the novelty they might have for the
average listener. "Application," he says, moreover, "was not my
talent, since nothing gave me any pleasure except what came to me of
itself." So it was that by the close of his first semester his
attendance at lectures became a jest, and the professors the butt of
his wit. It was characteristic that he found the prelections on
philosophy and logic specially tedious and distasteful. Of God and the
world he thought he knew as much as his teacher, and the scholastic
analysis of the processes of thought seemed to him only the deadening
of the faculties which he had received from nature. Of these dreary
hours in the lecture-rooms the biting comments of Faust and
Mephistopheles on university studies in general are the lively
reminiscence.
But while he was putting in a perfunctory attendance at lectures, his
education was proceeding in another school--the school which, as in
his after years he so insistently testified, affords the only real
discipline for life--the world of real men and women.[19] And the
lessons of this school he took in with a zest that well illustrates
what he called his "chameleon" nature. Within a year the "little, odd,
coddled boy" who had left his father's house was transformed into a
fashionable Leipzig youth who went even beyond his models. His
home-made suit, which had passed muster in Frankfort, but which
excited ridicule in Leipzig, was exchanged for a costume which went to
the other extreme of dandyism. His inner man underwent a corresponding
transformation, and, as was so often to be the case with him, it was a
woman who was the efficacious instrument of the change. We have just
seen how Frau Böhme seconded her husband's attempts to dissuade him
from abandoning his legal studies, but her good offices did not end
there. A woman of cultivated mind and considerable literary
attainments, she evidently saw the promise of the raw Frankfort youth,
and, with a feminine tact, to which Goethe bore grateful testimony,
she set herself to correct his manners and his tastes. He had brought
with him his Frankfort habits of speech, and these under protest he
was forced to give up for the modish forms of the smooth-speaking
Leipzigers.[20] Before Frau Böhme took him in hand, he assures us, he
was not an ill-mannered lad, but she impressed on him the need of
cultivating the external graces of social intercourse and even of
acquiring a certain skill in the fashionable games of the day--an
accomplishment, however, which he never succeeded in attaining. More
important for his future development was Frau Böhme's influence on his
literary tastes. As was his habit among his friends, he would declaim
to her passages from his favourite poets, and she, "an enemy to all
that was trivial, feeble, and commonplace," would unsparingly point
out their essential inanity. When he ventured to recite his own
poetical attempts, her criticism was equally unsparing. The discipline
was sharp, but for the "coddled" boy, who had been regarded at home
as a youthful prodigy, it was entirely wholesome. Yet, if we may judge
from a description of him some ten months after his arrival in
Leipzig, the chastening does not appear to have lessened his buoyant
self-confidence. The description is from the hand of a comrade of his
own in Frankfort, Horn by name, the son of a former chief magistrate
of the city. Horn, like Goethe, had come to study in Leipzig, and on
his arrival there, 1766, he thus (August, 1766) records his
impressions of Goethe to a common friend: "If you only saw him, you
would be either furious with rage or burst with laughing. It is beyond
me to understand how anyone can change so quickly. Besides being
arrogant, he is also a dandy, and his clothes, though fine, are in
such ridiculous taste that they attract the attention of the whole
university.[21] But he does not mind that a bit, and it is useless to
tell him of his follies.... He has acquired a gait which is simply
intolerable. Could you only see him!" Such was Horn's first impression
of his former comrade, but it is right to say that a few months later
he could tell the same correspondent that they had not lost a friend
in Goethe, who had still the same good heart and was as much a
philosopher and a moralist as ever.
[Footnote 19:
Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.]
[Footnote 20: In point of fact Goethe retained to the end the
intonation and the idioms of his native speech.]
[Footnote 21: In his Autobiography Goethe states as the reason for his
casting off the home-made suit he had brought with him from Frankfort,
that a person entering the Leipzig theatre in similar costume excited
the ridicule of the audience.]
In his second letter Horn gives a singular reason for the preposterous
airs which Goethe had lately put on. Goethe, wrote Horn, had fallen in
love with a girl "beneath him in rank," and his antics were assumed to
disguise the fact from his friends who might report it to his father.
Goethe's relations to this girl were to be his liveliest experience in
Leipzig, and an experience frequently to be repeated at different
periods of his life. Like his other adventures of the same nature, it
was to supply him with a fund of emotions and reflections which at a
future day were to serve him as literary capital. The tale of his
passion, if passion it was, is, therefore, an essential part of his
biography, both as a man and a literary artist.
The girl in question was Käthchen (or, as Goethe calls her in his
Autobiography, Ännchen) Schönkopf, the daughter of a wineseller and
lodging-house keeper in Leipzig, whose wife, we are informed, belonged
to a "patrician" family in Frankfort. As described by Horn, she was
"well-grown though not tall, with a round, pleasant face, though not
particularly pretty, and with an open, gentle, and engaging air"; and
in a letter to his sister Goethe gives the further information that
she had a "good heart, not bewildered with too much reading," and that
her spelling was dubious. And it may be noted in passing that Goethe
apparently had a preference for women who were not sophisticated with
letters, as was notably shown in the case of the woman whom he
eventually made his wife.
It was on April 26th, 1766, that he first made the declaration of his
passion, so that, when Horn wrote, we are to suppose that its course
was in full tide.[22] But now, as always, Goethe had room for two
objects in his affections. On October 1st, 1766, he wrote letters to
two friends, in the second of which he expressed his passion for
Käthchen, and in the first an equally ardent emotion for another
maiden who had crossed his path in Frankfort.[23] Goethe's confidant
throughout his relations with Käthchen was one of those peculiar
persons whom we meet with in following his career. He was one
Behrisch, now residing in Leipzig in the capacity of tutor to a young
German count. In his Autobiography Goethe has given a large place to
Behrisch, who, as there depicted, comes before us as an accomplished
man of the world, something of a _roué_, and a humorist in the old
English sense of the word. He never appeared without his periwig,
invariably wore a suit of grey, and was never seen in public without
his sword, hat under arm. Of a caustic wit, of considerable literary
attainments, and approaching his thirtieth year, he had evidently an
influence on Goethe which was not wholly for good. He took a genuine
interest in Goethe's literary efforts, gave him good advice on points
of style, and dissuaded him from hasty publication. On the other hand,
it was under his influence that Goethe began to assume the tone and
airs of a Don Juan, which are an unpleasant characteristic of his
recently published correspondence with Behrisch. It is in this
correspondence that we have the record of Goethe's dallyings with
Käthchen, and, take it as we may, the record is as vivid a presentment
as we could wish of a nature as complex in its emotions as it was
steadfast in its central bent.
[Footnote 22: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 159.]
[Footnote 23: _Ib._ pp. 60-3.]
The letters to Behrisch begin in October, 1766, and present Goethe in
the light of a happy lover. There is an assiduous rival, but his
addresses are coldly received.[24] In an ecstasy of delight, after a
four hours' _tête-a-tête_ with Käthchen, he treats Behrisch to some
lines of English verse which may be produced here as exhibiting the
state of his feelings and the extent of his acquaintance with the
English language:--
What pleasure, God! of like a flame to born,
A virteous fire, that ne'er to vice kan turn.
What volupty! when trembling in my arms,
The bosom of my maid my bosom warmeth!
Perpetual kisses of her lips o'erflow,
In holy embrace mighty virtue show.
[Footnote 24: _Ib._ pp. 61-2.]
In letters written to his sister Cornelia about the same date,
however, we see another side of his life in Leipzig. He has been
excluded from the society in which he was formerly received, and he
assigns as reasons that he is following the counsels of his father in
refusing to engage in play, and that he cannot avoid showing a sense
of his superiority in taste which gives offence. But, as we learn that
Behrisch was also excluded from the same society, and that he was
dismissed from the charge of his pupils on the ground of his loose
life, we may infer that Goethe does not state all the reasons for his
own social ostracism.[25]
[Footnote 25: _Ib._ pp. 81-2.]
So things stood with him in October, 1766, and it is not till the
following May that we hear of him again through his correspondence. In
a letter to Cornelia written in that month he excuses himself for his
long neglect of her. He has been busy, he has been ill, and the spring
has come late. In this letter he writes of Käthchen as follows: "Among
my acquaintances who are alive (he has just mentioned the death of
Frau Böhme) the little Schönkopf does not deserve to be forgotten. She
is a very good girl, with an uprightness of heart joined to agreeable
_naïveté_, though her education has been more severe than good. She
looks after my linen and other things when it is necessary, for she
knows all about these matters, and is pleased to give me the benefit
of her knowledge; and I like her well for that. Am I not a bit of a
scamp, seeing I am in love with all these girls? Who could resist them
when they are good; for as for beauty, that does not touch me; and,
indeed, all my acquaintances are more good than beautiful."[26] This
is not the tone of an ardent lover speaking of his mistress, and it is
evident that Cornelia was not the confidant of his real relations to
Käthchen, which, indeed, would have been as distasteful to her as to
their father. In another letter, addressed to her in the following
August, he is not more frank. There he tells her that Annette is now
his muse, and that, as Herodotus names the books of his History after
the nine muses, so he has given the name of Annette to a collection of
twelve poetical pieces, magnificently copied in manuscript.[27] But,
he significantly adds, Annette had no more to do with his poetry than
the Muses had to do with the History of Herodotus.[28] To what extent
this statement expressed the truth we shall presently see.
[Footnote 26: _Ib._ p. 86. The passage is in French.]
[Footnote 27: This was the work of Behrisch, who was a virtuoso in
calligraphy.]
[Footnote 28: _Werke, Briefe_, i. 96-7.]
In October, 1767, Goethe resumed his correspondence with Behrisch, and
it is in this part of it that we have the fullest revelation of his
state of mind during the last year of his residence in Leipzig. With
the exception of occasional digressions these letters are solely
concerned with his relations to Käthchen, and their outpourings
afterwards received their faithful echo in the incoherences of
Werther. Here is the beginning of a letter to Behrisch (October 13th),
in which he described his feelings as evoked by the appearance of two
rivals for the favours of Käthchen. "Another night like this,
Behrisch, and, in spite of all my sins, I shan't have to go to hell.
You may have slept peacefully, but a jealous lover, who has drunk as
much champagne as is necessary to put his blood in a pleasant heat and
to inflame his imagination to the highest point! At first I could not
sleep, I tossed about in my bed, sprang up, raved; then I grew weary
and fell asleep." And he proceeds to relate a wild dream in which
Käthchen was the distracting image; and he concludes: "There you have
Annette. She is a cursed lass!"[29] Yet on the same day or the day
following he could thus describe his mode of life in a letter to his
sister: "It is very philosophical," he writes; "I have given up
concerts, comedies, riding and driving, and have abandoned all
societies of young folks who might lead me into more company. This
will be of great advantage to my purse."[30] Very different is the
picture of his mode of life in his subsequent letters to Behrisch at
the same period. If we are to take him literally, it was the life of a
veritable Don Juan who had learned all the lessons of his instructor.
"Do you recognise me in this tone, Behrisch?" he writes; "it is the
tone of a conquering young lord.... It is comic. Aber ohne zu schwören
ich unterstehe mich schon ein Mädgen zu verf--wie Teufel soll ich's
nennen. Enough, Monsieur, all this is but what you might have expected
from the aptest and most diligent of your scholars."[31] That all
this was not mere bravado is distinctly suggested even in _Dichtung
und Wahrheit_, where the wild doings of Leipzig are so decorously
draped.
[Footnote 29: _Ib._ p. 105.]
[Footnote 30: _Ib._ p. 116.]
[Footnote 31: _Ib._ p. 133.]
Goethe knew from the first that he could never make Käthchen his wife,
and that sooner or later his lovemaking must come to an end. The end
came in the spring of 1768 after two years' philandering which had not
been all happiness. In a letter to Behrisch he thus relates the
_dénouement_: "Oh, Behrisch," he writes, "I have begun to live! Could
I but tell you the whole story! I cannot; it would cost me too much.
Enough--we have separated, we are happy.... Behrisch, we are living in
the pleasantest, friendliest intercourse.... We began with love and we
end with friendship."[32] Goethe makes one of his characters say that
estranged lovers, if they only manage things well, may still remain
friends, and the remark was prompted by more than one experience of
his own.
[Footnote 32: _Ib._ pp. 158-9.]
When he was past his seventieth year, Goethe made a remark to his
friend, Chancellor von Müller, which is applicable to every period of
his life: "In the hundred things which interest me," he said, "there
is always one which, as chief planet, holds the central place, and
meanwhile the remaining Quodlibet of my life circles round it in
many-changing phases, till each and all succeed in reaching the
centre." Even in these distracted Leipzig years the mental process
thus described is clearly visible. Neither Goethe's loves nor his
other dissipations ever permanently dulled the intellectual side of
his nature. While he was writing morbid letters to Behrisch, he was
directing the studies of his sister with all the seriousness of a
youthful pedagogue. Though he neglected the lectures of his
professors, he was assimilating knowledge on every subject that
appealed to his natural instincts. In truth, all the manifold
activities of his later years were foreshadowed during his sojourn in
Leipzig, as, indeed, they had already been foreshadowed during his
boyhood in Frankfort.
As in Frankfort, he took in knowledge equally from men, books, and
things.[33] In the house of a Leipzig citizen, a physician and
botanist, he met a society of medical men, and he records how his
attention was directed to an entirely new field through listening to
their conversation. Now, apparently for the first time, he heard the
names of Haller, Buffon, and Linnæus, the last of whom he, in later
years, named with Spinoza and Shakespeare as one of the chief moulding
forces of his life. Through the influence and example of other men he
intermittently practised etching, drawing, and engraving--all arts in
which he retained a lifelong interest. But among all the persons in
Leipzig who influenced him Goethe gave the first place to Friedrich
Oeser, director of the academy of drawing in the city. Oeser was about
fifty years of age, jovial in disposition, and an experienced man of
the world. Though as an artist he is now held in little regard, his
reputation was great in his own day,[34] and he had a reflected glory
in being the friend of Winckelmann, who was reputed to have profited
by his teaching in art. Under the inspiration of Oeser Goethe's
interest in the plastic arts in general, which had received its first
impulse at home, became a permanent preoccupation for the remainder of
his life. He took regular lessons in drawing from Oeser, made
acquaintance with all the collections, public and private, to be found
in Leipzig, and even made a secret visit to the galleries in Dresden,
where, he tells us, he gave his exclusive attention to the works of
the great Dutch masters. As was always his habit, Goethe generously
acknowledged his obligations to Oeser. "Who among all my teachers,
except yourself," he afterwards wrote on his return to Frankfort,
"ever thought me worthy of encouragement? They either heaped all blame
or all praise upon me, and nothing can be so destructive of talent....
You know what I was when I came to you, and what when I left you: the
difference is your work ... you have taught me to be modest without
self-depreciation, and to be proud without presumption."[35] And
elsewhere he declares that the great lesson he had learned from Oeser
was that the ideal of beauty is to be found in "simplicity and
repose." But the main interest of Goethe's intercourse with Oeser in
connection with his general development is that it strengthened an
illusion from which he did not succeed in freeing himself till near
his fortieth year--the illusion that nature had given him equally the
gifts of the painter and the poet. Many hours of the best years of his
life were to be spent in laboriously practising an art in which he was
doomed to mediocrity; and it must remain a riddle that one, who like
Goethe was so curiously studious of his own self-development, should
so long and so blindly have misunderstood his own gifts.[36]
[Footnote 33: "Das Bedürfnis meiner Natur zwingt mich zu einer
vermannigfaltigten Thätigkeit," he wrote of himself in his
thirty-second year.]
[Footnote 34: When, in his thirty-sixth year, Goethe renewed his
acquaintance with Oeser, he wrote of him to Frau von Stein: "C'est
comme si cet homme ne devroit pas mourir, tant ses talents paroissent
toujours aller en s'augmentant."]
[Footnote 35: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 179.]
[Footnote 36: In later years he consoled himself with the reflection
that the time he had spent on the technicalities of art was not wholly
lost, as he had thus acquired powers of observation which were
valuable to him both as a poet and as a man of science.]
It may partly explain his addiction to art that the poetical
productions which he had brought from Frankfort, and which had been
applauded by the circle of his friends there, did not meet with the
approval of the critics in Leipzig. We have seen how sharply Frau
Böhme commented on their shortcomings, but he was specially
disheartened by the severe criticism passed on one of his poems by
Clodius, the professor of literature. "I am cured of the folly of
thinking myself a poet,"[37] he wrote to his sister about a year after
his arrival in Leipzig. Some six months later he writes to her in a
more hopeful spirit: "Since I am wholly without pride, I may trust my
inner conviction, which tells me that I possess some of the qualities
required in a poet, and that by diligence I may even become one."[38]
In his Autobiography and elsewhere Goethe has spoken at length of the
disadvantages under which youthful geniuses laboured at the period
when he began his literary career.[39] As Germany then existed, there
was no national feeling to inspire great themes, no standard of taste,
and no worthy models for imitation. There was, indeed, no lack of
literature on all subjects; Kant speaks sarcastically of "the deluge
of books with which our part of the world is inundated every year."
But the fatal defects of the poetry then produced was triviality and
the "wateriness" of its style. Yet it was during the years that Goethe
spent in Leipzig that there appeared a succession of works which mark
a new departure in German literature. In 1766 Herder, who was
subsequently to exercise such a profound influence over Goethe,
published his _Fragments on Modern German Literature_; in the same
year appeared Lessing's _Laokoon_, which, in Goethe's own words,
transported himself and his contemporaries "out of the region of
pitifully contracted views into the domain of emancipated thought";
and in 1767 Lessing's _Minna von Barnhelm_, Germany's "first national
drama." Greatly as Goethe was impressed by both of these works of
Lessing, however, he was not mature enough to profit by them[40]; and,
in point of fact, all the work, poems and plays, which he produced
during his Leipzig period, is solely inspired by the French models
which had so long dominated German literature.
[Footnote 37: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 67.]
[Footnote 38: _Ib._ p. 88.]
[Footnote 39: Notably in his paper, entitled _Literarischer
Sansculottismus_. See above, p. 4. Regarding Lessing he made this
remark to Eckermann (February 7th, 1827): "Bedauert doch den
ausserordentlichen Menschen, dass er in einer so erbärmlichen Zeit
leben musste, die ihm keine bessern Stoffe gab, als in seinen Stücken
verarbeitet sind!"]
[Footnote 40: "Lessing war der höchste Verstand, und nur ein ebenso
grosser konnte von ihm wahrhaft lernen. Dem Halbvermögen war er
gefährlich." (To Eckermann, January 18th, 1825.)]
Considering his other manifold preoccupations, the amount of Goethe's
literary output during his three years in Leipzig is sufficient
evidence that his poetic instincts remained the dominant impulses of
his nature. He sprinkled his letters to his friends with poems in
German, French, and English, and he composed twenty lyrics which were
subsequently published in the autumn of 1769 under the title of _Neue
Lieder_[41]; and two plays, entitled _Die Laune des Verliebten_ and
_Die Mitschuldigen_. The biographic interest of all these productions
is the light which they throw on the transformation which Goethe had
undergone during his residence in Leipzig. In the poems he had written
in Frankfort religion had been the predominant theme; in his Leipzig
effusions it was love, and love in a sufficiently Anacreontic sense.
Regarding the poetic merit of the _Neue Lieder_ German critics are for
the most part at one. With hardly an exception the love lyrics are
mere imitations of French models; their style is as artificial as
their feeling; and they give little promise of the work that was to
come from the same hand a few years later. As the expression of one of
his lover's moods, one of them, reckoned the best in the collection,
may here be given. It is entitled _Die schöne Nacht_.
[Footnote 41: Nine of these _Lieder_ Goethe thought worthy of a
permanent place in his collected works.]
DIE SCHÖNE NACHT.
Nun verlass' ich diese Hütte,
Meiner Liebsten Aufenthalt;
Wandle mit verhülltem Schritte
Durch den öden, finstern Wald.
Luna bricht durch Busch und Eichen,
Zephyr meldet ihren Lauf;
Und die Birken streun mit Neigen
Ihr den süssten Weihrauch auf.
Wie ergötz' ich mich im Kühlen
Dieser schönen Sommernacht!
O wie still ist hier zu fühlen
Was die Seele glücklich macht!
Lässt sich kaum die Wonne fassen,
Und doch wollt' ich, Himmel! dir
Tausend solcher Nächte lassen,
Gäb' mein Mädchen Eine mir.
THE BEAUTIFUL NIGHT.
Now I leave the cot behind me
Where my love hath her abode;
And I wander with veiled footsteps
Through the drear and darksome wood.
Luna's rays pierce oak and thicket
Zephyr heraldeth her way;
And for her its sweetest incense
Sheddeth every birchen spray.
How I revel in the coolness
Of this beauteous summer night!
Ah! how peaceful here the feeling
Of what makes the soul's delight,
Bliss wellnigh past comprehending!
Yet, O Heaven, I would to thee
Thousand nights like this surrender,
Gave my maiden one to me.
But it is in the two plays produced during this period that Goethe
most fully reveals both his literary ideals and the essential traits
of his own character. The first of the two, _Die Laune des Verliebten_
("The Lover's Caprices"), is based on his own relations to Käthchen
Schönkopf, and is cast in the form of a pastoral drama, written in
Alexandrines after the fashion of the time.[42] The theme is a satire
on his own wayward conduct towards Käthchen, as he has depicted it in
his Autobiography. The plot is of the simplest kind. Two pairs of
lovers, Egle and Lamon, and Amine and Eridon, the first pair happy in
their loves, the second unhappy, make up the characters of the piece.
The leading part is taken by Egle, who is distressed at the misery of
her friend Amine, occasioned by the jealous humours of her lover
Eridon. Complications there are none, and the sole interest of the
play consists in the vivacity of the dialogues and in the arch
mischief with which Egle eventually shames Eridon out of his foolish
jealousy of his maiden, who is only too fondly devoted to him. What
strikes us in the whole performance is that Goethe, if he was so
madly in love with Käthchen as his letters to Behrisch represent him,
should have been capable of writing it. From its playful humour and
entirely objective treatment it might have been written by a
good-natured onlooker amused at the spectacle of two young people
trifling with feelings which neither could take seriously.
[Footnote 42: This play was based on an earlier attempt made in
Frankfort.]
Equally objective is Goethe's handling of the very different theme of
the other play, _Die Mitschuldigen_ ("The Accomplices"),[43] and in
this case the objectivity is still more remarkable in a youth who had
not yet attained his twentieth year. This second piece belongs to the
class of low comedy, and is as simple in construction as its
companion. The scene is laid in an inn, and the characters are four in
number: the Host, whose leading trait is insatiable curiosity; his
daughter Sophia, represented as of easy virtue; Söller, her husband, a
graceless scamp; and Alcestes, a former lover of Sophia, and for the
time a guest in the inn. In the central scene of the play there come
in succession to Alcestes' room in the course of one night Söller, who
steals Alcestes' gold; the Host, to possess himself of a letter with
the contents of which he has a burning curiosity to become acquainted;
and Sophia by appointment with Alcestes. As father and daughter have
caught sight of each other on their respective errands, each suspects
the other of being the thief, and in a sorry scene the father, on the
condition of being permitted to read the letter, which turns out to be
a trivial note, informs Alcestes that Sophia is the delinquent.
Finally, Söller, under the threat of a prick from Alcestes' sword,
confesses to the theft, and the piece ends with a mutual agreement to
condone each other's delinquencies.[44] The play is not without
humour, and the different characters are vivaciously presented, but
the blindest admirers of the master may well regret, as they mostly
have regretted, that such a work should have come from his hands. The
most charitable construction we can put on the graceless production is
that Goethe, out of his abnormal impressionability, for the time being
deliberately assumed the tone of cynical indifference with which he
had become familiar in his intercourse with his friend Behrisch.
[Footnote 43: The exact time and place of its composition is
uncertain, but Goethe's own testimony seems to indicate that it was
mainly written in Leipzig, in 1769. It was first published in 1787,
with some modifications, which affect only the form.]
[Footnote 44: With a fatuity into which he occasionally fell, Goethe
in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ remarks that his two plays are an
illustration of that most Christian text, "Let him who is without sin
among you cast the first stone."]
In direct connection with the shorter poems which Goethe wrote in
Leipzig, there is a passage in his Autobiography which has perhaps
been more frequently quoted than any other, and which, according as we
interpret it, must materially influence our judgment at once on his
character and his genius. The passage is as follows: "And thus began
that tendency of which, all my life through, I was never able to break
myself; the tendency to transmute into a picture or a poem whatever
gave me either pleasure or pain, or otherwise preoccupied me, and thus
to arrive at a judgment regarding it, with the object at once of
rectifying my ideas of things external to me and of calming my own
feelings. This gift was in truth perhaps necessary to no one more than
to me, whose temperament was continually tossing him from one extreme
to another. All my productions proceeding from this tendency that have
become known to the world are only fragments of a great confession
which it is the bold attempt of this book to complete."
From the context of this passage it is to be inferred that the habit
which Goethe describes applied only to the occasional short poems
which he threw off at the different periods of his life. But are we to
infer that the account here given of Goethe's occasional poems applies
to the passionate lyrics which a few years later he was to pour forth
in such abundance? To a very different purport is another passage in
the Autobiography, which is at the same time a striking commentary on
Wordsworth's remark that Goethe's poetry was "not inevitable enough."
"I had come," he there says, "to look upon my indwelling poetic talent
altogether as a force of nature; the more so as I had always been
compelled to regard outward nature as its proper object. The exercise
of this poetic faculty might indeed be excited and determined by
circumstances; but its most joyful and richest action was
spontaneous--even involuntary. In my nightly vigils the same thing
happened; so that I often wished, like one of my predecessors, to have
a leathern jerkin made, and to get accustomed to writing in the dark,
so as to be able to fix on paper all such unpremeditated effusions. It
had so often happened to me that, after composing some snatch of
poetry in my head, I could not recall it, that I would now hurry to my
desk and, without once breaking off, write off the poem from beginning
to end, not even taking time to straighten the paper, if it lay
crosswise, so that the verses often slanted across the page. In such a
mood I preferred to get hold of a lead pencil, because I could write
most readily with it; whereas the scratching and spluttering of a pen
would sometimes wake me from a poetic dream, confuse me, and so stifle
some trifling production in its birth."[45]
[Footnote 45: The translation of this passage is by Miss Minna Steele
Smith.--_Poetry and Truth from My Own Life_ (London, 1908.)]
Poetry produced as here described may certainly be regarded as part of
the poet's "confession," but in the circumstances of its origin it is
a world apart from the poetry composed in the fashion described in the
passage preceding. The poet here does not coolly say to himself: "Go
to, I will make a poem to relieve my feelings"; he sings, to quote
Goethe's own expression, "as the bird sings," out of the sheer
fulness of his heart, which insists on immediate expression.[46] True
it is that Goethe, like all other poets, frequently wrote under no
immediate pressure of inspiration, but to affirm this of the highest
efforts of his genius is at once to contradict his own testimony and
to misinterpret the conditions under which genius produces its
results.
[Footnote 46: In a letter to W. von Rumohr (September 28th, 1807),
Goethe calls "unaufhaltsame Natur, unüberwindliche Neigung, drängende
Leidenschaft" the "Haupterfordernisse der wahren Poesie." In two of
his _Zahme Xenien_ Goethe has expressed his opinion on the necessity
of inspiration in poetic production:--
Ja das ist das rechte Gleis,
Dass man nicht weiss,
Was man denkt,
Wenn man denkt:
Alles ist als wie geschenkt.
All unser redlichstes Bemühn
Glückt nur im unbewussten Momente.
Wie möchte denn die Rose blühn,
Wenn sie der Sonne Herrlichkeit erkennte!]