AT HOME IN FRANKFORT
SEPTEMBER, 1768--APRIL, 1770
On August 28th, 1768, Goethe left Leipzig after a residence of nearly
three years. He had gone to Leipzig in the spirit of a prisoner
released from his gaol; he left it in the spirit of one returning to
durance. In his Autobiography he has described the depressing
conditions under which he re-entered his father's house. In body and
mind he had found that in "accursed Leipzig one burns out as quickly
as a bad torch." In body he was a broken man. One night in the
beginning of August he had been seized with a violent hemorrhage, and
for some weeks his life hung by a thread. In his Autobiography he
assigns various reasons for his illness. As the result of an accident
on his journey from Frankfort to Leipzig he had strained the ligaments
of his chest, and the mischief was aggravated by a subsequent fall
from his horse; he had suffered from the fumes of the acids he had
inhaled in the process of etching; he had ruined his digestion by
drinking coffee and heavy beer; and, in accordance with the precepts
of Rousseau, he had adopted a _régime_ which proved too severe for his
enfeebled constitution. So he wrote in his old age, but his
contemporary letters leave us in little doubt regarding the cause of
his breakdown. He had, in fact, during the latter part of his sojourn
in Leipzig lived the life of the average German student of his day. He
had fought a duel, and had been wounded in the arm; he had drunk more
than was good for him, and we have seen that he had followed other
courses not conducive to his bodily health.
His mental condition was equally unsatisfactory. There was not a
friend, he tells us, whom at one time or another he had not annoyed by
his caprice, or offended by his "morbid spirit of contradiction" and
sullen avoidance of intercourse. All through his life Goethe seems to
have tried his friends by his variable humours,[47] but it was seldom
that he completely alienated them, and he gratefully records how in
his present stricken condition they rallied to his side, and put him
to shame by their assiduous attentions. One of these friends, Langer
by name, who had succeeded Behrisch as tutor to the young Count, he
specially mentions as helping to give a new turn to his thoughts.
Langer was religiously disposed, and found in Goethe, now in a mood to
receive them, a sympathetic listener to his theological views. Under
Langer's influence he resumed his youthful study of the Bible--not in
the Old Testament, however, but in the New, which he read, he tells
us, with "emotion and enthusiasm." It was the beginning of a new phase
in his life which was to last for about a year and a half, a phase in
which religion, if we are to accept the testimony of his
Autobiography, held the uppermost place in his thoughts.
[Footnote 47: When approaching his eightieth year, Goethe remarked to
Chancellor von Müller (March 6th, 1828): "Wer mit mir umgehen will,
muss zuweilen auch meine Grobianslaune zugeben, ertragen, wie eines
andern Schwachheit oder Steckenpferd."]
It was with the feelings of "a shipwrecked seaman," he tells us, that
he found himself again under his father's roof, though he
characteristically adds that "he had nothing specially to reproach
himself with." The atmosphere he found at home was not such as to put
him in better spirits. Father, mother and daughter had been living in
mutual misunderstanding during the whole period of the son's absence
in Leipzig. Cornelia had been made the sole victim of her father's
pedagogic discipline which had been partially alleviated when it was
shared with her brother, and she had come to regard her over-anxious
parent with a hardness which Goethe describes as having something
dreadful (_fürchterliches_) in it. The arrival of Goethe could not
improve the existing relations in the household. As in the time before
his going to Leipzig, Cornelia drew to him as the only member of the
family who sympathetically understood her, and she remained as
obdurate as ever in her sullen attitude towards her father. Between
Goethe himself and his father their former estrangement continued, and
we are given to understand that during the year and a half he now
spent under the paternal roof there was no cordial understanding
regarding the son's pursuits and his future career.[48] Dissatisfied
with his son, as from his point of view he had every reason to be,
Herr Goethe nevertheless cherished a secret pride in his genius. With
a paternal pride, which is even touching in the circumstances, he
carefully framed the drawings executed by his son, and collected and
stitched together his letters from Leipzig.
[Footnote 48: Referring to the time he now spent in Frankfort, Goethe
says in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_: "Mit dem Vater selbst konnte sich
kein angenehmes Verhältniss knüpfen."]
As in the case of his Leipzig period, Goethe's reminiscent account of
his present sojourn in Frankfort gives a somewhat different impression
of his main interests from that conveyed by his contemporary letters.
If we accept the testimony of his Autobiography, his attention was
mainly turned to religion and to chemical and cabbalistical studies;
from his correspondence, on the other hand, it would appear that his
thoughts at least occasionally ran on subjects that had little to do
with his spiritual welfare. At the same time, the apparent discrepancy
need not imply self-contradiction. The correspondents to whom his
letters were addressed were not persons specially interested in
religion or chemistry or the cabbala, and, of all men, Goethe was
least likely to be obsessed by any set of ideas to the exclusion of
all others. There can be little doubt, indeed, that during his year
and a half in Frankfort religion was a more predominant interest in
his life than at any other period; and the fact is sufficiently
explained by the circumstances in which he then found himself. From
the condition both of his mind and body he was disposed to
self-searching. Regret for the past was foreign to his nature; in his
mature judgment, indeed, such a feeling was resolutely to be checked
in the interest of healthy self-development. Yet in the retrospect of
his Leipzig days it seems to have crossed his mind that he might have
spent them more wisely. "O that I could recall the last two years and
a half,"[49] he wrote to Käthchen Schönkopf, and he warns a male
correspondent in Leipzig to "beware of dissoluteness."[50] And the
state of his health during the greater part of this time in Frankfort
was such as to strengthen this mood. Immediately after his return from
Leipzig he was threatened with pulmonary disease, and the state of his
digestion became such as to alarm himself and his friends. On December
7th he was attacked by a violent internal pain, and for some days
there were the gravest fears for his life. After two months'
confinement to his room there was a partial recovery, but it was not
till the spring of 1770 that his health was completely restored.
[Footnote 49: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 215.]
[Footnote 50: _Ib._ p. 217.]
But the truth is that Goethe's temporary preoccupation with religion
is only another illustration of his "chameleon" temperament. In gay
Leipzig he had promptly taken on the ways of a man about town; now in
Frankfort he found himself in a very different society, and he as
promptly entered into the spirit of it. The circle of which he now
became a member was a company of religious persons, mostly women,
friends or acquaintances of his mother. Its most prominent member was
that Fräulein von Klettenberg, already mentioned, a woman of high
rank, culture, and refinement. To moral beauty of character in man or
woman, Goethe, at all periods of his life, was peculiarly
sensitive,[51] and in the Fräulein he saw a woman who combined at once
the most winning graces of her sex and the virtues of a saint. For
women of all ages and all types Goethe had always a singular
attraction, and, though the Fräulein must have discerned that he could
never be a son or brother in the spirit, she was profoundly interested
in the wayward youth in whom she saw a brand that deserved to be
plucked from the burning.
[Footnote 51: _Cf._ his beautiful characterisation of Louis Bonaparte,
King of Holland, in whom he found the embodiment at once of the
Christian graces and of _reine Menschlichkeit_.]
With a kind of half consent Goethe entered into the spirit of the
pious circle; he even attended communion in spite of his unhappy
memories of that sacrament, and was present at a Synod of the Herrnhut
Community to which Fräulein von Klettenberg belonged. Bound up with
the Fräulein's religion was a curious interest in the occult powers of
nature from the point of view of their relation to the human body. It
is with evident irony that Goethe relates how in his own case the
efficacy of these occult powers was tried. Among the members of the
religious community was a mysterious physician who was credited with
possessing certain medicines of peculiar virtue. He was believed to
have in store one drug--a powerful salt--which he reserved only for
the most dangerous cases, and regarding which, though they had never
seen the result of its operation, the community spoke with bated
breath. At the vehement request of his mother the mysterious medicine
was administered to Goethe at the crisis of his malady, at the hour of
midnight, and with all due solemnity. From that moment his illness
took a favourable turn, and he steadily progressed towards recovery.
"I need not say," is his comment, "how greatly this result
strengthened and heightened our faith in our physician and our efforts
to share such a treasure." Partly, therefore, out of his own
insatiable curiosity and partly out of sympathy with his new friends,
Goethe now betook himself to occult studies, and, in imitation of the
Fräulein von Klettenberg, had a room fitted up with the necessary
chemical apparatus. It was the first practical commencement of those
scientific studies which were subsequently to occupy such a large part
of his life. Along with his chemical experiments went the study of
such visionaries in science as Paracelsus, Van Helmont, and others,
but also of the great Boerhaave, whose _Institutes of Medicine and
Aphorisms_, containing all that was then known of medical theory, he
"gladly stamped on his mind and memory."
To what extent are we to infer that Goethe really shared the religious
views of the circle of pious persons with whom he was now living in
daily contact? His own account we can only regard as half jesting,
half serious. He would never have spiritual peace, Fräulein von
Klettenberg told him till he had a "reconciled God." Goethe's
rejoinder was that it should be put the other way. Considering his
recent sufferings and his own good intentions, it was God who was in
arrears to him and who had something to be forgiven. The Fräulein
charitably condoned the blasphemy, but she and her fellow-believers
were assuredly in the right when they denied the blasphemer the name
of _Christian_. Yet, as has been said, Goethe in his own way was
seriously in search of a faith that would satisfy both his intellect
and his heart, and he even attempted to construct one. A book that
fell into his hands, Gottfried Arnold's _Impartial History of the
Church and of Heretics_,[52] prompted the attempt. From this book, he
tells us, he received a favourable impression of heretics, and the
impression was comforting to one who, like himself, was looked on as a
heretic by all his friends. Moreover, he had often heard it said that
in the long run every man must have his own religion; why, therefore,
should he not essay to think out a creed that would at least satisfy
himself? In brief outline he has described the system which he evolved
from his miscellaneous historical and scientific studies. It is, as he
himself says, a strange composite of Neo-Platonism, and of hermetical,
mystical, and cabbalistical speculations, all leading by a necessary
logic to the dogmas of Redemption and the Incarnation--a conclusion
which at least points to the fact that for Goethe at this time
Christianity was a religion specifically predestined for man's
salvation. "We all become mystics in old age," is a remark of his own
at that period of life; and the conclusion of the Second Part of
Faust, as well as other indications, proves that the remark was at
least true of himself. But, as has often been pointed out, not only in
old age, but at every period of his life, there was a mystic strain in
him which was only kept in check by what was the strongest instinct of
his nature--the instinct that demanded the direct vision of the
concrete fact as the only condition on which he could build "the
pyramid of his life."
[Footnote 52: Probably Goethe had this book in his mind when he wrote
the sarcastic epigram:--
"Es ist die ganze Kirchengeschichte
Mischmasch von Irrthum und von Gewalt."]
Goethe's experience derived from his intercourse with Fräulein von
Klettenberg and her friends undoubtedly enriched his own nature and
enlarged his conceptions of the content of human life, of its possible
motives and ideals. It was not a circle into which his own affinities
would have led him, but being in it, he, as was his invariable habit,
drew from it to the full all that it could give for his own
building-up. And in enriching his own nature and widening his outlook,
the experience enlarged the scope of his creative productiveness. But
for his intercourse with these pious enthusiasts the Confessions of a
Beautiful Soul would not have found a place in _Wilhelm Meister_, and
from the general picture of human life and its activities which it is
the object of that book to present, there would have been lacking one
conception of life and its responsibilities, not the least interesting
in the history of the human spirit. Most specific and important of all
his gains from his association with the Frankfort community, however,
was that from it directly emerged what is universally regarded as his
greatest creative effort--the First Part of Faust. The conception of
that work was closely associated with the chemical experiments and
cabbalistic studies suggested by his intercourse with Fräulein von
Klettenberg and her circle, and not only suggested but carried out on
the foundation that had thus been laid.[53]
[Footnote 53: Yet at a later date he would seem to have regarded his
mystical studies as among the errors of his youth. In his _Tagebuch_,
under date August 7th, 1779, he writes as follows, and the passage may
be taken as a commentary on the whole period of his life with which we
are dealing: "Stiller Rückblick auf's Leben auf die Verworrenheit
Betriebsamkeit, Wissbegierde der Jugend, wie sie überall
herumschweift, um etwas Befriedigendes zu finden. Wie ich besonders in
[Transcriber's Note: corrected error "im"] Geheimnissen, dunklen
imaginativen Verhältissen eine Wollust gefunden habe."]
As has been said, Goethe's contemporary letters addressed from
Frankfort to his friends bring a different side of his life before us
from that presented in the Autobiography. From these letters we gather
that he was by no means wholly engrossed in religious or mystical
studies. "During this winter," he wrote to his friend Oeser, about two
months after his arrival in Frankfort, "the company of the muses and
correspondence with friends will bring pleasure into a sickly,
solitary life, which for a youth of twenty years would otherwise be
something of a martyrdom."[54] In spite of the affectionate solicitude
of Fräulein von Klettenberg and other friends, he found Frankfort a
depressing place after gay Leipzig. "I could go mad when I think of
Leipzig," wrote his sprightly friend Horn, who had also tasted the
pleasures of that place; and Goethe shared his opinion. Both also
agreed that the girls of Frankfort were vastly inferior creatures to
those of Leipzig. "I came here," Goethe wrote in a poetical epistle to
the daughter of Oeser, "and found the girls a little--one does not
quite like to speak it out--as they always were; enough, none has as
yet touched my heart."[55] It would appear, nevertheless, that he did
find certain Frankfort girls to his taste. "I get along tolerably
here," he wrote to another correspondent. "I am contented and quiet; I
have half-a-dozen angels of girls whom I often see, though I have lost
my heart to none of them. They are pleasant creatures, and make my
life uncommonly agreeable. He who has seen no Leipzig might be very
well off here."[56] His life in Frankfort was, in short, what he
himself called it, an exile (_Verbannung_).
[Footnote 54: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 179, November 7th, 1768.]
[Footnote 55: _Ib._ p. 173.]
[Footnote 56: _Ib._ p. 217.]
Among his correspondents was Käthchen Schönkopf with whom, as we have
seen, he had come to what he thought a satisfactory arrangement before
leaving Leipzig. In this correspondence it is the Leipzig student, not
the associate of the Fräulein von Klettenberg, who is before us. There
is the same waywardness, there are the same irresponsible sallies
which made him such a difficult lover. If we are to take him
seriously, he still suffered from the pangs of rejected love and
regretted that his former relations to Käthchen had not continued. "A
lover to whom his love will not listen," he writes, "is by many
degrees not so unfortunate as one who has been cast off; the former
still retains hope and has at least no fear of being hated; the other,
yes, the other, who has once experienced what it is to be cast out of
a heart which once was his, gladly avoids thinking, not to say
speaking, of it."[57] When this passage was written (June, 1769) he
had received the news that Käthchen was betrothed to another. In a
final letter addressed to her (January 23rd, 1770) occur these
characteristic words: "You are still the same loveable girl, and you
will also be a loveable wife. And I, I shall remain Goethe. You know
what that means. When I mention my name, I mention all; and you know
that, as long as I have known you, I have lived only as part of
you."[58] So closed a relation of which it is difficult to say how
much there was in it of genuine passion, how much of artificial
sentiment. Serious intention in it there was none; from the first
Goethe perfectly realised the fact that he could never make Käthchen
his wife.[59]
[Footnote 57: _Ib._ p. 211.]
[Footnote 58: _Ib._ p. 224.]
[Footnote 59: Goethe saw Käthchen as a married woman in Leipzig in
1776, when he wrote to the lady who then held his affections (Frau von
Stein): "Mais ce n'est plus Julie."]
As at Leipzig, his other distractions did not divert him from his
interests in art and literature. When the state of his health
permitted, he assiduously practised drawing and etching. "Now as
formerly," he wrote to Oeser, "art is almost my chief occupation." But
he also found time for wide excursions into the fields of general
literature. Before leaving Leipzig he had exchanged with Langer "whole
baskets-full" of German poets and critics for Greek authors, and these
(though his knowledge of Greek remained to the end elementary) he
must have read in a fashion. Latin authors he read were Cicero,
Quintilian, Seneca, and Pliny. Among the moderns Shakespeare and
Molière already held the place in his estimation which they always
retained. Shakespeare he as yet knew only from the selections in
Dodd's _Beauties_ and Wieland's translation, but he already felt his
greatness, and, as we have seen, names him with Wieland and Oeser as
one of his masters. "Voltaire," he wrote to Oeser, "has been able to
do no harm to Shakespeare; no lesser spirit will prevail over a
greater one."[60] The German writers who now stood highest in his
esteem were Lessing and Wieland. Lessing's æsthetic teaching he
accepted with some reserves, but this did not abate the admiration
which he retained for him at every period of his life. "Lessing!
Lessing!" he wrote in the same letter to Oeser; "if he were not
Lessing, I might say something. Write against him I may not; he is a
conqueror.... He is a mental phenomenon, and, truly, such apparitions
are rare in Germany."[61] That Goethe, at this period, should have had
such an unbounded admiration for Wieland is an interesting commentary
on his pietistic leanings; for Wieland was now in his full pagan
phase, so distasteful to moral Germany, as Goethe himself indicates.
"I have already been annoyed on Wieland's account," he writes--"I
think with justice. Wieland has often the misfortune to be
misunderstood; frequently, perhaps, the fault is his own, but as
frequently it is not." At a later day Goethe clearly saw and marked in
Wieland that lack of "high seriousness" on which he himself came to
lay such stress as all-important in literature and life, but in the
meantime he freely acknowledged what Wieland had been to him.[62]
"After him (Oeser) and Shakespeare," he wrote in the letter just
quoted, "Wieland is still the only one whom I can hold as my true
master; others had shown me where I had gone astray; they showed me
how to do better."
[Footnote 60: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 205.]
[Footnote 61: _Ib._ p. 230.]
[Footnote 62: Goethe has this entry in his _Tagebuch_ (April 2nd,
1780): "Wieland sieht ganz unglaublich alles, was man machen will,
macht, und was hangt und langt in einer Schrift."]
What is noteworthy in the serious passages of Goethe's Frankfort
letters is the advance in maturity and self-knowledge which they
reveal when compared with those written from Leipzig. Penetrative
remarks on men and things, such as give its value to his later
correspondence, now begin to fall from his pen by the way. He
consciously takes the measure of his own powers, and forms clear
judgments on the literary and artistic tastes of the time. The poems
which he had written in Leipzig now seemed to him "trifling, cold,
dry, and superficial," and, as in Leipzig he had made a holocaust of
his boyish poems, so he made a second holocaust of those produced in
Leipzig. In a long letter addressed (February 13th, 1769) to
Friederike Oeser he thus expounds the artistic ideals at which he had
then arrived: "A great scholar is seldom a great philosopher, and he
who has laboriously thumbed the pages of many books regards with
contempt the simple, easy book of nature; and yet nothing is true
except what is simple--certainly a sorry recommendation for true
wisdom. Let him who goes the way of simplicity go it in quiet. Modesty
and circumspection are the essential characteristics of him who would
tread this path, and every step will bring its reward. I have to thank
your dear father for these conceptions; he it was who prepared my mind
to receive them; time will give its blessing to my diligence which may
complete the work he began."[63] In point of fact, partly owing to the
depressing conditions in which he found himself, and partly, it may
be, out of his own deliberate purpose, Goethe produced no work of
importance during the year and a half he spent in Frankfort. It was a
period of incubation, and the stimulus to production was to come to
him in another environment.
[Footnote 63: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 200.]
In the spring of 1770 Goethe recovered his normal health and spirits,
and, in accordance with his father's wish, he proceeded to Strassburg
to complete his legal studies. He left home with as intense a feeling
of relief as he had left it on the previous occasion. Between him and
his father there had been growing estrangement, and the estrangement
had ended in an open quarrel when he ventured to criticise the
architecture of the paternal house, which had been constructed under
his father's own directions. Thwarted though the father had been in
his hopes of his son, however, he was not turned from his purpose of
affording him every opportunity of laying a broad foundation of
general culture. It was his express wish that Wolfgang, after
completing his studies in Strassburg, should travel in France and
spend some time in Paris.