INFLUENCE OF MERCK AND THE DARMSTADT CIRCLE
1772
Specially associated with _Götz von Berlichingen_, but associated also
with Goethe's general development at this time, was another of those
mentors whose counsel and stimulus were necessary to him at all
periods of his life. This was Johann Heinrich Merck, the son of an
apothecary in Darmstadt and now Paymaster of the Forces there. Of
Merck Goethe says that "he had the greatest influence on my life," and
he makes him the subject of one of his elaborate character sketches in
his Autobiography. To men of original nature, however discordant with
his own, Goethe was always attracted. We have seen him in more or less
close relations with Behrisch, Jung Stilling, and Herder, from all of
whom he was divided by dissonances which made a perfect mutual
understanding impossible. So it was in the case of Merck, as Goethe's
references to him in his Autobiography and elsewhere clearly imply. In
Merck there was apparently a mixture of conflicting elements which
made him a mystery to his friends, and his suicide at the age of fifty
points to something morbid in his nature. Of his real goodness of
heart and of his genuine admiration for what he considered worthy of
it, his own reported sayings and the testimony of others leave us in
no doubt. Recording his impression of Goethe after a few interviews,
he wrote: "I begin to have a real affection for Goethe. He is a man
after my own heart, as I have found few." On the other hand, there
were traits in him which Goethe did not scruple to call
Mephistophelian--an opinion shared even by Goethe's mother, whose
nature it was to see the best side of men and things. His variable
humour and caustic tongue made him at once a terror and an attraction
in whatever society he moved, and it is evident from the tone of
Goethe's reminiscences of him that his intercourse with Merck was a
mixed pleasure. But, as we have seen, it was an abiding principle of
Goethe to be repelled by no one who had something to give him, and
Merck possessed qualities and accomplishments which were of the first
importance to him in the phase through which he was now passing. Merck
was keenly interested in literature, especially in English literature,
and had all Goethe's enthusiasm for Shakespeare. Though his own
original productions were of mediocre quality, he had an insight into
the character and genius of others which Goethe fully recognised and
to which he acknowledges his special obligation. His general attitude
in criticism was "negative and destructive," but this attitude was
entirely wholesome for Goethe at a period when instinct and passion
tended to overbear his judgment. With admirable penetration he saw how
Goethe during these Frankfort years occasionally wasted his powers in
attempts which were unworthy of his gifts and alien to his real
nature. It was in reference to these futile tendencies that Merck gave
him counsel in words which subsequent critics have recognised as the
most adequate definition of the essential characteristic of Goethe's
genius as a poet. "Your endeavour, your unswerving aim," he wrote, "is
to give poetic form to the real. Others seek to realise the so-called
poetic, the imaginative; and the result is nothing but stupid
nonsense." Like subsequent critics, also, Merck saw the superiority of
the first draft of _Götz_ to the second, but when the latter was
completed, he played a friend's part. "It is rubbish and of no
account," was his characteristic remark; "however, let the thing be
printed";[108] and published it was, Merck bearing the cost of
printing and Goethe supplying the paper.
[Footnote 108: Eckermann, _Gespräche mit Goethe_, November 9th, 1824.]
It was towards the close of 1771 that Goethe had made Merck's
acquaintance[109] on the occasion of a visit Merck had paid to
Frankfort; and in March of the following year, in company with the
younger Schlosser, they renewed their intercourse in Darmstadt, where
Merck was settled. The visit lasted a few days, and was of some
importance, as it introduced Goethe to a society of which he was to
see much during the remainder of his stay in Frankfort, and which,
according to his own testimony, "invigorated and widened his powers."
It was a society in which we are surprised to find the Mephistophelian
Merck the leading and most admired member. It consisted of a group of
men and women associated with the Court at Darmstadt, whose bond of
union was the cult of sensibility as the rising generation of Germany
had learned it from Rousseau, Richardson, and Sterne. They went by the
name of the _Gemeinschaft der Heiligen_, and the fervours of the
community were at least those of genuine votaries. So far as Goethe is
concerned, it was in three of the priestesses, one of them Caroline
Flachsland, the betrothed of Herder, that he found the attraction of
the society. For the youth who two years later was to give classic
expression to the cult of sensibility in his _Werther_, his
intercourse with these ladies of Darmstadt was an appropriate
schooling. For their sensibilities were boundless, and they did not
shrink from giving them expression. Caroline relates to her future
husband how one night in the woods she fell on her knees at sight of
the moon and arranged some glow-worms in her hair so that their loves
might not be disturbed. On one occasion when Merck and Goethe met two
of the coterie, one of them embraced Merck with kisses and the other
fell upon his breast. Goethe was not a youth to be indifferent to such
favours, and the attentions of Caroline were such as to disquiet
Herder and to occasion an estrangement between the two friends which
lasted for nearly two years.
[Footnote 109: It was Schlosser who had made Goethe and Merck
acquainted. Herder, to whom Merck was known, had been a previous
intermediary.]
From the effusive Caroline herself we learn the impression Goethe made
on the precious circle. "A few days ago" (in the beginning of March,
1772), she writes to Herder, "I made the acquaintance of your friend
Goethe and Herr Schlosser.... Goethe is such a good-hearted, lively
creature, without any parade of learning, and has made such a to-do
with Merck's children that my heart has quite gone out to him.... The
second afternoon we spent in a pleasant stroll and over a bowl of
punch in our house. We were not sentimental, but very merry, and
Goethe and I danced a minuette to the piano. Thereafter he recited an
excellent ballad of yours [the Scottish ballad _Edward_, translated by
Herder]." On the occasion of a later visit (April) of Goethe to
Darmstadt, she again writes to Herder: "Our Goethe has come on foot
from Frankfort[110] on a visit to Merck. We have been together every
day, and once, when we had gone together into the wood, we were soaked
to the skin. We took refuge under a tree, and Goethe sang a little
song, 'Under the Greenwood Tree,' which you translated from
Shakespeare. Our common plight made us very confidential. He read
aloud to us some of the best scenes from his _Gottfried von
Berlichingen_.... Goethe is choke-full of songs. One about a hut built
out of the ruins of a temple is excellent.[111] ... The poor fellow
told my sister and myself a day ago that he had already been once in
love, but that the girl had played with him for a whole year and then
deserted him.[112] He believed, however, that she really loved him,
but another had appeared on the scene, and he was made a goose of."
[Footnote 110: A six hours' walk.]
[Footnote 111: The poem, entitled _Der Wanderer_, noted below.]
[Footnote 112: The girl meant was no doubt Käthchen Schönkopf.]
Under the inspiration of these caressing attentions Goethe's muse
could not be silent, and in the course of the spring and autumn he
threw off a succession of pieces which are the classical expression of
the sentimentalism of the period. To the three ladies-in-chief, under
the pseudonyms of Urania, Lila, and Psyche (Caroline Flachsland), he
successively addressed odes in which he gave them back their own
emotions with interest. Their inspiration is sufficiently suggested by
these lines which conclude the lines entitled _Elysium, an Uranien_:--
Seligkeit! Seligkeit!
Eines Kusses Gefühl.
In all the three poems we have another illustration of Goethe's
susceptibility to immediate influences. Under the inspiration of
Friederike's simplicity he had written lyrics which were as pure in
form as direct in feeling. Now we have him indulging in a vein of
artificial sentiment, which, it might have been supposed, he had for
ever left behind as the result of his schooling in Strassburg.
In two pieces belonging to the same period, however, is revealed in
fullest measure the true self of the poet, with all the emotional and
intellectual preoccupations which he had brought with him from
Strassburg. Of the one, _Wanderers Sturmlied_, he has given in his
Autobiography an account which is fully borne out by the character of
the poem itself. It was composed, he tells us, in a terrific storm on
one of his restless journeys between Frankfort and Darmstadt, and at a
time when the memory of Friederike was still haunting him. Of
Friederike, however, there is no direct suggestion in the poem; from
first to last it is a pæan of the _Sturm und Drang_, composed in a
form directly imitated from Pindar, whom he had been ardently studying
since his return to Frankfort. The theme is the glorification of
genius--genius in its upwelling and original force as manifest in
Pindar, not as in poets like Anacreon and Theocritus. He who is in
possession of this genius is armed against all the powers of nature
and fate, and his end can only be crowned with victory. Goethe himself
calls the poem a _Halbunsinn_, and one of his most sympathetic
critics--Viktor Hehn--admits that to follow its drift requires some
labour and some creative phantasy on the part of the reader.[113] But
it is not its poetical merit that gives the poem its chief interest;
it is to be taken, as it was meant, as a profession of the poet's
literary faith at the period when it was written, and as such it is a
historic document of the _Sturm und Drang_--at once an illustration
and an exposition of its motives and ideals. "All this," is Goethe's
mature comment on this and other productions of the same period, "was
deeply and genuinely felt, but often expressed in a one-sided and
unbalanced way."
[Footnote 113: _Über Goethe's Gedichte_ (1911), p. 157.]
Of far higher poetic value is the second poem, _Der Wanderer_,[114] in
which Matthew Arnold found "the power of Greek radiance" which Goethe
could give to his handling of nature. The scene of the poem is in
southern Italy, near Cumæ. The Wanderer, wearied by his travel under
the noonday sun, comes upon a woman by the wayside whom he asks where
he may quench his thirst. She conducts him through the neighbouring
thicket, when an architrave, half-buried in the moss, and bearing an
effaced inscription, catches his eye. They reach the woman's hut,
which he finds to have been constructed from the stones of a ruined
temple. Asleep in the hut is the woman's infant son, whom she leaves
in the arms of the Wanderer, while she goes to fetch water from the
spring. She presses on him a piece of bread, the only food she has to
offer, and invites him to remain till the return of her husband to the
evening meal. He refuses her hospitality, and resumes his journey to
Cumæ, his destination. Such is the outline of the poem, which is in
the form of a dialogue, in the irregular measure common to the odes
above mentioned. But in the _Wanderer_ there is nothing dithyrambic;
rather its characteristic is a reflective repose, which is in strange
contrast to the tumultuous outpouring of the _Wanderers Sturmlied_,
and which might induce us to assign its production to a later day in
Goethe's life, to the period of his sojourn in Italy, when years had
somewhat chastened him, and when he was under the spell of the
artistic remains of classical antiquity. Of the finest inspiration is
the contrast between the remarks of the peasant woman wholly engrossed
in the immediate needs of the day, and the speculations of the
Wanderer as he comes upon the ruins that time has wrought upon the
choicest works of man's hand. Here we are far from all vapid and
artificial sentiment; we have philosophical meditation proceeding from
the profoundest source of the pathos of human life, the transitoriness
of man and his works. Completely in accord with the philosophy of his
ripest years, however, the poet finds no ground for melancholy regrets
in the spectacle of nature triumphing over man's handiwork. Even in
her work of corrosion she provides for the welfare of her children; in
a home reared out of a ruined temple happy human lives are spent. And
it is in the spirit of the broadest humanity--a spirit that marks him
off from the sentimentalists of the Darmstadt circle--that he regards
the "ruins of time."
[Footnote 114: On account of his constant travels between Frankfort
and Darmstadt, Goethe was known among his friends as the _Wanderer_.
The poem was written in the autumn, during Goethe's residence in
Wetzlar.]
Natur! du ewig keimende,
Schaffst jeden zum Genuss des Lebens,
Hast deine Kinder alle mütterlich
Mit Erbteil ausgestattet, einer Hütte.
Nature! eternal engenderer,
Thou bring'st forth thy children for the joy of living,
With care all maternal thou providest
Each with his portion, with his cottage.
In reading this poem we feel the force of the words of the younger
Schlosser in which he records his impression of Goethe at the moment
when both first made the acquaintance of the Darmstadt society. "I
shall be accompanied (to Darmstadt)," he wrote, "by a young friend of
the highest promise who, through his strenuous endeavours to purify
his soul, without unnerving it, is to me worthy of special
honour."[115] The purification had indeed begun, but Goethe had to
pass through many fires before the purification was complete. One such
fire was immediately awaiting him.
[Footnote 115: Biedermann, _op. cit._ i. 19-20.]