SATIRICAL DRAMAS AND FRAGMENTS
If, during the year that followed his return from Wetzlar, Goethe was
distracted by his wandering affections, he was no less divided in mind
by his intellectual ambitions. The doubt which had possessed him since
boyhood as to whether nature meant him for an artist or a poet
remained still unsettled for him. In one of the best-known passages of
his Autobiography he has related how he sought to resolve his
difficulty. As he wandered down the banks of the Lahn, after he had
torn himself away from Wetzlar, the beauty of the scenery awoke in him
the artist's desire to transfer it worthily to canvas. The whim then
occurred to him to let fate decide whether this was the work for which
he was appointed. He would throw his knife into the river, and, if he
saw it reach the surface, he would take it as a sign that art was his
vocation. Unfortunately the oracle proved dubious. Owing to the
intervening bushes he did not see the knife enter the river, but only
the splash occasioned by its fall. As the result of the uncertainty
of the oracle, he adds, he gave himself less assiduously than hitherto
to the study of art. If this were indeed the case, it was only for a
time, since the contemporary testimony, both of himself and his
friends, shows that during the period that immediately followed his
leaving Wetzlar, art received more of his attention than literature.
Goethe, wrote Caroline Flachsland to Herder, "still thinks of becoming
a painter, and we strongly advise him to pursue that end."[133] "I am
now quite a draughtsman," he himself wrote to Herder in December of
the same year; and he tells another correspondent in the autumn of
1773 that "the plastic arts occupy him almost entirely."
[Footnote 133: November 27th, 1772.]
Yet, since his return from Strassburg to Frankfort in August, 1771,
his literary activity was never wholly intermitted. During the
remainder of that year he wrote the first draft of _Götz von
Berlichingen_, and in 1772, mainly under the inspiration of the
Darmstadt circle, he produced the poems to which attention has already
been drawn. In that year, also, he shared in an undertaking the main
object of which was to proclaim those revolutionary ideas in
literature, religion, and life that inspired the movement of the
_Sturm und Drang_. In cooperation with Herder, Merck, and Schlosser,
his future brother-in-law, and others, he conducted a journal which,
under the title of the _Frankfurter Gelehrten Anzeigen_, expounded
these views to all who chose to read it. Merck, and afterwards
Schlosser, acted as editors during the year that it existed, but
Goethe was its principal contributor. In the preliminary announcement
to the first issue (January 1st, 1772) it is stated that the reviews
of books will range over science, philosophy, history, _belles-lettres_,
and the fine arts, and particularly that no English book worthy of
notice will escape attention. Of the successive reviews that appeared,
only three are certainly known to be by Goethe, though he must have
written or assisted in writing several others. With his usual
causticity Herder characterised the manner of the two chief
contributors. "You," he tells Merck, "are always Socrates-Addison; and
Goethe is for the most part a young, arrogant lord, with horribly
scraping cock's heels, and, if I come among you some day, I shall be
the Irish Dean with his whip." Goethe himself, reviewing these early
efforts in the light of his maturity, is sufficiently modest regarding
their intrinsic merit. He had then, he says, neither the knowledge nor
the discipline requisite for adequate criticism. On the other hand, he
claims to have given evidence in his notices of books of a gift, which
no reader of them can fail to perceive--the gift of instinctive
insight into the essentials of the subject in hand. In the business of
reviewing, however, he seems to have taken little pleasure. "The day
has begun festively," he wrote to Kestner on Christmas, 1772, "but,
unfortunately, I must spoil the beautiful hours with reviewing; but I
do so with good heart, as it is for the last issue."[134]
[Footnote 134: Goethe wrote the epilogue to the last number of the
Review, of which he says to Kestner, "hat ich das Publikum und den
Verleger turlipinirt."]
To the same year, 1772, belong two short productions of Goethe which
deserve a passing notice as exhibiting his strange blending of
interests at this period. The one is entitled _Brief des Pastors zu
... an den neuen Pastor zu ..._, and professes to have been translated
from the French. The Letter is another illustration of his interest in
religion and in the interpretation of the Bible which had begun with
his early reading of the Old Testament, and which his intercourse with
the Fräulein von Klettenberg and Herder had intermittently kept alive.
The theological teaching of the Letter is, in point of fact, a
compound of the teaching of these two. Its main object is to emphasise
the necessity of toleration in the interest of religion itself, and
nowhere was the monition more needed than in Frankfort, where the
antipathy between those of the Reformed and the Lutheran communions
was such as even to debar intermarriage. Rationalism and dogmatism are
equally reprobated, and the sum of all true religion is found to
consist in the love of God and of our neighbour. The strain of
mystical piety which runs through the whole production doubtless
proceeds from imaginative sympathy and not from personal experience,
and is to be regarded only as another illustration of Goethe's
facility in identifying himself with emotions essentially alien to his
own nature. The other piece, entitled _Zwo wichtige bisher unerörterte
biblische Fragen, zum erstenmal gründlich beantwortet_, professing to
be written by a Swabian pastor, is still more singular. In the first
of the two questions he inquires whether it was the Ten Commandments
or the prescriptions of ritual that were inscribed on the tables of
stone, and concludes that it was the latter; and in the second he
discusses the nature of the speaking with tongues that followed St.
Paul's laying of hands on the newly-baptised Christians, and resolves
the question in a purely mystical sense.
The year 1773 marks an epoch in Goethe's career, and an epoch also in
the literary history of Germany. In that year he made his first appeal
as a writer to the great German public which was to follow his
successive productions with varying degrees of admiration during the
next half-century. Dissatisfied with the first draft of _Götz von
Berlichingen_ as lacking in dramatic unity, in the beginning
(February--March) of 1773 he recast the whole play, which in its new
form was published in June.[135] As has already been said, the second
form of _Götz_ is generally recognised as inferior to the first, but,
such as it was, it made the sensation we have seen. With as much truth
as Byron, Goethe might have said that "he woke one morning and found
himself famous." In 1772 he could be spoken of by an intelligent
person in Leipzig as "one named Getté," and even in the circles he
frequented he had hitherto been known simply as a youth of
extraordinary promise from whom great things were to be expected.
Henceforth his name was on the tongue of all who were interested in
German literature, and whatever he was likely to produce in the future
was certain to command universal interest.
[Footnote 135: In its new form _Götz_ was no better adapted for the
stage. "Eine angeborne Unart ist schwierig zu meistern," is Goethe's
own remark on his attempt to make it a good acting play.]
According to Merck, Goethe's head was turned for a time by the success
of _Götz_. During the months that followed its publication, at all
events, he was possessed with a wanton humour which spared neither
friends nor foes, nor the society of which he had apparently caught
the contagion as completely as any of its members. At a later date,
Goethe speaks of his "considerate levity" and his "warm
coolness";[136] and in a succession of pieces which he threw off at
this time we have an interesting commentary on this characterisation
of himself. In these pieces we have an old vein reopened. We have seen
how in Leipzig he had burlesqued the professor of literature, Clodius,
but in the years that followed his departure from Leipzig--the
depressing period in Frankfort and the period of rapid development in
Strassburg--there was neither the occasion nor the prompting to
personal or general satire. Now, however, in the tumult of his own
feelings and in the follies of the society around him he found themes
for satirical comment which afforded scope for a side of his genius
rarely manifested in his later years. The short satirical dramas
produced at this time on the mere impulse of the moment have in
themselves only a local and temporary interest, but they derive
importance from the fact that they proceed from the same mental
attitude which was to find its definitive expression in the character
of Mephistopheles--essentially the creation of this period of Goethe's
development. In these trivial exercises he was practising the craft
which is so consummately displayed in the original fragments of
_Faust_.
[Footnote 136: Ich bin wie immer der nachdenkliche Leichtsinn und die
warme Kälte.--Goethe to Sophie von la Roche, September 1st, 1780.]
The first of these sallies--_Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern,
Ein Schönbartspiel_--was written in March, 1773, and was sent as a
birthday gift to Merck--an appropriate recipient. Written in doggerel
verse, which Goethe took over from the shoemaker poet Hans Sachs, the
piece brings before us the motley crowd of persons who frequented the
fairs of the time, each vociferating the cheapness and excellence of
his own wares. The humour of the spectacle, however, is that the
_dramatis personæ_ were individuals recognisable by contemporaries in
traits which now escape us. Goethe himself appears in the guise of a
doctor, Herder as a captain of the gipsies, and his bride, Caroline
Flachsland, as a milkmaid. The satire is directed equally against the
idiosyncrasies of individuals and against the follies of the time, the
sentimentalism which Goethe himself had not escaped, but of which he
saw the inanity, the petty jealousies of authors which had also come
within his personal experience. A mock tragedy on the subject of
Esther, which forms part of the burlesque, is a malicious parody of
the French models which he had begun by imitating, but which were now
the sport of the youths who led the _Sturm und Drang_.
The _Jahrmarktsfest_ is a genial explosion of madcap humour. Not so
another succession of scenes produced about the same time. The subject
of them is that Leuchsenring whose acquaintance, we have seen, Goethe
had made under the roof of Sophie von la Roche. Since then,
apparently, Leuchsenring's proceedings had provoked a repugnance in
Goethe which displays itself in a strain of bitterness hardly to be
found in any other of his works. It was Leuchsenring's habit to
ingratiate himself with households where his pseudo-sentiment made him
acceptable, and by questionable methods to make mischief between their
members, and especially between the two sexes.[137] Goethe had seen
the results of these intrigues in circles with which he was
acquainted, and it was to punish the sinner that he wrote _Ein
Fastnachtspiel, auch wohl zu tragieren nach Ostern, vom Pater Brey dem
falschen Propheten_. Pater Brey, the false prophet, is Leuchsenring,
and his sugared speech and shifty ways are the main object of the
satire, but other persons are introduced into the piece and exhibited
in lights which are a singular commentary on the taste of the time.
The victim on whom Pater Brey plies his arts is Caroline Flachsland,
who appears under the name of Leonora, and the injured lover is Herder
(Captain Velandrino).[138] The Captain, who has been informed of Pater
Brey's philanderings with his betrothed, appears on the scene, is
assured of her faithfulness, and in concert with another character in
the piece (Merck) plays a coarse trick on the Pater which makes him
the laughing-stock of the neighbourhood.
[Footnote 137: A quarrel had arisen between Merck and Leuchsenring,
and Goethe had warmly taken Merck's side.]
[Footnote 138: As we have seen, Herder was jealous of Goethe's own
attentions to Caroline.]
Herder had good reason to resent the licence with which his private
affairs had been obtruded on the public in _Pater Brey_,[139] but in
the same year Goethe made him the main subject of another production
which raises equally our astonishment at the manners of the time and
at the wanton audacity of its author. In _Pater Brey_ the prevailing
sentimentalism, as veiling dubious motives, had been the theme of
ridicule; in _Satyros, oder der vergötterte Waldteufel_, it was the
extravagancies of the followers of Rousseau in their idealisation of
the natural man. According to Kestner, as we have seen, Goethe himself
greatly admired Rousseau, but was not one of his blind worshippers,
and _Satyros_ is a sufficiently cogent proof of the fact. What is
astounding is the means he chose to give point to his ridicule. Herder
is Satyros, the Waldteufel,[140] who is represented as being humanely
received by a hermit (Merck) while suffering from a wounded leg.
Satyros requites his host with coarse abuse of himself and his
religion, flings his crucifix into the neighbouring stream, and steals
a valuable piece of linen cloth. Next by an enchanting melody he
cajoles two maidens, Arsinoë and Psyche (Caroline Flachsland), into
the belief that he is a superhuman being, and Psyche is so overcome
that she submits to his embraces. The people of the neighbourhood
flock to him, see in him a new god, and on his persuasion take to
eating chestnuts, as the natural food of man--the priest of the
community, Hermes, joining in their worship. The hermit appears on the
scene, and on his abusing Satyros for the theft of his crucifix, the
people decide to offer him as a sacrifice to their insulted divinity.
By a stratagem of the wife of Hermes, the hermit is rescued and the
bestiality of Satyros exposed. In no way disconcerted, Satyros leaves
the throng with flouts at their asinine attachment to their
conventional morality as opposed to the free life inculcated by
nature. Goethe's later comment on this remarkable production is that
it was "a document of the godlike insolence of our youth," and
certainly no document could bring more vividly before us the world in
which Goethe's genius came to fruition.[141]
[Footnote 139: It was published in the autumn of the following year,
1774.]
[Footnote 140: W. Scherer was the first to identify Herder with
Satyros.]
[Footnote 141: _Satyros_ was not published till 1814, after Herder's
death, but he was aware of its existence.]
Still another piece of the "godlike insolence of youth," though less
offensive in its implications, is the farce, _Götter, Helden, und
Wieland_, written in the autumn of the same year, 1773. At an earlier
period Wieland had been one of the gods of Goethe's idolatry, but
Wieland was now the most distinguished champion of those French models
against which Goethe and the youths associated with him had declared
irreconcilable war. Moreover, in a journal recently started by
Wieland, there had appeared an unfriendly review of _Götz von
Berlichingen_. By the publication of a play, _Alceste_, in which he
foolishly challenged comparison with Euripides' drama of the same
name, Wieland gave the enemy his opportunity. On a Sunday afternoon,
with a bottle of Burgundy beside him, as he tells us, Goethe tossed
off his skit at one sitting. As a piece of improvisation, it certainly
contains excellent fooling. We are introduced to the lower world,
where the four characters in Euripides' play, Admetus, Alcestis,
Hercules, and Mercury, as well as its author, are represented as in a
state of high indignation at the liberties which Wieland has taken
with them in his _Alcestes_. Summoned before them, Wieland appears in
his nightcap, and has to run the gauntlet of their several
reproaches--the purport of them all being that he has foolishly
misunderstood the Greek world which he had undertaken to portray.
Against Goethe's wish the satire was published in the following year,
and rapidly ran through four editions, but Wieland had a genteel
revenge. With that _Lebensweisheit_ which Goethe long afterwards
marked as his characteristic, he published in his review a notice of
the burlesque, in which it is recommended as "a masterpiece of
persiflage and of sophistical wit." "Wieland has turned the tables on
me," was Goethe's own admission; "Ich bin eben prostituiert."[142]
[Footnote 142: Max Morris, _op. cit._ iv. 81.]
These successive _jeux d'esprit_ were merely the crackling fireworks
of exuberant youth, and were regarded as such by their author himself.
At the very time he was writing them, he was planning and sketching
works, the scope of which reveals the true bent of his genius, and of
the ideals that were preoccupying him. "My ideals," he wrote to
Kestner (September 15th, 1773), "grow daily in beauty and grandeur";
and when he penned these words he was engaged on a production which,
though it remained a mere fragment, has justly been regarded as one of
the most striking manifestations of his powers. The subject, the myth
of Prometheus, he tells us, attracted him as one in which he could
embody his own deepest experience and the conclusions regarding the
individual life of man to which that experience had led him. In the
crises of his past life, he tells us, he had found that no aid had
been forthcoming either from man or any supernal power. "We must tread
the wine-press alone." Only in one source had he discovered a
stay and stimulus, which brought him the sense of individual
self-subsistence--in the exercise of such creative talent as nature
had bestowed upon him. Of this consciousness, no external power could
deprive him, and it is this consciousness that is the governing idea
of the fragment, and not the Titanism of the Prometheus of Æschylus.
It was, moreover, an idea which permanently accompanied Goethe
throughout life, and to which he frequently gave expression in his
later correspondence.[143]
[Footnote 143: The following passage from an article in the _Hibbert
Journal_, by M. Bergson (October, 1911, pp. 42-3), is an interesting
commentary on Goethe's conception: "If, then, in every province the
triumph of life is expressed by creation, might we not think that the
ultimate reason of human life is a creation which, in distinction from
that of the artist or man of science, can be pursued at every moment
and by all men alike; I mean the creation of self by self, the
continual enrichment of personality, by elements which it does not
draw from outside, but causes to spring forth from itself?"]
As, apart from its intrinsic power, _Prometheus_ has an incidental
interest in the history of philosophic thought, it may be worth while
to sketch briefly the development it attained. When Prometheus is
introduced to us, he is a rebel against Zeus and the other gods. He
had rendered them allegiance so long as he believed that "they saw the
past and the future in the present and were animated by
self-originated and disinterested wisdom," but, on the discovery of
his error, he had renounced their authority, and, as an independent
agent, he had fashioned images of human beings, to which, however, he
was powerless to give the breath of life. In the first Scene of the
first Act, Mercury appears as the messenger of the gods and reasons
with Prometheus on the folly of his contending with their omnipotence.
Prometheus denies their omnipotence either over nature or over
himself. "Can they separate me from myself?" he asks, and Mercury
admits that the gods are subject to a power stronger than their
own--the power of Fate. "Go, then," is the reply, "I do not serve
vassals." After a brief soliloquy, in which Prometheus expresses the
passionate wish that he might impart feeling to his lifeless images,
Epimetheus appears as a second representative of the gods. Their
offer, he tells Prometheus, is reasonable; let him but recognise their
supremacy, and he will be free of the heights of Olympus, from which
he would rule the earth. "Yes," is the reply, "to be their burggrave,
and defend their Heaven! My offer is more reasonable; their wish is to
be a partner with me, and my thought is to have nothing to
participate with them; they cannot rob me of what I have, and what
they have, let them guard. Here is mine, and here is thine, and so are
we apart." "But what is thine?" inquires Epimetheus; and the reply is,
"The circle which my activity fulfils--_Der Kreis, den meine
Wirklichkeit erfüllt_." And here follows one of the passages in the
dialogue which, as expressing the pantheistic conception of the
universe, gave occasion to the quarrel of the philosophers, to be
presently noted. "Thou standest alone," is the comment of Epimetheus
on the claim to independent self-subsistence asserted by Prometheus;
"thou standest alone; thy self-will fails to appreciate the bliss of
the gods--thou, thine, the world and heaven, all feel themselves one
intimate whole." Repelled like Mercury, Epimetheus departs, and
Minerva, in whom Prometheus acknowledges his sole inspirer and
instructress, appears. Minerva, who declares that she honours her
father Zeus and loves Prometheus, repeats the offer of Zeus to animate
the clay images if Prometheus will acknowledge his sovereignty; but
when Prometheus passionately refuses to accept the offer, she bursts
forth: "And they shall live! to fate and not to the gods it pertains
to bestow life and to take it. Come, I conduct thee to the source of
all life, which Jupiter may not close against us. They shall live, and
through thee!"
Of the second Act only two Scenes were written. In the first, Mercury,
proclaiming in Olympus that Minerva has given life to the clay images
of Prometheus, calls on Zeus to destroy the new creatures with his
thunder. Zeus calmly replies that they will only increase the number
of his servants, and Mercury, changing his tone, prays that he may be
sent to "the poor earthborn folk," to announce the goodness and wisdom
of the father of all. "Not yet," is the reply. "In the newborn rapture
of youth they dream that they are like unto the gods. Not till they
need thee will they listen to thy words. Leave them to their own
life!" In the second Scene, we see Prometheus in a valley at the base
of Olympus, surrounded by the new race of animated beings engaged in
business or pleasure. There follow three brief Scenes which are meant
to depict the dawnings of human consciousness and the conditions under
which life is to be lived. To one he shows how a hut to shelter him
may be constructed with the branches he has lopped with the aid of an
implement of stone. In a dispute between two men, one of whom wounds
the other and steals his goat, Prometheus pronounces the judgment that
the hand of the offender will be against every man, and every man's
hand against him. In the third and last Scene we have the most
remarkable passage in the poem. Pandora, Prometheus' favourite
creation, in dismay and bewilderment, describes the strange
experience she has witnessed in the case of a friend, another maiden,
and Prometheus tells her that what she had seen was death. What death
meant Prometheus explains in the following passage, charged with the
sensuous mysticism which was one of the elements of Goethe's own
experiences when he wrote it:--
Wenn aus dem innerst tiefsten Grunde
Du ganz erschüttert alles fühlst,
Was Freud' und Schmerzen jemals dir ergossen,
[Transcriber's Note: corrected error "and" for "und"]
Im Sturm dein Herz erschwillt,
In Tränen sich erleichtern will
Und seine Glut vermehrt,
Und alles klingt an dir und bebt und zittert,
Und all die Sinne dir vergehn,
Und du dir zu vergehen scheinst
Und sinkst,
Und alles um dich her versinkt in Nacht,
Und du, in inner eigenstem Gefühl,
Umfassest eine Welt;
Dann stirbt der Mensch.
When from thy inmost being's depths
Shattered to nought thou feelest all
Of joy and woe that e'er to thee hath flowed,
In storm thy heart hath swelled,
In tears doth find itself relief,
And doth its flow increase;
When all within thee thrills, and quakes, and quivers,
And all thy senses from thee part,
And from thyself thou seem'st to part,
And sink'st,
And all around thee sinketh deep in night,
And thou within thy inner very self
Encompassest a world;
Then dies the man.
To these two Acts Goethe subsequently added, as the opening of a third
Act, a soliloquy of Prometheus, written in the following year. In this
soliloquy Prometheus appears as the sheer Titan, the burden of his
defiance being that Zeus merits no worship from men to whose miseries
he is deaf, and that such worship as he receives proceeds only from
human folly and ignorance.[144] By its protest against the conception
of the mechanical god who "pushes the universe from without," and by
the Spinozistic pantheism which it implicitly proclaims, the ode
dismayed the more timid spirits of the time. To the horror of Fritz
Jacobi, Lessing, to whom he read it in manuscript in 1780, declared
that its conception of the [Greek: hen kai pan] was his own;[145] and
when, in 1785, Jacobi published the poem without Goethe's knowledge, a
controversy arose in which Lessing was charged with atheism and
pantheism, and which, as Goethe records, cost the life of one of the
combatants, Moses Mendelssohn.[146] Be it said that in his old age
Goethe himself came to regard the sentiments of the soliloquy as
_sansculottisch_, and in the time of reaction of the Holy Alliance
forbade the publication of the fragment as likely to be received as an
evangel by the revolutionary youth of Germany.[147]
[Footnote 144: Viktor Hehn pointed out that the drama and the ode are
inspired by different motives, and that it was in forgetfulness that
Goethe associated them.--_Über Goethe's Gedichte_, p. 160.
Bielschowsky (_Goethe, Sein Leben und Seine Werke_, i. 510) suggests
that the ode may have been intended as the opening of Act ii.]
[Footnote 145: Sir Frederick Pollock dates "modern Spinozism" from
this incident.--_Spinoza: His Life and Opinions_ (London, 1880), p.
390.]
[Footnote 146: While writing a defence of his friend Lessing against
the charge of atheism, Mendelssohn's mental agitation was such that it
was believed to have occasioned his death.]
[Footnote 147: Turgenieff relates that on translating passages from
_Satyros_ and _Prometheus_ to Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, and
Daudet, all three were profoundly impressed by the range and power
displayed in them.]
To the same period as _Prometheus_ belongs another fragment, inspired
by an equally grandiose conception, which, like so many others with
Goethe, was never to be realised. The theme of the projected drama was
to be the career of Mahomet, and in his Autobiography Goethe has
indicated the leading ideas it was to embody. Contrary to the
prevailing opinion, which had received brilliant expression in
Voltaire's play on the same subject, Mahomet was to be represented not
as an impostor but as a prophet sincerely convinced of the truth of
his message, and inflamed with a disinterested desire to give his
countrymen a purer religion--a view of Mahomet, it may be said in
passing, which Goethe's disciple, Carlyle, was among the first to
proclaim in this country.[148] The successive actions of the prophet
were to illustrate the influence which character and genius combined
have exercised on the destiny of men; but they were also to illustrate
how the idealist in his contact with actualities is forced, in spite
of himself, to compromise the purity of his original message, and, in
consequence, to deteriorate in his own personal character.[149] Of the
projected drama we have only two scenes, and a lyric in glorification
of Mahomet which was to be sung by two of the characters. In contrast
to _Prometheus_, not pantheism but monotheism, and not rebellion but
submission, were to be the animating creed and motive of the
protagonist. In the first of the two Scenes he addresses in succession
the great heavenly lights, but in their mutability he finds no stay or
solace for mind and heart, and he turns to the creator of them all.
"Uplift thee, loving heart, to the creating One! Be thou my Lord, my
God! Thou, all-loving One, Thou who didst create earth, heaven, and
me." In the second Scene we have a dialogue between Mahomet and his
foster-mother, Fatima, in which he communicates the religious
experiences which it was to be his mission to proclaim to his people;
and the manner in which Fatima receives them indicates the
difficulties he would have to encounter in his _rôle_ as prophet. "He
is changed; his nature is transformed; his understanding has suffered.
Better it is that I should restore him to his kinsfolk, than that I
should draw the responsibility of evil consequences upon myself." But,
as in the case of _Prometheus_, it is in the lyric that was to form
part of the drama that we have the most arresting expression of the
poet's genius--another proof of the fact that at this period it was in
the lyric that Goethe found the most adequate utterance for what was
deepest in his nature. In a rush of unrhymed, irregular measures it
describes the course of a river (the Rhine was in the poet's mind)
from its source on the mountain summit, its impetuous progress among
the obstacles that bar its passage, its gradually broadening current
as it sweeps through the plains, undelayed by shady valley or by the
flowers that adorn its banks; and finally losing itself in the ocean
with all its tributary streams.
[Footnote 148: It is one of the ironies of Goethe's literary career
that, in his later years, in the period of his reaction against the
formlessness that had invaded German literature, he, with the approval
of Schiller, translated Voltaire's _Mahomet_, and staged it in
Weimar.]
[Footnote 149: It is this conception, as he himself tells us, that
Renan applied to the life and teaching of Jesus.]
As sung by Ali and Fatima on the death of Mahomet, the ode was an
allegory of his life from its beginning to its triumphant close when
he passed from the present with the consciousness that he had won to
his faith the nation from which he had sprung. But it also undoubtedly
expressed the aspiration of the poet himself. The ambition to impress
himself on the world, and the consciousness of powers to give effect
to his ambition, were indeed the ruling impulses behind all his
distracted activities. But he was thwarted in his ambition alike by
external circumstances and by his own temperament, and there came
occasions when he was disposed to accept failure as his wisest choice.
In two poems of this period he gives expression to this mood, and the
necessity for overcoming it. In the one, _Adler und Taube_, a young
eagle is wounded by a fowler, but after three days recovers, though
with disabled wings. Two doves alight near the spot, and one of them
addresses soothing words to the crippled king of the birds. "Thou art
in sorrow," he coos; "be of good courage, friend! hast thou not here
all that peaceful bliss requires?... O friend, true happiness is
content, and everywhere content has enough." "O wise one," spoke the
eagle, and, moved to deep earnest, sinks more deeply into himself; "O
wisdom! thou speakest like a dove." In the other poem, _Künstlers
Erdewallen_ ("The Artist's Earthly Pilgrimage"), composed in the form
of a dialogue, we have equally a draft from Goethe's own experience.
To provide for his family needs, the artist is forced to prostitute
his genius by painting pictures for the vulgar _connoisseur_, and he
desponds at the prospect of a life spent under such conditions, but
the muse whispers consolation: "Thou hast time enough to take delight
in thyself, and in every creation which thy brush lovingly depicts."
It was a consolation which at this time and at other periods of his
life Goethe had to take home to himself.