"When I look back," said Goethe, "on my early and middle life, and now
in my old age reflect how few of those remain who were young with me,
life seems to me like a summer residence in a watering-place. When we
first arrive, we form friendships with those who have already spent some
time there, and must be gone the next week. The loss is painful, but we
connect ourselves with the second generation of visitors, with whom we
spend some time and become dearly intimate; but these also depart, and
we are left alone with a third set, who arrive just as we are preparing
for our departure, in whom we feel little or no interest."
Goethe thought that a knowledge of the universe must be _innate_ with
some poets. (It seems to have been so with Shakspeare.) He says he wrote
"Goetz von Berlichingen" when he was a young inexperienced man of
two-and-twenty. "Ten years later," he adds, "I stood astonished at the
truth of my own delineation; I had never beheld or experienced the like,
therefore the knowledge of these multifarious aspects of human nature I
must have possessed through a kind of anticipation."
Yes; the "kind of anticipation" through which Joanna Baillie conceived
and wrote her noble tragedies. Where did she, whose life was pure and
"retired as noontide dew," find the dark, stern, terrible elements, out
of which she framed the delineations of character and passion in De
Montfort, Ethwald, Basil, Constantine?--where but in her own prophetic
heart and genius?--in that intuitive, almost unconscious revelation of
the universal nature, which makes the poet, and not experience or
knowledge. Joanna Baillie, whose most tender and refined, and womanly
and christian spirit never, I believe, admitted an ungentle thought of
any living being, created De Montfort, and gave us the physiology of
Hatred; and might well, like Goethe, stand astonished at the truth of
her own delineation.
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