GOETHE

John Wolfgang von Goethe, a man of commanding influence in the

literature of modern Germany throughout the latter half of his long

life, and possessing two separate claims upon our notice; one in

right of his own unquestionable talents; and another much stronger,

though less direct, arising out of his position, and the

extravagant partisanship put forward on his behalf for the last

forty years. The literary body in all countries, and for reasons

which rest upon a sounder basis than that of private jealousies,

have always been disposed to a republican simplicity in all that

regards the assumption of rank and personal pretensions. _Valeat

quantum valere potest_, is the form of license to every man's

ambition, coupled with its caution. Let his influence and authority

be commensurate with his attested value; and, because no man in the

present infinity of human speculation, and the present multiformity

of human power, can hope for more than a very limited superiority,

there is an end at once to all _absolute_ dictatorship. The

dictatorship in any case could be only _relative_, and in

relation to a single department of art or knowledge; and this for a

reason stronger even than that already noticed, viz., the vast

extent of the field on which the intellect is now summoned to

employ itself. That objection, as it applies only to the

_degree_ of the difficulty, might be met by a corresponding

degree of mental energy; such a thing may be supposed, at least.

But another difficulty there is, of a profounder character, which

cannot be so easily parried. Those who have reflected at all upon

the fine arts, know that power of one kind is often inconsistent,

positively incompatible, with power of another kind. For example,

the _dramatic_ mind is incompatible with the _epic_. And

though we should consent to suppose that some intellect might arise

endowed upon a scale of such angelic comprehensiveness, as to

vibrate equally and indifferently towards either pole, still it is

next to impossible, in the exercise and culture of the two powers,

but some bias must arise which would give that advantage to the one

over the other which the right arm has over the left. But the

supposition, the very case put, is baseless, and countenanced by no

precedent. Yet, under this previous difficulty, and with regard to

a literature convulsed, if any ever was, by an almost total

anarchy, it is a fact notorious to all who take an interest in

Germany and its concerns, that Goethe did in one way or other,

through the length and breadth of that vast country, establish a

supremacy of influence wholly unexampled; a supremacy indeed

perilous in a less honorable man, to those whom he might chance to

hate, and with regard to himself thus far unfortunate, that it

conferred upon every work proceeding from his pen a sort of papal

indulgence, an immunity from criticism, or even from the appeals of

good sense, such as it is not wholesome that any man should enjoy.

Yet we repeat that German literature was and is in a condition of

total anarchy. With this solitary exception, no name, even in the

most narrow section of knowledge or of power, has ever been able in

that country to challenge unconditional reverence; whereas, with us

and in France, name the science, name the art, and we will name the

dominant professor; a difference which partly arises out of the

fact that England and France are governed in their opinions by two

or three capital cities, whilst Germany looks for its leadership to

as many cities as there are _residenzen_ and universities. For

instance, the little territory with which Goethe was connected

presented no less than two such public lights; Weimar, the

_residenz_ or privileged abode of the Grand Duke, and Jena,

the university founded by that house. Partly, however, this

difference may be due to the greater restlessness, and to the

greater energy as respects mere speculation, of the German mind.

But no matter whence arising, or how interpreted, the fact is what

we have described; absolute confusion, the "anarch old" of Milton,

is the one deity whose sceptre is there paramount; and yet

_there_ it was, in that very realm of chaos, that Goethe built

his throne. That he must have looked with trepidation and

perplexity upon his wild empire and its "dark foundations," may be

supposed. The tenure was uncertain to _him_ as regarded its

duration; to us it is equally uncertain, and in fact mysterious, as

regards its origin. Meantime the mere fact, contrasted with the

general tendencies of the German literary world, is sufficient to

justify a notice, somewhat circumstantial, of the man in whose

favor, whether naturally by force of genius, or by accident

concurring with intrigue, so unexampled a result was effected.

Goethe was born at noonday on the 28th of August, 1749, in his

father's house at Frankfort on the Maine. The circumstances of his

birth were thus far remarkable, that, unless Goethe's vanity

deceived him, they led to a happy revolution hitherto retarded by

female delicacy falsely directed. From some error of the midwife

who attended his mother, the infant Goethe appeared to be

still-born. Sons there were as yet none from this marriage;

everybody was therefore interested in the child's life; and the

panic which arose in consequence, having survived its immediate

occasion, was improved into a public resolution, (for which no

doubt society stood ready at that moment,) to found some course of

public instruction from this time forward for those who undertook

professionally the critical duties of accoucheur.

We have noticed the house in which Goethe was born, as well as the

city. Both were remarkable, and fitted to leave lasting impressions

upon a young person of sensibility. As to the city, its antiquity

is not merely venerable, but almost mysterious; towers were at that

time to be found in the mouldering lines of its earliest defences,

which belonged to the age of Charlemagne, or one still earlier;

battlements adapted to a mode of warfare anterior even to that of

feudalism or romance. The customs, usages, and local privileges of

Frankfort, and the rural districts adjacent, were of a

corresponding character. Festivals were annually celebrated at a

short distance from the walls, which had descended from a dateless

antiquity. Every thing which met the eye spoke the language of

elder ages; whilst the river on which the place was seated, its

great fair, which still held the rank of the greatest in

Christendom, and its connection with the throne of Caesar and his

inauguration, by giving to Frankfort an interest and a public

character in the eyes of all Germany, had the effect of

countersigning, as it were, by state authority, the importance

which she otherwise challenged to her ancestral distinctions. Fit

house for such a city, and in due keeping with the general scenery,

was that of Goethe's father. It had in fact been composed out of

two contiguous houses; that accident had made it spacious and

rambling in its plan; whilst a further irregularity had grown out

of the original difference in point of level between the

corresponding stories of the two houses, making it necessary to

connect the rooms of the same _suite_ by short flights of

steps. Some of these features were no doubt removed by the recast

of the house under the name of "repairs," (to evade a city bye-law,

) afterwards executed by his father; but such was the house of

Goethe's infancy, and in all other circumstances of style and

furnishing equally antique.

The spirit of society in Frankfort, without a court, a university,

or a learned body of any extent, or a resident nobility in its

neighborhood, could not be expected to display any very high

standard of polish. Yet, on the other hand, as an independent city,

governed by its own separate laws and tribunals, (that privilege of

_autonomy_ so dearly valued by ancient Greece,) and possessing

besides a resident corps of jurisprudents and of agents in various

ranks for managing the interests of the German emperor and other

princes, Frankfort had the means within herself of giving a liberal

tone to the pursuits of her superior citizens, and of cooperating

in no inconsiderable degree with the general movement of the times,

political or intellectual. The memoirs of Goethe himself, and in

particular the picture there given of his own family, as well as

other contemporary glimpses of German domestic society in those

days, are sufficient to show that much knowledge, much true

cultivation of mind, much sound refinement of taste, were then

distributed through the middle classes of German society; meaning

by that very indeterminate expression those classes which for

Frankfort composed the aristocracy, viz., all who had daily

leisure, and regular funds for employing it to advantage. It is not

necessary to add, because that is a fact applicable to all stages

of society, that Frankfort presented many and various specimens of

original talent, moving upon all directions of human speculation.

Yet, with this general allowance made for the capacities of the

place, it is too evident that, for the most part, they lay inert

and undeveloped. In many respects Frankfort resembled an English

cathedral city, according to the standard of such places seventy

years ago, not, that is to say, like Carlisle in this day, where a

considerable manufacture exists, but like Chester as it is yet. The

chapter of a cathedral, the resident ecclesiastics attached to the

duties of so large an establishment, men always well educated, and

generally having families, compose the original _nucleus_,

around which soon gathers all that part of the local gentry who,

for any purpose, whether of education for their children, or of

social enjoyment for themselves, seek the advantages of a town.

Hither resort all the timid old ladies who wish for conversation,

or other forms of social amusement; hither resort the

valetudinarians, male or female, by way of commanding superior

medical advice at a cost not absolutely ruinous to themselves; and

multitudes besides, with narrow incomes, to whom these quiet

retreats are so many cities of refuge.

Such, in one view, they really are; and yet in another they have a

vicious constitution. Cathedral cities in England, imperial cities

without manufactures in Germany, are all in an improgressive

condition. The public employments of every class in such places

continue the same from generation to generation. The amount of

superior families oscillates rather than changes; that is, it

fluctuates within fixed limits; and, for all inferior families,

being composed either of shopkeepers or of menial servants, they

are determined by the number, or, which, on a large average, is the

same, by the pecuniary power, of their employers. Hence it arises,

that room is made for one man, in whatever line of dependence, only

by the death of another; and the constant increments of the

population are carried off into other cities. Not less is the

difference of such cities as regards the standard of manners. How

striking is the soft and urbane tone of the lower orders in a

cathedral city, or in a watering place dependent upon ladies,

contrasted with the bold, often insolent, demeanor of a

self-dependent artisan or mutinous mechanic of Manchester and

Glasgow.

Children, however, are interested in the state of society around

them, chiefly as it affects their parents. Those of Goethe were

respectable, and perhaps tolerably representative of the general

condition in their own rank. An English authoress of great talent,

in her _Characteristics of Goethe_, has too much countenanced

the notion that he owed his intellectual advantages exclusively to

his mother. Of this there is no proof. His mother wins more esteem

from the reader of this day, because she was a cheerful woman, of

serene temper, brought into advantageous comparison with a husband

much older than herself, whom circumstances had rendered moody,

fitful, sometimes capricious, and confessedly obstinate in that

degree which Pope has taught us to think connected with inveterate

error:

"Stiff in opinion, always in the wrong,"

unhappily presents an association too often actually occurring in

nature, to leave much chance for error in presuming either quality

from the other. And, in fact, Goethe's father was so uniformly

obstinate in pressing his own views upon all who belonged to him,

whenever he did come forward in an attitude of activity, that his

family had much reason to be thankful for the rarity of such

displays. Fortunately for them, his indolence neutralized his

obstinacy. And the worst shape in which his troublesome temper

showed itself, was in what concerned the religious reading of the

family. Once begun, the worst book as well as the best, the longest

no less than the shortest, was to be steadfastly read through to

the last word of the last volume; no excess of yawning availed to

obtain a reprieve, not, adds his son, though he were himself the

leader of the yawners. As an illustration, he mentions Bowyer's

_History of the Popes_; which awful series of records, the

catacombs, as it were, in the palace of history, were actually

traversed from one end to the other of the endless suite by the

unfortunate house of Goethe. Allowing, however, for the father's

unamiableness in this one point, upon all intellectual ground both

parents seem to have met very much upon a level. Two illustrations

may suffice, one of which occurred during the infancy of Goethe.

The science of education was at that time making its first rude

motions towards an ampler development; and, amongst other reforms

then floating in the general mind, was one for eradicating the

childish fear of ghosts, &c. The young Goethes, as it happened,

slept not in separate beds only, but in separate rooms; and not

unfrequently the poor children, under the stinging terrors of their

lonely situation, stole away from their "forms," to speak in the

hunter's phrase, and sought to rejoin each other. But in these

attempts they were liable to surprises from the enemy; papa and

mamma were both on the alert, and often intercepted the young

deserter by a cross march or an ambuscade; in which cases each had

a separate policy for enforcing obedience. The father, upon his

general system of "perseverance," compelled the fugitive back to

his quarters, and, in effect, exhorted him to persist in being

frightened out of his wits. To his wife's gentle heart that course

appeared cruel, and she reclaimed the delinquent by bribes; the

peaches which her garden walls produced being the fund from which

she chiefly drew her supplies for this branch of the secret

service. What were her winter bribes, when the long nights would

seem to lie heaviest on the exchequer, is not said. Speaking

seriously, no man of sense can suppose that a course of suffering

from terrors the most awful, under whatever influence supported,

whether under the naked force of compulsion, or of _that_

connected with bribes, could have any final effect in mitigating

the passion of awe, connected, by our very dreams, with the shadowy

and the invisible, or in tranquillizing the infantine imagination.

A second illustration involves a great moral event in the history

of Goethe, as it was, in fact, the first occasion of his receiving

impressions at war with his religious creed. Piety is so beautiful

an ornament of the youthful mind, doubt or distrust so unnatural a

growth from confiding innocence, that an infant freethinker is

heard of not so much with disgust as with perplexity. A sense of

the ludicrous is apt to intermingle; and we lose our natural horror

of the result in wonder at its origin. Yet in this instance there

is no room for doubt; the fact and the occasion are both on record;

there can be no question about the date; and, finally, the accuser

is no other than the accused. Goethe's own pen it is which

proclaims, that already, in the early part of his seventh year, his

reliance upon God as a moral governor had suffered a violent shock,

was shaken, if not undermined. On the 1st of November, 1755,

occurred the great earthquake at Lisbon. Upon a double account,

this event occupied the thoughts of all Europe for an unusual term

of time; both as an expression upon a larger scale than usual of

the mysterious physical agency concerned in earthquakes, and also

for the awful human tragedy [Endnote: 5] Of this no picture can ever

hope to rival that hasty one sketched in the letter of the chaplain

to the Lisbon factory. The plague of Athens as painted by

Thucydides or Lucretius, nay even the fabulous plague of London by

De Foe, contain no scenes or situations equal in effect to some in

this plain historic statement. Nay, it would perhaps be difficult

to produce a passage from Ezekiel, from Aeschylus, or from

Shakspeare, which would so profoundly startle the sense of

sublimity as one or two of his incidents, which attended either

the earthquake itself, or its immediate sequel in the sudden

irruption of the Tagus. Sixty thousand persons, victims to the dark

power in its first or its second _avatar_, attested the

Titanic scale upon which it worked. Here it was that the shallow

piety of the Germans found a stumbling-block. Those who have read

any circumstantial history of the physical signs which preceded

this earthquake, are aware that in England and Northern Germany

many singular phenomena were observed, more or less manifestly

connected with the same dark agency which terminated at Lisbon, and

running before this final catastrophe at times so accurately

varying with the distances, as to furnish something like a scale

for measuring the velocity with which it moved. These German

phenomena, circulated rapidly over all Germany by the journals of

every class, had seemed to give to the Germans a nearer and more

domestic interest in the great event, than belonged to them merely

in their universal character of humanity. It is also well known to

observers of national characteristics, that amongst the Germans the

household charities, the _pieties of the hearth_, as they may

be called, exist, if not really in greater strength, yet with much

less of the usual balances or restraints. A German father, for

example, is like the grandfather of other nations; and thus a

piety, which in its own nature scarcely seems liable to excess,

takes, in its external aspect, too often an air of effeminate

imbecility. These two considerations are necessary to explain the

intensity with which this Lisbon tragedy laid hold of the German

mind, and chiefly under the one single aspect of its

_undistinguishing_ fury. Women, children, old men--these,

doubtless, had been largely involved in the perishing sixty

thousand; and that reflection, it would seem from Goethe's account,

had so far embittered the sympathy of the Germans with their

distant Portuguese brethren, that, in the Frankfort discussions,

sullen murmurs had gradually ripened into bold impeachments of

Providence. There can be no gloomier form of infidelity than that

which questions the moral attributes of the Great Being, in whose

hands are the final destinies of us all. Such, however, was the

form of Goethe's earliest scepticism, such its origin; caught up

from the very echoes which rang through the streets of Frankfort

when the subject occupied all men's minds. And such, for anything

that appears, continued to be its form thenceforwards to the close

of his life, if speculations so crude could be said to have any

form at all. Many are the analogies, some close ones, between

England and Germany with regard to the circle of changes they have

run through, political or social, for a century back. The

challenges are frequent to a comparison; and sometimes the result

would be to the advantage of Germany, more often to ours. But in

religious philosophy, which in reality is the true _popular_

philosophy, how vast is the superiority on the side of this

country. Not a shopkeeper or mechanic, we may venture to say, but

would have felt this obvious truth, that surely the Lisbon

earthquake yielded no fresh lesson, no peculiar moral, beyond what

belonged to every man's experience in every age. A passage in the

New Testament about the fall of the tower of Siloam, and the just

construction of that event, had already anticipated the difficulty,

if such it could be thought. Not to mention, that calamities upon

the same scale in the earliest age of Christianity, the fall of the

amphitheatre at Fidenae, or the destruction of Pompeii, had

presented the same problem at the Lisbon earthquake. Nay, it is

presented daily in the humblest individual case, where wrong is

triumphant over right, or innocence confounded with guilt in one

common disaster. And that the parents of Goethe should have

authorized his error, if only by their silence, argues a degree of

ignorance in them, which could not have co-existed with much

superior knowledge in the public mind.

Goethe, in his Memoirs, (Book VI.,) commends his father for the

zeal with which he superintended the education of his children. But

apparently it was a zeal without knowledge. Many things were taught

imperfectly, but all casually, and as chance suggested them.

Italian was studied a little, because the elder Goethe had made an

Italian tour, and had collected some Italian books, and engravings

by Italian masters. Hebrew was studied a little, because Goethe the

son had a fancy for it, partly with a view to theology, and partly

because there was a Jewish quarter, gloomy and sequestrated, in the

city of Frankfort. French offered itself no doubt on many

suggestions, but originally on occasion of a French theatre,

supported by the staff of the French army when quartered in the

same city. Latin was gathered in a random way from a daily sense of

its necessity. English upon the temptation of a stranger's

advertisement, promising upon moderate terms to teach that language

in four weeks; a proof, by the way, that the system of bold

innovations in the art of tuition had already commenced. Riding and

fencing were also attempted under masters apparently not very highly

qualified, and in the same desultory style of application. Dancing

was taught to his family, strange as it may seem, by Mr. Goethe

himself. There is good reason to believe that not one of all these

accomplishments was possessed by Goethe, when ready to visit the

university, in a degree which made it practically of any use to

him. Drawing and music were pursued confessedly as amusements; and

it would be difficult to mention any attainment whatsoever which

Goethe had carried to a point of excellence in the years which he

spent under his father's care, unless it were his mastery over the

common artifices of metre and the common topics of rhetoric, which

fitted him for writing what are called occasional poems and

_impromptus_. This talent he possessed in a remarkable degree,

and at an early age; but he owed its cultivation entirely to

himself.

In a city so orderly as Frankfort, and in a station privileged from

all the common hardships of poverty, it can hardly be expected that

many incidents should arise, of much separate importance in

themselves, to break the monotony of life; and the mind of Goethe

was not contemplative enough to create a value for common

occurrences through any peculiar impressions which he had derived

from them. In the years 1763 and 1764, when he must have been from

fourteen to fifteen years old, Goethe witnessed the inauguration

and coronation of a king of the Romans, a solemn spectacle

connected by prescription with the city of Frankfort. He describes

it circumstantially, but with very little feeling, in his Memoirs.

Probably the prevailing sentiment, on looking back at least to this

transitory splendor of dress, processions, and ceremonial forms,

was one of cynical contempt. But this he could not express, as a

person closely connected with a German court, without giving much

and various offence. It is with some timidity even that he hazards

a criticism upon single parts of the costume adopted by some of the

actors in that gorgeous scene. White silk stockings, and pumps of

the common form, he objects to as out of harmony with the antique

and heraldic aspects of the general costume, and ventures to

suggest either boots or sandals as an improvement. Had Goethe felt

himself at liberty from all restraints of private consideration in

composing these Memoirs, can it be doubted that he would have taken

his retrospect of this Frankfort inauguration from a different

station; from the station of that stern revolution which, within

his own time, and partly under his own eyes, had shattered the

whole imperial system of thrones, in whose equipage this gay

pageant made so principal a figure, had humbled Caesar himself to

the dust, and left him an emperor without an empire? We at least,

for our parts, could not read without some emotion one little

incident of these gorgeous scenes recorded by Goethe, namely, that

when the emperor, on rejoining his wife for a few moments, held up

to her notice his own hands and arms arrayed in the antique

habiliments of Charlemagne, Maria Theresa--she whose children where

summoned to so sad a share in the coming changes--gave way to

sudden bursts of loud laughter, audible to the whole populace below

her. That laugh on surveying the departing pomps of Charlemagne,

must, in any contemplative ear, have rung with a sound of deep

significance, and with something of the same effect which belongs

to a figure of death introduced by a painter, as mixing in the

festal dances of a bridal assembly.

These pageants of 1763-64 occupy a considerable space in Goethe's

Memoirs, and with some _logical_ propriety at least, in

consideration of their being exclusively attached to Frankfort, and

connected by manifold links of person and office with the

privileged character of the city. Perhaps he might feel a sort of

narrow local patriotism in recalling these scenes to public notice

by description, at a time when they had been irretrievably

extinguished as realities. But, after making every allowance for

their local value to a Frankfort family, and for their memorable

splendor, we may venture to suppose that by far the most impressive

remembrances which had gathered about the boyhood of Goethe, were

those which pointed to Frederick of Prussia. This singular man, so

imbecile as a pretender to philosophy and new lights, so truly

heroic under misfortunes, was the first German who created a German

interest, and gave a transient unity to the German name, under all

its multiplied divisions. Were it only for this conquest of

difficulties so peculiar, he would deserve his German designation

of Fred. the Unique, (_Fritz der einzige_.) He had been

partially tried and known previously; but it was the Seven Years'

War which made him the popular idol. This began in 1756; and to

Frankfort, in a very peculiar way, that war brought dissensions and

heart-burnings in its train. The imperial connections of the city

with many public and private interests, pledged it to the

anti-Prussian cause. It happened also that the truly German

character of the reigning imperial family, the domestic habits of

the empress and her young daughters, and other circumstances, were

of a nature to endear the ties of policy; self-interest and

affection pointed in the same direction. And yet were all these

considerations allowed to melt away before the brilliant qualities

of one man, and the romantic enthusiasm kindled by his victories.

Frankfort was divided within herself; the young and the generous

were all dedicated to Frederick. A smaller party, more cautious and

prudent, were for the imperialists. Families were divided upon this

question against families, and often against themselves; feuds,

begun in private, issued often into public violence; and, according

to Goethe's own illustration, the streets were vexed by daily

brawls, as hot and as personal as of old between the Capulets and

Montagues.

These dissensions, however, were pursued with not much personal

risk to any of the Goethes, until a French army passed the Rhine as

allies of the imperialists. One corps of this force took up their

quarters in Frankfort; and the Comte Thorane, who held a high

appointment on the staff, settled himself for a long period of time

in the spacious mansion of Goethe's father. This officer, whom his

place made responsible for the discipline of the army in relation

to the citizens, was naturally by temper disposed to moderation and

forbearance. He was indeed a favorable specimen of French military

officers under the old system; well bred, not arrogant, well

informed, and a friend of the fine arts. For painting, in

particular, he professed great regard and some knowledge. The

Goethes were able to forward his views amongst German artists;

whilst, on the other hand, they were pleased to have thus an

opportunity of directing his patronage towards some of their own

needy connections. In this exchange of good offices, the two

parties were for some time able to maintain a fair appearance of

reciprocal good-will. This on the comte's side, if not particularly

warm, was probably sincere; but in Goethe the father it was a

masque for inveterate dislike. A natural ground of this existed in

the original relations between them. Under whatever disguise or

pretext, the Frenchman was in fact a military intruder. He occupied

the best suite of rooms in the house, used the furniture as his

own; and, though upon private motives he abstained from doing all

the injury which his situation authorized, (so as in particular to

have spread his fine military maps upon the floor, rather than

disfigure the decorated walls by nails,) still he claimed credit,

if not services of requital, for all such instances of forbearance.

Here were grievances enough; but, in addition to these, the comte's

official appointments drew upon him a weight of daily business,

which kept the house in a continual uproar. Farewell to the quiet

of a literary amateur, and the orderliness of a German household.

Finally, the comte was a Frenchman. These were too many assaults

upon one man's patience. It Will be readily understood, therefore,

how it happened, that, whilst Goethe's gentle minded mother, with

her flock of children, continued to be on the best terms with Comte

Thorane, the master of the house kept moodily aloof, and retreated

from all intercourse.

Goethe, in his own Memoir, enters into large details upon this

subject; and from him we shall borrow the _denouement_ of the

tale. A crisis had for some time been lowering over the French

affairs in Frankfort; things seemed ripening for a battle; and at

last it came. Flight, siege, bombardment, possibly a storm, all

danced before the eyes of the terrified citizens. Fortunately,

however, the battle took place at the distance of four or five

miles from Frankfort. Monsieur le Comte was absent, of course, on

the field of battle. His unwilling host thought that on such an

occasion he also might go out in quality of spectator; and with

this purpose he connected another, worthy of a Parson Adams. It is

his son who tells the story, whose filial duty was not proof

against his sense of the ludicrous. The old gentleman's hatred of

the French had by this time brought him over to his son's

admiration of the Prussian hero. Not doubting for an instant that

victory would follow that standard, he resolved on this day to

offer in person his congratulations to the Prussian army, whom he

already viewed as his liberator from a domestic nuisance. So

purposing, he made his way cautiously to the suburbs; from the

suburbs, still listening at each advance, he went forward to the

country; totally forgetting, as his son insists, that, however

completely beaten, the French army must still occupy some situation

or other between himself and his German deliverer. Coming, however,

at length to a heath, he found some of those marauders usually to

be met with in the rear of armies, prowling about, and at intervals

amusing themselves with shooting at a mark. For want of a better,

it seemed not improbable that a large German head might answer

their purpose. Certain signs admonished him of this, and the old

gentleman crept back to Frankfort. Not many hours after came back

also the comte, by no means creeping, however; on the contrary,

crowing with all his might for a victory which he averred himself

to have won. There had in fact been an affair, but on no very great

scale, and with no distinguished results. Some prisoners, however,

he brought, together with some wounded; and naturally he expected

all well disposed persons to make their compliments of

congratulation upon this triumph. Of this duty poor Mrs. Goethe and

her children cheerfully acquitted themselves that same night; and

Monsieur le Comte was so well pleased with the sound opinions of

the little Goethes, that he sent them in return a collection of

sweetmeats and fruits. All promised to go well; intentions, after

all, are not acts; and there certainly is not, nor ever was, any

treason in taking a morning's walk. But, as ill luck would have it,

just as Mr. Goethe was passing the comte's door, out came the comte

in person, purely by accident, as we are told; but we suspect that

the surly old German, either under his morning hopes or his evening

disappointments, had talked with more frankness than prudence.

"Good evening to you, Herr Goethe," said the comte; "you are come,

I see, to pay your tribute of congratulation. Somewhat of the

latest, to be sure; but no matter." "By no means," replied the

German;" by no means; _mit nichten_. Heartily I wished, the

whole day long, that you and your cursed gang might all go to the

devil together. "Here was plain speaking, at least. The Comte

Thorane could no longer complain of dissimulation. His first

movement was to order an arrest; and the official interpreter of

the French army took to himself the whole credit that he did not

carry it into effect. Goethe takes the trouble to report a

dialogue, of length and dulness absolutely incredible, between this

interpreter and the comte. No such dialogue, we may be assured,

ever took place. Goethe may, however, be right in supposing that,

amongst a foreign soldiery, irritated by the pointed contrasts

between the Frankfort treatment of their own wounded, and of their

prisoners who happened to be in the same circumstances, and under a

military council not held to any rigorous responsibility, his

father might have found no very favorable consideration of his

case. It is well, therefore, that after some struggle the comte's

better nature triumphed. He suffered Mrs. Goethe's merits to

outweigh her husband's delinquency; countermanded the order for

arrest, and, during the remainder of their connection, kept at such

a distance from his moody host as was equally desirable for both.

Fortunately that remainder was not very long. Comte Thorane was

soon displaced; and the whole army was soon afterwards withdrawn

from Frankfort.

In his fifteenth year Goethe was entangled in some connection with

young people of inferior rank, amongst whom was Margaret, a young

girl about two years older than himself, and the object of his

first love. The whole affair, as told by Goethe, is somewhat

mysterious. What might be the final views of the elder parties it

is difficult to say; but Goethe assures us that they used his

services only in writing an occasional epithalamium, the pecuniary

acknowledgment for which was spent jovially in a general banquet.

The magistrates, however, interfered, and endeavored to extort a

confession from Goethe. He, as the son of a respectable family, was

to be pardoned; the others to be punished. No confession, however,

could be extorted; and for his own part he declares that, beyond

the offence of forming a clandestine connection, he had nothing to

confess. The affair terminated, as regarded himself, in a severe

illness. Of the others we hear no more.

The next event of importance in Goethe's life was his removal to

college. His own wishes pointed to Goettingen, but his father

preferred Leipsic. Thither accordingly he went, but he carried his

obedience no farther. Declining the study of jurisprudence, he

attached himself to general literature. Subsequently he removed to

the university of Strasburg; but in neither place could it be said

that he pursued any regular course of study. His health suffered at

times during this period of his life; at first from an affection of

the chest, caused by an accident on his first journey to Leipsic;

the carriage had stuck fast in the muddy roads, and Goethe exerted

himself too much in assisting to extricate the wheels. A second

illness connected with the digestive organs brought him into

considerable danger.

After his return to Frankfort, Goethe commenced his career as an

author. In 1773, and the following year, he made his maiden essay

in _Goetz of Berlichingen_, a drama, (the translation of

which, remarkably enough, was destined to be the literary _coup

d'essai_ of Sir Walter Scott,) and in the far-famed

_Werther_. The first of these was pirated; and in consequence

the author found some difficulty in paying for the paper of the

genuine edition, which part of the expense, by his contract with

the publisher, fell upon himself. The general and early popularity

of the second work is well known. Yet, except in so far as it might

spread his name abroad, it cannot be supposed to have had much

influence in attracting that potent patronage which now began to

determine the course of his future life. So much we collect from

the account which Goethe himself has left us of this affair in its

earliest stages.

"I was sitting alone in my room," says he, "at my father's house in

Frankfort, when a gentleman entered, whom at first I took for

Frederick Jacobi, but soon discovered by the dubious light to be a

stranger. He had a military air; and announcing himself by the name

of Von Knebel, gave me to understand in a short explanation, that

being in the Prussian service, he had connected himself, during a

long residence at Berlin and Potsdam, with the literati of those

places; but that at present he held the appointment from the court

of Weimar of travelling tutor to the Prince Constantine. This I

heard with pleasure; for many of our friends had brought us the

most interesting accounts from Weimar, in particular that the

Duchess Amelia, mother of the young grand duke and his brother,

summoned to her assistance in educating her sons the most

distinguished men in Germany; and that the university of Jena

cooperated powerfully in all her liberal plans. I was aware also

that Wieland was in high favor; and that the German Mercury (a

literary journal of eminence) was itself highly creditable to the

city of Jena, from which it issued. A beautiful and well-conducted

theatre had besides, as I knew, been lately established at Weimar.

This, it was true, had been destroyed; but that event, under common

circumstances so likely to be fatal as respected the present, had

served only to call forth the general expression of confidence in

the young prince as a restorer and upholder of all great interests,

and true to his purposes under any calamity." Thinking thus, and

thus prepossessed in favor of Weimar, it was natural that Goethe

should be eager to see the prince. Nothing was easier. It happened

that he and his brother Constantine were at this moment in

Frankfort, and Von Knebel willingly offered to present Goethe. No

sooner said than done; they repaired to the hotel, where they found

the illustrious travellers, with Count Goertz, the tutor of the

elder.

Upon this occasion an accident, rather than any previous reputation

of Goethe, was probably the determining occasion which led to his

favor with the future sovereign of Weimar. A new book lay upon the

table; that none of the strangers had read it, Goethe inferred from

observing that the leaves were as yet uncut. It was a work of

Moser, (_Patriotische Phantasien_;) and, being political

rather than literary in its topics, it presented to Goethe,

previously acquainted with its outline, an opportunity for

conversing with the prince upon subjects nearest to his heart, and

of showing that he was not himself a mere studious recluse. The

opportunity was not lost; the prince and his tutor were much

interested, and perhaps a little surprised. Such subjects have the

further advantage, according to Goethe's own illustration, that,

like the Arabian thousand and one nights, as conducted by Sultana

Scheherezade, "never ending, still beginning," they rarely come to

any absolute close, but so interweave one into another, as still to

leave behind a large arrear of interest In order to pursue the

conversation, Goethe was invited to meet them soon after at Mentz.

He kept the appointment punctually; made himself even more

agreeable; and finally received a formal invitation to enter the

service of this excellent prince, who was now beginning to collect

around him all those persons who have since made Weimar so

distinguished a name in connection with the German literature. With

some opposition from his father, who held up the rupture between

Voltaire and Frederick of Prussia as a precedent applying to all

possible connections of princes and literati, Goethe accepted the

invitation; and hence forwards, for upwards of fifty-five years, his

fortunes were bound up with those of the ducal house of Weimar.

The noble part which that house played in the great modern drama of

German politics is well known, and would have been better known had

its power been greater. But the moral value of its sacrifices and

its risks is not the less. Had greater potentates shown equal

firmness, Germany would not have been laid at the feet of Napoleon.

In 1806 the grand duke was aware of the peril which awaited the

allies of Prussia; but neither his heart nor his conscience would

allow of his deserting a friend in whose army he held a principal

command. The decisive battle took place in his own territory, and

not far from his own palace and city of Weimar. Personally he was

with the Prussian army; but his excellent consort stayed in the

palace to encourage her subjects, and as far as possible to

conciliate the enemy by her presence. The fortune of that great

day, the 14th of October, 1806, was decided early; and the awful

event was announced by a hot retreat and a murderous pursuit

through the streets of the town. In the evening Napoleon arrived in

person; and now came the trying moment. "The duchess," says an

Englishman well acquainted with Weimar and its court, "placed

herself on the top of the staircase to greet him with the formality

of a courtly reception. Napoleon started when he beheld her, _Qui

etes vous_? he exclaimed with characteristic abruptness. _Je

suis la Duchesse de Weimar. Je vous plains_, he retorted

fiercely, J'ecraserai votre mari; he then added, 'I shall dine in

my apartment,' and rushed by her. The night was spent on the part

of the soldiery in all the horrid excesses of rapine. In the

morning the duchess sent to inquire concerning the health of his

majesty the emperor, and to solicit an audience. He, who had now

benefited by his dreams, or by his reflections, returned a gracious

answer, and invited himself to breakfast with her in her

apartment." In the conversation which ensued, Napoleon asked her if

her husband were mad, upon which she justified the duke by

appealing to his own magnanimity, asking in her turn if his majesty

would have approved of his deserting the king of Prussia at the

moment when he was attacked by so potent a monarch as himself. The

rest of the conversation was in the same spirit, uniting with a

sufficient concession to the circumstances of the moment a

dignified vindication of a high-minded policy. Napoleon was deeply

impressed with respect for her, and loudly expressed it. For her

sake, indeed, he even affected to pardon her husband, thus making a

merit with her of the necessity which he felt, from other motives,

for showing forbearance towards a family so nearly allied to that

of St. Petersburg. In 1813 the grand duke was found at his post in

that great gathering of the nations which took place on the

stupendous fields of Leipsic, and was complimented by the allied

sovereigns as one of the most faithful amongst the faithful to the

great cause, yet undecided, of national independence.

With respect to Goethe, as a councillor so near the duke's person,

it may be supposed that his presence was never wanting where it

promised to be useful. In the earlier campaigns of the duke, Goethe

was his companion; but in the final contest with Napoleon be was

unequal to the fatigues of such a post. In all the functions of

peace, however, he continued to be a useful servant to the last,

though long released from all official duties. Each had indeed most

honorably earned the gratitude of the other. Goethe had surrendered

the flower of his years and the best energies of his mind to the

service of his serene master. On the other hand, that master had to

him been at once his Augustus and his Maecenas; such is his own

expression. Under him he had founded a family, raised an estate,

obtained titles and decorations from various courts; and in the

very vigor of his life he had been allowed to retire, with all the

honors of long service, to the sanctuary of his own study, and to

the cultivation of his leisure, as the very highest mode in which

he could further the public interest.

The life of Goethe was so quiet and so uniform after the year 1775,

when he may first be said to have entered into active life, by

taking service with the Duke of Weimar, that a biographer will

find hardly any event to notice, except two journeys to Italy, and

one campaign in 1792, until he draws near the close of his long

career. It cannot interest an English reader to see the dates of

his successive appointments. It is enough to know that they soon

raised him to as high a station as was consistent with literary

leisure; and that he had from the beginning enjoyed the unlimited

confidence of his sovereign. Nothing remained, in fact, for the

subject to desire which the prince had not previously volunteered.

In 1825, they were able to look back upon a course of uninterrupted

friendship, maintained through good and evil fortunes, unexampled

in their agitation and interest for fifty years. The duke

commemorated this remarkable event by a jubilee, and by a medal in

honor of Goethe. Full of years and honor, this eminent man might

now begin to think of his departure. However, his serenity

continued unbroken nearly for two years more, when his illustrious

patron died. That shock was the first which put his fortitude to

trial. In 1830 others followed; the duchess, who had won so much

admiration from Napoleon, died; then followed his own son; and

there remained little now to connect his wishes with the earth. The

family of his patron he had lived to see flourishing in his

descendants to the fourth generation. His own grandchildren were

prosperous and happy. His intellectual labors were now

accomplished. All that remained to wish for was a gentle

dismission. This he found in the spring of 1832. After a six days'

illness, which caused him no apparent suffering, on the morning of

the 22d of March he breathed away as if into a gentle sleep,

surrounded by his daughter-in-law and her children. Never was a

death more in harmony with the life it closed; both had the same

character of deep and absolute serenity.

Such is the outline of Goethe's life, traced through its principal

events. But as these events, after all, borrow their interest

mainly from the consideration allowed to Goethe as an author, and

as a model in the German literature,--_that_ being the centre

about which all secondary feelings of interest in the man must

finally revolve,--it thus becomes a duty to throw a glance over his

principal works. Dismissing his songs, to which has been ascribed

by some critics a very high value for their variety and their

lyrical enthusiasm; dismissing also a large body of short

miscellaneous poems, suited to the occasional circumstances in

which they arose; we may throw the capital works of Goethe into two

classes, philosophic novels, and dramas. The novels, which we call

_philosophic_ by way of expressing their main characteristic

in being written to serve a preconceived purpose, or to embody some

peculiar views of life, or some aspects of philosophic truth, are

three, viz., the _Werther's Leiden_; secondly, the _Wilhelm

Meister_; and, lastly, the _Wahloer-wand-schaften_. The

first two exist in English translations; and though the

_Werther_ had the disadvantage of coming to us through a

French version, already, perhaps, somewhat colored and distorted to

meet the Parisian standards of sentiment, yet, as respects Goethe

and his reputation amongst us, this wrong has been redressed, or

compensated at least, by the good fortune of his _Wilhelm

Meister_, in falling into the hands of a translator whose

original genius qualified him for sympathizing even to excess with

any real merits in that work. This novel is in its own nature and

purpose sufficiently obscure; and the commentaries which have been

written upon it by the Hurnboldts, Schlegels, &c., make the enigma

still more enigmatical. We shall not venture abroad upon an ocean

of discussion so truly dark, and at the same time so illimitable.

Whether it be qualified to excite any deep and _sincere_

feeling of one kind or another in the German mind,--in a mind

trained under German discipline,--this we will consent to waive as

a question not immediately interesting to ourselves. Enough that it

has not gained, and will not gain, any attention in this country;

and this not only because it is thoroughly deficient in all points

of attraction to readers formed upon our English literature, but

because in some capital circumstances it is absolutely repulsive.

We do not wish to offend the admirers of Goethe; but the simplicity

of truth will not allow us to conceal, that in various points of

description or illustration, and sometimes in the very outline of

the story, the _Wilhelm Meister_ is at open war, not with

decorum and good taste merely, but with moral purity and the

dignity of human nature. As a novelist, Goethe and his reputation

are problems, and likely to continue such, to the countrymen of

Mrs. Inchbald, Miss Harriet Lee, Miss Edgeworth, and Sir Walter

Scott. To the dramatic works of Goethe we are disposed to pay more

homage; but neither in the absolute amount of our homage at all

professing to approach his public admirers, nor to distribute the

proportions of this homage amongst his several performances

according to the graduations of _their_ scale. The

_Iphigenie_ is built upon the old subject of Iphigenia in

Tauris, as treated by Euripides and other Grecian dramatists; and,

if we are to believe a Schlegel, it is in beauty and effect a mere

echo or reverberation from the finest strains of the old Grecian

music. That it is somewhat nearer to the Greek model than a play

after the fashion of Racine, we grant. Setting aside such faithful

transcripts from the antique as the Samson Agonistes, we might

consent to view Goethe as that one amongst the moderns who had made

the closest approximation to the Greek stage. _Proximus_, we

might say, with Quintilian, but with him we must add," _sed lango

intervallo_; "and if in the second rank, yet nearer to the third

than to the first. Two other dramas, the _Clavigo_ and the

_Egmont_, fall below the _Iphigenie_ by the very

character of their pretensions; the first as too openly renouncing

the grandeurs of the ideal; the second as confessedly violating the

historic truth of character, without temptation to do so, and

without any consequent indemnification. The _Tasso_ has been

supposed to realize an Italian beauty of genial warmth and of sunny

repose; but from the common defect of German criticism--the absence

of all sufficient illustrations--it is as difficult to understand

the true nature and constituents of the supposed Italian standard

set up for the regulation of our judgments, as it is to measure the

degree of approach made to that standard in this particular work.

_Eugenie_ is celebrated for the artificial burnish of the

style, but otherwise has been little relished. It has the beauty of

marble sculpture, say the critics of Goethe, but also the coldness.

We are not often disposed to quarrel with these critics as

_below_ the truth in their praises; in this instance we are.

The _Eugenie_ is a fragment, or (as Goethe himself called it

in conversation) a _torso_, being only the first drama in a

trilogy or series of three dramas, each having a separate plot,

whilst all are parts of a more general and comprehensive plan. It

may be charged with languor in the movement of the action, and with

excess of illustration. Thus, _e. g_. the grief of the prince

for the supposed death of his daughter, is the monotonous topic

which occupies one entire act. But the situations, though not those

of _scenical_ distress, are so far from being unexciting,

that, on the contrary, they are too powerfully afflicting.

The lustre of all these performances, however, is eclipsed by the

unrivalled celebrity amongst German critics of the _Faust_.

Upon this it is better to say nothing than too little. How trifling

an advance has been made towards clearing the ground for any sane

criticism, may be understood from this fact, that as yet no two

people have agreed about the meaning of any separate scene, or

about the drift of the whole. Neither is this explained by saying,

that until lately the _Faust_ was a fragment; for no

additional light has dawned upon the main question since the

publication of the latter part.

One work there is of Goethe's which falls into neither of the

classes here noticed; we mean the _Hermann and Dorothea_, a

narrative poem, in hexameter verse. This appears to have given more

pleasure to readers not critical, than any other work of its

author; and it is remarkable that it traverses humbler ground, as

respects both its subject, its characters, and its scenery. From

this, and other indications of the same kind, we are disposed to

infer that Goethe mistook his destination; that his aspiring nature

misled him; and that his success would have been greater had he

confined himself to the _real_ in domestic life, without

raising his eyes to the _ideal_.

We must also mention, that Goethe threw out some novel speculations

in physical science, and particularly in physiology, in the

doctrine of colors, and in comparative anatomy, which have divided

the opinions of critics even more than any of those questions which

have arisen upon points more directly connected with his avowed

character of poet.

It now remains to say a few words by way of summing up his

pretensions as a man, and his intellectual power in the age to

which he belonged. His rank and value as a moral being are so plain

as to be legible to him who runs. Everybody must feel that his

temperament and constitutional tendency was of that happy quality,

the animal so nicely balanced with the intellectual, that with any

ordinary measure of prosperity he could not be otherwise than a

good man. He speaks himself of his own "virtue," _sans

phrase_; and we tax him with no vanity in doing so. As a young

man even at the universities, which at that time were barbarously

sensual in Germany, he was (for so much we collect from his own

Memoirs) eminently capable of self-restraint. He preserves a tone

of gravity, of sincerity, of respect for female dignity, which we

never find associated with the levity and recklessness of vice. We

feel throughout, the presence of one who, in respecting others,

respects himself; and the cheerfulness of the presiding tone

persuades us at once that the narrator is in a healthy moral

condition, fears no ill, and is conscious of having meditated none.

Yet at the same time we cannot disguise from ourselves, that the

moral temperament of Goethe was one which demanded prosperity. Had

he been called to face great afflictions, singular temptations, or

a billowy and agitated course of life, our belief is that his

nature would have been found unequal to the strife; he would have

repeated the mixed and moody character of his father. Sunny

prosperity was essential to his nature; his virtues were adapted to

that condition. And happily that was his fate. He had no personal

misfortunes; his path was joyous in this life; and even the reflex

sorrow from the calamities of his friends did not press too heavily

on his sympathies; none of these were in excess either as to degree

or duration.

In this estimate of Goethe as a moral being, few people will differ

with us, unless it were the religious bigot. And to him we must

concede thus much, that Goethe was not that religious creature

which by nature he was intended to become. This is to be regretted.

Goethe was naturally pious, and reverential towards higher natures;

and it was in the mere levity or wantonness of youthful power,

partly also through that early false bias growing out of the Lisbon

earthquake, that he falsified his original destination. Do we mean,

then, that a childish error could permanently master his

understanding? Not so; _that_ would have been corrected with

his growing strength. But having once arisen, it must for a long

time have moulded his feelings; _until_ corrected, it must

have impressed a corresponding false bias upon his practical way of

viewing things; and that sort of false bias, once established,

might long survive a mere error of the understanding. One thing is

undeniable,--Goethe had so far corrupted and clouded his natural

mind, that he did not look up to God, or the system of things

beyond the grave, with the interest of reverence and awe, but with

the interest of curiosity.

Goethe, however, in a moral estimate, will be viewed pretty

uniformly. But Goethe intellectually, Goethe as a power acting upon

the age in which he lived, that is another question. Let us put a

case; suppose that Goethe's death had occurred fifty years ago,

that is, in the year 1785, what would have been the general

impression? Would Europe have felt a shock? Would Europe have been

sensible even of the event? Not at all; it would have been

obscurely noticed in the newspapers of Germany, as the death of a

novelist who had produced some effect about ten years before. In

1832, it was announced by the post-horns of all Europe as the death

of him who had written the _Wilhelm Meister_, the

_Iphigenie_, and the _Faust_, and who had been enthroned

by some of his admirers on the same seat with Homer and Shakspeare,

as composing what they termed the _trinity of men of genius_.

And yet it is a fact, that, in the opinion of some amongst the

acknowledged leaders of our own literature for the last twenty-five

years, the _Werther_ was superior to all which followed it,

and for mere power was the paramount work of Goethe. For ourselves,

we must acknowledge our assent upon the whole to this verdict; and

at the same time we will avow our belief that the reputation of

Goethe must decline for the next generation or two, until it

reaches its just level. Three causes, we are persuaded, have

concurred to push it so far beyond the proportion of real and

genuine interest attached to his works, for in Germany his works

are little read, and in this country not at all. _First_, his

extraordinary age; for the last twenty years Goethe had been the

patriarch of the German literature. _Secondly_, the splendor

of his official rank at the court of Weimar; he was the minister

and private friend of the patriot sovereign amongst the princes of

Germany. _Thirdly_, the quantity of enigmatical and

unintelligible writing which he has designedly thrown into his

latter works, by way of keeping up a system of discussion and

strife upon his own meaning amongst the critics of his country.

These disputes, had his meaning been of any value in his own eyes,

he would naturally have settled by a few authoritative words from

himself; but it was his policy to keep alive the feud in a case

where it was of importance, that his name should continue to

agitate the world, but of none at all that he should be rightly

interpreted.