_From a Picture by George Dawe, Esq^r. R.A.
in the possession of Henry Dawe, Esq^r._
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge.
_London. Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street._
]
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born of affluent parents, August 28,
1749, at Frankfort on the Main. He attended successively the
universities of Leipzig and Strasburg; and, in 1771, took a doctor’s
degree in jurisprudence; but from his early youth literature was his
ruling passion. In his twenty-fourth year he had already acquired
unexampled popularity by his original and daring tragedy of ‘Götz von
Berlichingen,’ published in 1773. In 1774 he gained a European celebrity
by the ‘Sorrows of Werter;’ and he had already rendered himself an
object of admiration to the young, and of terror to the timid, by the
publication of several pungent satirical writings, when his good genius
guided to the vicinity of Frankfort the young Duke of Saxe Weimar, who
was about to assume the government on coming of age. In accepting the
friendship, and taking up his residence at the court of this prince,
Goethe entered on an unvarying career of prosperity. For a few years the
young Duke and his friend led a life of gaiety, of which there are many
curious anecdotes current in Germany; but, during a joyous and somewhat
wild life, the intellectual singularly prevailed over the sensual. Even
during that course of dissipation, the most important of Goethe’s works
were commenced, though none of them were published until after his
return from Italy. That country he visited in 1786, and to the time
which he spent in it he ever after recurred with delight. Though
Shakspeare was the individual poet he most prized, and Greek the
literature which he held up as the rule of all excellence, Italy was the
land of his affections. He remained two winters in Rome. Here he
cultivated the studies of archaeology and the fine arts, which he had
begun to practise in his youth, but now abandoned for poetry and the
study of nature.
To these pursuits, on his return to Germany, he applied as the chief
business of his life; and the insignificance of the patron as a
sovereign tended to render the poet more conspicuous, and to increase
his power over the minds of the Germans. The Duke was a general in the
Prussian service, and, as a minor power, followed the course of policy
pursued by the head of his house, the Elector of Saxony. He could not
indulge in ambition, and spent his small revenue more like a private
nobleman than a sovereign prince. He was desirous to collect a library
for the use of himself and the inhabitants of Weimar. He had mines on
one portion of his small territory. With the other Dukes of Saxony he
was jointly the possessor of a university, Jena. He wished to found a
school of drawing; and the creation of a German theatre, and the
collecting eminent men of all kinds at Weimar and Jena, were the
especial objects of his ambition. In all these things Goethe was the
right-hand to execute, if his, in fact, was not the mind to design. In
the matters which most governments make their prime concern, such as
finances, military affairs, and courts of justice, Goethe had certainly
no inclination to take any part; he was what, in France, would be called
a minister of public instruction. Scarcely was he settled in his new
office when the French Revolution broke out. This led to one famous
exception to the life he was pursuing. He has recorded it in the volume
of his ‘Memoirs,’ relating his participation in the too famous campaign
of 1792, when he, as a non-combatant, accompanied the Duke of Saxe
Weimar, who served under the Duke of Brunswick in his famous march which
did _not_ reach to Paris. The early retirement of Prussia from the
league against France restored peace to the North of Germany, and Goethe
was at liberty to return to his favourite pursuits. In the prosecution
of these he had the happiness soon to connect himself with Schiller, a
man ten years younger than himself, of a genius totally opposite to his
own, and therefore perhaps best adapted to act in concert with him.
Goethe has, with delightful frankness, related how, exceedingly
disliking the ‘Robbers,’ Schiller’s first, worst, and most famous play,
and feeling a strong aversion towards the Kantian philosophy, to which
Schiller was attached, he had conceived an antipathy towards the
offending poet, whom he resolutely shunned. But having once met, the
passionate zeal of Schiller in pursuit of their common objects was
irresistible. Dislike subsided into tolerance, and was at last converted
into warm admiration and love. Memorable consequences followed from
their union, and their literary correspondence remains an instructive
example of what may be effected by the collision of powerful minds of
opposite character. Schiller died in 1804. During the time allotted to
their joint exertions, Goethe produced many of his greatest works, and
Schiller all the best of his. During the same period, Goethe pursued his
philosophical studies with the eminent men who then filled professors’
chairs at Jena. The metaphysical systems of Fichte, and afterwards of
Schelling, which succeeded that of Kant, met with some favour in his
eyes. At least, though he kept aloof from the controversies of the day,
he laboured to connect with philosophical speculations his own
particular studies in various branches of natural history and science.
It was after Schiller’s death, and when Goethe was approaching his
sixtieth year, that the storm of war unexpectedly burst upon Weimar and
Jena. He did not leave Weimar; but aware of the peril to which he with
every one was exposed, on the very day of the battle of Jena, the 14th
of October, 1806, he married a lady with whom he had lived for many
years, and at the same time legitimated his only child, a son. During
the short period of extreme degradation into which Prussia and Saxony
sunk, from 1806 till the fall of Bonaparte in 1813, he withdrew, as much
as possible, from political life; he would not suffer newspapers to be
brought him, or politics to be discussed in his presence, but fled to
the arts and sciences as an asylum against the miserable realities of
life. Such had always been his practice. He has said of himself that he
never had a disease of the mind which he did not cure by turning it into
a poem. In his early youth, having lost a mistress through foolish
petulance of temper, he, as a penance, made his own folly the subject of
a comedy. And, in after life, while Europe was convulsed, he was
absorbed in studies independent of the incidents of the day. Thus
varying his pursuits, he kept on his serene course with no other
interruptions than such as inevitably befall those who attain old age.
It was his lot to survive the associates of his youth. In 1827, he lost
his early friend, from whom he had never been estranged, the Grand Duke
of Weimar. In 1830, he met with a severer privation, in the death of his
son at Rome. It was feared that this calamity would prove fatal to
Goethe, whose strength was sensibly declining; but he survived the blow,
and enjoyed the best consolation which could be afforded to him in the
exemplary care of his amiable and gifted daughter-in-law, and in his two
young grand-children, to whom he was tenderly attached. His last years
were spent in cheerful retirement. He possessed an elegant and spacious
house in Weimar, but he also had a cottage in the park, where he dwelt
alone, receiving his friends _tête-à-tête_; and, on particular
occasions, going into the town to entertain company. He retained his
faculties to the last, and made a very precise disposition of his
property. His extensive collections in natural history and art were
directed to be preserved as a museum for twenty years. These were among
the objects of his latest solicitude. He died March 24, 1832, in the
eighty-third year of his age.
Goethe’s figure was commanding, and his countenance severely handsome.
He appears to have acquired a great ascendency over his fellow-students
at the universities, and to have kept the professors in awe. In after
life he was reproached by Bürger and others with haughtiness, and was
accused of making his inferiors in station and in genius too sensible of
their inferiority; but his powers of captivation were irresistible when
he pleased to exert them. His social talents were of the highest order.
Such was Goethe for his own generation and country. To posterity he will
live chiefly as a poet. Of his most remarkable works we will now speak,
not chronologically, but according to the classes which are recognised
by systematic writers.
In epic poetry, his pretensions will be derided by those who adhere to
the theory of M. Bossu, adopted by Pope. According to this, the common
opinion, the ‘Epos’ requires supernatural machinery, illustrious actors,
and heroic incident. The German critics, on the contrary, maintain that
the essential character of the Homeric poetry lies in the epic style,
not in the subject of the narrative; a style analogous to that of
Herodotus, whom they place at the head of the epic historians, and to be
found in a very large proportion of our own ancient ballads, such as
relate to Robin Hood, Chevy Chase, &c. Goethe on this idea began a
continuation of the Iliad in his ‘Achilleis,’ and he threw the graces of
his own style over the old epic fable of ‘Reynard the Fox.’ But it was
in ‘Herman and Dorothea’ that he displayed all his powers: this is both
a patriotic and domestic tale; the characters in humble life; the
incident, a flight over the Rhine on the invasion of the French. It
abounds in maxims of moral wisdom, and in pathos; but it is too national
to bear translating.
It is as a lyric poet that Goethe is popular in the fullest sense of the
word, and may challenge comparison with the greatest masters of all
ages. In the song, he abounds in master-pieces, passionate and gay. His
elegy has sometimes the erotic character of Propertius, (as in the
famous ‘Roman Elegies,’) and sometimes emulates the refinement and
purity of Petrarch: his ballads are as wild and tender as any that Spain
or Scotland have produced. His very numerous epigrams bear more
resemblance to the Greek Anthology than to the pointed style of the
Latin writers. Besides these he has produced a number of allegorical and
enigmatical poems on art and philosophy, which cannot be placed under
any known class.
Goethe’s dramatic works are about twenty in number. There is this
peculiarity in his career as a dramatic poet, that though the drama is
essentially the most popular branch of poetry, he never wrote for the
people; his plays are all experiments, and no two resemble each other.
He seems to have been unaffectedly indifferent to their reception on the
stage. His first juvenile play, ‘Götz von Berlichingen,’ was in prose,
and unlike any thing that had appeared on the German boards. It
exhibited, in a strong light, the manners of the Germans at a romantic
period when the petty barons and knights were a sort of privileged
freebooters, sometimes generously resisting the oppressions of the
emperor and the higher nobility, and sometimes plundering the citizens
of the free towns. The style was in harmony with the subject, daring in
its originality, and all but licentious in its freedom. By audiences
accustomed only to pedantic imitations of the French, it was received
with tumultuous applause; but the admiration of the more cultivated
classes was given to the ‘Iphigenia in Tauris,’ an echo, as Schlegel
expresses it, of the Greek, yet neither a translation nor a copy.
Christian purity of morals harmoniously blending with pagan incident,
not a line disturbs the exquisite symmetry of this the most generally
admired of Goethe’s dramas.
Not less perfect in style is the anomalous ‘Torquato Tasso,’ which
deserves especial notice, though not as a play adapted to the stage: it
is rather a didactic poem in dialogue than a drama. Tasso and the
warrior statesman Antonio exhibit in contrast the poetical character and
that of the man of the world. It could secure the attention of an
audience only when performed on the Duke’s private theatre, where the
members of the Ducal family usually represented the princes of the House
of Este, and Goethe himself acted the part of Tasso; and when it was
performed as a sort of funeral obsequies on the death of the poet
himself.
‘Egmont’ is an historical play in prose, founded on the _real_ tragedy
perpetrated by the bloody Alba, in Belgium. Its most remarkable feature
is the unheroic character of Egmont himself. While William of Orange is
the common stage hero, patriotic and wise, destined to save his country,
Count Egmont is the warm-hearted, sensual, and munificent nobleman, a
patriot not from reflection but impulse, whose love for the humble Clara
is much more prominent than his patriotism, and who is therefore doomed
to perish. The pathos lies in the dissonance between the man and the
necessities of his position. Goethe, in drawing such a character,
probably thought of Hamlet, of whom he makes an analogous remark.
We pass over a number of dramas, all original, all experiments in
furtherance of his own studies, and name only ‘Faustus,’ the unique, the
undefinable. Begun in youth, continued at intervals during a long life,
and finally left unfinished, it has been called a grotesque tragedy. Who
knows not the popular legend of the learned magician who sold his soul
to the devil? This coarse tale of vulgar superstition is here used as a
vehicle into which the adventurous poet has cast all that
“Perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart.”
The erring philosopher is attended on the wrong road by a laughing
devil, Mephistophiles, who leads him through scenes of the wildest
frolic and the most appalling wretchedness. All that is most deplorable,
most frightful in human life, is here displayed with the running comment
of the dæmon whom Omnipotence does not confound; and the most awful
problems of divinity and moral philosophy are treated with pathetic
sadness by the wretched victim, or with infernal satire by his
master-slave. These repulsive elements are nevertheless combined with
the soothing, not to say sanctifying, influence of a Margaret, a
confiding, loving, innocent woman, whose very destruction works on the
heart like an act of grace, and prepares the spectator for the promised
salvation of her lover.
In the romance, as in the drama, Goethe commenced a career which he
immediately abandoned. His Werter breathes a spirit of dissatisfaction
with the world and its institutions. But by writing that book, which
infected the rising generation with the same spirit, he cured himself of
the disease; and he then became the declared foe of the sentimental,
which he attacked in his romantic comedy, ‘The Triumph of
Sentimentality.’
In later years, when he was become the meditating philosopher, and, at
the same time, indulged in more cheerful contemplations of life, he
produced ‘Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,’ intended to elucidate
problems of psychology. The stage being the symbol of life, his hero is
thrown among players, and both the real drama, and the drama of life are
analyzed, with perpetual illustrations of the one by the other. After an
interval of some years, Goethe, in a second part, exhibited his pupil
advanced as on a sort of journey. Conscious that his problem, like that
of Faustus, was insoluble, he has not dared to exhibit either Faustus in
heaven or Wilhelm as a master. Like the Faustus, Wilhelm Meister is
still ‘caviare to the million.’
In a third romance, ‘Elective Affinities,’ Goethe treats subtilely of
that passion to which Lord Bacon says “the stage is more beholden than
the life of man.” As the chemical title suggests, he shows how the
felicity of a married couple is marred by the intrusion of other minds,
with which each consort has more affinity than with the companion
previously chosen.
When ‘Wilhelm Meister’ first appeared, the narrative of Wilhelm’s
childhood was related with such spirit and air of truth, that it was
believed to be the author’s own personal history; and, in truth, the
resemblance between the feigned and real history was soon made manifest
by the appearance of Goethe’s own memoirs, under the puzzling title
‘From my Life: Fiction and Truth;’ so entitled, to allow for the
unconscious illusions to which we are exposed, when, in advanced life,
we try to recollect the occurrences of childhood, and unintentionally
confound memory with imagination. These memoirs, including his foreign
travels, amount already to nine volumes, and others are to follow; but
these earlier volumes treat solely of the author’s intellectual life.
Concerning much that men are inquisitive about, he says nothing. Not a
hint is dropped concerning the fortune of his father, or the amount of
profit which he himself derived from his writings. His being ennobled
was an incident which he thought too unimportant for notice; and of
honours and distinctions conferred on him he seldom condescends to
speak.
Among the studies which partook of Goethe’s attention were antiquities
and the fine arts. This led to the composition of a masterpiece, his
critical characteristic of Winkelman, and an account of Hackert, the
landscape painter. The same course of study led him to translate that
delightful work, the auto-biography of Benvenuto Cellini, which was
first made known to the European public by the Earl of Bristol, late
Bishop of Derry, and which is now in the hands of all lovers of the fine
arts. On art, in its various branches, Goethe’s prose writings are very
numerous. As a critic also he has written much, and his criticism is
remarkably indulgent and generous.
Such being the variety of works in which he has recorded his
speculations on man, his powers, his actions, and his productions, it
will be naturally asked, what were the main features of his philosophy,
and to what results did they lead on those great points which unhappily
disunite mankind, religion and politics?
Hume has well designated the great varieties of intellect and moral
character by the significant scholastic names of the Platonist, the
Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Sceptic. According to this classification,
it may be said that Goethe was too devotedly attached to the study of
nature and actual life to be a Platonist; he loved contemplation too
intensely, and was too indolent and self-indulgent to be a stoic; he was
too intellectual to be a gross sensualist, or, in the worst sense, an
Epicurean; and he had too much imagination to be able to tolerate the
modern rational philosophy, a mere system of negatives. In so far,
therefore, he was an enemy of vulgar scepticism; yet, blended with the
refinement which the poetic mind presupposes, he had a large portion of
scepticism and Epicureanism in his nature. Towards the positive religion
which he found established in his own country he manifested respect,
though he never made any distinct profession of faith upon doctrinal
matters; he conformed however to the Lutheran church. On two occasions
only do we recollect the expression of any strong feeling as to
religion. He early betrayed great contempt towards the German
Rationalists, whom he rather despised for their shallowness than
reproached with being mischievous. His love of Rome by no means
reconciled him to the Church of Rome, against which he would inveigh
with a warmth unusual in him. He maintained that Catholic superstition
had deeply injured the poetic character of Calderon, and considered the
Protestantism of Shakspeare as a happy accident in the life of that
incomparable man. It appears from his memoirs, that Judaism and
Christianity had occupied his mind very seriously from his childhood. He
delighted in portraying the Christian enthusiast in a tone of kindred
enthusiasm, as in his ‘Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,’ of which the
original was a Moravian lady, his friend; and it was only in incidental
bursts of sarcasm, especially in his gayer poems, that he alarmed the
timid and the scrupulous. In spite of occasional ebullitions of spleen
or rash speculation, he was habitually hostile towards the French
anti-religious party. He makes his devil in Faustus describe himself as
the “spirit that always denies,” in the same way that Alfieri scornfully
terms Voltaire “Disinventor ed Inventor di nulla.” It was this negative,
this merely destructive character, to which Goethe was in all things
most resolutely opposed.
This sentiment extended to politics. Long before the words
“Conservative” and “Destructive” were applied to English parties, Goethe
had made frequent use of them. It was the tendency of his mind to look
with indulgence, if not with favour, on whatever he found in the
exercise of productive power. _Laudo manentem_ might have been his
motto. He saw in the French revolutionists, as in their philosophers,
the spirit of destruction, and he clung with affection to institutions
under which so many fine arts and rapidly advancing sciences had
flourished. With reference to public life, Goethe has been severely
reproached on two grounds. He has been accused of wanting patriotism;
but before a passion can be generated, an object must be presented. What
country had Goethe to love in his youth? A walled city, which he could
run round before breakfast. The first great political event which he
witnessed, was the Seven years’ war. His native city was in the
possession of the French, whom one party considered as allies and the
other as enemies. Goethe’s father adhered to Frederick, his grandfather
was attached to the Imperial House: at the best he could love but half a
nation. Hence Wieland said, “I have no fellow-countrymen; I have only
_sprach-genossen_,”—speech-mates. Thus German patriotism could be but a
sort of corporation spirit; like the affections of a liveryman, confined
to the members of his company. It was not till the close of the last war
that the common oppression exercised by Bonaparte generated a common
hatred towards France, and with it something like patriotism on a great
scale. Yet so anomalous is the condition of Germany, that at this moment
this sentiment, or the loud avowal of it, is looked on as akin to
disloyalty; and, at the universities, students are forbidden to frequent
clubs, or to assume denominations, which have a reference to one general
national character. There are few appeals among Goethe’s writings to
national feeling; and, in truth, his studies led him to be, in
sentiment, the fellow-citizen of the great poets and artists of all
nations, the contemporary of the great men of all ages. The other
reproach is, that, being admitted to familiarity with princes, he lost
his love of the people, as such. Now, it must be owned, that in this
respect he felt pretty much as Milton did, in whom attachment to the
aristocracy of talent was a marked quality. Of the people, as such, he
seems to have thought lowly; his affections were exercised on the select
few,—the nobles of nature, not of the herald’s office. That he had no
vulgar reverence for persons in authority, or for the privileged orders,
is amply proved by all he wrote. It may finally be remarked, as the most
characteristic feature of his moral speculations, that he had habitually
contemplated mankind, not as a moralist, but as a naturalist. There are
some thinkers who never consider men but as objects of praise or blame;
others, who only study men with a view of making them different from
what they are. Such are reformers, the leaders of institutions,
philanthropists, who think only in order to act. To neither of these
classes did Goethe belong. He took men as he found them; he was content
to take society as he found it, with all its complex institutions. He
was disposed to make the best of what he found, but seemed reluctant to
waste his powers in the vain attempt to make men materially different
from what they were before; hence arose an inert, or indolent
acquiescence in what he found existing.
He had early in life laboured to catch a new point of view from which
nature might be contemplated on all sides; or a law in conformity with
which the manifold operations of nature might be seen as if they were
one. He first made this idea known in his ‘Metamorphosis of Plants.’ His
botanical studies were continued for many years of his life. He
afterwards busied himself with the minute and experimental study of
chromatics. He edited a journal of science, and wrote more or less on
mineralogy, geology, comparative anatomy, optics, and meteorology. A
metaphysical spirit runs through all these writings, so alien from the
mode of study pursued in other countries, that we do not recollect any
notice of them by any English writer, except Professor Lindley, in his
‘Introduction to Botany,’ who confines his remarks to Goethe’s botanical
works. The Professor represents Goethe as having revived a
nearly-forgotten doctrine, first promulgated by Linnæus. But, for thirty
years after the first appearance of the ‘Metamorphosis,’ it produced
little or no effect even in Germany. Now, indeed, “it has come to be
considered the basis of all scientific knowledge of vegetable
structure.” Whether, in the revolutions of opinion, the bold polemical
writings of Goethe against the Newtonian theory of light and colours
will ever be looked upon as more than the extravagances of a great
genius wandering out of his own sphere, time will show. For the present
this is the view taken of the great poet’s scientific writings, both by
Italians and Frenchmen. But, whatever dreams he may have mixed up with
his investigations, Goethe was no mere dreamer: to the last hour of his
life, he made it his business to inform himself concerning the progress
of the sciences in foreign countries. All new books were brought to him,
even to the end of his life; he composed elaborate poems at the age of
seventy; and when beyond sixty years of age, entered with zeal upon the
study of Oriental poetry, to apply the spirit of which, to Western
notions and feelings, he composed his ‘West-Eastern Divan.’ In this the
infinite variety of his studies and pursuits lay that ‘all-sidedness’
(if we may be pardoned for adopting such a word from the German) for
which he was so remarkable. From the same quality proceeded that unusual
toleration of novelties which he could reconcile to the love of what is
established. He would not permit a clever farce to be acted on the
stage, when he was manager, written in derision of Gall’s cranioscopy.
Instead of joining in the ridicule of animal magnetism, he would fairly
investigate its pretensions. When a book on the Clouds was published by
Howard, in England, Goethe instantly wrote an account of it, inventing
appropriate German words to designate the forms pointed out. In his
hunger and thirst after knowledge, he was omnivorous. This was the
ruling passion strong in death. Only the evening before his decease he
received some new books from Paris, by which he was greatly excited. It
is said that a volume, by Salvandy, was grasped in his hand when he
died; and his last words were singularly appropriate to his temper, and
might be received by his admirers as almost prophetic. He ordered the
window-shutters to be opened, exclaiming, “More light! More light!”
[Illustration: GOETHE]
[Illustration:
_Engraved by H. Meyer._