Hardly had Goethe set foot on Italian ground when he began to feel
something of the joy and elasticity of temper for which he had been
longing. He was absolutely his own master again, and all around him was
the sunny land which he greeted as, in some sense, the true home of his
spirit. The people, too, with their natural grace and courtesy,
delighted him, and their speech fell softly and pleasantly on his ears.
He had never had keener pleasure than he felt in looking forward to the
happy days and weeks that were before him.
During his visit to Italy he wrote a large number of letters, most of
which were addressed to Frau von Stein. Long afterwards he issued some
of them, carefully edited, as one of the supplements of his
autobiography, giving them the general title, “Italienische Reise”
(“Italian Journey”). These letters have all the freshness of immediate
impressions, yet we find in them only so much detail as is necessary to
give brightness and animation to his pictures of the central elements of
interest that meet him on his way. In every letter we feel the
influence of a deep enthusiasm, but it is an enthusiasm that never
distorts his vision or injures the noble simplicity and purity of his
style.
He entered Italy from the Tyrol, and the first important town at which
he stopped was Verona. From Verona he went to Vicenza, and so, through
Padua, to Venice. At Venice he remained three weeks, allowing its
splendours to impress themselves deeply on his imagination. He then went
to Bologna, which he ever afterwards associated with the charm of
Raphael’s St. Agatha. In his thoughts about Italy it had always been
Rome of which he had chiefly dreamed, and now his longing to be there
became so overwhelming that he hurried over what remained of the
journey, staying only three hours at Florence. In view of the joy that
was to come he was scarcely conscious of the inconveniences of travel.
“If I am dragged to Rome on Ixion’s wheel,” he wrote, “I will not
complain.”
On October 29, 1786, he drove into Rome through the Porta del Popolo.
“Yes,” he wrote a day or two afterwards, “I have at last arrived at the
capital of the world!... All the dreams of my youth are now realized.
The first engravings I remember--my father had hung the views of Rome in
an entrance-hall--I see now in reality, and all the things I have long
known from paintings and drawings, from copper-plates and wood-cuts,
from plaster casts and cork models, stand together before me. Wherever I
go, I find an acquaintance in a new world; it is all as I had conceived
it, and all new. The like I may say of my observations, of my ideas. I
have had no new thoughts, have found nothing quite strange, but the old
thoughts have been so defined, they have become so thoroughly alive,
they have been brought into such harmonious relation to one another,
that they may pass for new. When Pygmalion’s Elise, whom he had formed
absolutely in accordance with his wishes, and to whom he had given as
much truth and reality as were within the scope of art, at last came to
him, and said, ‘It is I,’ how different was the living woman from the
sculptured stone!”
While at Rome, Goethe realized with new vividness all that the mighty
city had been to the world in the remote ages when on her had been
imposed the task of guiding it to higher destinies. And he worked hard
to think himself back into the Rome of ancient times. This, he confesses
in one of his letters, was no easy task. “It is a sour and sad
undertaking,” he writes, “to pick out the old Rome from the new.... One
comes upon traces of a splendour and of a destruction, both of which go
beyond our conceptions. What the barbarians allowed to stand, the
architects of modern Rome have laid waste.” Gradually, however, a living
idea of the ancient city was formed in his mind. “Roman antiquities,” he
wrote about two months after his arrival, “begin to delight me. History,
inscriptions, medals, of which I might otherwise have known nothing, all
crowd in on me. As it happened to me in natural history, so it happens
here; for in this place the entire history of the world centres, and I
count as a second birthday, the day of a real new birth, that on which I
entered Rome.” With regard to the significance of the remains of ancient
art in Rome, Winckelmann had introduced a wholly new order of ideas, and
Goethe owed much to him in the appreciation of the Apollo Belvedere and
all the other masterpieces of sculpture he had now an opportunity of
studying. He was astonished to find how little he had learned from
plaster casts. The breath of life, it seemed to him, was to be felt only
in the original marble figures. The fascination exerted by ancient
statues led him to renew, but in a higher way, the studies of the human
body which he had formerly carried on through anatomy. “In our
medico-surgical anatomy,” he says, “all that is aimed at is a knowledge
of the part, and for this a wretched muscle is enough. But in Rome the
parts are worth nothing if they do not at the same time present a noble,
beautiful form.”
The art of the Renascence, as represented in Rome, stirred in Goethe an
interest not less profound than that awakened by ancient sculpture. Long
before, when as a young student he visited Dresden, the pictures which
had appealed to him most strongly were those of the Dutch school. Now he
felt the power of the ideal art of Italy in her great period. He was
fascinated by the Loggie of Raphael, at the Vatican, but even they
seemed of slight importance in comparison with the masterpieces of
Michael Angelo in the Sixtine Chapel. “I could,” he says, writing of
these sublime conceptions, “only gaze and stand amazed. The inward
sureness and manliness of the master, his greatness, go beyond all
expression.”
He did not fail, of course, to make pilgrimages to the great churches,
and in one of his letters he describes how, after a visit to the Sixtine
Chapel, he went with his friend Tischbein to St. Peter’s, “which
received the most beautiful light from the cheerful sky, and appeared in
all its parts bright and clear.” “As men who had come to enjoy what we
were to see, we delighted in its greatness and splendour, without
allowing ourselves, this time, to be misled by a taste too fastidious
and intelligent. We suppressed every unfavourable judgment, and
delighted in what was delightful.”
Anxious that nothing should stand in the way of his full enjoyment of
“the capital of the world,” Goethe avoided as far as possible all
association with “the great.” He had, however, several friends with whom
he had pleasant intercourse. The most intimate of them was Tischbein, a
good German artist, whom he had known for several years. Goethe occupied
two rooms in Tischbein’s house, and obtained from him much help in the
study both of ancient and of modern art. Another of his friends at Rome
was Meyer, a Swiss artist, who delighted him as much by the charm of his
personal character as by his artistic skill and knowledge. Goethe was
also greatly attracted by Moritz, a writer who had made some reputation
as the author of a book of travels in England, and was now collecting
materials for a like book on Italy. Angelica Kaufmann, who had settled
in Rome after her departure from London, welcomed Goethe cordially to
her home, and he soon held her in high esteem. With these and other
friends he spent many happy hours, and his delight in the new world
opened to him in Rome was, if possible, deepened and intensified by
their sympathy.
From the time when Goethe had taken lessons in drawing from Oeser at
Leipsic he had never lost the wish to become a skilful artist; and at
Weimar he had displayed considerable aptitude for portraiture. Now,
when he had so many opportunities of indulging his taste, he took great
pains to improve himself in drawing, painting, and modelling. For some
time he even debated with himself whether he ought not to become an
artist by profession. He did not long, however, remain in doubt.
Although, with Tischbein’s help, he made good progress, he was obliged
to admit that nature had denied to him the capacity of achieving, in
art, work that in any way corresponded to his lofty ideal of what such
work should be.
He had brought with him from Weimar many writings which he proposed
either to complete or to re-cast for the new edition of his works. The
first task undertaken was the transformation of “Iphigenie” from a prose
to a poetical drama, and he had worked at it more or less steadily at
all the places at which he had stopped before reaching Rome. It had also
frequently occupied his thoughts while he travelled from one point of
his journey to another. At Bologna, while he stood before Raphael’s St
Agatha, his conception of the character of Iphigenie assumed a new and
higher form. “I remarked the figure well,” he afterwards wrote; “in mind
I shall read my ‘Iphigenie’ to her, and my heroine shall say nothing
that the saint might not utter.” In Rome the writing of “Iphigenie”
formed from day to day, until the work was completed, the central
interest around which all his other occupations grouped themselves. On
the 12th of December the drama received its last touches, and it was
soon afterwards read to a group of his friends. They had expected that
the play would resemble “Goetz von Berlichingen,” and Goethe saw only
too plainly that it disappointed them. Angelica Kaufmann alone had
something like an adequate idea of its importance.
About this time Goethe received a friendly letter from the Duke of
Weimar extending his leave of absence indefinitely. He resolved to
profit to the utmost by the opportunity thus provided for him, and on
the 22nd of February, 1787, he started with Tischbein for Naples. As
they approached the city, he was powerfully impressed by the view of
Vesuvius, from which great masses of smoke were issuing. The liveliness
and good humour of the people of Naples enchanted him, and he found
inexhaustible sources of delight in the beauty of the town itself, in
the bright southern sky, and in all the splendours of nature that
constantly presented themselves in new aspects both on land and sea.
Twice he climbed Vesuvius, and on both occasions he described his
experiences in letters that bring the scene before us almost with the
vividness of reality. As in Rome, so in Naples he made himself familiar
with every treasure of ancient and modern art that was accessible to
him, and his conception of the old Roman world was at once enlarged and
made more definite by visits to Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Pæstum. “I
have seen much and thought still more,” he wrote on the 17th of March;
“the world opens itself more and more; even the things I have long known
become now for the first time my own.” In the same letter, however, he
says: “Many a time I think of Rousseau and his hypochondriacal misery,
and yet it becomes intelligible to me how so fine an organization might
be thrown off its balance. Did I not take such an interest in natural
things, and did I not see that in the apparent confusion a hundred
observations are capable of being compared and classified, as a land
surveyor corrects many single measurements by one line drawn through
them, I should often consider myself mad.”
On the 29th of March, 1787, accompanied by Kniep, a German artist
settled at Naples, Goethe embarked for Sicily. Sixteen days he remained
at Palermo, where art and nature combined to give him a happiness that
seems to have been absolutely unalloyed. He then made for Alcamo and
Segesta, visited Girgenti and Catania, climbed a part of Mount Etna, and
finally arrived at Messina, whence he returned by sea to Naples. His
letters, written for Frau von Stein, in the form of a diary, reproduce
with astonishing power, yet with perfect simplicity, the impressions
produced upon him during his visit to Sicily. He studied closely the
remains of Greek architecture, and at the same time carried on his
scientific investigations, which had occupied him at every favourable
opportunity from the day of his arrival in Italy. These investigations
had become more attractive to him than ever, for he had now a clear
conception of the main outlines of his great discovery of the
metamorphosis of plants.
On the 6th of June he was once more in Rome. It was his intention to
return to Weimar soon, but Rome exercised so irresistible a power over
him that nearly a year passed before he could bring himself to leave it.
All that he had seen before his departure for Naples he studied again
and again, and almost daily he found objects of interest that had been
overlooked. During this time his idea of Rome and of its greatest
possessions became so full, accurate, and vivid that it was never in the
faintest degree blurred by the events of his later life.
He looked forward with the deepest interest to the great ceremonies of
the Roman Church during Passion Week, and they seem to have given him a
wholly new conception of the service art may be made to render to
religion. Writing of a Mass in the Sixtine Chapel, attended by the Pope
and the Cardinals, he says he does not wonder that strangers are often
unable to contain themselves in the presence of a spectacle at once so
great and so simple. The ceremonies in the Sixtine Chapel on the morning
of Easter Day filled him with admiration, and appeared to him a striking
proof of the fact that at Rome the Church had penetrated deeply into the
spirit of “the Christian traditions.”
In his literary work his progress was less rapid than he had expected.
He was able, however, to achieve some important results. Among his
papers was an unfinished prose drama, “Egmont,” which dated from about
the time when he had written “Stella.” He had often thought of
completing it at Weimar, but had never accomplished his purpose. Now he
gave the play its final form, partly re-casting it; but re-writing it,
as originally planned, in prose. He also improved the less important
works, “Erwin and Elmire” and “Claudine von Villa Bella.”
Another of his papers, frayed at the edges and grey with age, was
“Faust,” in the form in which he had taken it from Frankfort to Weimar.
It was hard for him, after so long an interval, to take up this work at
the point at which he had left it. On the 1st of March, 1788, however,
he wrote that he had “found the thread again,” and that “the plan for
‘Faust’ was made.” At Rome he wrote “Die Hexenküche” (“The Witches’
Kitchen”), one of the most striking scenes in “Faust,” a scene at which,
no doubt, his imagination worked all the more freely from the strange
contrast it presented to the actual world in the midst of which it was
conceived. In this scene there is one slight indication of the
difficulty he must have experienced in carrying on the work in the
spirit in which it had been begun. Faust in the first monologue says he
has had pupils for ten years. This means that he cannot be much more
than thirty years old. In the “Hexenküche” he is presented as a man over
fifty, for he speaks of the possibility of his youth being renewed by
thirty years being struck out of his life. Goethe never detected this
curious contradiction.
At last it became necessary for him to drag himself away from the city
he now knew and loved so well. On the evening of the 21st of April,
1788, he strolled with some friends along the Corso in the moonlight,
and visited for the last time the Capitol and the Colosseum. Next day he
was travelling towards the North. On the way he spent some time at
Florence and Milan, and on the 18th of June he re-entered Weimar.