What most interested our travellers in the ancient city of Frankfort,
was neither the opera nor the Ariadne of Dannecker, but the house in
which Goethe was born, and the scenes he frequented in his childhood,
and remembered in his old age. Such for example are the walks around
the city, outside the moat; the bridge over the Maine, with the golden
cock on the cross, which the poet beheld and marvelled at when a boy;
the cloister of the Barefooted Friars, through which he stole with
mysterious awe to sit by the oilcloth-covered table of old Rector
Albrecht; and the garden in which his grandfather walked up and down
among fruit-trees and rose-bushes, in long morning gown, black velvet
cap, and the antique leather gloves, which he annually received as
Mayor on Pipers-Doomsday, representing a kind of middle personage
between Alcinous and Laertes. Thus, O Genius! are thy foot-prints
hallowed; and the star shines forever over the place of thy nativity.
"Your English critics may rail as they list," said the Baron, while he
and Flemming were returning from a stroll in the leafy gardens, outside
the moat; "but, after all, Goethe was a magnificent old fellow. Only
think of his life; his youth of passion, alternately aspiring and
desponding, stormy, impetuous, headlong;--his romantic manhood, in
which passion assumes the form of strength; assiduous, careful,
toiling, without haste, without rest; and his sublime old age,--the age
of serene and classic repose, where he stands like Atlas, as Claudian
has painted him in the Battle of the Giants, holding the world aloft
upon his head, the ocean-streams hard frozen in his hoary locks."
"A good illustration of what the world calls his indifferentism."
"And do you know I rather like this indifferentism? Did you never have
the misfortune to live in a community, where a difficulty in the parish
seemed to announce the end of the world? or to know one of the
benefactors of the human race, in the very `storm and pressure period'
of his indiscreet enthusiasm? If you have, I think you will see
something beautiful in the calm and dignified attitude which the old
philosopher assumes."
"It is a pity, that his admirers had not a little of this philosophic
coolness. It amuses me to read the various epithets, which they apply
to him; The Dear, dear Man! The Life-enjoying Man! The All-sided One!
The Representative of Poetry upon earth! The Many-sided Master-Mind of
Germany! His enemies rush into the other extreme, and hurl at him the
fierce names of Old Humbug! and Old Heathen! which hit like
pistol-bullets."
"I confess, he was no saint."
"No; his philosophy is the old ethnic philosophy. You will find it all
in a convenient andconcentrated, portable form in Horace's beautiful
Ode to Thaliarcus. What I most object to in the old gentleman is his
sensuality."
"O nonsense. Nothing can be purer than the Iphigenia; it is as cold and
passionless as a marble statue."
"Very true; but you cannot say the same of some of the Roman Elegies
and of that monstrous book the Elective Affinities."
"Ah, my friend, Goethe is an artist; and looks upon all things as
objects of art merely. Why should he not be allowed to copy in words
what painters and sculptors copy in colors and in marble?"
"The artist shows his character in the choice of his subject. Goethe
never sculptured an Apollo, nor painted a Madonna. He gives us only
sinful Magdalens and rampant Fauns. He does not so much idealize as
realize."
"He only copies nature."
"So did the artists, who made the bronzelamps of Pompeii. Would you
hang one of those in your hall? To say that a man is an artist and
copies nature is not enough. There are two great schools of art; the
imitative and the imaginative. The latter is the most noble, and most
enduring; and Goethe belonged rather to the former. Have you read
Menzel's attack upon him?"
"It is truly ferocious. The Suabian hews into him lustily. I hope you
do not side with him."
"By no means. He goes too far. He blames the poet for not being a
politician. He might as well blame him for not being a missionary to
the Sandwich Islands."
"And what do you think of Eckermann?"
"I think he is a toady; a kind of German Boswell. Goethe knew he was
drawing his portrait, and attitudinized accordingly. He works very hard
to make a Saint Peter out of an old Jupiter, as the Catholics did at
Rome."
"Well; call him Old Humbug, or Old Heathen, or what you please; I
maintain, that, with all his errors and short-comings, he was a
glorious specimen of a man."
"He certainly was. Did it ever occur to you that he was in some points
like Ben Franklin? a kind of rhymed Ben Franklin? The practical
tendency of his mind was the same; his love of science was the same;
his benignant, philosophic spirit was the same; and a vast number of
his little poetic maxims and sooth-sayings seem nothing more than the
worldly wisdom of Poor Richard, versified."
"What most offends me is, that now every German jackass must have a
kick at the dead lion."
"And every one who passes through Weimar must throw a book upon his
grave, as travellers did of old a stone upon the grave of Manfredi, at
Benevento. But, of all that has been said or sung, what most pleases me
is Heine's Apologetic, if I may so call it; in which he says, that the
minor poets, who flourished under the imperialreign of Goethe `resemble
a young forest, where the trees first show their own magnitude after
the oak of a hundred years, whose branches had towered above and
overshadowed them, has fallen. There was not wanting an opposition,
that strove against Goethe, this majestic tree. Men of the most warring
opinions united themselves for the contest. The adherents of the old
faith, the orthodox, were vexed, that, in the trunk of the vast tree,
no niche with its holy image was to be found; nay, that even the naked
Dryads of paganism were permitted to play their witchery there; and
gladly, with consecrated axe, would they have imitated the holy
Boniface, and levelled the enchanted oak to the ground. The followers
of the new faith, the apostles of liberalism, were vexed on the other
hand, that the tree could not serve as the Tree of Liberty, or, at any
rate, as a barricade. In fact the tree was too high; no one could plant
the red cap upon its summit, or dance the Carmagnole beneath its
branches. The multitude, however, venerated this tree for the
veryreason, that it reared itself with such independent grandeur, and
so graciously filled the world with its odor, while its branches,
streaming magnificently toward heaven, made it appear, as if the stars
were only the golden fruit of its wondrous limbs.' Don't you think that
beautiful?"
"Yes, very beautiful. And I am glad to see, that you can find something
to admire in my favorite author, notwithstanding his frailties; or, to
use an old German saying, that you can drive the hens out of the garden
without trampling down the beds."
"Here is the old gentleman himself!" exclaimed Flemming.
"Where!" cried the Baron, as if for the moment he expected to see the
living figure of the poet walking before them.
"Here at the window,--that full-length cast. Excellent, is it not! He
is dressed, as usual, in his long yellow nankeen surtout, with a white
cravat crossed in front. What a magnificent head! and what a posture!
He stands like a tower ofstrength. And, by Heavens! he was nearly
eighty years old, when that was made."
"How do you know?"
"You can see by the date on the pedestal."
"You are right. And yet how erect he stands, with his square shoulders
braced back, and his hands behind him. He looks as if he were standing
before the fire. I feel tempted to put a live coal into his hand, it
lies so invitingly half-open. Gleim's description of him, soon after he
went to Weimar, is very different from this. Do you recollect it?"
"No, I do not."
"It is a story, which good old father Gleim used to tell with great
delight. He was one evening reading the Göttingen Musen-Almanach in a
select society at Weimar, when a young man came in, dressed in a short,
green shooting-jacket, booted and spurred, and having a pair of
brilliant, black, Italian eyes. He in turn offered to read; but finding
probably the poetry of the Musen-Almanach of that year rather too
insipid for him, he soon began to improvise the wildest and most
fantastic poems imaginable, and in all possible forms and measures, all
the while pretending to read from the book. `That is either Goethe or
the Devil,' said good old father Gleim to Wieland, who sat near him. To
which the `Great I of Osmannstadt' replied; `It is both, for he has the
Devil in him to-night; and at such times he is like a wanton colt, that
flings out before and behind, and you will do well not to go too near
him!' "
"Very good!"
"And now that noble figure is but mould. Only a few months ago, those
majestic eyes looked for the last time on the light of a pleasant
spring morning. Calm, like a god, the old man sat; and with a smile
seemed to bid farewell to the light of day, on which he had gazed for
more than eighty years. Books were near him, and the pen which had just
dropped, as it were from his dying fingers. `Open the shutters, and let
in more light!' were the last words that came from those lips. Slowly
stretching forth his hand, he seemed to write inthe air; and, as it
sank down again and was motionless, the spirit of the old man
departed."
"And yet the world goes on. It is strange how soon, when a great man
dies, his place is filled; and so completely, that he seems no longer
wanted. But let us step in here. I wish to buy that cast; and send it
home to a friend."