No. I.
It may be as well to state at the outset, that we have not the most
distant intention of laying before the public the whole mass of
poetry that flowed from the prolific pen of Goethe, betwixt the days
of his student life at Leipsic and those of his final courtly
residence at Weimar. It is of no use preserving the whole wardrobe of
the dead; we do enough if we possess ourselves of his
valuables--articles of sterling bullion that will at any time command
their price in the market--as to worn-out and threadbare
personalities, the sooner they are got rid of the better. Far be it
from us, however, to depreciate or detract from the merit of any of
Goethe's productions. Few men have written so voluminously, and still
fewer have written so well. But the curse of a most fluent pen, and
of a numerous auditory, to whom his words were oracles, was upon him;
and seventy volumes, more or less, which Cotta issued from his
wareroom, are for the library of the Germans now, and for the
selection of judicious editors hereafter. A long time must elapse
after an author's death, before we can pronounce with perfect
certainty what belongs to the trunk-maker, and what pertains to
posterity. Happy the man--if not in his own generation, yet most
assuredly in the time to come--whose natural hesitation or
fastidiousness has prompted him to weigh his words maturely, before
launching them forth into the great ocean of literature, in the midst
of which is a Maelstrom of tenfold absorbing power!
From the minor poems, therefore, of Goethe, we propose, in the
present series, to select such as are most esteemed by competent
judges, including, of course, ourselves. We shall not follow the
example of dear old Eckermann, nor preface our specimens by any
critical remarks upon the scope and tendency of the great German's
genius; neither shall we divide his works, as characteristic of his
intellectual progress, into eras or into epochs; still less shall we
attempt to institute a regular comparison between his merits and
those of Schiller, whose finest productions (most worthily
translated) have already enriched the pages of this Magazine. We are
doubtless ready at all times to back our favourite against the field,
and to maintain his intellectual superiority even against his
greatest and most formidable rival. We know that he is the showiest,
and we feel convinced that he is the better horse of the two; but
talking is worse than useless when the course is cleared, and the
start about to commence.
Come forward, then, before the British public, O many-sided,
ambidextrous Goethe, as thine own Thomas Carlyle might, or could, or
would, or should have termed thee, and let us hear how the
mellifluous Teutonic verse will sound when adapted to another tongue.
And, first of all--for we yearn to know it--tell us how thy
inspiration came? A plain answer, of course, we cannot expect--that
were impossible from a German; but such explanation as we can draw
from metaphor and oracular response, seems to be conveyed in that
favourite and elaborate preface to the poems, which accordingly we
may term the