life-journey, nor does there appear to have been any reason why he
should. A position, an office of some kind, he needs must have. Even
now, the life of a writer by profession, with no function but that of
literary composition, is seldom a prosperous one; in Goethe's day, when
literature was far less remunerative than it is in ours, it was seldom
practicable. Unless he had chosen to be maintained by his father, some
employment besides that of book-making was an imperative necessity. The
alternative of that which was offered--the one his father would have
chosen--was that of a plodding jurist in a country where forensic
pleading was unknown, and where the lawyer's profession offered no scope
for any of the higher talents with which Goethe was endowed. On the
whole, it was a happy chance that called him to the little capital of
the little Grand-Duchy of Saxe-Weimar. If the State was one of petty
dimensions (a kind of pocket-kingdom, like so many of the
principalities of Germany), it nevertheless included some of the fairest
localities, and one at least of the most memorable in Europe,--the
Wartburg, where Luther translated the Bible, where Saint Elizabeth
dispensed the blessings of her life, where the Minnesingers are said to
have held their poetic tournament,--
"Heinrich von Ofterdingen,
Wolfram von Eschenbach."
It included also the University of Jena, which at that time numbered
some of the foremost men of Germany among its professors. It was a
miniature State and a miniature town; one wonders that Goethe, who would
have shone the foremost star in Berlin or Vienna, could content himself
with so narrow a field. But Vienna and Berlin did not call him until it
was too late,--until patronage was needless; and Weimar did. A miniature
State,--but so much the greater his power and freedom and the
opportunity of beneficent action.
No prince was ever more concerned to promote in every way the welfare of
his subjects than Karl August; and in all his works undertaken for this
purpose, Goethe was his foremost counsellor and aid. The most important
were either suggested by him or executed under his direction. Had he
never written a poem, or given to the world a single literary
composition, he would still have led, as a Weimar official, a useful and
beneficent life. But the knowledge of the world and of business, the
social and other experience gained in this way, was precisely the
training which he needed,--and which every poet needs,--for the
broadening and deepening and perfection of his art. Friedrich von
Müller, in his valuable treatise of "Goethe as a Man of Affairs," tells
us how he traversed every portion of the country to learn what advantage
might be taken of topographical peculiarities, what provision made for
local necessities. "Everywhere--on hilltops crowned with primeval
forests, in the depths of gorges and shafts--Nature met her favorite
with friendly advances, and revealed to him many a desired secret."
Whatever was privately gained in this way was applied to public uses. He
endeavored to infuse new life into the mining business, and to make
himself familiar with all its technical requirements. For that end he
revived his chemical experiments. New roads were built, hydraulic
operations were conducted on more scientific principles, fertile meadows
were won from the river Saale by systematic drainage, and in many a
struggle with Nature an intelligently persistent will obtained
the victory.
Nor was it with material obstacles only that the poet-minister had to
contend. In the exercise of the powers intrusted to him he often
encountered the fierce opposition of party interest and stubborn
prejudice, and was sometimes driven to heroic and despotic measures in
order to accomplish a desired result,--as when he foiled the
machinations of the Jena professors in his determination to save the
University library, and when, in spite of the opposition of the leading
burghers, he demolished the city wall.
In 1786 Goethe was enabled to realize his cherished dream of a journey
to Italy. There he spent a year and a half in the diligent study and
admiring enjoyment of the treasures of art which made that country then,
even more than now, the mark and desire of the civilized world. He came
back an altered man. Intellectually and morally he had made in that
brief space, under new influences, a prodigious stride. His sudden
advance while they had remained stationary separated him from his
contemporaries. The old associations of the Weimar world, which still
revolved its little round, the much-enlightened traveller had outgrown.
People thought him cold and reserved. It was only that the gay,
impulsive youth had ripened into an earnest, sedate man. He found
Germany jubilant over Schiller's "Robbers" and other writings
representative of the "storm-and-stress" school, which his maturity had
left far behind, his own contributions to which he had come to hate.
Schiller, who first made his acquaintance at this time, writes
to Körner:--
"I doubt that we shall ever become intimate. Much that to me is still of
great interest he has already outlived. He is so far beyond me, not so
much in years as in experience and culture, that we can never come
together in one course."
How greatly Schiller erred in the supposition that they never could
become intimate, how close the intimacy which grew up between them, what
harmony of sentiment, how friendly and mutually helpful their
co-operation, is sufficiently notorious.
But such was the first aspect which Goethe presented to strangers at
this period of his life; he rather repelled than attracted, until nearer
acquaintance learned rightly to interpret the man, and intellectual or
moral affinity bridged the chasm which seemed to divide him from his
kind. In part, too, the distance and reserve of which people complained
was a necessary measure of self-defence against the disturbing
importunities of social life. "From Rome," says Friedrich von Müller,
"from the midst of the richest and grandest life, dates the stern maxim
of 'Renunciation' which governed his subsequent being and doing, and
which furnished his only guarantee of mental equipoise and peace."
His literary works hitherto had been spasmodic and lawless effusions,
the escapes of a gushing, turbulent youth. In Rome he had learned the
sacred significance of art. The consciousness of his true vocation had
been awakened in him; and to that, on the eve of his fortieth year, he
thenceforth solemnly devoted the remainder of his life. He obtained
release from the more onerous of his official engagements, retaining
only such functions as accorded with his proper calling as a man of
letters and of science. He renounced his daily intercourse with Frau von
Stein, though still retaining and manifesting his unabated friendship
for the woman to whom in former years he had devoted so large a portion
of his time, and employed himself in giving forth those immortal words
which have settled forever his place among the stars of first magnitude
in the intellectual world.
Noticeable and often noted was the charm and (when arrived to maturity)
the grand effect of his personal presence. Physical beauty is not the
stated accompaniment, nor even the presumable adjunct, of intellectual
greatness. In Goethe, as perhaps in no other, the two were combined. A
wondrous presence!--on this point the voices are one and the witnesses
many. "Goethe was with us," so writes Heinse to one of his friends; "a
beautiful youth of twenty-five, full of genius and force from the crown
of his head to the sole of his foot; a heart full of feeling, a spirit
full of fire, who with eagle wings _ruit immensus ore profundo_." Jacobi
writes: "The more I think of it, the more impossible it seems to me to
communicate to any one who has not seen Goethe any conception of this
extraordinary creature of God." Lavater says: "Unspeakably sweet, an
indescribable appearance, the most terrible and lovable of men."
Hufeland, the chief medical celebrity of Germany, describes his
appearance in early manhood: "Never shall I forget the impression which
he made as 'Orestes' in Greek costume. You thought you beheld an Apollo.
Never was seen in any man such union of physical and spiritual
perfection and beauty as at that time in Goethe." More remarkable still
is the testimony of Wieland, who had reason to be offended, having been
before their acquaintance the subject of Goethe's sharp satire. But
immediately at their first meeting, sitting at table "by the side," he
says, "of this glorious youth, I was radically cured of all my
vexation.... Since this morning," he wrote to Jacobi, "my soul is as
full of Goethe as a dewdrop is of the morning sun." And to Zimmermann:
"He is in every respect the greatest, best, most splendid human being
that ever God created." Goethe was then twenty-six. Henry Crabbe
Robinson, who saw him at the age of fifty-two, reports him one of the
most "oppressively handsome" men he had ever seen, and speaks
particularly as all who have described him speak, of his wonderfully
brilliant eyes. Those eyes, we are told, had lost nothing of their
lustre, nor his head its natural covering, at the age of eighty.
Among the heroic qualities notable in Goethe, I reckon his faithful and
unflagging industry. Here was a man who took pains with himself,--_liess
sich's sauer werden,_--and made the most of himself. He speaks of
wasting, while a student in Leipsic, "the beautiful time;" and certainly
neither at Leipsic nor afterward at Strasburg did he toil as his Wagner
in "Faust" would have done. But he was always learning. In the
lecture-room or out of it, with pen and books or gay companions, he was
taking in, to give forth again in dramatic or philosophic form the world
of his experience.
A frolicsome youth may leave something to regret in the way of time
misspent; but Goethe the man was no dawdler, no easy-going Epicurean. On
the whole, he made the most of himself, and stands before the world a
notable instance of a complete life. He would do the work which was
given him to do. He would not die till the second part of "Faust" was
brought to its predetermined close. By sheer force of will he lived till
that work was done. Smitten at fourscore by the death of his son, and by
deaths all around, he kept to his task. "The idea of duty alone sustains
me; the spirit is willing, the flesh must." When "Faust" was finished,
the strain relaxed. "My remaining days," he said, "I may consider a free
gift; it matters little what I do now, or whether I do anything." And
six months later he died.
A complete life! A life of strenuous toil! At home and abroad,--in
Italy and Sicily, at Ilmenau and Carlsbad, as in his study at
Weimar,--with eye or pen or speech, he was always at work. A man of
rigid habits; no lolling or lounging. "He showed me," says Eckermann,
"an elegant easy-chair which he had bought to-day at auction. 'But,'
said he, 'I shall never or rarely use it; all indolent habits are
against my nature. You see in my chamber no sofa; I sit always in my old
wooden chair, and never, till a few weeks ago, have permitted even a
leaning place for my head to be added. If surrounded by tasteful
furniture, my thoughts are arrested; I am placed in an agreeable but
passive state. Unless we are accustomed to them from early youth,
splendid chambers and elegant furniture had better be left to people
without thoughts.'" This in his eighty-second year!
A widely diffused prejudice regarding the personal character of Goethe
refuses to credit him with any moral worth accordant with his bodily and
mental gifts. It figures him a libertine,--heartless, loveless, bad. I
do not envy the mental condition of those who can rest in the belief
that a really great poet can be a bad man. Be assured that the fruits of
genius have never grown, and will never grow, in such a soil. Of all
great poets Byron might seem at first glance to constitute an exception
to this--I venture to call it--law of Nature. Yet hear what Walter
Scott, a sufficient judge, said of Byron:--
"The errors of Lord Byron arose neither from depravity of heart--for
nature had not committed the anomaly of uniting to such extraordinary
talents an imperfect moral sense--nor from feelings dead to the
admiration of virtue. No man had ever a kinder heart for sympathy, or a
more open hand for the relief of distress; and no mind was ever more
formed for enthusiastic admiration of noble actions."
The case of Goethe requires no appeal to general principles. It only
requires that the charges against him be fairly investigated; that he be
tried by documentary evidence, and by the testimony of competent
witnesses. The mistake is made of confusing breaches of conventional
decorum with essential depravity.
That Goethe was faulty in many ways may be freely conceded. But surely
there is a wide difference between not being faultless and being
definitely bad. To call a man bad is to say that the evil in him
preponderates over the good. In the case of Goethe the balance was
greatly the other way. It has been said that he abused the confidence
reposed in him by women; that he encouraged affection which he did not
reciprocate for artistic purposes. The charge is utterly groundless; and
in the case of Bettine has been refuted by irrefragable proof. To say
that he was wanting in love, heartless, cold, is ridiculously false. Yet
the charge is constantly reiterated in the face of facts,--reiterated
with undoubting assurance and a certain complacency which seems to say,
"Thank God! we are not as this man was." There is a satisfaction which
some people feel in _spotting_ their man,--Burns drank; Coleridge took
opium; Byron was a rake; Goethe was cold: by these marks we know them.
The poet found it necessary, as I have said, in later years, under
social pressure, for the sake of the work which was given him to do, to
fortify himself with a mail of reserve. And this, indeed, contrasted
strangely with his former _abandon_, and with the customary gush of
German sentimentality. It was common then for Germans who had known each
other by report, and were mutually attracted, when first they met, to
fall on each other's necks and kiss and weep. Goethe, as a young man,
had indulged such fervors; but in old age he had lost this effusiveness,
or saw fit to restrain himself outwardly, while his kindly nature still
glowed with its pristine fires. He wrote to Frau von Stein, "I may truly
say that my innermost condition does not correspond to my outward
behavior." Hence the charge of coldness. Say that Mount Aetna is cold:
do we not see the snow on its sides?
But he was unpatriotic; he occupied himself with poetry, and did not cry
out while his country was in the death-throes--so it seemed--of the
struggle with France! But what should he have done? What _could_ he
have done? What would his single arm or declamation have availed? No man
more than Goethe longed for the rehabilitation of Germany. In his own
way he wrought for that end; he could work effectually in no other. That
enigmatical composition,--the "Märchen,"--according to the latest
interpretation, indicates how, in Goethe's view, that end was to be
accomplished. To one who considers the relation of ideas to events, it
will not seem extravagant when I say that to Goethe, more than to any
one individual, Germany is indebted for her emancipation, independence,
and present political regeneration.[6]
[Footnote 6: (The following interpretation of the "Märchen" is condensed
from a later portion of this essay, and used here as a foot-note for the
light it throws upon Goethe's political career.)
In the summer of 1795 Goethe composed for Schiller's new magazine, "Die
Horen," a prose poem known in German literature as _Das Märchen,_--"
_The_ Tale;" as if it were the only one, or the one which more than
another deserves that appellation....
Goethe gave this essay to the public as a riddle which would probably be
unintelligible at the time, but which might perhaps find an interpreter
after many days, when the hints contained in it should be verified.
Since its first appearance commentators have exercised their ingenuity
upon it, perceiving it to be allegorical, but until recently without
success.... I follow Dr. Herman's Baumgart's lead in the exposition
which I now offer.
"The Tale" is a prophetic vision of the destinies of Germany,--an
allegorical foreshowing at the close of the eighteenth century of what
Germany was yet to become, and has in great part already become. A
position is predicted for her like that which she occupied from the time
of Charles the Great to the time of Charles V.,--a period during which
the Holy Roman Empire of Germany was the leading secular power in
Western Europe. That time had gone by. Since the middle of the sixteenth
century Germany had declined, and at the date of this writing (1795) had
nearly reached her darkest day. Disintegrated, torn by conflicting
interests, pecked by petty rival princes, despairing of her own future,
it seemed impossible that she should ever again become a power among the
nations. Goethe felt this; he felt it as profoundly as any German of his
day ... and he characteristically went into himself and studied the
situation. The result was this wonderful composition,--"Das Märchen." He
perceived that Germany must die to be born again. She did die, and is
born again. He had the sagacity to foresee the dissolution of the Holy
Roman Empire,--an event which took place eleven years later, in 1806.
The Empire is figured by the composite statue of the fourth King in the
subterranean Temple, which crumbles to pieces when that Temple,
representing Germany's past, emerges and stands above ground by the
River. The resurrection of the Temple and its stand by the River is the
_dénouement_ of the Tale. And that signifies, allegorically, the
rehabilitation of Germany.]
It is true, his writings contain no declamations against tyrants, and
no tirades in favor of liberty. He believed that oppression existed only
through ignorance and blindness, and these he was all his life long
seeking to remove. He believed that true liberty is attainable only
through mental illumination, and that he was all his life long seeking
to promote.
He was no agitator, no revolutionist; he had no faith in violent
measures. Human welfare, he judged, is not to be advanced in that way;
is less dependent on forms of polity than on the life within. But if the
test of patriotism is the service rendered to one's country, who more
patriotic than he? Lucky for us and the world that he persisted to serve
her in his own way, and not as the agitators claimed that he should. It
was clear to him then, and must be clear to us now, that he could not
have been what they demanded, and at the same time have given to his
country and the world what he did.
As a courtier and favorite of Fortune, it was inevitable that Goethe
should have enemies. They have done what they could to blacken his name;
and to this day the shadow they have cast upon it in part remains. But
of this be sure, that no selfish, loveless egoist could have had and
retained such friends. The man whom the saintly Fraulein von Klettenberg
chose for her friend, whom clear-sighted, stern-judging Herder declared
that he loved as he did his own soul; the man whose thoughtful kindness
is celebrated by Herder's incomparable wife, whom Karl August and the
Duchess Luise cherished as a brother; the man whom children everywhere
welcomed as their ready playfellow and sure ally, of whom pious Jung
Stilling lamented that admirers of Goethe's genius knew so little of the
goodness of his heart,--can this have been a bad man, heartless, cold?
II. THE WRITER.
I have said that to Goethe, above all writers, belongs the distinction
of having excelled, not experimented merely,--that, others have also
done,--but excelled in many distinct kinds. To the lyrist he added the
dramatist, to the dramatist the novelist, to the novelist the mystic
seer, and to all these the naturalist and scientific discoverer. The
history of literature exhibits no other instance in which a great poet
has supplemented his proper orbit with so wide an epicyle.
In poetry, as in science, the ground of his activity was a passionate
love of Nature, which dates from his boyhood. At the age of fifteen,
recovering from a sickness caused by disappointment in a boyish affair
of the heart, he betook himself with his sketch-book to the woods. "In
the farthest depth of the forest," he says, "I sought out a solemn spot,
where ancient oaks and beeches formed a shady retreat. A slight
declivity of the soil made the merit of the ancient boles more
conspicuous. This space was inclosed by a thicket of bushes, between
which peeped moss-covered rocks, mighty and venerable, affording a rapid
fall to an affluent brook."
The sketches made of these objects at that early age could have had no
artistic value, although the methodical father was careful to mount and
preserve them. But what the pencil, had it been the pencil of the
greatest master, could never glean from scenes like these, what art
could never grasp, what words can never formulate, the heart of the boy
then imbibed, assimilated, resolved in his innermost being. There awoke
in him then those mysterious feelings, those unutterable yearnings, that
pensive joy in the contemplation of Nature, which leavened all his
subsequent life, and the influence of which is so perceptible in his
poetry, especially in his lyrics....
The first literary venture by which Goethe became widely known was "Götz
von Berlichingen," a dramatic picture of the sixteenth century, in which
the principal figure is a predatory noble of that name. A dramatic
picture, but not in any true sense a play, it owed its popularity at the
time partly to the truth of its portraitures, partly to its choice of a
native subject and the truly German feeling which pervades it. It was a
new departure in German literature, and perplexed the critics as much as
it delighted the general public. It anticipated by a quarter of a
century what is technically called the Romantic School.
"Götz von Berlichingen" was soon followed by the "Sorrows of
Werther,"--one of those books which, on their first appearance have
taken the world by storm, and of which Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin"
is the latest example. It is a curious circumstance that a great poet
should have won his first laurels by prose composition. Sir Walter Scott
eclipsed the splendor of his poems by the popularity of the Waverley
novels. Goethe eclipsed the world-wide popularity of his "Werther" by
the splendor of his poems.
Of one who was great in so many kinds, it may seem difficult to decide
in what department he most excelled. Without undertaking to measure and
compare what is incommensurable, I hold that Goethe's genius is
essentially lyrical. Whatever else may be claimed for him, he is, first
of all, and chiefly, a singer. Deepest in his nature, the most innate of
all his faculties, was the faculty of song, of rhythmical utterance. The
first to manifest itself in childhood, it was still active at the age of
fourscore. The lyrical portions of the second part of "Faust," some of
which were written a short time before his death, are as spirited, the
versification as easy, the rhythm as perfect, as the songs of his youth.
As a lyrist he is unsurpassed, I venture to say unequalled, if we take
into view the whole wide range of his performance in this kind,--from
the ballads, the best-known of his smaller poems, and those light
fugitive pieces, those bursts of song which came to him without effort,
and with such a rush that in order to arrest and preserve them he
seized, as he tells us, the first scrap of paper that came to hand and
wrote upon it diagonally, if it happened so to lie on his table, lest,
through the delay of selecting and placing, the inspiration should be
checked and the poem evaporate,--from these to such stately compositions
as the "Zueignung," or dedication of his poems, the "Weltseele" and the
"Orphic Sayings,"--in short, from poetry that writes itself, that
springs spontaneously in the mind, to poetry that is written with
elaborate art. There is this distinction, and it is one of the most
marked in lyric verse. Compare in English poetry, by way of
illustration, the snatches of song in Shakspeare's plays with
Shakspeare's sonnets; compare Burns with Gray; compare Jean Ingelow
with Browning.
Goethe's ballads have an undying popularity; they have been translated,
and most of them are familiar to English readers....
In the Elegies written after his return from Italy, the author figures
as a classic poet inspired by the Latin Muse. The choicest of these
elegies--the "Alexis and Dora"--is not so much an imitation of the
ancients as it is the manifestation of a side of the poet's nature which
he had in common with the ancients. He wrote as a Greek or Roman might
write, because he felt his subject as a Greek or Roman might feel it.