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The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries VOLUME I
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
A LIFE
GOETHE, the illustrious poet-sage whom Matthew Arnold called the "clearest, largest, and most helpful thinker of modern times",
was born August 28, 1749, at Frankfurt on the Main. He was christened Johann Wolfgang. In his early years his familiar name was Wolfgang, or simply Wolf, never Johann. His family was of the
middle class, the
aristocratic von which sometimes appears in his name, in accordance with German custom, having come to him with a patent of nobility which he received in
the year 1782.
Johann Caspar Goethe, the poet’s father, was the son of a prosperous
tailor, who was also a tailor’s son. Having abundant means and being of an
ambitions turn, Johann Caspar prepared himself for the profession of law, spent
some time in Italy, and then settled in Frankfurt in the hope of rising to
distinction in the public service. Disappointed in this hope, he procured the
imperial title of Councilor, which gave him a dignified social status but
nothing in particular to do. He thus became virtually a gentleman of leisure,
since his law practise was quite insignificant. In 1748 he married Katharina
Elisabeth Textor, whose father, Johann Wolfgang Textor, was the town’s older
magistrate and most eminent citizen. She was eighteen years old at the fine of
her marriage — twenty years younger than her husband — and well fitted to
become a poet’s mother. The gift on which she especially prided herself was her
story-telling. Wolfgang was the first child of these parents.
The paternal strain in Goethe’s blood made for levelheadedness, precise
and methodical ways, a serious view of life, and a desire to make the most of
it. By his mother he was a poet who liked nothing else so well as to invent
dream-worlds and commune with the spirits of his imagination. He also ascribes
to his mother his Frohnatur, his joyous nature. And certain it is that his temperament was on the whole
sunny. As he grew to manhood men and women alike were charmed by him. He became
a virtuoso in love and had a genius for friendship. But he was not always
cheerful. In his youth, particularly, he was often moody and given to brooding
over indefinable woes. He suffered acutely at times from what is now called the
melancholia of adolescence. This was a phase of that emotional sensitiveness
and nervous instability which are nearly always a part of the poet's dower.
Wolfgang grew up in a wholesome atmosphere of comfort and refinement. He never knew the tonic bitterness of poverty. On the other hand, he was never spoiled by his advantages; to his dying day he disliked luxury. At home under private tutors the boy studied Latin, French, and English, and picked up a little Italian by overhearing his sister's lessons. In 1758 Frankfurt was occupied by a French army, and a French playhouse was set going for the diversion of the officers. In the interest of his French Wolfgang was allowed to go to the theatre, and he made such rapid progress that he was soon studying the dramatic unities as expounded by Corneille and actually trying to write a French play. Withal he was left much to himself, so that he had time to explore Frankfurt to his heart's content. He was much in contact with people of the humbler sort and learned to like their racy dialect. He penetrated into the ghetto and learned the jargon of the Jews. He even attacked biblical Hebrew, being led thereto by his great love of the Old Testament It was his boyish ambition to become a great poet. His favorite amusement was a puppet-show, for which he invented elaborate plays. From his
tenth year on he wrote a great deal of verse, early acquiring technical
facility and local renown and coming to regard himself as a "thunderer". He attempted a polyglot novel, also a biblical tale on the
subject of Joseph, winch he destroyed on observing that the hero did nothing but
pray and weep. When he was ready for the university he wished to go to
Gottingen to study the old humanities, but his father was bent on making a lawyer
of him. So it came about that some ten years of his early life were devoted,
first as a student and then as a practitioner, to a reluctant and halfhearted
grapple with the intricacies of Holy Roman law.
At the age of sixteen Goethe entered the University of
Leipzig, where he remained about three years. The law lectures bored him and
he soon ceased to attend them. The other studies that he took up, especially
logic and philosophy, seemed to him arid and unprofitable — mere conventional
verbiage without any bed-rock of real knowledge. So he presently fell into that
mood of disgust with academic learning which was afterwards to form the keynote
of Faust. Outside the
university he found congenial work in Oeser's drawing-school. Oeser was an
artist of no great power with the brush, but a genial man, a frend of
Winckelmann, and an enthusiast for Greek art. Goethe learned to admire and love
him, and from this time on, for some twenty years, his constant need of
artistic expression found hardly less satisfaction in drawing from nature than
in poetry.
His poetic ambition received little encouragement in university
circles. Those to whom he read his ambireus verses made light of them. The
venerated Gellert, himself a poet of repute, advised the lad to cultivate a
good prose style and look to his handwriting. No wonder that he despaired of
his talent, concluded that he could never be a poet, and burnt his effusions. A
maddening love-affair with his landlady's daughter, Anna Katharina Schönkopf,
revived the dying lyric flame, and he began to write verses in the gallant
erotic vein then and there fashionable — verses that tell of love-lorn
shepherds and shepherdesses, give sage advice to girls about keeping their
innocence, and moralize on the ways of this wicked world. They show no signs of
lyric genins. His short-lived passion for Annette, as he called her, whom he
tormented with his jealousy until she lost patience and broke off the intimacy,
was also responsible for his first play, Die Laune des Verliebten, or The Lover's Wayward Humor. It s a pretty one-act pastoral in alexandrine verse, the theme being the
punishment of an overjealous lover. What is mainly significant in these
Leipzig poetizings is the fact that they grew out of genuine experience. Goethe
had resolved to drop his ambitions projects, such as Belshazzar, and coin his own real thoughts and feelings into
verse. Thus early he was led into the way of poetic "confession"
In the summer of 1768 he was suddenly prostrated by a grave illness — an
internal hemorrhage which was at first thought to portend consumption. Pale and
languid he returned to his father's house, and for several months it was
uncertain whether he was to live or die. During this period of seclusion he
became deeply interested in magic, alchemy, astrology, cabalism, and all that
sort of thing. He even set up a kind of alchemist's laboratory to search
experimentally for the panacea. Out of these abstruse studies grew Faust's wonderful dream of an ecstatic spirit-life to be attained by natural
magic. Of course the menace of impending death drew his thoughts in the
direction of religion. Among the Ultimate friends of the family was the devout
Susanna von Klettenberg, one of the leading spirits in a local conventicle of
the Moravian Brethren. This lady—afterwards immortalized as the "beautiful
soul" of Wilhelm Meister—tried
to have the sick youth make his peace with God in her way, that is,
by accepting Christ as an everpresent personal saviour. While he never would
admit a conviction of sin he envied the calm of the saintly maiden and was so
far converted that he attended the meetings of the Brethren, took part in their
communion service, and for a while spoke the language of a devout pietist.
This religious experience of his youth bit deep into Goethe's character.
He soon drifted away from the pietists and their ways, he came to have a poor
opinion of priests and priestcraft, and in time men called him a heathen.
Nevertheless his nature had been so deeply stirred in his youth by religion's
mystic appeal that he never afterwards lost his reverence for genuine religious
feeling. To the end of his days the aspiration of the human soul for communion
with God found in him a delicate and sympathetic interpreter.
During his convalescence Goethe retouched a score of his Leipzig songs
and published them anonymously, with music by his friend Breitkopf, under the
title of New Songs. He
regarded them at the time as trifles that had come into being without art or
effort. "Young, in love, and full of feeling," he had sung them so,
while "playing the old game of youth". Today they seem to convey
little forewarning of the matchless lyric gift that was soon to awaken, being
a shade too intellectual and sententious. One hears more of the critic's
comment than of the poet's cry. It was at this time also that he rewrote an
earlier Leipzig play, expanding it from one act to three and giving it the
title Die Mitschuldigen, or The Fellow-culprits. It is
a sort of rogue's comedy in middleclass life, written in the alexandrine
verse, which was soon to be discarded along with other French fashions. We
lave a quartet consisting of an inquisitive inn-keeper, his misrcated
sentimental daughter, her worthless husband, and her former lover. They
tangle themselves up in a series of low intrigues and are finally unmasked as
one and all poor miserable sinners. Technically it is a good play — lively,
diverting, well put together. But one can not call it very edifying.
In the spring of 1770 Goethe entered the University of Strassburg, which
was at that time in French terrtory. It was a part of his general purpose to
better his French, but the actual effect of his sojourn in Alsatia was to put
him out of humor with all French standards, especially with the classic French
drama, and to excite in him a fervid enthusiasm for the things of the
fatherland. This was due partly to the influence of Herder, with whom he now
came into close personal relations. From Herder, who was six years his senior
and already known by his Fragments and Critical Forests as a trenchant and original critic, he heard the gospel of a literary
revolution. Rules and conventions were to be thrown overboard; the new
watchwords were nature, power, originality, genius, fulness of expression. He
conceived a boundless admiration for Homer, Ossian, and Shakespeare, in each of
whom he saw the mirror of an epoch and a national life. He became an
enthusiastic collector of Allsatian folksongs and was fascinated by the
Strassburg minster — at a time when "Gothic" was generally
regarded as a synonym of barbarous. Withal his gift for song-making came
to a new stage of perfection under the inspiration of his love for the village
maid Friederike Brion. From this time forth he was the prince of German
lyrists.
In the summer of 1771 he returned to Frankfurt once more, this time with
the title of licentiate in law, and began to practise in a
perfunctory way, with his heart in his literary projects. By the end of the
year he had written out the first draft of a play which he afterwards
revised and published anonymously (in 1773) under the title of Oots von Berlichingen. By its exuberant fulness of life, its bluff German heartiness, and the freshness
and variety
The close of the year 1775 brought a momentous change in
Goethe's life and prospects. On the invitation of the young duke Karl August,
who had met him and taken a liking to him, he went to visit the Weimar
court, not expecting to stay more than a few weeks. But the duke was so
pleased with his gifted and now famous guest that he presently decided to keep
him in Weimar, if possible, by making him a member of the Council of
State. Goethe was the more willing to remain, since he detested his law practise,
and his income from authorship was pitifully small. Moreover, he saw a the
boyish, impulsive, sport-loving prince a sterling nature that might be led in
the ways of wise rulership. For the nonce this was mission enough, he took his
seat n the Council in June, 1776, with the title of Councilor of Legation. At
first there was not very much for him to do except to familiarize himself with
the physical and economic conditions of the little duchy. This he did with a
will. He set about studying mineralogy, geology, botany, and was soon observing
the homologies of the vertebrate skeleton. Withal he was very attentive tc routine
business. One after another important departments of administration were
turned over to him, until he became, in 1782, the President of the Chambers and
hence the leading statesman of the duchy.
All this produced a sobering and clarifying effect. The inner storm and
stress gradually subsided, and the new Goethe — statesman, scientific
investigator, man of the world, courtier, friend of princes — came to see that
after all feeling was not everything, and that its untrammeled expression was
not the whole of art. Form and decorum counted for more than he had supposed,
and revolution was not the word of wisdom. Self-control was the only basis of character,
and limitation lay at the foundation of all art. To work to make things
better, even in a humble sphere, was better than to fret over the badness of
the world. Nature's method was that of bit-by-bit progress, and to puzzle out
her ways was a noble and fascinating employment. In this general way of
thinking he was confirmed by the study of Spinoza's Ethics, a book which, as he said long afterwards, quieted his
passions and gave him a large and free outlook over the world. In this process
of quieting the passions some influence must be ascribed to Charlotte von
Stein, a woman in whom, for some twelve years of his life, he found his muse
and his madonna. His letters often address her in terms of idolatrous endearment.
She was a wife and a mother, but Weimar society regarded her relation to Goethe
as a platonic attachment not to be condemned.
The artistic expression of the new life in Weimar is found in various
short poems, notably Wanderer's
Night-song, Ilmenau,
The Divine, and The Mysteries; also in a number of plays which were written for the amateur stage of the court
circle. The Weimarians were very fond of play-acting, and Goethe became their
purveyor of dramatic supplies. It was to meet this demand that he wrote Brother and Sister (Die Geschwister),
The Triumph of
By the end of his first decade in Weimar Goethe began to feel that he
needed and had earned a vacation. His conduct of the public business had been
highly successful, but he had starved his esthetic nature; for after all Weimar
was only a good-sized village that could offer little to the lover of art.
Overwork had so told upon him that he was unable to hold limself long to any
literary project. He had begun half a dozen important works, but had completed
none of them, and the public was beginning to suspect that the author of Götz and Werther was lost to
literature. The effect of the whole situation — that inner conflict between the
poetic dreamer and the man of affairs which is the theme of Tasso — was to produce a
feeling of depression, as of a bird caught in a net. So acute did the trouble
become that he afterwards spoke of it as a terrible disease. In the summer of
1786 he contracted with the Leipzig publisher Goschen for a new edition of his
works in eight
In Italy, where he remained nearly two years, Goethe's mind and art
underwent another notable change. He himself called it a spiritual rebirth.
Freed from all oppressive engagements, he gave himself to the study of ancient
sculpture and architecture, reveled in the splendors of Renaissance painting,
and pursued his botanical studies in the enticing plant-world of the Italian
gardens. Venice, Naples, Vesuvius, Sicily, the sea, fascinated him in their
several ways and gave him the sense of being richer for the rest of his life. Sharing
in the care-free existence of the German artist-colony in Rome made him very
happy. It not only disciplined his judgment in matters of art and opened a vast
new world of deas and impressions, but it restored the lost balance between the
intellectual and duty-bound man on the one hand and the esthetic and
sensual man on the other. He resolved never again to put on the harness of an
administrative drudge, but to claim the freedom of a poet, an artist, a man of
science. To this desire the Duke of Weimar generously assented.
On his return to Weimar, in June, 1788, Goethe made it his first
task to finish the remaining works that were called for by his
contract with Göschen. Egmont and Tasso were
soon disposed of, but Faust proved intractable. While in Rome he had taken out the old manuscript and
written a scene or two, and had then somehow lost touch with the subject. So he
decided to revise what he had on hand and to publish a part of the scenes as a
fragment. Thiss fragmentary Faust came out in 1790. It attracted little attention, nor was any other of the new
works received with much warmth by the public of that day. They expected
something like Götz and Werther, and did not understand the new Goethe, who showed many ways that his heart
was still in Italy and that he found Weimar a little dull and provincial. Thus
the greatest of German poets had for the time being lost touch with the German
public; he saw that he must wait for the growth of the taste by which he was to
be understood and enjoyed. Matters were hardly made better by his taking
Christiane Vulpins into his house as his unwedded wife. This step, which
shocked Weimar society—except the duke and Herder—had the effect of
ending his unwholesome relaxion to Frau von Stein, who was getting old and
peevish. The character of Christiane has often been pictured too harshly. She
was certainly not her husband's intellectual peer — he would have looked long
for a wife of that grade — and she became a little too fond of wine. On the
other hand, she was affectionate, devoted, true, and by no means lacking in
mental gifts. She and Goethe were happy together and faithful to each other.
For several years after his return from Italy Goethe wrote nothing that
is of much importance in the history of his literary life. He devoted himself
largely to scientific studies in plant and animal morphology and the theory of
color. His discovery of the intermaxillary bone in the human skull, and his
theory that the lateral organs of a plant are but successive phases of the
leaf, have given him an assured if modest place in the history of the development
hypothesis. On the other hand, his long and laborious effort to refute
Newton's theory of the composition of white light is now generally regarded as
a misdirection of energy. In his Roman Elegies (1790) he struck a note of pagan sensuality. The
pensive distichs, telling of the wanton doings of Amor amid the grandeur that
was Rome, were a little shocking their frank portraiture of the emancipated
flesh. The outbreak of violence in France seemed to him nothing but madness and
folly, since he did not see the real Revolution, but only the Paris Terror.
He wrote two or three very ordinary plays to satirize various phases of
the revolutionary excitement—phases that now seem as insignificant as the plays
themselves. In 1792 he accompanied the Duke of Weimar on the inglorious
Austro-Prussian invasion of France, heard the cannonade at Valmy, and was an
interested observer as the allies tumbled back over the Rhine. Perhaps the best
literary achievement of these years is the fine hexameter version of the
medieval Reynard the Fox.
The year 1794 marks the beginning of more intimate relations between
Goethe and Schiller. Their memorable friendship lasted until Schiller's death,
in 1805 — the richest decade in the whole history of German letters. The two
men became in a sense allies and stood together in the championship of good
taste and humane idealism. Goethe's literary occupations during this period
were very multifarious; a list of his writings in the various fields of poetry,
drama, prose, fiction, criticism, biography, art and art-history, literary
scholarship, and half a dozen sciences, would show a many-sidedness to which
there is no modern parallel. Of all this mass of writing only a few works of
major importance can even be mentioned here.
In 1796 appeared Wilhelm
Meister's Apprenticeship, a novel which captivated the literary
class, if not the general public, and was destined to exert great influence on
German fiction for a generation to come. It had been some twenty years in the
making. In its earlier form it was called Wilhelm
Meister's Theatrical Mission. This tells the story of a
Werther-like youth who is to be saved from Werther's fate by finding a work
to do. Ills " mission," apparently, is to become a good actor and to
promote high ideals of the histrionic art. Incidentally he is ambitious to be a
dramatic poet, and his childhood is simply that of Wolfgang Goethe. For reasons
Intimately connected with
During this high noon of his life Goethe again took up his long
neglected Faust, decided to make two parts of it, completed the First Part, and thought out much
that was to go into the Second Part. By this time he had become somewhat
alienated from the spirit of his youth, when he had envisaged life in a mist of
vague and stormy emotionalism. His present passion was for clearness. So he
boldly decided to convert the old tragedy of sin and suffering into a drama of
mental clearing-up. The early Faust — the pessimist, murderer, seducer — was to
be presented as temporarily wandering in the dark; as a man who had gone
grievously wrong in passionate error, but was essentially "good" by
virtue of his aspiring nature, and hence, in the Lord's fulness of time, was to
be led out into the light and saved. The First Part, ending with the heart-rending death of Margaret in her prison-cell, and leaving Faust in an agony of
remorse, was published in 1808. Faust's redemption, by enlarged experience of
life and especially by his symbolic union with the Creek Queen of Beauty, was
reserved for the Second Part.
The other more notable works of this period are Hermann and Dorothea, a
delightful poem in dactylic hexameters, picturing a bit of German still life
against the sinister background of the French Revolution, and the Natural Daughter, which was
planned to body forth, in the form of a dramatic trilogy in blank verse,
certain phases of Goethe's thinking about the upheaval in France. In the former
he appears once more as a poet of the plain people, with an eye and a heart for
their ways and their outlook upon life. Everybody likes Hermann and Dorothea. On
the other hand, the Natural
Daughter is disappointing, and not merely because it is a
fragment. (Only the first part of the intended trilogy was written.) Goethe had
now convinced himself that the function of art is to present the typical.
Accordingly the characters appear as types of humanity divested of all that is
accidental or peculiar to the individual. The most of them have not even a
name. The consequence is that, notwithstanding the splendid verse and the
abounding wisdom of the speeches, the personages do not seem to be made of
genuine human stuff. As a great thinker's comment on the Revolution the Natural Daughter is almost
negligible.
The decade that followed the death of Schiller was for Germany a time
of terrible trial, during which Goethe pursued the even tenor of his way as a
poet and man of science. He had little sympathy with the national uprising
against Napoleon, whom he looked on as the invincible subduer of the hated
Revolution. From the point of view of our modern nationalism, which was just
then entering on its world-transforming career, his conduct was unpatriotic. But let him at least be rightly understood. It was not that he lacked sympathy
for the German people, but he misjudged and underestimated the new forces that
were coming into play. As the son of an earlier age he could only conceive
a people's welfare as the gift of a wise ruler. He thought of politics as the
affair of the great. He hated war and all eruptive violence, being convinced
that good would come, not by such means, but by enlightenment, self-control and
attending to one's work in one's sphere. To
the historian Luden he said in 1313:
"Do not believe that I am indifferent to the great ideas of freedom,
people, fatherland. No! These ideas are in us, they are a part of our being,
and no one can cast them from him. I too have a warm heart for Germany. I have
often felt bitter pain in thinking of the German people, so worthy of respect in
some ways, so miserable on the whole. A comparison of the German people with
other peoples arouses painful emotions which I try in every way to surmount;
and in science and art I have found the wings whereby I rise above them. But the comfort which these afford is after all a poor comfort that does not
compensate for the proud consciousness of belonging to a great and strong
people that is honored and feared."
In 1808 he published The Elective
Affinities, a novel in which the tragic effects of lawless
passion invading the marriage relation were set forth with telling art. Soon
after this he began to write a memoir of his life. He was now a European
celebrity, the dream of his youth had come true, and he purposed to show in
detail how everything had happened; that is, how his literary personality had
evolved amid the environing conditions. He conceived himself as a phenomenon to
be explained. That he called his memoir Poetry and Truth was perhaps an error of judgment, since
the title has been widely misunderstood. For Goethe poetry was not
the antithesis of truth, but a higher species of truth — the actuality as seen
by the selecting, combining and harmonizing imagination. In themselves, he
would have said, the facts of a man's life are meaningless, chaotic,
discordant: it is the poet's office to put them into the crucible of his spirit
and give them forth as a significant and harmonious whole. The
"poetry" of Goethe's autobiography—by far the best of autobiographies
in the German language — must not be taken to imply concealment, perversion,
substitution, or anything of that gross kind. It lies in the very style of the hook and
is a part of its author's method of self-revelation. That he devotes so much
space to the seemingly transient and unimportant love-affairs of his youth is
only his way of recogrizing that the poet-soul is born of love and nourished by
love. He felt that these fleeting amorosities were a part of the natural
history of his inner being.
And even it the serene afternoon of his life lovely woman often
disturbed his soul, just as in the days of his youth. But the poetic expression
of his feeling gradually became less simple and direct: he liked to embroider
it with musing reflections and exotic fancies gathered from everywhere. Just as
he endeavored with indefatigable eagerness of mind to keep abreast of
scientific research, so he tried to assimilate the poetry of all nations. The
Greeks and Romans no longer sufficed his omnivorous appetite and his "panoramic ability." When Hammer-Purgstall's German version of the Diwan of Haflz came into
his hands he at once set about making himself at home in the mental world
of the Persian and Arabic poets. Thus arose his Divan (1819), in which he irritated the oriental costume, but not
the form. His aim was to reproduce in German verse the peculiar savor of the
Orientals, with their unique blend of sensuality, wit, and mystic philosophy.
But the feeling — the tuner experience — was all his own. The best book of the Divan, the one called Suleika, was inspired by a
very real liking for Marianne Willemer, a tainted lady who played the love-game
with him and actually wrote some of the poems long ascribed to Goethe himself.
At last, in 1824, when he was seventy-five years old, he came back once
more to his Faust, the completion of which had long floated before his mind as a duty that he owed
to himself and to the world. There was no longer any doubt as to what his great
life-work was to be. With admirable energy and with perfect clarity of vision
he addressed himself to the gigantic task, the general plan of which and many
of the details had been thought out long before.
It was finished in the summer of 1831. About sixty years after he had
penned the first words of Faust, the disgruntled pessimist at war with life,
he took leave of him as a purified soul mounting upward among the saints toward
the Ineffable Light, under the mystic guidance of the Eternal-Womanly.
Goethe died March 18, 1832. The story that his last words were "more light" is probably nothing more than a happy invention.
Admirers of the great German see more in him than the author of the various works which have been all too briefly characterized in the preceding sketch. His is a case where, in very truth, the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Goethe is the representative of an epoch. He stands for certain ideals which are not those of the present hour, but which it was of inestimable value to the modern man to have thus nobly worked out and exemplified in practice. Behind and beneath his writings, informing them and giving them their value for posterity, is a wonderful personality which it is a delight and an education to study in the whole process of its evolution. By way of struggle, pain and error, like his own Faust, he arrived at a view of life, in which he found inspiration and inner peace. It is outlined in the verses which he placed before his short poems as a sort of motto:
Wide horizon, eager life, Busy years of honest strife, Ever seeking, ever founding, Never ending, ever rounding, Guarding tenderly the old, Taking of the new glad hold, Pure in purpose, light of heart, Thus we gain at least a start
The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries GENERAL INTRODUCTION
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