The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Chapter 2 : In the spring of 1770 Goethe entered the University of Stra.s.sburg, which was at that t

In the spring of 1770 Goethe entered the University of Stra.s.sburg, which was at that time in French territory. 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 cla.s.sic 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 Alsatian folksongs and was fascinated by the Stra.s.sburg 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 t.i.tle 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 t.i.tle of _Gotz von Berlichingen_. By its exuberant fulness of life, its bluff German heartiness, and the freshness and variety of its scenes, it took the public by storm, notwithstanding its disregard of the approved rules of play-writing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE _From the Painting by J.

Stieler_]

The next year he published _The Sufferings of Young Werther_, a tragic tale of a weak-willed sentimental youth of hyperesthetic tendencies, who commits suicide because of disappointment in love. The story was the greatest literary triumph that Germany had ever known, and in point of sheer artistic power it remains to this day the best of novels in the tragic-sentimental vein. These two works carried the name of Goethe far and wide and made him the accepted leader of the literary revolution which long afterwards came to be known, from the t.i.tle of a play by Klinger, as the Storm and Stress.

The years 1773-1775 were for Goethe a time of high emotional tension, from which he sought relief in rapid, desultory, and multifarious writing. Exquisite songs, musical comedies of a sentimental tinge, humorous and satiric skits in dramatic form, prose tragedy of pa.s.sionate error, and poetic tragedy of t.i.tanic revolt--all these and more welled up from a sub-conscious spring of feeling, taking little counsel of the sober intellect. Several minor productions were left unfinished and were afterwards published in fragmentary form. Such is the case with _Prometheus_, a splendid fragment, in which we get a glimpse of the t.i.tan battling, as the friend of man, against the ever-living G.o.ds. Of the works completed and published at this time, aside from _Gotz_ and _Werther_, the most notable were _Clavigo_ and _Stella_, prose tragedies in which a fickle lover meets with condign punishment. Another prose tragedy, _Egmont_, with its hero conceived as a "demonic" nature borne on to his doom by his own buoyancy of spirit, was nearly finished. Most important of all, a considerable portion of _Faust_, which was to be its author's great life-work, was "stormed out" during these early years at Frankfurt.

The legendary Faust is presented as a bad man who sells his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of power and pleasure, gets what he bargained for, and in the end goes to perdition. Young Goethe conceived his hero differently: not as a bad man on the way to h.e.l.l, and not--at first--as a good man on the way to heaven. He thought of him rather as a towering personality pa.s.sionately athirst for transcendental knowledge and universal experience; as a man whose nature contained the very largest possibilities both for good and for evil. It is probable that, when he began to write, Goethe did not intend to antic.i.p.ate the judgment of G.o.d upon Faust's career. The essence of his dramatic plan was to carry his hero through a lifetime of varied experience, letting him sin and suffer grandly, and at last to give him something to do which would seem worth having lived for.

After the going down of the curtain, in all probability, he was to be left in the hands of the Eternal Pardoner. Later in life, as we shall see, Goethe decided not only to save his hero, but to make his salvation a part of the dramatic action.

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 authors.h.i.+p was pitifully small. Moreover, he saw in the boyish, impulsive, sport-loving prince a sterling nature that might be led in the ways of wise rulers.h.i.+p. For the nonce this was mission enough. He took his seat in the Council in June, 1776, with the t.i.tle 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 h.o.m.ologies of the vertebrate skeleton. Withal he was very attentive to routine business.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 1. GOETHE'S GARDEN HOUSE IN WEIMAR]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 2. GOETHE'S HOUSE IN WEIMAR]

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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sions and gave him a large and free outlook over the world. In this process of quieting the pa.s.sions 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 Nightsong_, _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 Sentimentalism, The Fisher-maid, The Birds_, and other pieces. Much more important than any of these bagatelles, which were often hastily composed for a birthday celebration or some other festive occasion, are the two fine poetic dramas, _Iphigenie_ and _Ta.s.so_. The former was first written rather rapidly in stately rhythmic prose and played by the amateurs, with Goethe himself in the role of Orestes, in the spring of 1779. Eight years later, the author being then in Italy, it was recast with great care in mellifluous blank verse. _Iphigenie_ is essentially a drama of the soul, there being little in it of what is commonly called action.

A youth who is the prey of morbid illusions, so that his life has become a burden, is cured by finding a n.o.ble-minded sister, whose whole being radiates peace and self-possession. The entire power of Goethe's chastened art is here lavished on the figure of his heroine who, by her goodness, her candor, her sweet reasonableness, not only heals her soul-sick brother, but so works on the barbarian king Thoas, who would fain have her for his wife, that he wins a notable victory over himself.

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 himself 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 _Gotz_ 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 _Ta.s.so_--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 volumes; and to gain time for this enterprise he resolved to take a trip to the land upon which he had already twice looked down with longing--once in 1775 and again in 1779--from the summit of the Gotthard.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GOETHE IN THE CAMPAGNA]

On the 3d of September, at three o'clock in the morning, he stole away from Karlsbad, where he had been taking the waters, and hurried southward, alone and incognito, over the Alps.

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 ideas 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 a.s.sented.

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 Goschen. _Egmont_ and _Ta.s.so_ were soon disposed of, but _Faust_ proved intractable. While in Rome he had taken out the old ma.n.u.script 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. This 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 _Gotz_ and _Werther_, and did not understand the new Goethe, who showed in 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 Vulpius 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 relation 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 a.s.sured 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 in their frank portraiture of the emanc.i.p.ated 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 champions.h.i.+p 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 scholars.h.i.+p, and half a dozen sciences, would show a many-sidedness to which there is no modern parallel. Of all this ma.s.s of writing only a few works of major importance can even be mentioned here.

In 1796 appeared _Wilhelm Meister's Apprentices.h.i.+p_, a novel which captivated the literary cla.s.s, 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_.[3] This tells the story of a Werther-like youth who is to be saved from Werther's fate by finding a work to do. His "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 his own development Goethe finally decided to change his plan and his t.i.tle, and to present Wilhelm's variegated experiences as an apprentices.h.i.+p in the school of life. In the final version Wilhelm comes to the conclusion that the theatre is _not_ his mission--all that was a mistaken ambition. Just what use he _will_ make of his well-disciplined energy does not clearly appear at the end of the story, since Goethe bundles him off to Italy. He was already planning a continuation of the story under the t.i.tle of _Wilhelm Meister's Journeymans.h.i.+p_. In this second part the hero becomes interested in questions of social uplift and thinks of becoming a surgeon. Taken as a whole _Wilhelm Meister_ moves with a slowness which is quite out of tune with later ideals of prose fiction. It also lacks concentration and artistic finality. But it is replete with Goethe's ripe and mellow wisdom, and it contains more of his intimate self than any other work of his except _Faust_.

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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sionate 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 Greek Queen of Beauty, was reserved for the Second Part.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MONUMENT TO GOETHE (Berlin 1880) Sculptor, Fritz Schaper]

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 1813:

"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 pa.s.sion 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 t.i.tle has been widely misunderstood. For Goethe poetry was not the ant.i.thesis 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, subst.i.tution, or anything of that gross kind.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GOETHE'S MONUMENT IN ROME. (SCULPTOR, EBERLEIN) Presented to the City of Rome by the German Emperor (From Seidel's _Der Kaiser and die Kunst_)]

It lies in the very style of the book and is a part of its author's method of self-revelation. That he devotes so much s.p.a.ce to the seemingly transient and unimportant love-affairs of his youth is only his way of recognizing 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 in 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 a.s.similate the poetry of all nations. The Greeks and Romans no longer sufficed his omnivorous appet.i.te and his "panoramic ability."

When Hammer-Purgstall's German version of the _D[=i]w[=a]n_ of H[=a]f[=i]z 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 imitated 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 inner 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 talented 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 n.o.bly 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DEATH OF GOETHE Fritz Fleischer]

POEMS

GREETING AND DEPARTURE[4] (1771)

My heart throbbed high: to horse, away then!

Swift as a hero to the fight!

Earth in the arms of evening lay then, And o'er the mountains hung the night, Now could I see like some huge giant The haze-enveloped oak-tree rise, While from the thicket stared defiant The darkness with its hundred eyes.

The cloud-throned moon from his dominion Peered drowsily through veils of mist.

The wind with gently-wafting pinion Gave forth a rustling strange and whist.

With shapes of fear the night was thronging But all the more my courage glowed; My soul flamed up in pa.s.sionate longing And hot my heart with rapture flowed.

I saw thee; melting rays of pleasure Streamed o'er me from thy tender glance, My heart beat only to thy measure, I drew my breath as in a trance.

The radiant hue of spring caressing Lay rosy on thy upturned face, And love--ye G.o.ds, how rich the blessing!