True, he had handed her over; and this admirer, older and quieter, would know better how to treat her. But the sight of him was too much for the invalid; he fled, with no farewell, from the girl who had long ceased to be his. It was to be repeated, and now proved an instinct which gradually became an experience, teaching him how far he could trust his heart, and what he must spare it, in the catastrophes which convulsed his early years. An embittered father, whose own long-shattered hopes of rank and in- fluence were now centred on his children, and who had lost four of them in swift succession, to see but two grow up.
On his only son he had fastened all his ambition, and three years ago had sent a gifted youth, the product of his anxious personal training, out into the world of men. His essential traits were pride and energy; his suffering was the outcome of disappointed ambition. His aim was now to obtain rank for his son. And in precisely the same spirit he had given his son an extraordinarily complete education — such learning and such training as would fit him to be either a great dilettante or a universal genius.
He knew something about exploration and cartography, he could ride and fence and dance, had come into personal contact with municipal and governmental affairs, with painters and diaiQoiid-cutters at their work, with the stage both before and behind the footlights — nay, his father was actually the first to induce him to make verses.
But now that hard-featured face clouds over, as the father stands near the staircase in the broad vestibule, and sees the object of all his anxiety transformed into a pale-faced, languid, dissipated-looking student, devoid of all energy, all vitality. For Goethe was the child of an unhappy marriage. The father who could be so kind to his son showed little kindness to his vivacious wife.
Stinginess and distrust made a gloomy atmosphere round the unoccupied, embittered husband; with increasing age there came indications of pathological disturbance, the outcome of his inward unrest. When the event proved that the ambitious elder Goethe was not to get what he wanted out of his purchased title of Councillor, his coldness to the young wife grew more marked than ever, for her innate gaiety of disposi- tion had from the first been uncongenial to him. Soon he fell out with his father-in-law as well, and it ended in his accusing him of having betrayed the city to the French. The conduct of such debates between Goethe's father and grandfather is depicted by a constant witness of them, in these casual words: She was full of vitality, eager to enjoy the passing moment.
The chiaroscuro of his tempera- ment, so strangely commingled as to be the source of all his joys and pains, originated in this heritage from parents so disparate as his; but genius is never of mortal prove- nance — the mind is always autochthonous. The mother, with her charm and spontaneity, was like an elder sister to him, and to her he drew much closer than to the father. But he learnt nothing from her; she added in no way to his experience. Now, on his home-coming, she stood in the hall and welcomed her son as a deliverer from strife and ennui. Still more ardently, because her heart was heavier, had his sister set all her hopes on him ; she had borne much in 23 ROCOCO the last three years.
Perhaps she was already mentally affected. This brother and sister strongly resembled one another in the elements of their characters, but were totally dis- similar in the combination of those elements — and this it was which decided their respective destinies. When Goethe, in later life, called his sister an inextricable mixture of strength and weakness, he might have said the same thing of himself without thereby revealing the essential. Those moods of depression which at all times, but especially in his adolescence, were wont to attack him, he could always overcome by the virile cheerful elements in his nature, and this up to the ninth decade of his life.
In Cornelia there was nothing to redress them, and Goethe went so far as to call her a creature devoid of faith, love, and hope. It is written in both their faces: Though the physical likeness between them was so marked that they were sometimes taken for twins, the traits which in the brother were attractive, even beautiful at times, were in her repellently masculine; moreover, she stooped and had an unhealthy complexion.
The three younger members of the household breathed again, though cautiously, and left the old man to his grumbles. The student had to tell the women all about Leipzig; he collected his Leipzig verses, published them anonymously, though he utterly scorned them, and began on a one-act play, first entitled Lustspielin and then Die Mitschuldigen.
It is a remarkably gloomy sort of comedy, closely allied to a tragedy. His illness was not quite over. It was hanging about him still and now attacked his throat, so that with bancfeged head he would sit in his dressing-gown on the sofa in his attic-room, under the eaves of the old house. He would usually be reading. What musty old folio had he got hold of? Indeed, I considered that, after my many and various experiences, he really owed me some amends, and I was impudent enough to think that I had something to forgive him. But Goethe was attracted by the transparency of her nature; and so he lent an ear when her doctor and friend, in their transcendental conversations, pointed him to certain occult writings, to the practice of alchemy, and hinted that he had found such useful in his medical work.
At nineteen, one had read so much — why not a mystical book into the bargain? So close had his tireless genius drawn him to the source of things. But since the scholar in him was still obdurate, it went hard with him. In December he had a serious relapse, so alarming that he was convinced by his sufferings that he must be on the point of death, and that no power could save him.
And then, when it was touch- and-go, his distracted parents begged the mystical doctor to use his magic panacea. His refusal increased their anguish; at last he did rush home one night, and returned with a little phial of crystallized salts, which he administered to the patient. For when after weeks of misery he rose from his bed of fever, something had awakened in him which gave his unsettled nature the first clear note of stability.
That this should have originated in the means which he believed to have cured his physical body could not deter his searching intellect from following. The thing that matters is that he found a support. Such a psychic evolution, regarded not as a miracle but merely as the result of much that had gone before, is not likely to achieve wonders over-night, as one might say.
In the mind as in the body we perceive a general alleviation, a gradually growing sense of clearer air. For 1 had attained a wonderful lightness of heart. I was happy, conscious of my spiritual emancipation, though threatened by a period of tedious physical suffering. But at the same time his curiosity was aroused — it kept a parallel course with belief throughout the life of Qpethe; and he made himself a little blast-furnace and a sand-bath, and tried, by some eccentric method of his own invention, to produce medicinal salts — in a word, was definitely busying himself with the craft.
In this way the quasi-adept got a general idea of it; it was by this cir- cuitous path that he reached the confines of pure physics. His thirst for universal knowledge was now renewed, and on a higher level. Well prepared by education, and by the progressive though undisciplined Leipzig period, this great dilettante was ready for a much wider flight. And now the darkness which had so perpetually enshrouded his prehensile brain began very slowly to lift. The clouds dispersed, and he could write: It is night which is the unreality. And what is beauty?
It is neither the light nor the night. A twilight, born of truth and untruth, a something intermediate. Time will bless my labours, and grant them to accomplish what has been begun. Has he who began by being omnis- cient turned diffident all of a sudden? Nay, rather call this the earliest perception of himself. For the flickering insight of his confidences to his Leipzig friend is now a still flame burning upward from the deeper stillness within. His self-consciousness was now, without a tinge of vanity, transmuting itself into con- sciousness of his vocation; and the loftier his flight was to be, the longer he must take to prepare himself for it.
At this time he spoke of himself, quite frankly, as a poet in the germ, and said with equal candour that no very young man could expect to be a master. So tljat now we have our first tangible evidence for the way in which critical insight and plastic powers, cool perceptions and glowing emotions, worked on equal terms in the depths of his spirit; for before his poetry was inspired by the pan- theistic impulse, he had recognized that impulse as indispensable. Such self-recognition vehemently turns against its own endeavours. That was why he burnt most of the Leipzig lyrics, and abandoned that phase once for all.
KSlthchen alone survived for him; and while Leipzig became a thing of the past, the bitter-sweet aftertaste of that first passion remained with him for years. After a few letters which hovered between friendliness and love- making, with a tendency to exaggerate the portentousness of the past, he heard of her formal betrothal to his suc- cessor in her favour; and instead of exchanging his tender avowals for the phrases of ceremony, all the painfully repressed passion broke out afresh. And forty years later he reiterated this falsification of a biographical fact, and that with full conviction: KSthchen had mrown him over!
He felt now that her betrothal had shattered his last secret hope. Bridal songs he could not send her — those he had attempted were all either too intimate or too cold; and when shortly before his twentieth birthday he was seized by bitter resentment for his wasted years, it is as though he were seeking to atone for the pain he had given her when in the Hamletian manner, but with a challenge underlying the self-reproach, he laments: There was a time when I never could have my fill of talk with you, and now all the wits that I possess are insufficient to cover a page of letter-paper.
If you could write me a line Oh, if I could call back these last two and a half years 1 Kathchen, dear Kathchen, I swear to you that I should show more wisdom! A year and a half after their amicable separation, he suddenly begged her not to write to him again. I would rather not see your handwriting again, just as I would rather not hear jour voice; it is bad enough to have my dreams so taken up with you. And I — I shall always be Goethe. You know what that means. When I say my name, 1 say all that I am. For thou shalt break forth on t ;ie right hand and on the left.
His endangered life and all his disappointments did, in the beginning, lead him to a resumption of the childish faith which he had hastily abandoned, rather from perplexity than from conviction. But behind it all, behind it, there must be something — and that sense wasT urgent in appeal. And while, that evening, he installed himself, arranging clothes and ink-bottle and pens for everything must be in good order ; while he compared the pleasant new quarters with his Leipzig workshop, he suddenly remembered the man in the next room there, who had nursed him so kindly.
Was he still prayerful, that purblind theologian? It was the night or Good-Friday. What about miting him a religious letter? Money would be more welcome, for he was badly off. It is twilight everywhere in this world, a little more or a little less; some comfort in that. I am changed, much changed, and I thank my Saviour for it; that I am not now what I threat- ened to become is another cause for thankfulness. If in the first weeks at Strasburg he sometimes consorted with religious people, he soon found them tiresome, narrow- minded.
Die Quintessenz im Universum - Das Lachen der Götter hört nie auf
Vacillating between the allurements of a haven of rest, and a yearning for the splendours of the perilous ocean, Goethe cruised for a while along the coast. At that time Strasburg was a French town, its inhabit- ants were called sujets allemands du Rot de France. Only alnong the French could he learn to be a man of the world; then he would come home to dazzle his native town.
Would he bring it off this time? He was unchangingly eccentric, more inclined to be reclusive than to look up successful people. This young aesthete seemed to abominate everything that was French, though in fact he was only disgusted with his own recent behaviour. And besides, he had been hit on the raw. Proud and offended, he resolved to abjure French; he would make it his business to speak his mother tongue and show them how forcible and expressive it was.
The academic forms and ceremonies bored not only the young dandy, but the eccentric, in him. Some violent prejudices, however, began to give way; for now, at twenty, he no longer declined to play cards, but learnt whist and piquet. During his adoles- cence Goethe went from the scholarly to the amusing, and slowly retraced his steps in his old age. Returning health, a new faith, his surroundings and sympathies, forbade him any intellectual affectations; he was gradually arriving at a spontaneity which gave play to the best part of his nature, and was before long to inspire his genius.
Before any such relation could bear fruit, Nature demanded a whole summer season for the ripening of her disciple. He sought to render himself immune from noises, morbid sensations, giddiness, and adopted violent measures to that end. This nerve-regime was the outcome of much latent struggle of a deeper kind. It may be regarded as the earliest evidence of that stringent preservative method to which he afterwards devoted half his powers, so as to keep the other half at liberty to take their highest flight. For if the adolescent Goethe took his daemon in hand, it was in the daemonic manner; the older man was to go about it more systematically.
At this time it was all blind instinct; later it was conscious technique. We have only a few rough drafts which witness, as a diary might, to the mute exaltations of an expectant soul. What joy it is to have a light, free heart 1 The mettle in us urges us to the difficult, the dangerous; but great joys are not to be attained without great effort, and that is perhaps my chief quarrel with love. People say it gives us courage. Once the heart is soft, it is weak. When it beats — oh, how warmly!
That heart, an embittered convalescent from its first passion, was floating sentimentally on a tide of vague desires; the sapling was patiently and presciently awaiting the fructifying rain. One September day, running up the steps of the hotel, he brushed against a young clergyman whose black silk gown was caught up at one corner and stuck in his pocket, while his powdered hair was clubbed. Foppish, but ele- gant and attractive. Goethe recognized Herder; he spoke to the renowned young man, mentioning his own obscure name, and saying he would like to come and see him. The elder cordially assented.
What made our student address him He had heard at dinner that the author of Kritische WSlder had arrived, and was under- going treatment from the Strasburg oculists. And was the young litterateur an admirer of that work? Had it not been for this, Goethe would have avoided Herder in Strasburg as he had avoided Lessing in Leipzig. For it was only by the law of contraries that these two natures could attract one another.
They stopped short at this pedagogic relation; friendship was not for them. Here were two young men, one of whom was fond of teaching, tied by the leg, and in his loneliness very glad of a gifted disciple; while the other, always anxious to learn, had never yet found the right teacher and in a swift flash of insight had now grasped eagerly at what this stranger might have to offer him. And so in these weeks, whose results were incalculable for Goethe and for German culture, the unexpected happened — Herder, born for domination, with every day surrendered himself more com- pletely, though much against his will ; while Goethe, born for self-surrender, took all he wanted and gave the lohely in- valid little more than the pleasure of his company in return.
His first impulse was towards knowledge; his second towards display. It was the effort which pri- marily attracted him; ambition came next. There he sat in the half-light with one eye bandaged; his features sharp, his forehead high, his nose somewhat blunt, his mouth perhaps too sensual for such a thinker. His genius was in his brain; his eye was diseased.
He who sat before him, his visitor, had just begun to escape from over-exercise of the brain to exercise of the eye — a young student, not dazzling, of middle height, well built, nicely dressed, his hair carefully curled, with a head whose beauty might have been spoilt by a large nose if a nobly curved mouth and a high clear brow had not made it attractive. But the dominating features of that head were two dark eyes that could light up with ardour, could sparkle, muse, enkindle, probe.
For, eight decades these, and only these, betrayed the stirrings in a mighty spirit, and all the more when they sought to conceal them. And where was the point of contact between these two — Herder and Goethe — sitting in front of one another? True, they had mockery in common; and if we figure its degrees as steps of a staircase, there they could meet. Herder going up and Goethe coming down. But it was only the elder of the pair who expressed himself in ribaldry; the.
Reverence and gratitude made Goethe the inquiring disciple. What, then, did Goethe give Herder? Goethe, during the next few years, developed great narrative power; Herder talked. He preached, guided, convinced. Meanwhile, what of the young man before him? Was it his to perceive the genius in this student?
Hence his sarcastic temper made him the more insistent to take back with one hand what he gave with the other. Directly he felt that he had got hold of the boy, he wanted to master him completely. Herder had already decided on his own life-work. Creative intuition was what he loved, and preached to the world; he had j ust written a history of the mind, based upon that hitherto unheard-of thesis. In this unprinted piece upon the origin of language he put before his disciple not only the historical side — he showed the nursling of the rococo 38 HIS srau FOR OOSTHB that the art of poetry is a universal gift, a folk-gift, not the I rivate property of educated people.
All this was fruitful for the disciple because it did not really astonish him, only confirmed what he had already surmised. True, no one else in Germany could have given the twenty-yeared Goethe so far-reaching, so weighty and largely conceived an exposition. But educative in- fluence has the same effect upon genius as dramatic treatment has upon an audience — the more powerful it is the less it surprises, the better it has been prepared-for. In these weeks Herder confirmed, deepened, accelerated the perceptions germinating in Goethe, who secretly related every pronouncement on genius to himself and his future works.
And yet he never loved him. At first he admired him, then avoided him, then again sought him out; but in the following decades there was only one really intimate passage between them. As long as Goethe lived, he learnt something from everv type of individual, not only from humanity in general; but this was the last of his definite instructors. When Herder, at this time, wrote a satirical poem in which he compared Goethe to a woodpecker, Goethe politely retorted that a woodpecker was far from being a common bird.
He seems to have grown more and more reserved. With this man he was quick to conceal his real self. While Goethe was learning, his heart was in pain; while Herder was teaching, his eye was. The lachrymal gland would not open; he left the clinic and the town, an angry man. He felt that all his weeks there had been wasted. His disciple, issuing from the darkened room into the light of every day, was conscious of a sense of relief.
For under the snow-mantle of fashion Goethe had it all in him, soon to break through as does the earth from its glittering veil. But as yet his mind was in a state of chaos. For years it had been silently preparing, and did not even now spring to light so abruptly as his friends and imitators boasted. This epoch, then, begins with an emphatic No. Not till then did Goethe find the Strasburg Minster impressive ; hitherto it had baffled his classifying eye.
Very much like this are his flamboyant stammerings in presence of the poet of whom in Leipzig he had thought no more than or many others. For let our course be ever so long and ever so fortunate, at the end we must fall out. I who am everything to myself, who kjnow everything through myself! Such is the cry of all who are selMware, and take this life in giant strides. Shakespeare, my friend, wert thou still with us, I could live nowhere but with thee. How gladly would I play the subordinate part of Pylades, if thou wert the Orestes!
At the conclusion of Deutsche Baukunst he invokes himself thus, in a sort of cosmic rapture: We have rometheus here. But though the artist thus anticipated his future, there were to be long days in which he dragged the burden of his earlier experiences, striving to make them, too, productive. The fruit of these Promethean ecstasies is not perceptible for two years to come.
Pan was reborn in him; Pantheism had transformed his faith. Wie herrlich leuchtet, Mir die Natur! Wie glflnzt die Sonne, Wie lacht die Flur! The sun how radiant. How glad the lea! The buds are thrusting On branches tall. And myriad voices From thickets call. Virile, paternal was the Immanence to which now, and even as a white- haired man, he confidingly submitted his spirit. He was then translating Ossian. Everything that was rhapsodic in him had to find its outlet; and when intoxicated by words, he wanted to intoxicate others by them.
He would wander about the woods, fields, hills, and valleys just as the fancy took him. His look, his gait, his speech, his very walking-stick were those of an extraordinary personality. It was the well nigh universal opinion that he had a slate loose in the upper storey. He came in with such an air! To this clever oddity of a Salzmann, who founded the first German Club, all his letters were now written, as of yore to Behrisch. He accepted his friends and their atmosphere; and yet there was a warning voice within — the voice of that unconquerable perplexity of mind which made him seem older than his years, and questioned whether he and those around him were not mistaken in establishing this mutual admiration society.
He wrote to one of them who was living at a distance: We love our friends as we love our sweethearts We have only the draft of it. Goethe was always sociable, but always reserved: Only to women did he wholly surrender himself, and so he always gave them more than they gave him. The love-aflFair which marks these months was neither Sturm nor Drang, though this period has been so characterized.
This experience of the heart is an oddly tranquil interlude between the shocks of the same year, and seems to have scarcely any connection with them. Nothing that we know of it implies the kind of passion which he had felt in Leipzig, and which was ere long to make havoc in his heart no less than thrice. She was the mildly radiant star of the moment; in his work of this year one immortal poem scintillates. Goethe did not frequent the parsonage at Sesenheim in quite so literary a spirit as he afterwards represented.
Anyhow, he captivated the blonde maiden at first sight, on a ride through the moun- tain region, and estivated her once for all. Her rustic style of dress — so German! She gazed very frankly out of her mirthful blue eyes. She was cheerful, even-tempered, tranquil; and so had everything that Goethe then and always wanted from women, because he had himself so uncertain a hold on it. The girl was one of those who look particularly well out of doors; he had a picturesque vision of her on a path high above his head.
I was talkative, gay, witty, impudent, yet all this was modified by emotion, respect, and attach- ment. Here we have a tame sort of affection, out of which his essential nature plucked no fruit. He wrote her some verses. Half of these were for the girl, but he retained no more than two in the subsequent collection of his verse. One of these is world re- nowned. For while the odes to Behrisch were visionary and stiff-jointed, here the vision has subdued the material to its plastic purpose. Ich ging, du stands! But Goethe, with this, began his precautions ; and the poem was thus printed in a newspaper — Du gingst, ich stund und sah zur Erden.
The idyll lasted too long, grew faded, lamentable. To say nothing of the conscia menSy but unfortunately not rectiy that I carry about with me. If you would send me a two-pound box of confectionery, there would be sweeter lips, at any rate, than the faces we have been seeing lately. I gave myself up to it body and bones. And yet if I could say I was happy, it would be far better than that sort of thing. For a man who could enjoy it! It is difficult to punctuate it as one should. Girls never use commas or full-stops, and it is no wonder if I am turning into a species of girl.
My heart is in a strange state. The counterpoise that fate always weighs in wim our blisses 1 Dear friend, it takes a lot of courage not to lose heart in this world. What could he do? He fled the place. Every time that gentle and strong nature, that heart of devotion, forced by the law of evolu- tion to inflict pain upon others, was driven to confess its inner conflicts, he avoided scenes and explanations, and withdrew into himself to save himself. A strange mixture of fear and courage. When he was about to ride off, leaving his beloved in her deplorable situation, he leant down from the saddle to shake hands with her again.
In Leipzig such a vehement passion had enchained the idling student that he felt himself cheated of lifelong happiness. In Strasburg it was not from dreams of happiness that he fled; by that time his passion was concentrated on the strenuous future. In Leipzig he fled from a passion; in Strasburg from an idyll. On the day before his departure he drew a picture of himself which is very different from the cool confessions of his old age. Oh, my head is as disordered as my room.
Nor is my soul precisely cheerful; I am far too wide-awake not to feel mat I may be grasping at shadows. How utterly he ignores the girl, whose fate was afterwards to haunt him as a symbol! Eight months after their parting, he was telling his in- timates in Darhistadtthat he had hctn in love once before — but it was only of KSlthchen that he spoke. Once more the law of love, as creative spirits know it, was affirmed. The girl he could not win turned the adolescent Goethe into a poet; her whom he won too easily he soon forgot. While Goethe, by his flight, broke through the ob- stacles set up by his heart, he was simultaneously in flight from the prescribed course of study; for though officially speaking he finished it, his sensuous temperament — involved, moreover, as it was in the general upheaval — was alien to theoretical jurisprudence, in Strasburg as elsewhere.
Thus his graduation at the end of the term was merely a form demanded of him by his father; and in his disser- tation on canon law, which set forth that the law-maker is entitled to ordain the form of worship, the only interesting passage is the tolerant afterthought that there should be no question of what anyone present might be thinking, feeling, or imagining.
Ultimately Goethe discussed some uncontroversial question of the sort which provided after-dinner mirth; and by so doing displayed for the first time that submission of genius to recognized authority which afterwards dis- tinguished him, and was unlike so many of his colleagues. It was because he then and there perceived that the external forms of revolt are not of any real importance.
For Goethe always, even in this year, kept apart from the indiscriminate revolutionaries, the mere hotheads, among his fellow students. If it be said that these are but forms, was it not for the formulation of existence, of thought, that his soul strenu- ously sought? Already he had surprised a 3trasburg connoisseur by the just remark that the Minster tower was not really finished, for there ought to be four slender spires to contrast with the four squat arches. He was still in a state of chaotic unrest when he left Strasburg; but his internal development had little in common with his external life.
A like contrast between his inner self and his production will now and again recur. The creative spirit would at one time keep step with that which determined his daily life, and at another be far in advance, occasionally ex- pressing itself in images which the more actual side of him had either left?
In these early days he displayed all the accepted marks of genius. Now he arrived in good health, it is true, but in so nervous a condition that he owned to not being mentally at his best. Nor did he come alone; the astonished parents beheld at his side a boy-harpist, to whom he had taken a fancy in Mainz the day before, and for whom he now pro- posed to find employment during the Fair.
Geflügelte Worte: Der Citatenschatz des deutschen Volkes by Georg Büchmann et al.
So there he was, back in Frankfurt, the gifted son of an Imperial Councillor, caged again, and now as it Seemed for good and all ; for when on his twenty-second birthday he applied for a post as advocate, his idea was to become a useful citizen of the Free — but unemancipated, narrow — Town, which he never really liked. In fact that stormy nature was never in any sense outwardly revolutionary.
In the new journal for which he then wrote his social confession of faith soon appeared. And do not thousands live happily under such limitations? Why then strive after an emotion which we neither feel nor want to feel? The Roman sense of patriotism! God preserve us from that, as from an ogre! We should find no chair to sit on, no bed to sleep in, in that country of the mind. Inwardly, however, that boyish mind was restlessly vacillating, under obscure urgencies, between its desire for tranquillity and its determination towards the vortex.
What made the little attic-room that he inhabited now as in his boyhood a pleasant place for him? Hier meine Welt, mein All! Mein Geist so tausendiach Geteilt und ganz in meinen teuren Kindern. Here I am I, Here every wish is with me. My myriad-minded self Dispersed and whole in these my well-loved children. He wanted a hero, and tried Caesar, Socrates, Prometheus first; then Gdtz and Mahomet, who succeed one another as examples of his hero-worship ; and for the guiding conception he shaped this phrase from his own intimate foreknowledge: Only a few fragments of his Caesar survive, nor are many lost to us.
For Socrates, whom he shortly attempted, he took Herder as model; he himself was to be Alcibiades! But again it was all fragmentary. His soul was too deeply stirred to find its outlet in a well-made drama; the name of his intellect consumed every formula. But the more these dramatic torsos are embedded, as it were, in the block from which they spring, the more they seem to issue from the depths of his inarticulate emotion.
Only in a work like Gdtz, where a consecutive artistic purpose has made of a similar kind of sketch a finished stage-play, are we in some degree unconscious of the in- ward stress. And Gotz itself was begun by accident, so to speak. So he began one morning, without any sort of a plan, wrote a few scenes, and read them to Cornelia in the evening. Her praise was tempered by doubts of his perseverance; this piqued him, and he pushed on.
This first Gdtz he revised at the end of six months — distilling, clarifying, recasting, transposing, till a new play lay before him, to be in its turn regarcied as practice, and subsequently rejected for yet another re-modelling. G5tz was written three times, the third rendering amr a generation had gone by; and Gdtz did more to make Goethe famous in his lifetime than any one of his later dramas. Is it therefore in the canon of masterpieces? Where — since all the documents have been searched and carefully analysed — where, in earlier sketches or later works, do we find any indication of such a characteristic?
In which letters, which poems, of this periofj? The personages shaped in his own image are, and were bound to be, the antagonists of Gdtz. Ana these are by far the best realized figures in the drama. But whence came his vision of that heroic, non-moral Adelheid? Here is a new feature in his poetry; for with that commingling of male and female elements without which genius cannot be, Goethe is no less present in his feminine than in his masculine figures — often indeed more so; and sometimes he needed two women for the subtlest refinements in presentation of the duality within himself.
Hence there is more of him in Adelheid than in Gotz, and afterwards he expressed this by saying that while he was at work, he fell so much in love with Adelheid that she cut out Gotz. His fierce sense of power, his lust for experience, burn in the woman ; in the boy blazes his own young dream of love, hovering between sensuality and devotion. Oh, that on thy breast I were one of the immortal gods, who lived self-centred in their passionate brooding ardour, and in a single moment engendered myriad teeming worlds, and felt the raptures of those myriad worlds in one swift instant touch themselves.
I would slay my father, if he disputed this place with me! When Goethe diffidently sent the play to Herder, the latter criticized it sharply and accused the author of having been utterly ruined by Shakespeare. It took Goethe only a few months to know all about himself and his work. But to save this play, he had to do it violence. But Goethe did all this reluctantly, in defiance of his passion for divagations. He felt that spontaneous in- spiration was being sacrificed to stage-craft, and wrote of his second G 8 tz to a friend: At first there were difficulties; his moods were unaccountable, he was fond of taking long walks at dead of night, and moreover his people looked upon poetical activities as a protest against the civic sphere.
The elder did what he could; and indeed even more lavish hands than his might have hesitated to bestow the surprising amount of dollars for nine months of life at Frankfurt. The first literary triumph altered the family atmosphere. The proud embittered man wanted fame and success for his son, though it were only through writing verses! This is Merck, to whom Goethe afterwards ascribed the greatest influence.
Again an oddity, again older, again long-limbed and haggard with a pointed nose, and grey-blue eyes which glanced about him watchfully, giving his aspect something of the tigerish. He was prone to infatuations for the sentimental ladies whose circle was dominated by the Herder influence; would be tender as long as might be, but was at the mercy of his malignity, when he would suddenly write impertinent spiteful verses of which Goethe says that he could not possibly reproduce them. A silhouette seems to dawn on us. This is Mephis- topheles.
Faust always seeks Mephisto — and especially when he is not only Faust. Merck, on practical things intent, advised Goethe to get something ready for the press. But when Goethe published for the first time, he yielded to his bourgeois blood and made up his mind that talent, intellect, and industry ought to be paid for by the world.
Merck paid for the printing, Goethe for the paper. It made a great sensation. The edition was soon sold out, a second appeared ; and though the author was much congratulated, he was much embarrassed too by the huge bill for paper, due to irregular payment for the copies sold. He Jiimself soon came to regard the work with in- difference. He left the second edition unaltered, on the ground that this was his trial essay and must remain as it was. I see more to be done every day, and my way grows clearer.
There may be many a day of schooling still to put through. For I tell you once for all: He had scarcely abandoned this captious friend before instinct drove him to begin a correspondence which might forge the link afresh. It was a secret rivalry, a mute measuring of himself with one who was to be overborne. I won't be stiff-necked 1 Your withering letter is worth three years of any experience I can get here. Apollo Belvedere, why dost thou show us thy nakedness but that we may be ashamed of our own. Herder, Herder, go on being what you are to mel If I am born to be your satellite, I accept my fate, and gladly, loyally.
A moon that loves its earth! Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord. And though it cripple me, so will 1! There was fever in his blood; he clutched at the man as in a walking dream, and yet his pride revolted tremulously at this bending of the neck. We can catch the arrogant intonation as the storm- tossed 5 routh, set on his own proud course, flings down the gauntlet: Herder wrote to his betrothed: What was the explanation About this time he said to his betrothed: This girl, Caroline Flachsland — whom Goethe often met in their al fresco gatherings during these months — was never tired of saying what a kind pleasant boy he was, what a thoroughly good-hearted companion of their walks, not a bit erudite, and very fond of playing with children.
He got on so fast that this soon became a mental resource, for he felt that the swinging motion vaguely inspired him, so that his thoughts ripened as it were of themselves. But it was when walking that he got nearest to himself. One day he braved a threatening tempest, and when it caught him, he sang passionately to himself: But suddenly the god-like poet, lustily singing, pulls up the chariot with a jerk and thus concludes: Dort auf dem Htlgcl, Himmlische Macht!
Nur so viel Glut: Dort metnc Hutte, Dorthin zu waten! Like the skylark — There, above me! There on the hill-top, Touching high Heaven 1 One pulse, no more: Low lies my dwelling. In this piece, how exquisite is the passage where, on the mountain-crag, his wanderer meets the woman with her nursling at her breast, coming from the antique temple where she dwells, and takes the sleeping boy in his arms — but when she invites him to linger in this freedom, this vast, narrow sphere, he passes resolutely onward, saying to himself: O leite meinen Gang, Natur!
Nature, guide my steps! And coming home To some roof- tree At evening, All golden with dying sunset-rays. May she await me — such a wife. Our boy upon her arm! Sie nahert sich mir, Himmlische Lippe! Und ich wanke, nahe mich, Blickc, seufze, wankc — Seligkeit, Seligkcit!
It is a small gathering which awaits the spring under the fresh foliage of the mountain-path. And I tremble, nearing them, Gaze and sigh and tremble — Ecstasy, ecstasy! Oh, the sense of a kiss! The storm and stress is modulated into a minor key: Morgennebel, Lila, hQllen deinen Turm um. His adolescent heart stirs in this chaste company, to which he is drawn neither by his own internal flame nor their fresh beauty, but simply by a common zest for culture, and the aspirations of youth.
It is an Atlantis of the mind, a plane of contemplative ardours, a tranquil return to Nature, somewhat feminine in feeling; and in this period of vehement self-absorption he is soothed by such intercourse with sympathetic women. At this time Goethe was, like many of his contem- poraries, extremely impressionable.
His feeling for religion, too, was hovering between paganism and Chris- tianity. He harked back more than once. He con- sented to attend the Synod of the Moravian Brotherhood, but his interest quickly cooled. This springtime was to make her votary something more than the enthusiast of landscape, the plastic recipient of impressions. He became the Goethe who could love her — and hence, the solitary. Those around him could not read the riddle of his heart. People say that the curse of Cain is upon me. What brother have I slain 1 And so 1 Mists of morning, Lila, shroud thy turret-window.
To be so utterly alone! More remote from his fellow-men than his expanding soul desired, yet perforce reserved with the crowd whose pioneers were in touch with him; not specially desirous of cultivating the Muse, but still less so of living a prac- tical life; contemplative, expectant, hovering between two worlds as it were — at the end of May Goethe spent some time in a smiling region, where the thrusting shoul- ders of the hills were like the side-scenes of a theatre, and the valley was always hazy, and the crests of the impenetrable forest tempered the sunlight.
Here he would lie in the tall grass by the leaping brook, where I observed a great many different kinds of grasses. When I listen to that susurrant little world which has its being amid the green blades. Was this retreat a watering-place. There young jurists acquired the final polish — so tradition said; but in truth the teaching was far too vague and diffuse. He saw a pale, thin young person lying on the grass, with a long face, rather a big beaky nose, dark hair and eyes; he was leaning on one soft and not very beautiful hand, and arguing vehemently with some other young fellows.
When the introductions were made, Kestner, who was just thirty and a man of the world, looked searchingly at Goethe as he shook hands. His name was Jerusalem. The young diplomat and philosopher who bore so pregnant a name was pre- judiced against this Goethe who was holding forth so vehemently; and when he got home he wrote to a friend: There was nothing to forewarn them that a woman and a genius were to make such a marvellous link between the three.
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A week later they were all at a party, and so was a girl who danced a great deal with the young doctor from Frankfurt. The slender blooming creature, in her simple summer frock, moved like a sylph, if less yieldingly than Friederike, less ardently than Kftthchen; a girl of the middle class, accustomed to society and quick-witted. Her greatest external attraction for me is her sweet engaging expression. She has plenty of sense besides, and a jueasure-loving disposition. She is amusing and can say witty things. Not forgetting her heart, which is of the first order — noble, affectionate, kind, and generous.
Lotte Buff was his type, once more. The women of his adolescence were all slender and airy, all light-hearted — the sedative influences which his daemonic nature required. Had he not almost every- thing which Kestner lacked — passion, ingenuousness, and the charm of novelty besides? On the other hand, Kestner had much that was lacking in Goethe — knowledge of the world, cool judgment, impeccability, and such tact that he contrived to bring his betrothed, himself, and his new friend unscathed out of the three months' romance which was then beginning.
Soon he came to know him so well that he could deliver the following verdict: He often declares that he cannot help using figurative language, that he never can express himself literally, but that when he is older he hopes to be able to utter the idea as it really is. He is extremely impressionable, but often shows great self-control. He hates cortstraint of any kind.
He loves children and will play with them for hours. He has a very great reverence for women. Sometimes he takes these things lightly, sometimes quite the reverse. He be- lieves in a future life, and a better one. In short, he is a very remarkable fellow. He acted wisely all along. The restrictions of that respectable household, effective in warding off many of the risks attendant on actual romance, were no less so in lending a charm to the written narrative. Passion was soon at its height, and the sentimentality of the time would lead us to anticipate such a climax as the following: Goethe, yielding to his passion and more and more intimately drawn in spirit to the girl, neither trans- gressed against friendship nor wallowed in self-sacrifice.
He wanted a wife like any other young man. As always, he was thinking less of passion and romance than of home and marriage. Goethe soon made preparations for flight from this situation, but he did not carry them out. Kestner, of course, admired Lotte all the more for the way she kept the other man in check. Usually I felt very sorry for him and was much perturbed in spirit. He began to see that he must pull himself together, for his own sake. Our lover never entirely lost his head; or rather he found it again in the moment when Lotte, called upon by him after eight weeks of courtship to decide the question once for all, chose — at the cost of one sleepless night — not him, but Kestner.
And genius drew the sleep-walker away from the inhos- pitable threshold. Disdained by the woman he loved, and rejected for a lesser man, his daemonic nature asserted itself. He accepted the position and took the strongest line — to go, and go at once, no matter what it cost him.
Had not Merck invited him to join a party on the Rhine? That would be a good pretext. Goethe went, and made no scene at all; he did not even say good-bye. And then — the swift revulsion! But now, when he had left her, when kindly chance could do no more for him, the elemental forces in his heart broke bounds. In the farewell notes which he left for the two lovers we hear the first mutterings of the tempest in his soul.
I felt composed, but your conversation was too much for me. If I had stayed one instant longer, I could not have controlled myself. Now I am alone, and to-morrow I depart. Youknowall, you know how happy I have been throughout these days. And I am going to the dearest and best of people, but why away from you.? So it is, and this is my destiny. Adieu, a thousand times adieu. That is the way with daemonic natures. If he had won and possessed the girl he would have been intoxicated for a little while; renunciation and flight let loose the mysterious forces within him.
His passion grew with absence, and he indulged in raptures of renunciation. For thenceforth the ruler of his spirit was not so much Lotte as Eros; and never was he more the prey of Eros than just now — like Romeo, who loved because he had loved. This was Sophie Laroche, at one time the beloved of Wieland, and now becoming known as an authoress. She had a daughter too. The sixteen-yeared Maximiliane was not so tall as Lotte Buff, but hers was the same kind of open countenance and clear complexion, and she too had the darkest of dark eyes. He spent five days in this house. Fifty years afterwards he had not lost sight of the mother, daughter, and grand-daughter.
I am offended at that, and insist on her dreaming of me to-night, and not telling you anything about it, either. There he stayed a few days in a state of ecstatic friendship; when he was going he regretted not having made his formal good-byes: I very nearly went over there this morning. Indeed, Kestner, it was time I took my- self off. Last night, on the sofa, my thoughts were concerned with hanging, and very hangworthy they were.
And if now, when he could have kissed his friend under the eyes of his friend, there was audible — so many weeks after the decision and the earlier parting — a sigh over the futility of existence, it was no more than a momentary mood of dejection. In this spirit he now became an advocate at Frankfurt, and so remained during the three succeeding years of the last and longest stay he was obliged to make at home. He had twenty-eight cases, most of them for Frankfurt Jews; not a remarkable number.
Goethe was practical enough to keep for his poetic w'orkshop that dispassionate attitude towards both parties which dis- tinguishes the dramatist from the advocate, and to aim at cumulative effect in his first case for the defence. He was representing a son whose father refused to grant him undisturbed possession of a porcelain factory. A couple of ridiculous mice that creep from the pages 7S EROS of some compendium of definitions, and proclaim them- selves her children.
Run away, little mice! But Goethe, never a revolutionary in the narrow sphere of established custom, changed his tactics after this first effort; and thenceforth it was only very rarely that his briefs had to suffer the irruption of epigram. The father must have had some influence here. But directly the son became known as an author, the old gentleman resolutely altered his course. When he wanted to travel, he could hand over his work to his father — and to his brother-in-law as well, for at this time Cornelia married Schlosser, who was a lawyer.
Soon after their engagement, Goethe turned jealous. He was used to this confidante, he liked to tell her about his schemes for work, his letters, and even his answers to them; and the conservative side of him was vexiid by any intrusion from without.
Full text of "Goethe Vol. 1"
A sort of hypochondria of the spirit set in; he complained of being deserted, and although the sister had never been anything more than an echo, or possibly a timorous ally against the father, he wanted to find her always there when he came home and needed a confidante. A distant female relative became his mother- confessor — one Johanna Fahimer, not young, a single woman but safe. For her nephew, the poet Fritz Jacobi, Goethe cherished a prejudice; he refused to make any approaches to him and his brother, would not even con- tribute to their new magazine.
But a sudden fancy took him, after all, to pay Jacobi a visit on a trip up the Rhine; and he found him an idealistic, delightful-looking man. From the first moment he was conscious of the closest kind of affinity, and the ice was melted by words of flame. Goethe looked upon it all as a lark. He wanted the suffrage of the few, while the applause of the many- headed was heaped on him. But always as a poet condescending to criticism — or, as Herder said, an arrogant young cock of the walk with very formidable spurs.
The chaotic youm had scarce one attribute of the true critic. One day there came strange tidings ftom Kestner. He was the son of rich parents and was cultured, independent. Once, when I was coming back from a walk and he met me in the moonlight, I said to myself immediately: I shall keep it, and remember him as long as I live. This latter had once written an essay to prove that complete surrender to passion was despicable ; but when it did get hold of him he made the greatest of all surrenders — self-murder.
Goethe, who had never moral- ized on the subject, who defended every manifestation of passion, and who moreover was emancipated from all semi-religious scruples, yet had a safety-valvfe in his daemonic temperament; and in his spirit such instinctive, life-giving lowliness before destiny and Nature that to his tempestuous soul the thought of death by his own hand could never seriously present itself.
Where was the fire, the craving to learn, to shape a course, which had been so intense the year before.? He now stood remote from the world around him; Eros possessed his fervid, lonely heart; his walks were almost all he had to cling to. The winter season in Frankfurt was in full swing ; he was young, brilliant, famous, good-looking; he could go into society, he did help to dress a girl for a ball, but would not join in the carnival.
That is the fate of the noblest spirits, to sigh in vain for a reflection of themselves. If you are sure that this product is in violation of acceptable content as defined in the agreement or that it does not meet our guidelines for General Access, please fill out the form below.
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