[Footnote 96: In point of fact, only two legal cases passed through Goethe's hands during the first seven months after his return. During the later period of his stay in Frankfort he was more busily engaged with law.]

Again, as after his return from Leipzig, it was his sister Cornelia who made home in any degree tolerable for the brother whom she alone of the family was sufficiently sympathetic and sufficiently instructed fully to understand. She had gathered round her a circle of attractive and educated women, of whom she was the dominating spirit, and in whose company her brother, always appreciative of feminine society, now found a congenial atmosphere. Associated with the circle were certain men with kindred interests, among whom Goethe specially names the two brothers Schlosser as esteemed counsellors.[97] Both were accomplished men of the world, the one a jurist, the other engaged in the public service; and both were keenly interested in literature. It was a peculiarity of Goethe, even into advanced life, that he seems always to have required a mentor, whose counsels, however, he might or might not choose to follow. At this time it was the elder of these two brothers who played this part, and Goethe testifies that he received from him the sagest of advice, which, however, he was prevented from following by "a thousand varying distractions, moods, and passions."

[Footnote 97: The younger brother, Georg, subsequently married Cornelia.]

What these distractions were is vividly revealed in his correspondence of the time. First, his whole being was in disaccord with the social, religious, and intellectual atmosphere of Frankfort; he felt himself cribbed, cabined, and confined in all the aspirations of his nature; and the future seemed to offer no prospect of more favouring conditions. Two months after his return he communicates to his friend Salzmann in Strassburg his sense of oppression in his present surroundings. Arduous intellectual effort is necessary to him, he writes, "for it is dreary to live in a place where one's whole activity must simmer within itself.... For the rest, everything around me is dead.... Frankfort remains the nest it was—nidus, if you will. Good enough for hatching birds; to use another figure, spelunca, a wretched hole. God help us out of this misery. Amen."[98]

[Footnote 98: Werke, Briefe, Band 2, pp. 7-8.]

In himself, also, there was a turmoil of thoughts and emotions which, apart from depressing surroundings, was sufficient to occasion alternating moods of exaltation and despair. The upbraiding memory of Friederike pursued him, and we may take it that in his Autobiography he faithfully records his continued self-reproach for his abrupt desertion of her. "Friederike's reply to a written adieu lacerated my heart. It was the same hand, the same mind, the same feeling that had been educed in her to me and through me. For the first time I now realised the loss she suffered, and saw no way of redressing or even of alleviating it. Her whole being was before me; I continually felt the want of her; and, which is worse, I could not forgive myself my own unhappiness." We may ascribe it either to delicacy of feeling or to the consideration that their further intercourse was undesirable, that he ceased to communicate directly with her. A drawing by his own hand, which he thought would give her pleasure, he sends to her through Salzmann, who is requested to accompany it with or without a note, as he thinks best. Through the same hands he sends to her a play (Goetz von Berlichingen), in which a lover plays a sorry part, and adds the comment that "Friederike will find herself to some extent consoled if the faithless one is poisoned."

But the profoundest source of his unrest was neither the distastefulness of Frankfort society nor his remorse for his conduct to Friederike. It was his concern with his own life and what he was to make of it. It is this concern that gives interest to his letters of the period which otherwise possess little intrinsic value, either in substance or form. What we find in them, and what is hardly to be found elsewhere, is a mirror of one of the world's greatest spirits in the process of attaining self-knowledge and self-mastery in the direction of powers which are not yet fully revealed to him. At times, it appears to him as if the task were hopeless of establishing any harmony between his own nature and the nature of things. Now he is filled with an exhilarating confidence in his own gifts and in his destiny to bring them to full fruition; now he seems to be paralysed with a sense of impotence in which we see all the perils attending his peculiar temperament. In his letters to his Strassburg friend Salzmann we have the frankest communications regarding his alternating moods of depression and hopefulness. "What I am doing," he writes immediately after his settlement in Frankfort, "is of no account. So much the worse. As usual, more planned than done, and for that very reason nothing much will come of me."[99] To a different purport are his words in a later note (November 28th) to the same correspondent: "In searching for your letter of October 5th, I came upon a multitude of others requiring answers. Dear man, my friends must pardon me, my nisus forwards is so strong that I can seldom force myself to take breath, and cast a look backwards."[100] In the opening of the year, 1772 (February 3rd), he is in the same sanguine temper: "Prospects daily widen out before me, and obstacles give way, so that I may confidently lay the blame on my own feet if I do not move on."[101]

[Footnote 99: Ib. p. 6.]

[Footnote 100: Ib. p. 8.]

[Footnote 101: Ib. p. 14.]

The "nisus forwards," of which he speaks, had no connection with the worldly ambition for success in his profession. What was consuming him was the double desire of mastering himself and at the same time of giving expression to the seething ideas and emotions which rendered that self-mastery so hard of attainment. From the moment of his return to Frankfort we see all the seeds fructifying which had taken root in him during his residence in Strassburg. He sends to Herder the ballads he had collected in Alsace, and sends him, also, translations from what he considered the original of the adored Ossian. But the overmastering influence in him at this time was the genius of Shakespeare, as it had been interpreted for him by Herder. Goethe's unbounded admiration for Shakespeare had already found expression in the rhapsody composed in Strassburg to which reference has been made, and to the circle of men and women who had gathered round his sister, he communicated his enthusiasm. Their enthusiasm took a form perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the time. Shakespeare's birthday occurred on October 14th,[102] and it was resolved that, at once as a tribute to their divinity and a challenge to all his gainsayers, the auspicious day should be celebrated with due rites. At Cornelia's instance, Herder, as high-priest of the object of their worship, was invited to honour the occasion. If he could not be present in body, he was at least to be present in spirit, and he was to send his essay on Shakespeare that it might form part of the day's liturgy. So under the roof of the precise Imperial Rath, to whom Klopstock's use of unrhymed verse in his Messias was an unpardonable innovation in German literature, the memory of the "drunken barbarian," as with Voltaire he must have regarded him, was celebrated—whether in his presence or not, his son does not record.[103]

[Footnote 102: So it was then thought, but the exact date is uncertain.]

[Footnote 103: The toast of the evening—"The Will of all Wills"—was given by Goethe, who thereupon delivered the panegyric on Shakespeare which he had composed in Strassburg. This toast was followed by one to the health of Herder.]

But Goethe was about to pay more serious homage to the Master, as he then understood him. On November 28th, he informed Salzmann that he was engaged on a work which was absorbing him to the forgetfulness of Homer, Shakespeare, and everything else. He was dramatising the history of "one of the noblest of Germans," rescuing from oblivion the memory of "an honest man." The "noblest of Germans" was Gottfried von Berlichingen (1482-1562), one of those "knights of the cows," whose predatory propensities were the terror of Germany throughout the Middle Ages, and who appears to have been neither better nor worse than the rest of his class. While still in Strassburg, Goethe had noted Gottfried as an appropriate subject for dramatic treatment, but, as he records in his Autobiography, it was immediately after his return to Frankfort that he first put his hand to the work. Stimulated to his task by his sister Cornelia, in the course of six weeks he had completed the play which, on its publication two years later, was to make him the most famous author in Germany.

Goethe's choice of Goetz as a theme on which to try his powers is a revelation of the motives that were now compelling him. Of the nature of these motives he has himself given somewhat conflicting accounts. He tells his contemporary correspondents that the play was written to relieve his own bosom of its perilous stuff; to enable him "to forget the sun, moon, and dear stars," and, again, that its primary object was to do justice to the memory of a great man. Writing in old age, he assigns still another motive as mainly prompting him to the production of the play: it was written, he says, with the express object of improving the German stage, of rescuing it from the pitiful condition into which it had fallen during the first half of the eighteenth century. What is entirely obvious, however, is that Shakespeare is the beginning and end of the inspiration of the Geschichte Gottfriedens von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, as the play in its original form was entitled. In its conception and in its details Shakespeare is everywhere suggested, though it may be noted that the comic element with which Shakespeare flavours his tragedies is absent from Goetz. But for Shakespeare the play could not have taken the shape in which we have it. Given the model, however, Goethe had to infuse it with motives which would have a living interest for his own time. One of these motives was the admiration of great men which Goethe shared with the generation to which he belonged. During this Frankfort period he was successively attracted by such contrasted types of heroes as Julius Caesar, Socrates, and Mahomet as appropriate central figures for dramatic representation. "It is a pleasure to behold a great man," one of the characters in Goetz is made to say; and, if Goethe had any determinate aim when he took his theme in hand, it was to present the spectacle of a hero for admiration and inspiration. As it was, deeper instincts of his nature asserted themselves as he proceeded with his work, and Goetz is overshadowed by other characters in the drama in whom the poet himself, by his own admission, came to find a more congenial interest.

The play exists in three forms—the first draft being recast for publication in 1773, which second version was adapted for the Weimar theatre in collaboration with Schiller in 1804. It is generally admitted that in its first form we have the fullest manifestation of its author's genius, and equally the fullest expression of the original inspiration that led to its production. Like Shakespeare he had a book for his text—the Memoirs of Gottfried, written by himself; and like Shakespeare he took large liberties with his original—no fewer than six characters in the play, two of whom are of the first importance, being of Goethe's own invention. The plot may be briefly told. Adelbert von Weislingen, a Knight of the Empire, had been the early friend of Gottfried, but under the influence of the Bishop of Bamberg and others he had taken a line which led him into direct conflict with Gottfried. While the latter, identifying himself with the lesser German nobles, was for supporting the power of the Emperor, Weislingen had identified himself with the princes whose object was to cripple it. Gottfried seizes Weislingen while on his way to the Bishop of Bamberg, and bears him off to his castle at Jaxthausen. The contrasted characters of the two chief personages in the play are now brought before us—Gottfried the rough soldier, honest, resolute, and Weislingen, more of a courtier than a soldier, weak and unstable. Overborne by the stronger nature of Gottfried, Weislingen agrees to break his alliance with the Bishop, and, as a pledge for his future conduct, betroths himself to Gottfried's sister Marie, who, weakly devout, is a counterpart to Gottfried's wife Elizabeth, who is depicted as a Spartan mother.[104] To square accounts with the Bishop, Weislingen finds it necessary to proceed to Bamberg, and the second act tells the tale of his second apostacy. At Bamberg he comes under the spell of an enchantress in the shape of a beautiful woman, Adelheid von Walldorf, a widow, whose physical charms are represented as irresistible. Weislingen becomes her creature, forswears his bond with Gottfried, and rejoins the ranks of his enemies—news which Gottfried is reluctantly brought to credit. In the third act we find Gottfried in a coil of troubles. He has robbed a band of merchants on their way from the Frankfort Fair, and, at the prompting of Weislingen, the Emperor puts him under the ban of the Empire, and dispatches an armed force against him. Beaten in the field and besieged in his own castle, he is at length forced to surrender. In the fourth act he is a prisoner in Heilbronn, but is rescued by Franz von Sickingen, a knight of the same stamp and with the same political sympathies as himself. Sickingen, who is on friendly terms with the Emperor, does him the still further service of securing his relief from the ban, whereupon Gottfried settles down to a peaceful life in his own castle, and to relieve its monotony betakes himself to the uncongenial task of writing his own memoirs. In the fifth act we sup with horrors. The peasants rise in rebellion and wreak frightful vengeance on their oppressors. In the hope of controlling them, Gottfried, at their own request, puts himself at their head, but finds himself powerless to check their excesses, and on their defeat he is again taken prisoner. But the main interest of the last act is concentrated in Adelheid, who now reveals all the depths of her sensual nature and her unscrupulous ambition. Weislingen she has discovered to be a despicable creature, and she attaches herself to Sickingen, in whom she finds a man after her own heart, able to satisfy all the cravings of her nature. She poisons Weislingen, who dies as he has lived, the victim of weakness rather than of wickedness. Her crimes are known to the judges of the Vehmgericht, who in their mysterious tribunal adjudge her to death, which is effected in a curious scene by one of their agents. The drama closes with the death of Gottfried in prison, baffled in his dearest schemes, blasted in reputation, and with gloomy forebodings for the future of his country.

[Footnote 104: In the characters of Marie and Elizabeth we have traits of Friederike and of Goethe's mother.]

Such is an outline of the production in which Goethe made his first appeal to his countrymen at large,[105] and which is in such singular contrast to the ideals of his maturity. That it was not the inevitable birth of his whole heart and mind is proved by the fact that he never repeated the experiment. Neither the incidents nor the hero of the piece, indeed, were of a nature to elicit the full play of his genius. Goethe had not, like Scott, an inborn interest in the scenes of the camp and the field, and could not, like Scott, take a special delight in describing them for their own sake. To the portrayal of a character like Gottfried Scott could give his whole heart, but Goethe required characters of a subtler type to enlist his full sympathies and to give scope to his full powers. Goethe himself has told us how, as he proceeded in the writing of the play, his interest in his hero gradually flagged. In depicting the charms of Adelheid, he says, he fell in love with her himself, and his interest in her fate gradually overmastered him. In truth, it is in scenes where Gottfried is not the principal actor that any originality in the play is to be found, for in these scenes Goethe was drawing from his own experience and recording emotions that had distracted himself. In the unstable Weislingen he represents a weakness of his own nature of which he was himself well aware. "You are a chameleon," Adelheid tells Weislingen; and, as we have seen, Goethe so described himself. It is, therefore, in the relations of Weislingen to Marie and Adelheid that we must look for the spontaneous expression of the poet's genius, working on material drawn from self-introspection. In Weislingen's hasty wooing and equally hasty desertion of Marie we have an exaggerated presentment of Goethe's own conduct to Friederike, to which objection may be taken on the score of delicacy, though he himself suggests that it is to be regarded as a public confession of his self-reproach. In depicting Marie and Weislingen he had Friederike and himself before him to restrain his imagination within the limits of nature and truth. In the case of Adelheid he had no model before him, and the result is that, with youthful exaggeration, he has made her a beautiful monster with no redeeming touch, and, therefore, of little human interest. Such a character was essentially alien to Goethe's own nature, and so are the melodramatic scenes which depict her desperate attempts to escape from her toils and the proceedings of the avenging tribunal that had marked her for judgment.

[Footnote 105: As we have seen, the Leipzig book of verses did not attract general attention.]

As in the case of all Goethe's longer productions, critical opinion has been divided from the beginning regarding the intrinsic merits of Goetz. In the opinion of critics like Edmond Scherer it is a crude imitation of Shakespeare with little promise of its author's future achievement, while other critics, like Lewes, regard it as a "work of daring power, of vigour, of originality." On one point Goethe himself and all his critics are agreed: the play as a whole is only a succession of scenes, loosely strung together, with no inner development leading up to a determinate end. In his later life Goethe characterised Shakespeare's plays as "highly interesting tales, only told by more persons than one." Whatever truth there may be in this judgment in the case of Shakespeare, it exactly describes Goetz. It is as a tale, a narrative, and not as a drama, that it is to be read if it is to be enjoyed without the sense of artistic failure. The anachronisms with which the piece abounds, and which Hegel caustically noted, have been a further stumbling-block to the critics.[106] In the second scene of the first Act, Luther is introduced for no other purpose than to expound ideas which come strangely from his mouth, but which were effervescing in the minds of Goethe and his contemporaries—the ideas which they had learned from Rousseau regarding the excellence of the natural man. Similarly, in the scene following, educational problems are discussed which sound oddly in the castle of a mediaeval baron, but which were awakening interest in Goethe's own day. In the supreme moments of his career—on the occasion of the surrender of his castle and in his last hour—Gottfried is made to utter the word freedom as the watchword of his aspirations, but in so doing he is expressing Goethe's own passionate protest against the conventions of his age in religion, in philosophy, and art, and not a sentiment in keeping with the class of which he is a type.

[Footnote 106: Lessing strongly disapproved of Goetz as flouting the doctrines laid down in his Dramaturgie. When his brother announced to him that Goetz had been played with great applause in Berlin, his cold comment was that no doubt the chief credit was due to the decorator.]

These blemishes in the play as a work of art are apparent, yet it may be said that it was mainly owing to these very blemishes that the "beautiful monster," as Wieland called it, took contemporaries by storm and retains its freshness of interest after the lapse of a century and a half. The successive scenes are, indeed, without organic connection, but each scene by itself has the vivacity and directness of improvisation. Nor do the anachronisms to which criticism may object really mar the interest of the work. Rather they constitute its most characteristic elements, proceeding as they do from the poet's own deepest intellectual interests, and, therefore, from his most spontaneous inspiration.

But the most conclusive testimony to the essential power of the play is the effect it produced not only in German but in European literature. Its publication in its altered form in 1773 had the effect of a bomb on the literary public of Germany. It sent a shudder of horror through the sticklers for the rules of the classical drama which it ignored with such contemptuous indifference; a shudder of delight through the band of effervescing youths who shared Goethe's revolutionary ideals, and to whom Goetz was a manifesto and a challenge to all traditional conventions in literature and life. It was the immediate parent of that truly German growth—the literature of Sturm und Drang, whose exponents, says Kant, thought that they could not more effectively show that they were budding geniuses than by flinging all rules to the winds, and that one appears to better advantage on a spavined hack than on a trained steed. The literature of Sturm und Drang was a passing phenomenon, but the influence of Goetz did not end with its abortive life. But for Goetz Schiller's early productions would have been differently inspired; and to Goetz also was due much of the inspiration of the subsequent German Romantic School, though many of its developments were abhorrent to Goethe's nature both in youth and maturity. It emancipated the drama from conventional shackles, but it did more: it extended the range of national thought, sentiment, and emotion, and for good and evil introduced new elements into German literature which have maintained their place there since its first portentous appearance. And German critics are unanimous in assigning another result to the publication of Goetz: in its style as in its form it set convention at naught, and thus marks an epoch in the development of German literary language. Not since Luther, "whose words were battles," had German been written so direct from the heart and with such elemental force as makes words living things.

It has been a commonplace remark that 1773, the year of the publication of Goetz, corresponds in European literature to 1789 in European political history. The remark may be exaggerated, but, if a work is to be named which marks the advent of what is covered by the vague name of romanticism, Goetz may fairly claim the honour. It had precursors of more or less importance in other countries, but, by the nature of its subject, by its audacious disregard of reigning models, and by its resounding notoriety, it gave the signal for a fresh reconstruction of art and life. It gave the decisive impulse to the writer who is the European representative of the romantic movement, and whose genius specifically fitted him to work the vein which was opened in Goetz—a task to which Goethe himself was not called. In 1799 Scott published his translation of Goetz,[107] and followed it up by his series of romantic poems in which the influence of Goethe's work was the main inspiration. But it was in his prose romances, dealing with the Middle Ages, that he found the appropriate form for his inspiration—a form which ensured a popular appeal, impossible in the case of the severer form of the drama. In the enchanter's sway which Scott exercised over Europe during the greater part of the nineteenth century, the memories of Goetz were not the least potent of his spells.

[Footnote 107: Two of the scenes in Goetz were imitated by Scott in his own work—the Vehmgericht scene in Anne of Geierstein and the description of the siege of Torquilstone by Rebecca to the wounded Ivanhoe. Scott also borrowed from Egmont.]



CHAPTER VI

INFLUENCE OF MERCK AND THE DARMSTADT CIRCLE

1772

Specially associated with Goetz von Berlichingen, but associated also with Goethe's general development at this time, was another of those mentors whose counsel and stimulus were necessary to him at all periods of his life. This was Johann Heinrich Merck, the son of an apothecary in Darmstadt and now Paymaster of the Forces there. Of Merck Goethe says that "he had the greatest influence on my life," and he makes him the subject of one of his elaborate character sketches in his Autobiography. To men of original nature, however discordant with his own, Goethe was always attracted. We have seen him in more or less close relations with Behrisch, Jung Stilling, and Herder, from all of whom he was divided by dissonances which made a perfect mutual understanding impossible. So it was in the case of Merck, as Goethe's references to him in his Autobiography and elsewhere clearly imply. In Merck there was apparently a mixture of conflicting elements which made him a mystery to his friends, and his suicide at the age of fifty points to something morbid in his nature. Of his real goodness of heart and of his genuine admiration for what he considered worthy of it, his own reported sayings and the testimony of others leave us in no doubt. Recording his impression of Goethe after a few interviews, he wrote: "I begin to have a real affection for Goethe. He is a man after my own heart, as I have found few." On the other hand, there were traits in him which Goethe did not scruple to call Mephistophelian—an opinion shared even by Goethe's mother, whose nature it was to see the best side of men and things. His variable humour and caustic tongue made him at once a terror and an attraction in whatever society he moved, and it is evident from the tone of Goethe's reminiscences of him that his intercourse with Merck was a mixed pleasure. But, as we have seen, it was an abiding principle of Goethe to be repelled by no one who had something to give him, and Merck possessed qualities and accomplishments which were of the first importance to him in the phase through which he was now passing. Merck was keenly interested in literature, especially in English literature, and had all Goethe's enthusiasm for Shakespeare. Though his own original productions were of mediocre quality, he had an insight into the character and genius of others which Goethe fully recognised and to which he acknowledges his special obligation. His general attitude in criticism was "negative and destructive," but this attitude was entirely wholesome for Goethe at a period when instinct and passion tended to overbear his judgment. With admirable penetration he saw how Goethe during these Frankfort years occasionally wasted his powers in attempts which were unworthy of his gifts and alien to his real nature. It was in reference to these futile tendencies that Merck gave him counsel in words which subsequent critics have recognised as the most adequate definition of the essential characteristic of Goethe's genius as a poet. "Your endeavour, your unswerving aim," he wrote, "is to give poetic form to the real. Others seek to realise the so-called poetic, the imaginative; and the result is nothing but stupid nonsense." Like subsequent critics, also, Merck saw the superiority of the first draft of Goetz to the second, but when the latter was completed, he played a friend's part. "It is rubbish and of no account," was his characteristic remark; "however, let the thing be printed";[108] and published it was, Merck bearing the cost of printing and Goethe supplying the paper.

[Footnote 108: Eckermann, Gespraeche mit Goethe, November 9th, 1824.]

It was towards the close of 1771 that Goethe had made Merck's acquaintance[109] on the occasion of a visit Merck had paid to Frankfort; and in March of the following year, in company with the younger Schlosser, they renewed their intercourse in Darmstadt, where Merck was settled. The visit lasted a few days, and was of some importance, as it introduced Goethe to a society of which he was to see much during the remainder of his stay in Frankfort, and which, according to his own testimony, "invigorated and widened his powers." It was a society in which we are surprised to find the Mephistophelian Merck the leading and most admired member. It consisted of a group of men and women associated with the Court at Darmstadt, whose bond of union was the cult of sensibility as the rising generation of Germany had learned it from Rousseau, Richardson, and Sterne. They went by the name of the Gemeinschaft der Heiligen, and the fervours of the community were at least those of genuine votaries. So far as Goethe is concerned, it was in three of the priestesses, one of them Caroline Flachsland, the betrothed of Herder, that he found the attraction of the society. For the youth who two years later was to give classic expression to the cult of sensibility in his Werther, his intercourse with these ladies of Darmstadt was an appropriate schooling. For their sensibilities were boundless, and they did not shrink from giving them expression. Caroline relates to her future husband how one night in the woods she fell on her knees at sight of the moon and arranged some glow-worms in her hair so that their loves might not be disturbed. On one occasion when Merck and Goethe met two of the coterie, one of them embraced Merck with kisses and the other fell upon his breast. Goethe was not a youth to be indifferent to such favours, and the attentions of Caroline were such as to disquiet Herder and to occasion an estrangement between the two friends which lasted for nearly two years.

[Footnote 109: It was Schlosser who had made Goethe and Merck acquainted. Herder, to whom Merck was known, had been a previous intermediary.]

From the effusive Caroline herself we learn the impression Goethe made on the precious circle. "A few days ago" (in the beginning of March, 1772), she writes to Herder, "I made the acquaintance of your friend Goethe and Herr Schlosser.... Goethe is such a good-hearted, lively creature, without any parade of learning, and has made such a to-do with Merck's children that my heart has quite gone out to him.... The second afternoon we spent in a pleasant stroll and over a bowl of punch in our house. We were not sentimental, but very merry, and Goethe and I danced a minuette to the piano. Thereafter he recited an excellent ballad of yours [the Scottish ballad Edward, translated by Herder]." On the occasion of a later visit (April) of Goethe to Darmstadt, she again writes to Herder: "Our Goethe has come on foot from Frankfort[110] on a visit to Merck. We have been together every day, and once, when we had gone together into the wood, we were soaked to the skin. We took refuge under a tree, and Goethe sang a little song, 'Under the Greenwood Tree,' which you translated from Shakespeare. Our common plight made us very confidential. He read aloud to us some of the best scenes from his Gottfried von Berlichingen.... Goethe is choke-full of songs. One about a hut built out of the ruins of a temple is excellent.[111] ... The poor fellow told my sister and myself a day ago that he had already been once in love, but that the girl had played with him for a whole year and then deserted him.[112] He believed, however, that she really loved him, but another had appeared on the scene, and he was made a goose of."

[Footnote 110: A six hours' walk.]

[Footnote 111: The poem, entitled Der Wanderer, noted below.]

[Footnote 112: The girl meant was no doubt Kaethchen Schoenkopf.]

Under the inspiration of these caressing attentions Goethe's muse could not be silent, and in the course of the spring and autumn he threw off a succession of pieces which are the classical expression of the sentimentalism of the period. To the three ladies-in-chief, under the pseudonyms of Urania, Lila, and Psyche (Caroline Flachsland), he successively addressed odes in which he gave them back their own emotions with interest. Their inspiration is sufficiently suggested by these lines which conclude the lines entitled Elysium, an Uranien:—

Seligkeit! Seligkeit! Eines Kusses Gefuehl.

In all the three poems we have another illustration of Goethe's susceptibility to immediate influences. Under the inspiration of Friederike's simplicity he had written lyrics which were as pure in form as direct in feeling. Now we have him indulging in a vein of artificial sentiment, which, it might have been supposed, he had for ever left behind as the result of his schooling in Strassburg.

In two pieces belonging to the same period, however, is revealed in fullest measure the true self of the poet, with all the emotional and intellectual preoccupations which he had brought with him from Strassburg. Of the one, Wanderers Sturmlied, he has given in his Autobiography an account which is fully borne out by the character of the poem itself. It was composed, he tells us, in a terrific storm on one of his restless journeys between Frankfort and Darmstadt, and at a time when the memory of Friederike was still haunting him. Of Friederike, however, there is no direct suggestion in the poem; from first to last it is a paean of the Sturm und Drang, composed in a form directly imitated from Pindar, whom he had been ardently studying since his return to Frankfort. The theme is the glorification of genius—genius in its upwelling and original force as manifest in Pindar, not as in poets like Anacreon and Theocritus. He who is in possession of this genius is armed against all the powers of nature and fate, and his end can only be crowned with victory. Goethe himself calls the poem a Halbunsinn, and one of his most sympathetic critics—Viktor Hehn—admits that to follow its drift requires some labour and some creative phantasy on the part of the reader.[113] But it is not its poetical merit that gives the poem its chief interest; it is to be taken, as it was meant, as a profession of the poet's literary faith at the period when it was written, and as such it is a historic document of the Sturm und Drang—at once an illustration and an exposition of its motives and ideals. "All this," is Goethe's mature comment on this and other productions of the same period, "was deeply and genuinely felt, but often expressed in a one-sided and unbalanced way."

[Footnote 113: Ueber Goethe's Gedichte (1911), p. 157.]

Of far higher poetic value is the second poem, Der Wanderer,[114] in which Matthew Arnold found "the power of Greek radiance" which Goethe could give to his handling of nature. The scene of the poem is in southern Italy, near Cumae. The Wanderer, wearied by his travel under the noonday sun, comes upon a woman by the wayside whom he asks where he may quench his thirst. She conducts him through the neighbouring thicket, when an architrave, half-buried in the moss, and bearing an effaced inscription, catches his eye. They reach the woman's hut, which he finds to have been constructed from the stones of a ruined temple. Asleep in the hut is the woman's infant son, whom she leaves in the arms of the Wanderer, while she goes to fetch water from the spring. She presses on him a piece of bread, the only food she has to offer, and invites him to remain till the return of her husband to the evening meal. He refuses her hospitality, and resumes his journey to Cumae, his destination. Such is the outline of the poem, which is in the form of a dialogue, in the irregular measure common to the odes above mentioned. But in the Wanderer there is nothing dithyrambic; rather its characteristic is a reflective repose, which is in strange contrast to the tumultuous outpouring of the Wanderers Sturmlied, and which might induce us to assign its production to a later day in Goethe's life, to the period of his sojourn in Italy, when years had somewhat chastened him, and when he was under the spell of the artistic remains of classical antiquity. Of the finest inspiration is the contrast between the remarks of the peasant woman wholly engrossed in the immediate needs of the day, and the speculations of the Wanderer as he comes upon the ruins that time has wrought upon the choicest works of man's hand. Here we are far from all vapid and artificial sentiment; we have philosophical meditation proceeding from the profoundest source of the pathos of human life, the transitoriness of man and his works. Completely in accord with the philosophy of his ripest years, however, the poet finds no ground for melancholy regrets in the spectacle of nature triumphing over man's handiwork. Even in her work of corrosion she provides for the welfare of her children; in a home reared out of a ruined temple happy human lives are spent. And it is in the spirit of the broadest humanity—a spirit that marks him off from the sentimentalists of the Darmstadt circle—that he regards the "ruins of time."

[Footnote 114: On account of his constant travels between Frankfort and Darmstadt, Goethe was known among his friends as the Wanderer. The poem was written in the autumn, during Goethe's residence in Wetzlar.]

Natur! du ewig keimende, Schaffst jeden zum Genuss des Lebens, Hast deine Kinder alle muetterlich Mit Erbteil ausgestattet, einer Huette.

Nature! eternal engenderer, Thou bring'st forth thy children for the joy of living, With care all maternal thou providest Each with his portion, with his cottage.

In reading this poem we feel the force of the words of the younger Schlosser in which he records his impression of Goethe at the moment when both first made the acquaintance of the Darmstadt society. "I shall be accompanied (to Darmstadt)," he wrote, "by a young friend of the highest promise who, through his strenuous endeavours to purify his soul, without unnerving it, is to me worthy of special honour."[115] The purification had indeed begun, but Goethe had to pass through many fires before the purification was complete. One such fire was immediately awaiting him.

[Footnote 115: Biedermann, op. cit. i. 19-20.]



CHAPTER VII

WETZLAR AND CHARLOTTE BUFF

MAY—SEPTEMBER, 1772

During the summer and autumn of 1772 Goethe found himself in a society and surroundings which were in curious contrast to those of Darmstadt; and the next four months were to supply him with an experience which, wrought into one book of transcendent literary effect, was to make his name known, literally, to the ends of the earth,[116] and which may be regarded as the most remarkable episode in his long life. It was as "the author of Werther" that he was known to the reading world, until after his death the publication of the completed Faust gradually effaced the conception of Goethe as the master-sentimentalist of European literature.

[Footnote 116: Werther, as Goethe reminds us in one of his Venetian epigrams, was known in China:—

Doch was foerdert es mich, dass auch sogar der Chinese Malet mit aengstlicher Hand Werthern und Lotten auf Glas?]

It was mainly as a temporary escape from the tedium of Frankfort that, towards the end of May, 1772, Goethe proceeded to Wetzlar, a little town on the Lahn, a confluent of the Rhine. His settlement in Wetzlar had the semblance of a serious professional purpose, since Wetzlar was the historic legal capital of the Holy Roman Empire, and the seat of the Imperial Court of Justice. If he had any such serious purpose, his experience of the place speedily dispelled it. The place itself he found distasteful; a "little, ill-built town," he calls it, though the modern visitor finds it not unattractive, with its climbing, tortuous streets, reminiscent of the Middle Age, and with its impressive cathedral, one of the most interesting specimens of mediaeval architecture to be found in Germany, and still unfinished in Goethe's day. Instead of the spectacle of an august tribunal administering prompt and even justice, what he saw was a multitude of corrupt officials, deluded litigants, and endless delays of law. Wetzlar, in fact, he gives us to understand, destroyed any respect he may ever have had alike for judges and the law they professed to administer. He duly enrolled himself as a "Praktikant,"[117] but, as was the case with the majority of that class who haunted the town, his legal activity was confined to this step. "Solitary, depressed, aimless," so he described himself to his friends during his first weeks in Wetzlar.[118] Disgusted with law, he found refuge in the study of literature. In a long and rhapsodical letter to Herder he depicts the intellectual and spiritual experiences through which he was now passing. The Greeks were his one preoccupation. Homer, Xenophon, Plato, Theocritus, and Anacreon he had read in turn, but it was in Pindar he was now revelling, and from Pindar he was learning the lesson that only in laying firm hold of one's subject is the essence of all mastery. A sentence of Herder to the effect that "thought and feeling create the expression" had rejoiced his heart as expressing his own deepest experience. Herder had said of Goetz that its author had been spoilt by Shakespeare, and he modestly accepted the censure. Goetz, he admits, had been thought, not felt, and he would be depressed by his failure, were he not occasionally conscious that some day he would do better things.[119]

[Footnote 117: The Praktikanten were voluntary attendants on the Imperial Court, had little or no dependence on the authorities, and lived on their own resources.]

[Footnote 118: Caroline Flachsland to Herder, May 25th, 1772.]

[Footnote 119: Goethe to Herder, Werke, Briefe, Band ii. 15.]

As in Strassburg, it was at a table d'hote[120] that Goethe made the acquaintance of the youths who, like himself, were idling away their time in Wetzlar. To relieve the tedium of the place[121] they had formed a fantastic society on a feudal model, with a Grand-master, Chancellor, and all the other subordinate officials—the point of the jest being that each associate bore the name and played the part of his office and title. For frolic of all kinds Goethe was ever ready; his taste for practical joking, indeed, as we shall see, occasionally led him to play questionable pranks. Under the name of Goetz von Berlichingen he became a member of the brotherhood, and, according to his own account, he contributed to the gaiety of the proceedings. Among the company, however, there were a few serious persons with tastes kindred to his own, and he specially names F.W. Gotter, Secretary of the Gotha Legation at Wetzlar, as one who, like Salzmann and Schlosser, impressed him by his character and talent. In English literature they had a common interest, and, as a poem which both admired, they each made a translation of Goldsmith's Deserted Village—Gotter, according to Goethe, being the more successful in the attempt. Gotter was thus still another of those grave counsellors whom Goethe had the good fortune to discover and attach to himself amid the distracting frivolities of every society he frequented.[122]

[Footnote 120: In the Kronprinz, the principal hotel in the town.]

[Footnote 121: Goethe's own lodging (still shown) was in the Gewandsgasse, a narrow, dirty street, whence sun or moon could be seen at no season of the year.]

[Footnote 122: In his contemporary letters, Goethe does not always speak of Gotter so favourably as he does in his Autobiography.]

"What happened to me in Wetzlar," Goethe writes in his Autobiography, "is of no great significance." But posterity has thought differently, and, if we are to judge by the consequences of what, happened to him in Wetzlar, both for himself and for the world, posterity is right.[123] Be it said also, that contemporary testimony at first hand leaves us in no doubt that, but for his Wetzlar experience, one of the most remarkable phases in Goethe's development would not have found expression, and one resounding note in European literature would have been unheard.

[Footnote 123: An exhaustive account of Goethe's sojourn in Wetzlar will be found in W. Herbst's Goethe in Wetzlar, 1772. Vier Monate aus des Dichters Jugendleben, Gotha, 1881.]

In Leipzig and Strassburg Goethe had found objects to engage his affections, and he was not to be without a similar experience in Wetzlar. During his first weeks there he had seen no maiden to interest him, and the fact may explain his dissatisfaction during that period. After leaving in succession the circles of Sesenheim, Frankfort, and Darmstadt, he tells us, he felt a void in his heart which he could not fill. An accident at length came to fill the void. On June 9th (the date is carefully recorded) he met a girl at a ball in a neighbouring village (Garbenheim), who "made a complete conquest of him."[124] Her name was Charlotte Buff, the second daughter of an official of the Teutonic Order—a widower with twelve children. Charlotte, or Lotte, as he calls her, was of a different type from any of his previous loves, so that she possessed all the freshness of novelty. Though only nineteen, she had taken upon her the care of the numerous household, and discharged her duties with a motherly tact and good sense which excited general admiration. Over Lotte's personal appearance Goethe is not rapturous as in the case of Friederike; he simply says that she had a light and graceful figure, and in the same cool tone remarks that she was one of those women who do not inspire ardent passion, but who give general pleasure. So he chose to say in the retrospect, but neither his contemporary words nor actions permit us to believe that his feeling to Lotte was merely a calm regard. In the case of Lotte his situation was materially different from what it had been in the case of Friederike. He had no rival in his relations to Friederike; in his relations to Lotte he had one. Shortly after their first meeting he learned that Lotte was already betrothed, though the fact was not known to the world. The successful wooer was Johann Christian Kestner, a native of Hanover, and a Secretary of Legation settled in Wetzlar. Kestner was at every point the antithesis of his intruding rival. He was calm, deliberate, unimaginative, yet conspicuously a man of insight and character, with a fund of good sense and good temper, on which the situation made a large draft. "Kestner must be a very good man," was the frequent remark of Merck's wife in view of the relations of the three parties to each other, and Kestner's own words prove it. It is in his Letters and Diary that we have the closest glimpse of all three, and all that he says of himself, of Lotte, and of Goethe, shows a tact and good feeling that inspire esteem.

[Footnote 124: This is the expression of Kestner, Lotte's betrothed.]

After their first meeting at the ball, according to Goethe's own testimony, he became Lotte's constant attendant. "Soon he could not endure her absence." In her home he made himself the idol of the children; in the beautiful surrounding country they were inseparable companions—Kestner, when his avocations permitted, occasionally joining them. "So through the splendid summer," he records, "they lived a true German idyll." But the testimony of Kestner shows that the idyll was not without its discords. Goethe, he says, "with all his philosophy and his natural pride, had not such self-control as wholly to restrain his inclination.... His peace of mind suffered," and "there were various notable scenes," though Lotte showed herself a model of discretion. The situation was, in fact, an impossible one, and Goethe came to see it. Several times he made the effort to break his bonds and flee, but it was not till the beginning of September that he took the decisive step. Equally from his own and Kestner's account of the circumstances of his flight we receive the impression that his relation to Lotte was such as to make their further intercourse undesirable. The night before he went, according to Kestner, all three were together in Lotte's home, and their conversation, suggested by Lotte, turned upon the dead and the possibility of holding intercourse with them. Whichever of the three should die first, it was agreed, should, if possible, communicate with the survivors. All through the evening Goethe was in deep dejection, knowing, as he did, that it would be the last they would spend together. The following morning he left Wetzlar without intimating his intention to any of his friends—a proceeding which his grand-aunt, resident in the town, characterised as "very ill-bred," declaring that she would let the Frau Goethe know how her son had behaved.[125] In three brief parting notes he addressed to Kestner and Lotte we have the expression of the mental tumult which his passion for Lotte had produced in him. On his return home, after the last evening he spent with them, he wrote as follows to Kestner: "He is gone, Kestner; by the time you receive this note, he is gone. Give Lotte the enclosed note. I was quite calm, but your conversation has torn me to distraction. At this moment I can say nothing more than farewell. Had I remained a moment longer with you, I could not have restrained myself. Now I am alone, and to-morrow I go. Oh, my poor head!" In the lines enclosed for Lotte he has this outburst with reference to the evening's conversation: "When I ventured to say all I felt, it was of the present world I was thinking, of your hand which I kissed for the last time."

[Footnote 125: Such abrupt departures were characteristic of Goethe. We shall find him taking similar unceremonious leave of another of his loves. Goethe, wrote Frau von Stein to her son (May, 1812), "kann das Abschied nehmen nicht leiden, er ging ohne Abschied neulich von mir."]

From this record of the Wetzlar episode, directly reproducing the relations of all the persons concerned, it is clear that Lotte was for Goethe more than the pleasant companion he represents her in his Autobiography. If his own words and those of Kestner have any meaning, his feeling towards her amounted to a passion which only the singular self-control of her and Kestner prevented from breaking bounds. Strange as it may appear, neither Lotte nor Kestner regarded one whose presence was a menace to their own peace with other feelings than esteem, and apparently even affection. He parted from Lotte, he says, "with a clearer conscience" than from Friederike, and the statement is at least borne out by what we know of the sequel to the "splendid idyll." As we shall see, he continued to remain on the most cordial terms with the two lovers, and, though with mingled feelings, he gave them his best blessing on the day which saw them united as husband and wife.

In what has been said of Goethe's relations to Lotte Buff it is the emotional side of his nature that has been before us, but from the hand of the judicious Kestner we have a portrait of the whole man which leaves nothing to be desired in its completeness and insight. Kestner's description of his first meeting with his formidable rival reminds us of the "conquering lord" whose self-assurance evoked Herder's stinging criticism. Stretched on his back on the grass under a tree, Goethe was carrying on a conversation with two acquaintances who stood by. Kestner's first decided impression was that the stranger was "no ordinary man," and that he had "genius and a lively imagination." His final and complete impression, after Goethe had left Wetzlar, he thus records:—

"He has very many gifts, is a real genius, and a man of character; he has an extraordinarily lively imagination, and so, for the most part, expresses himself in pictures and similes. He is himself in the habit of saying that he always expresses himself in general terms, can never express himself with precision; when he is older, however, he hopes to think and express the thought as it is. He is violent in all his emotions; yet often exercises great self-command. His manner of thinking is noble; as free as possible from all prejudices, he acts on the prompting of the moment without troubling whether it may please other people, is in the fashion, or whether convention permits it. All constraint is hateful to him. He is fond of children and can occupy himself much with them. He is bizarre; in his conduct and manner there are various peculiarities which might make him disagreeable. But with children, with women, and many others he is nevertheless a favourite. For the female sex he has great respect. In principiis he is not yet fixed, and is still only endeavouring after a sure system. To say something on this point; he thinks highly of Rousseau, but is not a blind worshipper of him. He is not what we call orthodox; yet this is not from pride or caprice or from a desire to play a part. On certain important matters, also, he expresses himself only to few, and does not willingly disturb others in their ideas. He certainly hates scepticism, and strives after truth and settled conviction on certain subjects of the first importance; believes even that he has already attained conviction on the most important; but, so far as I have observed, this is not the case. He does not go to church; not even to communion, and he prays seldom. For, says he, I am not hypocrite enough for that. At times he seems at rest with regard to certain subjects; at other times, however, very far from being so. He reverences the Christian religion, but not as our theologians present it. He believes in a future life and a better state of existence. He strives after truth, and yet attaches more importance to feeling than to demonstration as the test of it. He has already accomplished much; has many acquirements and much reading, but has thought and reasoned still more. He has mainly devoted himself to belles lettres and the fine arts, or rather to all branches of knowledge, only not to the so-called bread-winning ones. I wished to describe him, but to do so I should run to too great length, for he is one of whom there is a great deal to be said. In one word, he is a very remarkable man."[126]

[Footnote 126: Kestner's characterisation of Goethe will be found in Biedermann, op. cit. i. pp. 21-3.]



CHAPTER VIII

AFTER WETZLAR

1772—1773

In Goetz von Berlichingen Goethe had given expression to the ideals and emotions he had brought with him from Strassburg; Shakespeare and the memory of Friederike had been the main impulses to its production. As the result of his experience at Wetzlar, he was filled with a new inspiration, which, though it did not immediately find utterance, left him no repose till it was embodied in a work in which the man and the artist in him equally found deliverance. That the conception came to him shortly after his leaving Wetzlar we have conclusive evidence. In the beginning of November, 1772, after his return to Frankfort from Wetzlar, he received the news that a youth named Jerusalem, a casual acquaintance of his own,[127] had committed suicide as the result of an unhappy love adventure. Instantly, Goethe tells us in his Autobiography, the plan of Werther shaped itself in his mind; and his contemporary letters bear out the statement. Immediately on receiving the news of Jerusalem's death, he wrote to Kestner for a detailed account of all the circumstances, and he made a careful copy of the information with which Kestner supplied him. In point of fact, it was not till after more than a year that Werther came to fruition, but that he was in labour with the portentous birth all its lineaments were to show.

[Footnote 127: Goethe had made Jerusalem's acquaintance in Leipzig. Jerusalem called Goethe a Geck, a coxcomb, a description which, as we have seen, was not inapplicable to him in his Leipzig days. Jerusalem was a friend of Lessing, who highly esteemed him, and after his death published his MSS.]

But before Werther came to birth, Goethe went through another experience which was to form an essential part of its tissue. Merck, to whom Goethe attributes the chief influence over him during this Frankfort period, was again the intermediary. Before Goethe left Wetzlar, Merck had arranged that they should meet at Ehrenbreitstein, where he would introduce Goethe to a family resident there.[128] The family was that of Herr von la Roche, a Privy Councillor in the service of the Elector of Trier, and it consisted of himself, his wife and two daughters. The head of the house, a matter-of-fact man of the world, plays no part in Goethe's relations to the family. It was Frau von la Roche to whom, as a desirable acquaintance, Merck specially wished to introduce his friend, and the sequel proved that he had rightly divined their mutual affinities. The cousin of Wieland, with whom she had had a liaison before her marriage, she was now past forty, but, according to Goethe's description of her, she possessed all the charm of youth with the dignity and repose of maturity. What is evident is, that Goethe saw in her the type of a high-bred woman such as had not yet crossed his path. In his reminiscence of her, his words have a warmth which is in notable contrast to the coldness of his portrait of Lotte Buff. "She was a most wonderful woman," he writes; "I knew no other to compare with her. Slight and delicately formed, rather tall than short, she had contrived even in advanced years to retain a certain elegance both of form and bearing which pleasingly combined the manner of a Court lady with that of a dignified burgess's wife."[129] In addition to these graces, Frau von la Roche had precisely the temperament and the mental qualities that appealed to Goethe in the emotional phase through which he was now passing. She lived in the same world of sentiment as the ladies of the Darmstadt circle, and she had the gift of effusive utterance, as she had shown in a novel in the manner of Richardson which had brought her some celebrity.

[Footnote 128: In point of fact, Goethe announced himself. Merck arrived after him.]

[Footnote 129: In a letter to Schiller (July 24th, 1799) Goethe gives a much less favourable estimate of Frau von la Roche, whom he had just met: "Sie gehoert zu den nivellierenden Naturen, sie hebt das Gemeine herauf und zieht das Vorzuegliche herunter...."]

With Frau von la Roche Goethe established a Platonic relation which he assiduously cultivated during the remainder of his residence in Frankfort, but there was another member of the household to whom he was attracted by a livelier feeling. This was the elder of the two daughters, Maximiliane by name, a girl of seventeen, whose charms were subsequently to be given to the lady of Werther's infatuation. From what we have seen of Goethe's inflammability, we are prepared for the naive remark in which he records his new sensation. "It is a very pleasant sensation," he says, "when a new passion begins to stir in us before the old one is quite extinct. So, as the sun sets, we gladly behold the moon rise on the opposite horizon, and rejoice in the double splendour of the two heavenly lights." Be it said that the atmosphere of the household was provocative of relaxed feelings. Goethe was not the only guest. Besides Merck there was a youth named Leuchsenring whose special line of activity had endeared him to a wide circle. Leuchsenring made it his business to enter into correspondence with susceptible souls whose effusions he carried about with him in dispatch-boxes and was in the habit of reading aloud to sympathetic listeners. The reading of these precious documents was part of the entertainment of the circle in which Goethe now found himself, and he assures us that he enjoyed it. We see, therefore, the world in which he was now moving—a world in which those who belonged to it made it their first concern to titillate their sensibilities, and squandered their emotions with a profusion and abandonment in which self-respecting reserve was forgotten. It was a world wide as the poles apart from that of Sesenheim, where human relations were founded on natural feeling and only the language of the heart was spoken. Once again Goethe had taken on the hue of his surroundings. In Leipzig he had been what we have seen him; now under the influence of Darmstadt he appears in still another phase—to be by no means the last.

From Goethe's connection with the family of von la Roche was to come the occasion which immediately prompted the production of Werther, but more than a year was to elapse before the occasion came, and in the interval his own mental experiences were to supply him with further materials which were to find expression in that work. In his correspondence of the period we have the fullest revelation of these experiences, and they leave us with the impression that he spoke only the literal truth when he tells us in his Autobiography that, on being delivered of Werther, he felt as if he had made a general confession. The same period, moreover, is signalised by a succession of minor productions which, though they did not attain to the celebrity of Goetz and Werther, exhibit a range of intellectual interests and a play of varied moods which materially enhance our conceptions of his genius.

The circumstances in which Goethe had left Friederike had precluded subsequent communications with her and her family; in the case of the Wetzlar circle there was no such impediment to future epistolary intercourse. He had left Lotte Buff, as he tells us, with a clearer conscience than he had left Friederike, and on the part of Lotte and Kestner there was apparently no feeling that prompted a breach of their relations with him. For more than a year he kept up assiduous communications with Wetzlar; then his letters became less frequent and finally ceased when changes in the circumstances of both parties effaced their mutual interests. While the correspondence was in full flood, however, Goethe's letters leave us in no doubt as to the real nature of his passion for Lotte; if words mean anything, his memories of her were a cause of mental unrest to which other distractions of the time gave a morbid direction, and which threatened to end in moral collapse.

A few extracts from his letters to Wetzlar will reveal his state of mind during the months that immediately followed his return to Frankfort. Within a week after his return we have these hurried lines addressed to Kestner: "God bless you, dear Kestner, and tell Lotte that I sometimes imagine I could forget her; but then comes the recitative, and I am worse than ever." In the same month (September) he again addresses Kestner: "I would not desire to have spent my days better than I did at Wetzlar, but God send me no more such days!... This I have just said to Lotte's silhouette." In the beginning of November he paid a flying visit to Wetzlar, and apparently had reason to regret it. "Certainly, Kestner," he wrote the day after he left, "it was time that I should go; yesterday evening, as I sat on the sofa, I had thoughts for which I deserve hanging." On Christmas Day he writes still at the same high pitch: "It is still night, dear Kestner, and I have risen to write again by the morning light, which recalls pleasant memories of past days.... Immediately on my arrival here I had pinned up Lotte's silhouette; while I was in Darmstadt, they placed my bed here, and there to my great joy hangs Lotte's picture at its head." In April, 1773, Kestner and Lotte were married, and Goethe insisted, against Kestner's wish, on sending the bride her marriage-ring, which was accompanied by the following note: "May the remembrance of me as of this ring be ever with you in your happiness. Dear Lotte, after a long interval we shall see each other again, you with the ring on your finger, and me always yours. I affix no name nor surname. You know well who writes." A few days later we have the following words in a letter to Kestner: "To part from Lotte, I do not yet understand how it was possible.... It cost me little, and yet I don't understand how it was possible. There is the rub." In the course of the summer Kestner removed to Hanover, where he had received an official appointment, and took his wife with him. The correspondence then became less frequent, though on both sides it was maintained in the same friendly spirit. Only for a time, on the publication of Werther, as we shall see, was there the shadow of possible estrangement. "Alienated lovers," is Goethe's remark, already quoted, "become the best friends, if only they can be properly managed"; and Goethe showed himself an adept in this art of management.

While Goethe was pouring forth his confessions to Kestner and Lotte, his circumstances at home were not such as to conduce to calm of mind. Frankfort remained as distasteful to him as ever. "The Frankforters," he wrote to Kestner, "are an accursed folk; they are so pig-headed that nothing can be made of them." With his father his relations had not become more cordial after his return from Wetzlar. "Lieber Gott," he wrote on receiving a letter from his father, "shall I then also become like this when I am old? Shall my soul no longer attach itself to what is good and amiable? Strange the belief that the older a man becomes, the freer he becomes from what is worldly and petty. He becomes increasingly more worldly and petty."[130] His father's insistence on his attention to legal business was a permanent cause of mutual misunderstanding. "I let my father do as he pleases; he daily seeks to enmesh me more and more in the affairs of the town, and I submit."[131]

[Footnote 130: Goethe to Kestner, November 10th, 1772. Werke, Briefe, Band ii. 35.]

[Footnote 131: To the same, September 15th, 1773. Ib. p. 104.]

In his sister Cornelia, as formerly, he had a sympathetic confidant equally in his affairs of the heart and in his literary and artistic ambitions, but in the course of the year 1773 he was deprived of her soothing and stimulating influence. In October she was betrothed to J.G. Schlosser, who has already been noted as one of Goethe's sager counsellors, and the marriage took place on November 1st. "I rejoice in their joy," he wrote to Sophie von la Roche, "though, at the same time, it is mostly to my own loss." Other friends, also, in the course of the same year, he complains, were departing and leaving him in dreary solitude. "My poor existence," he writes to Kestner, "is becoming petrified. This summer everyone is going—Merck with the Court to Berlin, his wife to Switzerland, my sister, and Fraeulein Flachsland, you, everybody. And I am alone. If I do not take a wife or hang myself, say that life is right dear to me, or something, if you like, which does me more honour."[132] So in May he describes himself as alone and daily becoming more so; in October as "entirely alone," and as indescribably rejoiced at the return of Merck towards the close of the year.

[Footnote 132: Ib. pp. 82-3.]



CHAPTER IX

SATIRICAL DRAMAS AND FRAGMENTS

If, during the year that followed his return from Wetzlar, Goethe was distracted by his wandering affections, he was no less divided in mind by his intellectual ambitions. The doubt which had possessed him since boyhood as to whether nature meant him for an artist or a poet remained still unsettled for him. In one of the best-known passages of his Autobiography he has related how he sought to resolve his difficulty. As he wandered down the banks of the Lahn, after he had torn himself away from Wetzlar, the beauty of the scenery awoke in him the artist's desire to transfer it worthily to canvas. The whim then occurred to him to let fate decide whether this was the work for which he was appointed. He would throw his knife into the river, and, if he saw it reach the surface, he would take it as a sign that art was his vocation. Unfortunately the oracle proved dubious. Owing to the intervening bushes he did not see the knife enter the river, but only the splash occasioned by its fall. As the result of the uncertainty of the oracle, he adds, he gave himself less assiduously than hitherto to the study of art. If this were indeed the case, it was only for a time, since the contemporary testimony, both of himself and his friends, shows that during the period that immediately followed his leaving Wetzlar, art received more of his attention than literature. Goethe, wrote Caroline Flachsland to Herder, "still thinks of becoming a painter, and we strongly advise him to pursue that end."[133] "I am now quite a draughtsman," he himself wrote to Herder in December of the same year; and he tells another correspondent in the autumn of 1773 that "the plastic arts occupy him almost entirely."

[Footnote 133: November 27th, 1772.]

Yet, since his return from Strassburg to Frankfort in August, 1771, his literary activity was never wholly intermitted. During the remainder of that year he wrote the first draft of Goetz von Berlichingen, and in 1772, mainly under the inspiration of the Darmstadt circle, he produced the poems to which attention has already been drawn. In that year, also, he shared in an undertaking the main object of which was to proclaim those revolutionary ideas in literature, religion, and life that inspired the movement of the Sturm und Drang. In cooperation with Herder, Merck, and Schlosser, his future brother-in-law, and others, he conducted a journal which, under the title of the Frankfurter Gelehrten Anzeigen, expounded these views to all who chose to read it. Merck, and afterwards Schlosser, acted as editors during the year that it existed, but Goethe was its principal contributor. In the preliminary announcement to the first issue (January 1st, 1772) it is stated that the reviews of books will range over science, philosophy, history, belles-lettres, and the fine arts, and particularly that no English book worthy of notice will escape attention. Of the successive reviews that appeared, only three are certainly known to be by Goethe, though he must have written or assisted in writing several others. With his usual causticity Herder characterised the manner of the two chief contributors. "You," he tells Merck, "are always Socrates-Addison; and Goethe is for the most part a young, arrogant lord, with horribly scraping cock's heels, and, if I come among you some day, I shall be the Irish Dean with his whip." Goethe himself, reviewing these early efforts in the light of his maturity, is sufficiently modest regarding their intrinsic merit. He had then, he says, neither the knowledge nor the discipline requisite for adequate criticism. On the other hand, he claims to have given evidence in his notices of books of a gift, which no reader of them can fail to perceive—the gift of instinctive insight into the essentials of the subject in hand. In the business of reviewing, however, he seems to have taken little pleasure. "The day has begun festively," he wrote to Kestner on Christmas, 1772, "but, unfortunately, I must spoil the beautiful hours with reviewing; but I do so with good heart, as it is for the last issue."[134]

[Footnote 134: Goethe wrote the epilogue to the last number of the Review, of which he says to Kestner, "hat ich das Publikum und den Verleger turlipinirt."]

To the same year, 1772, belong two short productions of Goethe which deserve a passing notice as exhibiting his strange blending of interests at this period. The one is entitled Brief des Pastors zu ... an den neuen Pastor zu ..., and professes to have been translated from the French. The Letter is another illustration of his interest in religion and in the interpretation of the Bible which had begun with his early reading of the Old Testament, and which his intercourse with the Fraeulein von Klettenberg and Herder had intermittently kept alive. The theological teaching of the Letter is, in point of fact, a compound of the teaching of these two. Its main object is to emphasise the necessity of toleration in the interest of religion itself, and nowhere was the monition more needed than in Frankfort, where the antipathy between those of the Reformed and the Lutheran communions was such as even to debar intermarriage. Rationalism and dogmatism are equally reprobated, and the sum of all true religion is found to consist in the love of God and of our neighbour. The strain of mystical piety which runs through the whole production doubtless proceeds from imaginative sympathy and not from personal experience, and is to be regarded only as another illustration of Goethe's facility in identifying himself with emotions essentially alien to his own nature. The other piece, entitled Zwo wichtige bisher uneroerterte biblische Fragen, zum erstenmal gruendlich beantwortet, professing to be written by a Swabian pastor, is still more singular. In the first of the two questions he inquires whether it was the Ten Commandments or the prescriptions of ritual that were inscribed on the tables of stone, and concludes that it was the latter; and in the second he discusses the nature of the speaking with tongues that followed St. Paul's laying of hands on the newly-baptised Christians, and resolves the question in a purely mystical sense.

The year 1773 marks an epoch in Goethe's career, and an epoch also in the literary history of Germany. In that year he made his first appeal as a writer to the great German public which was to follow his successive productions with varying degrees of admiration during the next half-century. Dissatisfied with the first draft of Goetz von Berlichingen as lacking in dramatic unity, in the beginning (February—March) of 1773 he recast the whole play, which in its new form was published in June.[135] As has already been said, the second form of Goetz is generally recognised as inferior to the first, but, such as it was, it made the sensation we have seen. With as much truth as Byron, Goethe might have said that "he woke one morning and found himself famous." In 1772 he could be spoken of by an intelligent person in Leipzig as "one named Gette," and even in the circles he frequented he had hitherto been known simply as a youth of extraordinary promise from whom great things were to be expected. Henceforth his name was on the tongue of all who were interested in German literature, and whatever he was likely to produce in the future was certain to command universal interest.

[Footnote 135: In its new form Goetz was no better adapted for the stage. "Eine angeborne Unart ist schwierig zu meistern," is Goethe's own remark on his attempt to make it a good acting play.]

According to Merck, Goethe's head was turned for a time by the success of Goetz. During the months that followed its publication, at all events, he was possessed with a wanton humour which spared neither friends nor foes, nor the society of which he had apparently caught the contagion as completely as any of its members. At a later date, Goethe speaks of his "considerate levity" and his "warm coolness";[136] and in a succession of pieces which he threw off at this time we have an interesting commentary on this characterisation of himself. In these pieces we have an old vein reopened. We have seen how in Leipzig he had burlesqued the professor of literature, Clodius, but in the years that followed his departure from Leipzig—the depressing period in Frankfort and the period of rapid development in Strassburg—there was neither the occasion nor the prompting to personal or general satire. Now, however, in the tumult of his own feelings and in the follies of the society around him he found themes for satirical comment which afforded scope for a side of his genius rarely manifested in his later years. The short satirical dramas produced at this time on the mere impulse of the moment have in themselves only a local and temporary interest, but they derive importance from the fact that they proceed from the same mental attitude which was to find its definitive expression in the character of Mephistopheles—essentially the creation of this period of Goethe's development. In these trivial exercises he was practising the craft which is so consummately displayed in the original fragments of Faust.

[Footnote 136: Ich bin wie immer der nachdenkliche Leichtsinn und die warme Kaelte.—Goethe to Sophie von la Roche, September 1st, 1780.]

The first of these sallies—Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern, Ein Schoenbartspiel—was written in March, 1773, and was sent as a birthday gift to Merck—an appropriate recipient. Written in doggerel verse, which Goethe took over from the shoemaker poet Hans Sachs, the piece brings before us the motley crowd of persons who frequented the fairs of the time, each vociferating the cheapness and excellence of his own wares. The humour of the spectacle, however, is that the dramatis personae were individuals recognisable by contemporaries in traits which now escape us. Goethe himself appears in the guise of a doctor, Herder as a captain of the gipsies, and his bride, Caroline Flachsland, as a milkmaid. The satire is directed equally against the idiosyncrasies of individuals and against the follies of the time, the sentimentalism which Goethe himself had not escaped, but of which he saw the inanity, the petty jealousies of authors which had also come within his personal experience. A mock tragedy on the subject of Esther, which forms part of the burlesque, is a malicious parody of the French models which he had begun by imitating, but which were now the sport of the youths who led the Sturm und Drang.

The Jahrmarktsfest is a genial explosion of madcap humour. Not so another succession of scenes produced about the same time. The subject of them is that Leuchsenring whose acquaintance, we have seen, Goethe had made under the roof of Sophie von la Roche. Since then, apparently, Leuchsenring's proceedings had provoked a repugnance in Goethe which displays itself in a strain of bitterness hardly to be found in any other of his works. It was Leuchsenring's habit to ingratiate himself with households where his pseudo-sentiment made him acceptable, and by questionable methods to make mischief between their members, and especially between the two sexes.[137] Goethe had seen the results of these intrigues in circles with which he was acquainted, and it was to punish the sinner that he wrote Ein Fastnachtspiel, auch wohl zu tragieren nach Ostern, vom Pater Brey dem falschen Propheten. Pater Brey, the false prophet, is Leuchsenring, and his sugared speech and shifty ways are the main object of the satire, but other persons are introduced into the piece and exhibited in lights which are a singular commentary on the taste of the time. The victim on whom Pater Brey plies his arts is Caroline Flachsland, who appears under the name of Leonora, and the injured lover is Herder (Captain Velandrino).[138] The Captain, who has been informed of Pater Brey's philanderings with his betrothed, appears on the scene, is assured of her faithfulness, and in concert with another character in the piece (Merck) plays a coarse trick on the Pater which makes him the laughing-stock of the neighbourhood.

[Footnote 137: A quarrel had arisen between Merck and Leuchsenring, and Goethe had warmly taken Merck's side.]

[Footnote 138: As we have seen, Herder was jealous of Goethe's own attentions to Caroline.]

Herder had good reason to resent the licence with which his private affairs had been obtruded on the public in Pater Brey,[139] but in the same year Goethe made him the main subject of another production which raises equally our astonishment at the manners of the time and at the wanton audacity of its author. In Pater Brey the prevailing sentimentalism, as veiling dubious motives, had been the theme of ridicule; in Satyros, oder der vergoetterte Waldteufel, it was the extravagancies of the followers of Rousseau in their idealisation of the natural man. According to Kestner, as we have seen, Goethe himself greatly admired Rousseau, but was not one of his blind worshippers, and Satyros is a sufficiently cogent proof of the fact. What is astounding is the means he chose to give point to his ridicule. Herder is Satyros, the Waldteufel,[140] who is represented as being humanely received by a hermit (Merck) while suffering from a wounded leg. Satyros requites his host with coarse abuse of himself and his religion, flings his crucifix into the neighbouring stream, and steals a valuable piece of linen cloth. Next by an enchanting melody he cajoles two maidens, Arsinoe and Psyche (Caroline Flachsland), into the belief that he is a superhuman being, and Psyche is so overcome that she submits to his embraces. The people of the neighbourhood flock to him, see in him a new god, and on his persuasion take to eating chestnuts, as the natural food of man—the priest of the community, Hermes, joining in their worship. The hermit appears on the scene, and on his abusing Satyros for the theft of his crucifix, the people decide to offer him as a sacrifice to their insulted divinity. By a stratagem of the wife of Hermes, the hermit is rescued and the bestiality of Satyros exposed. In no way disconcerted, Satyros leaves the throng with flouts at their asinine attachment to their conventional morality as opposed to the free life inculcated by nature. Goethe's later comment on this remarkable production is that it was "a document of the godlike insolence of our youth," and certainly no document could bring more vividly before us the world in which Goethe's genius came to fruition.[141]

[Footnote 139: It was published in the autumn of the following year, 1774.]

[Footnote 140: W. Scherer was the first to identify Herder with Satyros.]

[Footnote 141: Satyros was not published till 1814, after Herder's death, but he was aware of its existence.]

Still another piece of the "godlike insolence of youth," though less offensive in its implications, is the farce, Goetter, Helden, und Wieland, written in the autumn of the same year, 1773. At an earlier period Wieland had been one of the gods of Goethe's idolatry, but Wieland was now the most distinguished champion of those French models against which Goethe and the youths associated with him had declared irreconcilable war. Moreover, in a journal recently started by Wieland, there had appeared an unfriendly review of Goetz von Berlichingen. By the publication of a play, Alceste, in which he foolishly challenged comparison with Euripides' drama of the same name, Wieland gave the enemy his opportunity. On a Sunday afternoon, with a bottle of Burgundy beside him, as he tells us, Goethe tossed off his skit at one sitting. As a piece of improvisation, it certainly contains excellent fooling. We are introduced to the lower world, where the four characters in Euripides' play, Admetus, Alcestis, Hercules, and Mercury, as well as its author, are represented as in a state of high indignation at the liberties which Wieland has taken with them in his Alcestes. Summoned before them, Wieland appears in his nightcap, and has to run the gauntlet of their several reproaches—the purport of them all being that he has foolishly misunderstood the Greek world which he had undertaken to portray. Against Goethe's wish the satire was published in the following year, and rapidly ran through four editions, but Wieland had a genteel revenge. With that Lebensweisheit which Goethe long afterwards marked as his characteristic, he published in his review a notice of the burlesque, in which it is recommended as "a masterpiece of persiflage and of sophistical wit." "Wieland has turned the tables on me," was Goethe's own admission; "Ich bin eben prostituiert."[142]

[Footnote 142: Max Morris, op. cit. iv. 81.]

These successive jeux d'esprit were merely the crackling fireworks of exuberant youth, and were regarded as such by their author himself. At the very time he was writing them, he was planning and sketching works, the scope of which reveals the true bent of his genius, and of the ideals that were preoccupying him. "My ideals," he wrote to Kestner (September 15th, 1773), "grow daily in beauty and grandeur"; and when he penned these words he was engaged on a production which, though it remained a mere fragment, has justly been regarded as one of the most striking manifestations of his powers. The subject, the myth of Prometheus, he tells us, attracted him as one in which he could embody his own deepest experience and the conclusions regarding the individual life of man to which that experience had led him. In the crises of his past life, he tells us, he had found that no aid had been forthcoming either from man or any supernal power. "We must tread the wine-press alone." Only in one source had he discovered a stay and stimulus, which brought him the sense of individual self-subsistence—in the exercise of such creative talent as nature had bestowed upon him. Of this consciousness, no external power could deprive him, and it is this consciousness that is the governing idea of the fragment, and not the Titanism of the Prometheus of AEschylus. It was, moreover, an idea which permanently accompanied Goethe throughout life, and to which he frequently gave expression in his later correspondence.[143]

[Footnote 143: The following passage from an article in the Hibbert Journal, by M. Bergson (October, 1911, pp. 42-3), is an interesting commentary on Goethe's conception: "If, then, in every province the triumph of life is expressed by creation, might we not think that the ultimate reason of human life is a creation which, in distinction from that of the artist or man of science, can be pursued at every moment and by all men alike; I mean the creation of self by self, the continual enrichment of personality, by elements which it does not draw from outside, but causes to spring forth from itself?"]

As, apart from its intrinsic power, Prometheus has an incidental interest in the history of philosophic thought, it may be worth while to sketch briefly the development it attained. When Prometheus is introduced to us, he is a rebel against Zeus and the other gods. He had rendered them allegiance so long as he believed that "they saw the past and the future in the present and were animated by self-originated and disinterested wisdom," but, on the discovery of his error, he had renounced their authority, and, as an independent agent, he had fashioned images of human beings, to which, however, he was powerless to give the breath of life. In the first Scene of the first Act, Mercury appears as the messenger of the gods and reasons with Prometheus on the folly of his contending with their omnipotence. Prometheus denies their omnipotence either over nature or over himself. "Can they separate me from myself?" he asks, and Mercury admits that the gods are subject to a power stronger than their own—the power of Fate. "Go, then," is the reply, "I do not serve vassals." After a brief soliloquy, in which Prometheus expresses the passionate wish that he might impart feeling to his lifeless images, Epimetheus appears as a second representative of the gods. Their offer, he tells Prometheus, is reasonable; let him but recognise their supremacy, and he will be free of the heights of Olympus, from which he would rule the earth. "Yes," is the reply, "to be their burggrave, and defend their Heaven! My offer is more reasonable; their wish is to be a partner with me, and my thought is to have nothing to participate with them; they cannot rob me of what I have, and what they have, let them guard. Here is mine, and here is thine, and so are we apart." "But what is thine?" inquires Epimetheus; and the reply is, "The circle which my activity fulfils—Der Kreis, den meine Wirklichkeit erfuellt." And here follows one of the passages in the dialogue which, as expressing the pantheistic conception of the universe, gave occasion to the quarrel of the philosophers, to be presently noted. "Thou standest alone," is the comment of Epimetheus on the claim to independent self-subsistence asserted by Prometheus; "thou standest alone; thy self-will fails to appreciate the bliss of the gods—thou, thine, the world and heaven, all feel themselves one intimate whole." Repelled like Mercury, Epimetheus departs, and Minerva, in whom Prometheus acknowledges his sole inspirer and instructress, appears. Minerva, who declares that she honours her father Zeus and loves Prometheus, repeats the offer of Zeus to animate the clay images if Prometheus will acknowledge his sovereignty; but when Prometheus passionately refuses to accept the offer, she bursts forth: "And they shall live! to fate and not to the gods it pertains to bestow life and to take it. Come, I conduct thee to the source of all life, which Jupiter may not close against us. They shall live, and through thee!"

Of the second Act only two Scenes were written. In the first, Mercury, proclaiming in Olympus that Minerva has given life to the clay images of Prometheus, calls on Zeus to destroy the new creatures with his thunder. Zeus calmly replies that they will only increase the number of his servants, and Mercury, changing his tone, prays that he may be sent to "the poor earthborn folk," to announce the goodness and wisdom of the father of all. "Not yet," is the reply. "In the newborn rapture of youth they dream that they are like unto the gods. Not till they need thee will they listen to thy words. Leave them to their own life!" In the second Scene, we see Prometheus in a valley at the base of Olympus, surrounded by the new race of animated beings engaged in business or pleasure. There follow three brief Scenes which are meant to depict the dawnings of human consciousness and the conditions under which life is to be lived. To one he shows how a hut to shelter him may be constructed with the branches he has lopped with the aid of an implement of stone. In a dispute between two men, one of whom wounds the other and steals his goat, Prometheus pronounces the judgment that the hand of the offender will be against every man, and every man's hand against him. In the third and last Scene we have the most remarkable passage in the poem. Pandora, Prometheus' favourite creation, in dismay and bewilderment, describes the strange experience she has witnessed in the case of a friend, another maiden, and Prometheus tells her that what she had seen was death. What death meant Prometheus explains in the following passage, charged with the sensuous mysticism which was one of the elements of Goethe's own experiences when he wrote it:—

Wenn aus dem innerst tiefsten Grunde Du ganz erschuettert alles fuehlst, Was Freud' und Schmerzen jemals dir ergossen, [Transcriber's Note: corrected error "and" for "und"] Im Sturm dein Herz erschwillt, In Traenen sich erleichtern will Und seine Glut vermehrt, Und alles klingt an dir und bebt und zittert, Und all die Sinne dir vergehn, Und du dir zu vergehen scheinst Und sinkst, Und alles um dich her versinkt in Nacht, Und du, in inner eigenstem Gefuehl, Umfassest eine Welt; Dann stirbt der Mensch.

When from thy inmost being's depths Shattered to nought thou feelest all Of joy and woe that e'er to thee hath flowed, In storm thy heart hath swelled, In tears doth find itself relief, And doth its flow increase; When all within thee thrills, and quakes, and quivers, And all thy senses from thee part, And from thyself thou seem'st to part, And sink'st, And all around thee sinketh deep in night, And thou within thy inner very self Encompassest a world; Then dies the man.

To these two Acts Goethe subsequently added, as the opening of a third Act, a soliloquy of Prometheus, written in the following year. In this soliloquy Prometheus appears as the sheer Titan, the burden of his defiance being that Zeus merits no worship from men to whose miseries he is deaf, and that such worship as he receives proceeds only from human folly and ignorance.[144] By its protest against the conception of the mechanical god who "pushes the universe from without," and by the Spinozistic pantheism which it implicitly proclaims, the ode dismayed the more timid spirits of the time. To the horror of Fritz Jacobi, Lessing, to whom he read it in manuscript in 1780, declared that its conception of the [Greek: hen kai pan] was his own;[145] and when, in 1785, Jacobi published the poem without Goethe's knowledge, a controversy arose in which Lessing was charged with atheism and pantheism, and which, as Goethe records, cost the life of one of the combatants, Moses Mendelssohn.[146] Be it said that in his old age Goethe himself came to regard the sentiments of the soliloquy as sansculottisch, and in the time of reaction of the Holy Alliance forbade the publication of the fragment as likely to be received as an evangel by the revolutionary youth of Germany.[147]

[Footnote 144: Viktor Hehn pointed out that the drama and the ode are inspired by different motives, and that it was in forgetfulness that Goethe associated them.—Ueber Goethe's Gedichte, p. 160. Bielschowsky (Goethe, Sein Leben und Seine Werke, i. 510) suggests that the ode may have been intended as the opening of Act ii.]

[Footnote 145: Sir Frederick Pollock dates "modern Spinozism" from this incident.—Spinoza: His Life and Opinions (London, 1880), p. 390.]

[Footnote 146: While writing a defence of his friend Lessing against the charge of atheism, Mendelssohn's mental agitation was such that it was believed to have occasioned his death.]

[Footnote 147: Turgenieff relates that on translating passages from Satyros and Prometheus to Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, and Daudet, all three were profoundly impressed by the range and power displayed in them.]

To the same period as Prometheus belongs another fragment, inspired by an equally grandiose conception, which, like so many others with Goethe, was never to be realised. The theme of the projected drama was to be the career of Mahomet, and in his Autobiography Goethe has indicated the leading ideas it was to embody. Contrary to the prevailing opinion, which had received brilliant expression in Voltaire's play on the same subject, Mahomet was to be represented not as an impostor but as a prophet sincerely convinced of the truth of his message, and inflamed with a disinterested desire to give his countrymen a purer religion—a view of Mahomet, it may be said in passing, which Goethe's disciple, Carlyle, was among the first to proclaim in this country.[148] The successive actions of the prophet were to illustrate the influence which character and genius combined have exercised on the destiny of men; but they were also to illustrate how the idealist in his contact with actualities is forced, in spite of himself, to compromise the purity of his original message, and, in consequence, to deteriorate in his own personal character.[149] Of the projected drama we have only two scenes, and a lyric in glorification of Mahomet which was to be sung by two of the characters. In contrast to Prometheus, not pantheism but monotheism, and not rebellion but submission, were to be the animating creed and motive of the protagonist. In the first of the two Scenes he addresses in succession the great heavenly lights, but in their mutability he finds no stay or solace for mind and heart, and he turns to the creator of them all. "Uplift thee, loving heart, to the creating One! Be thou my Lord, my God! Thou, all-loving One, Thou who didst create earth, heaven, and me." In the second Scene we have a dialogue between Mahomet and his foster-mother, Fatima, in which he communicates the religious experiences which it was to be his mission to proclaim to his people; and the manner in which Fatima receives them indicates the difficulties he would have to encounter in his role as prophet. "He is changed; his nature is transformed; his understanding has suffered. Better it is that I should restore him to his kinsfolk, than that I should draw the responsibility of evil consequences upon myself." But, as in the case of Prometheus, it is in the lyric that was to form part of the drama that we have the most arresting expression of the poet's genius—another proof of the fact that at this period it was in the lyric that Goethe found the most adequate utterance for what was deepest in his nature. In a rush of unrhymed, irregular measures it describes the course of a river (the Rhine was in the poet's mind) from its source on the mountain summit, its impetuous progress among the obstacles that bar its passage, its gradually broadening current as it sweeps through the plains, undelayed by shady valley or by the flowers that adorn its banks; and finally losing itself in the ocean with all its tributary streams.